Posted 9/12/2007 02:14:00 PM by Douglas

This guy goes a bit over the top, but I like the sentiment: Where is the silence?

But wait, this can't be: Music is everywhere; we have more of it, available in more forms, more often, than at any time in human history. I can go to the web and find O King of Berio, Baksimba dances from Uganda, something really obscure like Why Are we Born (not to have a good time) of the young Buck Owens, even Pat Boone's version of Tutti Frutti; I can find all of the same at the mall. Surely this is a good thing. I can find renewal of spirit in Sur Incises of Boulez or stand aghast at the toxic grandiloquence of Franz Schmidt's Book of the Seven Seals. Music is everywhere. Long live it.

Just give me five minutes without it; that's all I ask, perhaps all I'll need to bring it back into being for myself. Imprisoned by it as I am now, assaulted in every store, elevator, voice-mail system, passing car, neighbor's home, by it and its consequent immolation in the noise of the quotidian, it is lost to me as anything other than a kind of psychic rape, a forced intimacy with sonic partners not of my choosing. When music is everywhere, it is nowhere; when everything is music, nothing is. Silence is as crucial to the musical experience as any of its sounding parameters, and not merely as a kind of acoustical "negative space." Silence births, nurtures, and eventually takes back the musical utterance; it shapes both the formation of its textures and the arc of its progress through time.

That's what I think when I see so many people plugged in all the time. You can't go 45 seconds without some kind of noise in your head? Give it a rest. Time for a little 4'33 action, I think.

Labels: silence

Posted 6/03/2004 06:36:00 PM by Douglas

The price of silence.

British composer Mike Batt found himself the subject of a plagiarism action for including the song, "A One Minute Silence," on an album for his classical rock band The Planets.

He was accused of copying it from a work by the late American composer John Cage, whose 1952 composition "4'33"" was totally silent.

On Monday, Batt settled the matter out of court by paying an undisclosed six-figure sum to the John Cage Trust.

I hope this is a joke. I bet the Cage Trust is really busy prosecuting all the live performance versions of 4'33 that happen every day. I think I just had one right now!

Before the start of the court case, Batt had said: "Has the world gone mad? I'm prepared to do time rather than pay out. We are talking as much as £100,000 in copyright.

"Mine is a much better silent piece. I have been able to say in one minute what Cage could only say in four minutes and 33 seconds."

I've heard a rumor that 4'33 became very popular in the 50s. People at diners would put as many nickels as they had on this record just so they could enjoy some silence with their meals. Eventually the record became quite scratched, and then entertained the patrons with cracks and hisses.

Which to this day is still more enjoyable than anything by Justin Timberlake.

Labels: silence