[silence] Messiaen & Cage

[Joe Galvan]

Messaien, despite all his outward appearances as a contemporary composer,
was very much in-line with the old-guard European conservativism that was
alive and well when Cage was beginning to make himself known. Cage's use of
free indeterminacy serves as a lively counter to the fixed and rigid, almost
scientific nature of total serialism, of which Messaien was considered a
venerable old master. We must remember that Messiaen was taught by Dupré,
whose early organ works parallel developments in atonality and mingle with
late Romantic harmony; at the same time we must also be aware that much of
this was passed onto Messiaen's student Boulez, a one time friend of Cage
himself.

I remember an anecdote I heard somewhere in which Messaien was asked what he
thought of American composers being played in European music halls. Messaien
replied that his predictions of these kind of performances would be quickly
dismissed as quite banal, for audiences would think themselves as being in a
barnyard at dawn rather than in an elegant concert hall. I do know that
protegées of Messaien, viz. Boulez and Stockhausen, often had very difficult
and clashing relationships with Cage, and that Cage was not receptive to
certain performances of the music of those respective composers.

The great lesson, as I've learned, is that while European composers were
most concerned with structual functions of harmony, counterpoint and
orchestration, the American composers were more concerned about
deconstructing the old ideas about sounds in concentration and their free
distribution in an aural space. Cage and a couple of other composers that
were related to him I believe were more interested in the pure enjoyment of
sounds in interaction with one another, or non-interaction, or simply the
sound of silence, period.

Certainly a good question, and one worth asking.
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