Aspectos vanguardistas na música de John Cage * Vanguard aspects in John Cage’s music

2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 120
Author(s):  
VINICIUS CRANEK GAGLIARDO
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
American Composer ◽  
The Common

<p><strong>Resumo:</strong> Este artigo tem por objetivo estabelecer algumas relações entre as vanguardas artísticas europeias, como o surrealismo e o dadaísmo, e as peças musicais de John Cage. De modo mais específico, procurarei apresentar algumas das características destes movimentos de vanguarda que ainda persistiram na obra do compositor norte-americano. Para isso, a partir do livro Teoria da Vanguarda, de Peter Bürger, e do estudo de Jorge de Almeida, Crítica dialética em Theodor Adorno, retomarei os ideais do Expressionismo – momento auge do esteticismo –, refletindo sobre sua relação com as manifestações vanguardistas subsequentes, no intuito de proporcionar uma melhor compreensão das características comuns aos movimentos de vanguarda da primeira metade do século XX. Nesta análise, discutirei os conceitos de vanguarda, instituição arte e obra de arte. Em seguida, mapearei alguns aspectos da obra de John Cage, relacionando-a com os ideais vanguardistas apresentados anteriormente. Em suma, pretendo evidenciar, ao final dessas reflexões, o projeto vanguardista para a arte no século XX e a manifestação de elementos deste projeto na poética de John Cage.</p><p><strong>Palavras-chave:</strong> John Cage – Vanguarda – Arte.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Abstract:</strong> This paper aims to establish some relations between the European artistic vanguards, such as Surrealism and Dadaism, and John Cage’s musical pieces. More specifically, I will try to present some of the characteristics of these vanguard movements that persisted in the work of the American composer. To do this, I will consider the ideals of Expressionism – height moment of aestheticism –, from the book Theory of Vanguard, by Peter Bürger, and the study of Jorge de Almeida, Crítica dialética em Theodor Adorno, reflecting on its relationship with subsequent vanguard manifestations in order to provide a better understanding of the common characteristics of the vanguard movements in the first half of the Twentieth Century. In this analysis, I will discuss the concepts of vanguard, art institution and work of art. Then, I will map some aspects of the John Cage’s work, relating it to the avant-garde ideas presented earlier. In short, I intend to demonstrate, at the end of these reflections, the avant-garde project for the art in the Twentieth Century and the manifestation of the elements of this project in the John Cage’s poetic.</p><p><strong>Keywords:</strong> John Cage – Vanguard – Art.</p>

Being Numerous

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oren Izenberg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Literary Life ◽  
Aesthetic Politics ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Common ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Practical Question ◽  
Language Poets

This book offers a new way to understand the divisions that organize twentieth-century poetry. It argues that the most important conflict is not between styles or aesthetic politics, but between poets who seek to preserve or produce the incommensurable particularity of experience by making powerful objects, and poets whose radical commitment to abstract personhood seems altogether incompatible with experience—and with poems. Reading across the apparent gulf that separates traditional and avant-garde poets, the book reveals the common philosophical urgency that lies behind diverse forms of poetic difficulty—from William Butler Yeats's esoteric symbolism and George Oppen's minimalism and silence to Frank O'Hara's joyful slightness and the Language poets' rejection of traditional aesthetic satisfactions. For these poets, what begins as a practical question about the conduct of literary life—what distinguishes a poet or group of poets?—ends up as an ontological inquiry about social life: What is a person and how is a community possible? In the face of the violence and dislocation of the twentieth century, these poets resist their will to mastery, shy away from the sensual richness of their strongest work, and undermine the particularity of their imaginative and moral visions—all in an effort to allow personhood itself to emerge as an undeniable fact making an unrefusable claim.

John Cage (1921–1990)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Bernstein
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Shock Waves ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Twelve Tone ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Future ◽  
Musical Sounds

A leading figure in the twentieth-century avant-garde, John Cage was a prolific composer, writer, and artist. His early works show Schoenberg’s influence in their use of a naive modification of the latter’s twelve-tone system. By the late 1930s Cage had begun to pursue his own compositional interests, embarking on a career as a musical innovator who, for fifty years, would send ‘shock waves’ throughout the music world. In ‘The Future of Music Credo’, a manifesto written in 1940, Cage declared that in the future the distinction between ‘noise’ and so-called ‘musical sounds’ would no longer exist.

Boulez, Pierre (1925-2016)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Goldman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Personal Development ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Going Public ◽  
Concert Music ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Central Concern ◽  
Pierre Boulez ◽  
History Of ◽  
Listening Habits

French composer Pierre Boulez was one of the most influential composers of the second half of the twentieth century. His personal development mirrored the history of Western concert music. An essential figure in the history of artistic modernism, he was perceived as a leader of the musical avant-garde since 1945. In addition, through his international career as a conductor, he sought to change the listening habits of the concert-going public by initiating them, through concerts and recordings, into the classics of modernism from the first half of the twentieth century (Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, Bartók, Berg, etc.). From serialism, open forms, the interface between instrument and machine, the concern with perceptibility, Boulez’s catalog forms a rich and varied corpus. Although Boulez dispensed with total serialism after a brief but decisive period, his concern with the formal unity of a work of art remained a central concern throughout his career.

Sonorism

Artful Noise ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 136-145
Author(s):  
Thomas Siwe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Relaxed Controls ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Crumb ◽  
The Arts ◽  
American Composer ◽  
Tone Color ◽  
Media Work

In this chapter, the use by twentieth-century composers of tone color, or timbre is explained with examples by those who made its use central to their compositional output. Poland, freed from the bonds of communism and the Soviet state, relaxed controls over the arts and in 1956 initiated the Warsaw Autumn festival where avant-garde Polish and Western music could be heard. Kazimierz Serocki cofounded the festival, contributing to the percussion canon his timbre-based sextet, Continuum. In the United States, the American composer George Crumb definitely had an ear for timbre coupled with a love for percussion evident in the works discussed. A young Polish/American composer, Marta Ptaszynska, created a number of works for both solo and ensemble percussion in the latter half of the century. Her work Siderals was conceived as an audio-visual, or mixed-media work utilizing ten percussionists, magnetic tape playback, and lighting. The three composers highlighted in this chapter approached the use of timbre in differing ways.

The New Failure of Nerve

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Byers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Jackson Pollock ◽  
Max Horkheimer ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Mark Rothko

The first chapter asks how the postwar American avant-garde emerged, and under what conditions. It considers a constellation of works from 1945 to 1947 which figured the need to ‘begin again’ both aesthetically and philosophically. The first section suggests that the roots of this movement can be found in critiques of the Enlightenment tradition which emerged in the United States from 1943 and informed a new independent left politics focused on the radical individual. The following sections reveal how these critiques (which included the work of émigrés such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer) initiated an American neo-primitivism exemplified by Olson’s early oeuvre as well as those of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and John Cage.

Auditory Mirrors

2019 ◽  
pp. 740-764
Author(s):  
Sabine Sanio
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Musical Idea ◽  
General Goal ◽  
The Relationship

With the general goal of describing “how music understands itself socially and politically,” Sabine Sanio starts out by focusing on the musical neo-avant-garde, and especially on John Cage, and continues by discussing aspects of the musical idea of space. Although her chapter draws on several threads reaching back to the beginning of the twentieth century, the central topics of the chapter are current issues dealing with musical explorations of the sound itself, modern data technologies, and public spaces. Using a number of examples, Sanio discusses how the relationship between composers and audiences is both socially and aesthetically challenged by redefinitions of the concept of space and character of the musical live event—or live-like event.

Satie, Erik Alfred Leslie (1866–1925)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel N. Dorf
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Claude Debussy ◽  
Pablo Picasso ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Jean Cocteau ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Piano Works ◽  
Man Ray ◽  
Les Six ◽  
Francis Picabia

Erik Satie’s compositions, writings, and humor played an important role in many modernist movements of the twentieth century. Experimenting with simple forms, neoclassicism, mysticism, satire, and Dadaism, Satie collaborated with prominent artists, musicians, and institutions including Vincent Hypsa, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Rene Clair, Francis Picabia, Claude Debussy, Man Ray, the Ballets Russe, the Ballets Suédois. Most recognized today for early his modal, pseudo-antique dances, the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes, Satie also composed popular tunes, humorous piano works that mocked musical conventions, avant-garde ballets, as well as numerous mystical, irreverent, and nonsensical writings and drawings. His works and persona, sometimes whimsical, arcane, gothic, mystical, or Dadaistic inspired later generations of modernist artists and composers such as Les Six, Virgil Thomson, and John Cage.

scholarly journals Passivity and leveling Husserl, Heidegger and Hugo Ball

2016 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 225-236
Author(s):  
Dragan Prole
Keyword(s):  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Passive Synthesis ◽  
The World ◽  
Average Work ◽  
Important Trait ◽  
The Common ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

The first part of this paper explores the kinship in diagnosis of contemporaneity of Hugo Ball and Martin Heidegger. Both thinkers recognize leveling as an important trait of their age. In Ball?s terms, leveling is identified with the apocalyptic abolishment of humanity. That happens by equalizing all of human creation, which becomes possible only after the abolishment of the hierarchy of values, thanks to which it was previously possible to distinguish a work of art from an average work. With Heidegger, leveling is equated with the perverted forms of curiosity. Unlike the former forms of curiosity, coupled by the common desire for deeper insight, modern curiosity is fairly superficial, let loose with no boundaries to all the impressions which supersede the expected and already seen. In the second part of the paper, Husserl?s term of passive synthesis is examined, so we can observe the intervention of phenomenology from the perspective of deconstruction of the effects of leveling. I conclude with a warning that we cannot protect ourselves from the world to which we are exposed by natural subjectivity and conventional forms of knowledge. Which insight leads us to revert to the sources of subjectivity, the idea common to both the avant-garde and the phenomenologists.

Aesthetics of Popular Art

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Novitz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Popular Art ◽  
Area Of Interest ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Clement Greenberg ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Aesthetic

Questions about the aesthetic value and appreciation of popular art have only recently become an area of interest to Anglo-American aesthetics. This is curious, for the distinction between high and popular art — like that between high and popular culture, and between avant-garde art and mass art — is a familiar and longstanding one frequently drawn by critics, philosophers, and cultural theorists throughout the course of the twentieth century. It was extensively discussed by Marxist thinkers like Walter Benjamin, and was the stock-in-trade of the Critical Theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Not just those two, but high-modernist philosophers and critics like R. G. Collingwood, Clement Greenberg, and Dwight MacDonald also made much of the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ (or popular) art. Even so, it was a distinction that did not earn the serious attention of philosophical aesthetics until the penultimate decade of the twentieth century.

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