[silence] Messiaen & Cage

[Rob Haskins]

I don't think anyone has brought up this written Cage criticism of Messiaen: 



It
is, incidentally, the emphasis on harmony in Messiaen’s music which accounts
for its occasional bad taste.  This
element, harmony, is not medieval nor Oriental but baroque.  Because of its ability to enlarge sound and
thus to impress an audience, it has become in our time the tool of Western
commercialism.


 


from
“The East in the West,” in John Cage: Writer, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, p. 24–25.  The original article was published in Modern Music 23, no. 2 (April 1946):
111–15.



I've often wondered what piece Cage had in mind when he made this remark.

Best,
Rob
 
Rob Haskins
Assistant Professor of Music
University of New Hampshire
rob_haskins@yahoo.com
http://robhaskins.net
"Heroism doesn't consist in brilliantly combatting someone else. . . .  What is heroic is to accept the situation in which you find yourself."  -- John Cage




----- Original Message ----
From: Thomas Moore <tmoore@umbc.edu>
To: Ralph Lichtensteiger <lichtconlon@t-online.de>; Silence <silence@list.mail.virginia.edu>
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2007 9:55:30 PM
Subject: Re: [silence] Messiaen & Cage

Re: [silence] Messiaen & Cage



On 3/29/07 1:42 PM, "Ralph Lichtensteiger" <lichtconlon@t-online.de> wrote:



> dear all,

> did john cage ever comment on O. Messiaen's music? in his writing or 

> interview?

> 

> they had strong similarities: 

> nature - sound (birds, gurgle shells, environmental sound etc.)

> mysticism, spirituality, and philosophy - concept of art, life and music

> investigation in sound, new concepts of the orchestra (orchestration) 



Ralph, this is a very interesting question. 



Sometime around 1990 I talked with John over dinner about Messiaen (or tried to, at least!). At the time I was playing solo piano concerts of Cage and Messiaen, and I thought their music, while from very different aesthetics (as other replies have already articulated), made for a beautiful program together: all the pieces I was playing seemed to have an element of "timelessness" to them. (Or, in another sense, they were all about time.) I was curious to know what he thought of Messiaen, and tried to coax him into talking about his impressions of Messiaen or his music, but it was immediately clear that John had no interest in taking the conversation in that direction.



So I described the concerts I was doing -- pieces of his (Etudes Australes, etc.) and from Messiaen's Catalogue d'oiseaux, and spoke about how, as you describe, both composers shared a love a nature (mushrooms on one hand and birds on the other), etc., and for me especially a sense of duration, of time (or non-time). That is, in Messiaen's music (post mid-50s) I often feel like there is an attempt take us outside of normal time -- one musicologist (sorry, don't remember who) beautifully said something to the effect that in Messiaen's music there is nowhere to go: we are all already here in eternity together. And in John's music there is also a similar emphasis on time/duration. In the Catalogue d'oiseaux, as with the Etudes Australes and many other pieces by John, there is no progression toward anything: we and the music are just moving through time together, and the music just "is," it isn't going anywhere. But at the same time there is a (sometimes complex) durational
 structure through which we are traveling. I'm not articulating this very well as I write this email just now, but maybe you can sense what I'm trying to say. In any case, John listened to all this with something that rested somewhere on the border between politeness and curiosity, but I don't remember that he said much of anything in response. So that was the end of that. Hopefully someone else had more success. Frankly, I was left with the impression that John thought of and heard Messiaen's music so infrequently that he just didn't have much to say on the subject, but I certainly didn't sense any negativity. He wasn't at all dismissive.



There is a new (2005) book on Messiaen by the brilliant pianist Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone. (Peter Hill's recording of the Catalogue d'oiseaux is extraordinary.) While I haven't read it, I do remember thumbing through the book and seeing a passage toward the end about John visiting Messiaen in Paris -- it must have been in the late 1980s or early 1990s -- and it sounds as if Messiaen was genuinely thrilled to see John, and that it had been many years. (Possibly the passing of time had diminished whatever antagonism (to which Joe Galvan alludes in his reply) had cropped up between John and certain European composers in the late 50s and later.) I will have to track this down again.



Regards,

Tom Moore



-- 



Thomas Moore

Director, Arts & Culture

UMBC

410-455-3370

http://userpages.umbc.edu/~tmoore/music.html



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