Dear Stewart, Your delightfully ironic remarks about Beethoven's Eroica and bad tempered cowbells in fact hit the nail on the head. As a student when I wasn't at=20 Oxford=20 doing research into 12-tone music, German literature, etc., I would spend my time in the Austrian Alps, climbing alone, and the sound of cowbells is=20 unforgettable. And the very last thing I would have wanted to hear was Beeth oven (though I always carried the Missa Solemnis and the Deutsches Requiem in my rucksack to read in the mountain hut in the evenings). Another poster=20 (forgive this general reply, all) suggested the answer to the Cage question about Beethove= n and Cowbells was that told you something about the human condition as agains where one might find a cow. This is in once sense true, in another=20 irrelevant. When lying in a field in the Alps having come down from some mountain, cowbells are what I want to hear, a sentiment Mahler understood very well, a= s=20 he even used the things in his music.
There are different human conditions, the cowbell-condition, and the Beethoven-condition, and I would not want to say which was better or more=20 valuable. Certainly I would not have wished to choose between the=20 Beethoven-induced-bliss and that of the sound of cowbells on a gorgeous sunny day in Austria after=20 having climbed a difficult mountain alone and come back alive. And this is=20 what Cage taught us, that music is as much a state of mind as anything else. It i= s organised sound in which there is an element of chance, and the cowbells are the perfect example. Take various recordings of Schubert's great B-Flat=20 sonata and see what various pianists make of 'Molto moderato'. What does 'allegro' mean, without a metronome mark? How fast is adagietto? (see Mahler 5) What d= o=20 the funny tied 1/8 notes really mean in the main theme of the 'grosse Fuge'? Or=20 if you want chance in your music, listen to Schnabel playing Beethoven sonat= as,=20 whether or not he gets anywhere near the right notes, but wonderful music-making all the same. Cowbells answer those questions. They are organised, in as much as they are=20 variations on a theme (different pitches, tempi, sound etc. but within the s= ame sound world, with chance elements as to what sounds they make when and at=20 what tempo) , in the right surroundings they conjure up blissful feelings, a= nd so=20 on and so forth. And so does Beethoven. Where's the REAL difference? As I=20 said, the difference lies in the fact that we have Beethoven rammed down our throats by the powers that be as GREAT, GREAT, GREAT!!! And so he is. But so can cowbells be. And it was Cage as much as anyone who made us aware of this= ,=20 who asked the right questions with that wonderful American humour, and who wrote the right music to make his point. As regards the music, I've always been=20 profoundly bored by it, but that's neither here not there. I'm also profound= ly=20 bored by Haydn. The point is that Cage restored sound as sound to us, someth= ing=20 which many of my favourite composers have turned into great music. And=20 anywa=3Dy, what is the 'human condition'? Why is it what Beethoven put about= ? And not=20 that lovely feeling I've described in the Alps? Cage has done another thing for music. Following path trod by Webern, he has= =20 made us aware of the music of the past not just as some mere 'human=20 condition', but as pure sound. Just listen to the 'grosse Fuge' as sound , forget about life and death, all the great questions we are supposed to=20 bother with, listen to it as sound. And then listen to the lute as sound, all those octaves and=20 fifths, a completely different SOUND world. Stewart, I know exactly what you mean, find most conceptual art a bore, but=20 on the other hand=E2=80=A6 Well, being asked to look at an unmade bed=E2=80= =A6.At least tIt=20 does make you think, if only 'What rubbish!' which is better than the comato= se=20 state in which most people chew the cud of the classics, glassy-eyed and=20 secretly glad that the 'awful scraping' which is the 'grosse Fuge' has finally come toan=20 end. Nah, music didn't snuff it in the first half of the 19th century, there's=20 been loads of great stuff and loads of junk since, and good old John Cage=20 incorporates both, and God bless his cotton socks for giving us a good laugh= , being=20 provoking (in contrast to that world champion of second hand boredom=20 Shostakovich), and giving us, whether you like his own stuff or not, to adap= t=20 Flanders and Swann, sound, sound, glorious sound!=20 Cheers TB --
