33ammi33
I enjoy Cage’s take on silence and noise in music. He successfully challenged the common notion of what music is and opened up doors for other composers to be more experimental and abstract in their work. However, I still question whether I consider silence to be music. I think his piano recital was performative, but I'm unsure if I can agree to call it music. I think there is music in other mundane things like birds singing or the streets with cars passing by. But then again, even silence isn’t silence, there is still stifling in the crowd and the floor creaking. So, I suppose I can understand why some people wouldn't hear of this performance. The article explains, “Cage’s passion for silence, it seems, had political roots. He was a lonely, precocious child, mocked by classmates as a sissy”. I think I would like a more thorough artist's statement on the piece, I would love to learn about these political roots and other influences that let him create this piece. I think I'm more interested in the performative aspects of the performance rather than the aspects that are relating to music. I think his piece reminds me of other performative pieces people have done as social experiments. I think a big part of this piece is a social experiment, or as he says an “assertion of will”. It reminds me of a Performance (I can't remember the name of the woman) where she sat on the subway with foul-smelling food in her purse, to see how the people reacted.
