[silence] Messiaen & Cage

[Mark Kolmar]

Analogies stretch quickly into the ridiculous, so I would not read into 
it beyond a basic illustration.

You can make a pleasant "harmony" of flavor out of table sugar and lemon 
juice in water.  Together, it is lemonade, like an Am7 chord.  It is 
pleasant and easy to absorb, mixed easily from elemental ingredients 
that don't have a lot of appeal alone.  Large drums of high-fructose 
corn syrup and citric acid are even cheaper.  Put it in plastic bottles 
and sell for US$1.25 each.

In the quotation about Messiaen, Cage said harmony would "enlarge sound" 
and "impress an audience".  Maybe an angel food cake would be a better 
analogy.

In late Cage, and late Feldman, I do not hear it as built up from 
elements that way.  Rather, it seems to grow from combinations and 
inter-relationships of components, in which each is to be perceived as a 
  thing-in-itself -- rather than, say, a point of reference to measure 
distance between moving lines.

Even in "Music of Changes", the component parts are gestures or cells, 
not pitches.  Then even in the late number pieces, the purpose of a 
single tone, when it appears, is not for its role in a functional 
harmony, but rather for its own qualities.  So the effect is not so much 
to "enlarge sound", but rather to present each sound in its own size in 
relation to others.

To return to Messiaen -- take _Catalogue d'Oiseaux_ as an example.  That 
is somewhat of an imitation of nature in its manner of operation, but as 
a fantasy about birdsong.  The manner of operation is to map the pitches 
of birdsong onto special scales that allow some interesting ways to deal 
with relationships between pitches.  Cage preferred to deal with sounds 
and relationships between sounds, more than between pitches.

--Mark

john saylor wrote:
> hi
> 
> On 3/30/07, Mark Kolmar <mark@burningrome.com> wrote:
>> Any connection to Western commercialism is less clear.  To extend the
>> analogy, I might submit that harmony uses "cheaper" materials to produce
>> complex sonorities with greater "added value", therefore more "profit"
>> than other types of sound combinations.
> 
> i sense you are half-joking here, but i think your analysis is flawed
> nonetheless. nothing personal, it's just interesting to me to try and
> combine economics and music in this way [as opposed to the 'pop music
> machine' way we are all too familiar with ...]
> 
> harmony is cheaper? maybe. there's a lot of 'prior art' to compare it
> against for valuation. on the other hand, it requires more
> coordination between musicians to pull off- more top-down control
> [where is the beat?] than what happens in the majority of cage's
> music.
> 
> how do we measure the 'value' of complex sonorities? [an interesting
> question outside of any economic manifestations that we are discussing
> here] if the goal is to persuade someone to spend money, than the
> sounds that get people to think less are better than sounds that
> encourage the listener to contemplate.
> 
> and, of course, how do we measure the 'profit' of sound combinations?
> it seems to be related to the effort of the musicians to produce them
> in your analysis.
> 
> i don't really have an answer, but i'd think some marketing whitepaper
> [beautifully formatted] is sitting in a file cabinet somewhere that
> might tell us something about this question.
> 
> i think looking at this issue in terms of 'supply and demand' may be
> more ... um ... *profitable*
> 
> [ouch!]
>