Wednesday, July 13, 2011

cage on elevator music...

"one of the things we nowadays know is that something that happens (anything) can be experienced by means of technique (electronic) as some other (any other) thing (happening). for instance, people getting in and out of elevators and elevators moving from one floor to another" this "information" can activate circuits that bring to our ears a concatenation of sounds (music). perhaps you wouldn't agree that what you heard was music. but in that case another transformation has intervened: what you heard had set your mind to repeating the definitions of art and music that are found in out-of-date dictionaries. (even if you didn't think it was music, you'd admit that you took it in through your ears, not through your eyes, nor did you feel it with your hands or walk around inside of it/ perhaps you did walk around inside of it: the architecturality of music is now a technical possibility and a poetic fact. "

john cage, happy new ears, a year from monday 1967

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1 Comments:

Anonymous greg.org said...

Cage had a couple of projects that involved or related to Muzak, including an unrealized site-specific composition at the Pan Am Building where people walking in and out of elevators tripped switches that turned the Muzak on and off.

http://greg.org/archive/2010/04/03/cage_match.html

9:04 AM  

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