Some art-haters in the comments, so to defend this piece of contemporary art for a moment: one thing I love about it is a commitment to the long future of art, creativity, and civilization. What does it take to keep an instrument playing for six hundred years? To commit to that idea -- like the century-long projects of cathedral building in the middle ages, or the idea of planting trees you won't live to see mature -- is (to me) the awesome thing about the Halberstadt performance. All rendered in a medium (church organ) that has existed for an even longer time.
It's a pretty hopeful, optimistic view of the future in a time of high uncertainty, but also represents a positive argument: it's worth doing these things because they are interesting, weird, and fun, and because they represent a continuity with past and future people we will never meet.
Plus, you can already buy a ticket to the finale, so your distant descendants can go see it :)
I'm not disagreeing with you, but you should invert the question and think about it.
In the case of a cathedral, I think it is relatively easy to commit to the project you won't see through, it has a significance to those people making the commitment. What becomes much more challenging is when future generations don't have the same level of commitment, it's a much bigger ask to stop. Maybe there is a better use of the resources that could impact people immediately; if it's a church, I'm thinking feeding the hungry and clothing the naked sorts of things. It's hard to stop something that "we've just been doing." It's also hard to ask "why are we doing this?"
In 200 years, suppose there is some crisis we cannot predict and the recital is to be interrupted or stopped. There will be an incredible amount of pressure on somebody to make a good choice. Pressure that was created by a distant ancestor, of sorts. That might be part of the beauty of it, that might be part of the bond that ties different people together throughout time and it might be wonderful. What if there is a caretaker that is ready to retire and cannot find the next caretaker? That seems like a horrible position to be in.
Japan is or was doing multi-generational mortgages a while back (I assume they might still be.) as it was the only way a family could afford to buy a property. I can see that being a tremendously loving act for your children or grandchildren in providing a property that they will own, but I could just as well see it being a gigantic burden to them, what if they want to live somewhere else? Them following their bliss effectively changes the living and working future of the parents.
There's always an opportunity cost to making art. Taking your argument to it's extreme people should never paint or make music but instead spend all their time growing food and building homes (and distributing those goods because that's a big crux, we could feed everyone on the planet if we got food to the right people).
The cool thing about freedom is that we don't have to be rational monks that are slave to economic utilitarism.
This conundrum comes up sometimes in the context of generational starships, about intermediate generations being born into bondage board, committed by their ancestors to a shitty life in a metal tube, with their only purpose being a preordained duty to keep a few systems operational and produce the next generation of slaves just so that eventually someone can birth the arrival generation.
Alastair Reynolds' book Chasm City touches on a bunch of this, in particular the class warfare angle of some wealthy travelers getting to enjoy the journey in peaceful cryosleep while the poor ones pay for their passage in servitude.
> being born into bondage board, committed by their ancestors to a shitty life in a metal tube, with their only purpose being a preordained duty to keep a few systems operational and produce the next generation of slaves just so that eventually someone can birth the arrival generation.
This isn't really so different from being born on Earth, except that we take being born on Earth for granted, and the population is really really big.
Ehhh I see where you're coming from but I don't think it's quite the same. Here on Earth is the default, and while each individual's opportunities are greatly affected by the circumstances of their birth and parentage, with effort and luck there's a fair chance to change one's stars.
Opting into an interstellar voyage is a significant reduction in opportunity for almost anyone.
And yes, the same could be said for a European colonist crossing the Atlantic to the Americas in the 16th century, and many of them did face starvation, exposure, etc, but it's different when you're largely committing yourself and your immediate family to those hardships, under the belief that the timeframe for "a better life" is the next generation. Committing intermediate generations is a different beast.
You're assuming life after the journey was guaranteed to be better, but not all colonists and immigrants happened to head to the world's future superpower.
Every decision is potentially committing descendants to the consequences of that choice (and to wit: life aboard a generation ship hardly need be a miserable or undesirable one, at the size of say, a large town and surrounding hinterland you have as much or more opportunity as anyone else at most times in history - I think generation ships force us to confront uncomfortable questions about what is the meaning of life on Earth which we try to sweep aside by deciding they're an impossible moral burden).
We're all living in the world created by our ancestors. All their short sighted fuckups (lead poisoning, climate change) or triumphs (tech, art) is ours to bear.
I spend too much time thinking about all the stuff that can go wrong on generation ships.
You take off for your destination, but when you get there you find out that humans back on earth made a faster ship 100 years after you left and beat you to the destination.
You spent generations expecting to be bold explorers pushing the frontier and getting to claim nice territory, and you show up to find you’re in second place.
> You take off for your destination, but when you get there you find out that humans back on earth made a faster ship 100 years after you left and beat you to the destination.
> In 200 years, suppose there is some crisis we cannot predict and the recital is to be interrupted or stopped. There will be an incredible amount of pressure on somebody to make a good choice. Pressure that was created by a distant ancestor, of sorts. That might be part of the beauty of it, that might be part of the bond that ties different people together throughout time and it might be wonderful. What if there is a caretaker that is ready to retire and cannot find the next caretaker? That seems like a horrible position to be in.
We have plenty of examples where this has already happened. Traditions that were maintained at significant cost in the face of difficulties or opposition. Caretakers of something ancient who struggle to find an heir. We tend to view them positively.
> Japan is or was doing multi-generational mortgages a while back (I assume they might still be.) as it was the only way a family could afford to buy a property.
I suspect this has been misreported. Japanese mortgage terms are pretty normal and property prices are much lower than in the west (even the bubble only really affected central Tokyo). There's a practice of an elderly parent being able to get a mortgage that's then "inherited" by a child, in cases where the parent is retired or close to retirement, but it's pretty much a face-saving (and tax-avoidance) measure.
They couldn’t even quarry the Washington Monument out of a single color of stone. It’s not that visible in pictures but if you go see it on a sunny day it’s hard to ignore that stupid line in the middle.
If you take too long building a cathedral the quarry might exhaust itself in the meantime. So even if you keep to the design it might not look right.
> The outside facing consists, due to the interrupted building process, of three different kinds of white marble.
For some cathedrals that visible mismatch in the materials might be a feature, not a bug.
At least that's the case for the co-cathedral in Zamora, Michoacán which had its construction interrupted for almost a century due to the Mexican Revolution, the Cristero War and its subsequent expropriation by the government. In this context, the mismatching facade remains as a testament of the building's history.
Maybe a crisis will occur and maybe our descendants will have to make a tough choice, but that could enrich the story of the performance. If they choose to end the performance for whatever reason, that’s their business. The hopes and desires of one generation can only hold sway over the next for so long.
> If they choose to end the performance for whatever reason, that’s their business.
Well, in this case, "you can already buy a ticket to the finale, so your distant descendants can go see it." Selling tickets for an event that far in the future makes it the business of the ticket purchaser and whoever they leave the tickets for.
Is the money collected from the tickets being held in such a way that it can be refunded if/when this project fails before another 600 years have gone by? If not, it seems like a potential scam in that sense.
No need to speculate wildly or cast unsupported aspersions. The funds from the “Final Ticket” sales are explicitly a financial contribution to supporting the project. Nobody buying one is unaware of that fact, there’s no potential for scam.
It's not wild to speculate that a ticket I buy for an event 600 years in the future might not be honored. People get screwed over on pre-orders with timetables far smaller than that.
Again, if they sell something they're calling a ticket to the final part of the performance, then they have a financial duty to keep the project going (or refund the ticket) and it's not "their business" to end the project early like the person I replied to was claiming. At the very best, they could invest the money and use only the interest to support ongoing operations, but they need to keep the original value available to refund or else they need to fulfill what the ticket's for-- if they do neither of those things, they ripped people off, period.
If they're just funding the project's continuation, it's on them for pulling the marketing stunt (and/or false advertising) of calling it a ticket for this event in 600 years instead of just taking donations, selling present-day tickets and/or merch, etc. Fine print saying "actually, this ticket isn't a real ticket, it's just for fun" doesn't make them look better to me, so I don't see how that'd be a defense in your mind.
> It's not wild to speculate that a ticket I buy for an event 600 years in the future might not be honored. People get screwed over on pre-orders with timetables far smaller than that.
I think you're framing this in the wrong way. Anyone buying a ticket knows there is no guarantee that this finale will occur, or that even if it does, that whatever entity in is in charge of it by then will honor the tickets. They treat this as a donation to something they care about, and the ticket is a cute gift of appreciation. And on top of that, the descendants of the ticket-purchasers may have lost the tickets generations ago, not even know about them, or not even care.
Suggesting that people are getting "screwed over" is unnecessarily dramatic.
Again, the terms of the purchase are explicitly laid out. Maybe go read them? It’s not a marketing stunt, not false advertising, and it is a real ticket. It’s a financial contribution to the project, same as any donation. You can rationalize your speculation and assumptions but the terms of the deal aren’t confusing anyone buying these tickets. Donations with merch attached to them as ‘thank yous’ are absolutely standard practice, and there’s nothing wrong with it. Regardless, I guarantee nobody who buys one will be alive to redeem the ticket. Your best choice, if you were hoping to be there, or if you don’t want to contribute is to not purchase a Final Ticket. Aside from that, there’s really no call for muckraking. Zero people will be duped, they are extremely clear with their intent.
> Regardless, I guarantee nobody who buys one will be alive to redeem the ticket.
I agree 100%, which is part of what makes it such an easy scam to pull off!
You're attempting to sell this thing as a donation with a fake toy Monopoly-money not-actually-expected-to-be-redeemed ticket thrown in. The top commenter of this thread shouldn't have tried to include the ticket as a serious value-add if that's what it is. The comment specifically said "you can already buy a ticket to the finale, so your distant descendants can go see it [using the ticket]," not "so you can support the project out of the kindness of your own heart without any guarantee your descendants will get to see the finale."
Jesus, maybe dial the cynicism down a bit. This is not that serious. It's a fun thing where people get to donate to a bit of art they care about, and get a token of appreciation in return. I doubt any of these "purchasers" really care all that much if their descendants actually end up able to go to a finale in 600 years, outside of the "wouldn't it be cool if..." sense.
Smh. It’s not a scam, and it is a serious value add, and a real ticket. For someone, just not you. And only if the project survives, which is why they’re fundraising. https://www.aslsp.org/the_final_ticket.html
That's the beauty of a long-term commitment. You are stating so much confidence about the future that you say "yes, we can have a functioning society and set aside these resources".
Sure, you can create scenarios were that fails. You can do that for anything. The power lies in saying "we are willing to remove these paths from consideration because we as a people are committed to not letting them occur".
It's a model that fails if you apply first-order utilitarian calculus. But the intangible value of the hope and commitment in it likely overshadows any immediate gain. This isn't about how to maximize utilization or optionality. It's a bold statement about who we are, and a lodestar to aspire to. (Which is, ultimately, the job art does)
It's not surprising that people who love AI and NFTs are willfully ignorant about what makes art meaningful. It's a sadly transactional view of the world.
It’s obvious that many people in this industry believe themselves to be supremely intelligent and curious hacker types, yet they obviously never taken a humanities course.
They have a huge blind spot that they aren’t even aware of, or worse just devalue the entire history of human thought and creation that doesn’t involve hard science.
Your comment will rattle a few cages here but I honestly think about this all the time, as one of the minority of music educators around HN. The blind spots (or perhaps a STEM vs STEAM upbringing) are unfortunate. We are possibly the only — or one of an incredibly small number of — species that even makes sounds solely for enjoyment and aesthetics. The humanities are what make us us.
We're also the only species that can use abstraction to assign meaning to and relations between symbols in any way we choose. The humanities and the sciences are both extremely important to what makes us human, and saying that only one is 'what makes us us' will alienate those who are different from you.
That you are primarily driven by music and aesthetics, and others are primarily driven by science and technological creation, and most of us are driven by both in varying degrees - that is what makes us human.
That said, early in my life I took a chance on music and really enjoyed the performing arts. Through an unfortunate set of circumstances, I ended up doing Music education for my peers.
A beloved teacher had a health issue that left them unable to teach and the substitute did not have the same manner and appreciation for the music and after a few conflicts, they called me out and I (foolishly) accepted!
Now I just had to back it up with actions.
Short story, "my" class was a success. Students reached their goals, we placed well in competition and that teacher and I developed a great friendship.
You are dead on with your comment. And having had the chance to take music education, then turn right around and deliver it seriously was at once crazy and ultra enlightening!
I had the realization my chest thumping got me placed into a position where I had an obligation to educate my peers and rid them of that blind spot you wrote of the same as was done for me.
And that was the H in "hard." Running the class, prepping pieces for performance, debugging the choir all were what I thought was hard.
Nope.
Getting them to internalize the humanity of it, language of emotion and all that, is hard. Respect for the art, whatever it may be, is hard. Cultivating the culture of learning, shared vulnerability (in the case of group performing arts) and the intensely personal nature of it all is hard.
I grew half a decade doing that as a high schooler, who had no clue at all what they said yes to...
In the end, a walk through the humanities is both empowering and enlightening on a level many technical people fail to appreciate.
No fault of theirs. They just did not get what I and many others did or gave as the case may be.
I can put a notch sharper point on all this for passersby (assuming you and I talking is preaching to the choir):
The ones who do not take the trip through the humanities are often told what to do by the ones who did.
Thanks for doing the hard work you do. It is often underappreciated.
You don’t. It’s a great way to get an introduction to a field outside of your typical realm of expertise though.
It’s one of those things that really lets you know how much you don’t know. Then when you comment about such things on the internet you might be open to learning more, as opposed to what many folk in this thread are doing.
We call this people "Fachidioten" in Germany, people who are really good at their craft but absolute morons in every other field. Unfortunately, these are the people that dominate tech and you can see this in how technology develops.
It can. Qualitatively - having spent the first half of my working life in the arts, and now the second nearly-half in tech - all I can say is that serious artists are every bit as smart and driven and interesting as are the serious people in tech. They just don't make as much money, so they don't get much respect.
I don't see how that follows. Avant-garde music of this type is basically an NFT already. All of its value is in the novelty, none is in the aesthetics. The meaning of the piece is completely externalized to the identity of its author and the history of its composition and cannot be derived from observing the piece itself. That describes NFTs to a tee! The only thing missing the layer of cryptography on top.
Why are you making such sweeping assumptions about us? I studied architecture and art history for over a year, I'm the son of a painter, I have an uncle who's a Grammy-winning musician and an aunt who's a musical scholar who literally has a doctorate degree on John f* Cage of all people... which is to say I grew up surrounded by art. I've visited every museum you can name this side of the Berlin Wall's remains, many more than once.
I have a degree in humanities, another in business and another in computer science.... and while I still don't mind Cage that much, I do think most of contemporary art is absolute shit.
I don't have to agree with you for my opinion to have value. You need to learn to name call people less and make your points on the merits of arguments. It's tiring for everyone else to engage otherwise.
I get the frustration with art discourse that it can feel exclusionary or pretentious. There are definitely versions of that discussion that are more about gatekeeping than appreciation.
I think the original, parent comment was coming from a much more generous place. Like that top parent commenter, to me the Halberstadt organ piece isn’t about being highbrow or obscure; it’s about a kind of radical optimism—committing to something weird, beautiful, and long-term in a world that often feels very short-sighted. I don’t think you need to read Derrida or listen to Stockhausen to find meaning in that. Just as you don’t need to love AI or NFTs to appreciate innovation.
Many may think that's stupid or useless because it lacks utility (or any other reason) or seems arbitrary. Reasonable people can disagree, but I think such reactions are truly missing the point; that is simultaneously completely OK, but also personally dispiriting at times. There’s room for a lot of perspectives in how we engage with art, and I think it’s more interesting when we try to understand what someone finds meaningful before writing it off.
Art Appreciation is such a mystical skill! I would have never even remotely thought of OP's take upon reading a description of this art piece. I'm just not wired to come up with takeaways like that. When I hear about "weird" art project, my mind usually just thinks "Well, I guess that's just how this guy wanks" and I just don't seem to have the brain to divine the kind of stuff that OP wrote about!
I think you do have the brain, but maybe you're framing it wrong! When you come across art that seems unapproachable or strange to you, the last question you should ask is "What did the artist mean by this?" Instead, first think "What does this make me feel?" The answer may often be nothing, but then in the spirit of curiosity follow it up with "What might others who love this art be responding to?"
Sometimes for me, I need to take myself out of trying to "solve" the art piece and be intentional about viewing it with a different, less literal mindset. It's still me doing the thinking, but it kind of short-circuits my normal interaction with the world.
Or maybe that's just a bunch of blowhard bullshit, I don't know, but it is what I do.
You should mind that old saying about not being so open-minded that your brain falls out.
While the questions "what is art" and "what is beauty" are indeed interesting, this doesn't help in any way.
There's no substance, it wouldn't get a thousandth of this attention if it was made by a nobody and isn't even fit to be called a meme: it's something between outrage bait and an insipid conversation piece, a transparent (thus vulgar) case of "muddying the water to make it seem deep". But the whole intellectual "class" being so devoid of people upright enough to call out the naked emperor is much less benign than that: a clear symptom of decadence.
I think it’s possible to critique art, institutions, or trends without assuming everyone who finds meaning in something is deluded or complicit in cultural decline. Dismissing curiosity or optimism as decadence seems like its own kind of absolutism. Reasonable people can still find value in things even when you don’t, which is kind of my main point. Your comment makes me a little sad, but not for me.
> I think the original, parent comment was coming from a much more generous place.
I don't. Equating questioning a piece with willful ignorance and a safe-to-hate caricature all smell of bile to me.
"nerds too nerd to art" (more specifically in this case "hustler too hustle for art") is just a grade school putdown we use as artists to perpetuate the inaccessibility of art conversations and keep our cool mystique up.
Sorry, you've got me wrong: I'm referring to the original, OP parent comment of this full thread. So, three comments up from mine in the tree. The one that begins "Some art-haters in the comments, so to defend..."
It's a neat goal to keep an organ playing for hundreds of years. I just don't think that's related to the musical composition itself, which is not impressive to me. The fact that Cage added the phrase "as slow as possible" is not, in my opinion, musically interesting.
It would be analogous to writing a screenplay, adding the note "produce the film using as much money as possible," and then having someone attempt to do that. It's technically impressive to spend $500 million on a film production, sure, but that small note at the end of the screenplay is not cinematically interesting.
Cage created art that transcends music and you are rightfully noting that it is not that impressive when judged solely on musical merit.
It’s like saying a dodecahedron isn’t that impressive when viewed sitting on a 2D plane because it’s just a triangke and there are more interesting 2D shapes. True, but so reductive it’s tautological.
Yeah, something has been lost in current generations. I'm reminded of Asimov's Foundation books where the protagonist dies at the beginning but leaves behind the foundations of a thousand-year plan to rebuild civilisation after the collapse that he predicts including a time capsule that opens following predicted crises.
I feel like such ideas are of a time, namely the 1950s when things were looking up. Nowadays I feel like everyone is aware that Earth is basically finished but we have no way off of it, so they just try to squeeze as much joy as they can before they die without any thought towards the future at all.
This even comes out in smaller cycles like writing software that works today with no thought about how it will look in a decade. I feel like the stuff they were doing even in 90s was done with the intention of being around for a very long time. Now it's like, yagni, just write any old shit that works.
Regarding the YAGNI stuff, that applies to whole companies. All you have to do is stack the cobbled-together shit high enough to get bought and exit. Even the founders aren't in it for a sustainable long term business. In fact that goal is derisively called a "lifestyle business".
If you have ever dabbled in philosophy at all, your notion of “real art” would be the first thing you would have to challenge.
“What is music” is one of those questions that leads to some truly subversive trains of thought and it’s amazing to read all of you so called hackers having trouble wrapping your head around a work that goes against your comfortable worldview.
The set of requirements evolved and changed throughout history as our did our culture and society.
We do still have a set of requirements for what is considered art, and we still have a set of hyper conservative gatekeepers that are resistant to change and will blame today’s boogeyman for everything that they feel is wrong with society
By God, you are truly a trifecta of clichés converging.
Where exactly have you got this narrative from? Or even better: please explain how Marxism relates to contemporary art, I can accept just a general line of ideals connecting to each other.
I tried to have some leveled way to see your opinions on my other comments but this went a bridge too far, you seem to be repeating a collage of unrelated stuff, as I said in another comment: it's so bad that it isn't even wrong.
That is general knowledge, but if you really want to go down that way of "where did you get this narrative from" to try and avoid the subject. Well, you can see it, for instance, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for starters. [1]
By just about any reasonable accounting, the willful deconstruction of the concept of art reached its peak during and after World War I (e.g. Dadaism), specifically because of the wanton and apparently pointless destruction of an entire generation of French, British, Germans, and Russians (and others besides, but they bore the brunt of it). There was a very widespread questioning of traditional mores, which arguably bolstered the broader Marxist cause, but its definitely an inversion of causality to say that Marxism caused existentialism.
But, Dadaism, for instance, was a far left movement. Its followers, were people that held radical or even far left views. [1]
Marxism is really a cancer that destroys everything it touches. Its final aim was always to destroy everything that is beautiful, elevated or pure about mankind, and we, as a society, have been sponsoring it with our taxpayer money that pays for the self anointed gatekeepers of intellectualism that populate a big part of our Academia - that is to say, all Academia that doesn't get judged by the outcomes of their ideas when applied in practice.
Broadly speaking, all existentialism was leftist in character because its core tenet was a rejection of old ways. Definitionally, you cannot reject the old order without being liberal/progressive/leftist/etc. Which, again, was in response to the 15-20 million killed during WWI, the most deadly 4 years in Europe since the plague years.
Again, I think you're inverting causality by blaming Marxism for post-modernism, when they are instead related results of the same overall trend, that was simply catalyzed by WWI (there's definitely a read on e.g. the 1917 Russian Revolution that it happens at least wildly differently without Tsarist Russia entering the war).
If your definition of leftism is "progressive" then I'm sorry to tell you: all advances in art were made by people you'd consider "leftists".
There is simply no way that a conservative worldview brings any art form forward, not even from classically-inspired backgrounds, by pure definition it attempts to keep the status quo, and all they achieve is a soulless repetition of what art was from the period they considered as "golden".
Not much dissimilar to what you are trying to do, to be honest.
I'm not sure if you realized, but you are not any kind of intellectual authority in any matter related to art. The idea that all artists are leftist is just imbecile, to say the least.
You are just part - probably only a satellite - of the self pleasing circle of modern art critics that ultimately live on the backs of the working man.
People that write stuff like this about a urinal on a wall:
"Arensberg had referred to a 'lovely form' and it does not take much stretching of the imagination to see in the upside-down urinal's gently flowing curves the veiled head of a classic Renaissance Madonna or a seated Buddha or, perhaps more to the point, one of Brâncuși's polished erotic forms."
I don't think all artists are leftists, but I do believe that all art that has a broad impact is progressive in character, if not in intent.
Did the Renaissance painters who used single-point-perspective do so in service of seizing the means of production? Obviously not. But they did do so knowing full well that it was a break from the previous art styles, and that such a break was a good thing. Likewise for the rise of the novel, the fall of meter in poetry, digital and electronic art, etc etc
At the end of the day, one of the better (although still incomplete) differentiators between art and simply craft is the deliberate pursuit of novelty of expression. That is, an artist is always trying to say something new, or say something in a new way. You can be exceptionally good at producing the exact same painting, but that doesn't make you an artist, simply a craftsman (and there is nothing wrong with being a craftsman).
> A sixth, broadly Marxian sort of objection rejects the project of defining art as an unwitting (and confused) expression of a harmful ideology.
But I don't think many serious critiques of "this is not art" claims invoke Marxism. The Marxist perspective generalises the idea that art is incredibly difficult to define, but doesn't originate it.
639 years? Big deal, The Long Now foundation built a clock to last 10,000 years. I hate John Cage since I got his massive world-wide hit 4′33″ stuck in my head.
I think at one point the Van Horn TX clock was considered a "prototype" or another one that would be built incorporating lessons learned, although I don't know if that's still the plan.
Coincidentally the clock will ring with a cycle of chimes that repeats every 10,000 years
>The anticipation was palpable, with at least six other tourists wandering the cold brick hall, there to hear the final hours of this loud and, after a time, torturous sound.
Just reading that line alone brightened up my morning. You can admire something and still find it a bit silly.
To be fair, while the piece is a deliberate provocation, like some of his others, the rest wasn’t imagined by Cage to take 17 months, that’s just an artifact of someone else’s decision to play the piece for 639 years. In typical performances while Cage was alive, the opening rest wasn’t more than a few seconds.
Ever been to see an orchestra play? In my opinion, the part where the conductor puts his hands up and the audience and orchestra both grow quiet in anticipation of the start of the piece is semantic.
Pedantic note, the tuning is typically before the conductor raises the baton. Depending on the concert, it is often done before the conductor even comes on stage.
Beethoven’s 5th symphony (da-da-da-DAA) starts with a rest too, it’s not unusual to notate like this. Many pieces have “pickup” measures which are not complete and much shorter than a full measure. But when the pickup is more than 50% of a normal measure, it’s no longer much of a pickup and starting with a rest to make up the complete measure makes sense.
That's all fine and dandy when you're talking about a genuine piece of music. But for something like this, counting a rest that goes for 17 years is taking it way too far.
17 months. But in what sense isn’t this a genuine peice of music? It certainly meets Merriam-Webster’s definition:
a: vocal, instrumental, or mechanical sounds having rhythm, melody, or harmony
b: the science or art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity
An exploration of what is and is not a piece of music, like this work explicitly is, needs to acknowledge the possibility that the answer might be “no, this isn't”. Dictionary definitions are entirely irrelevent except insofar as they provide the inspiration to ask “wait, but is that _really_ all a work of music is?”
One of HN's few(?) music appreciation professors here: in fact, I start every term posing this question. It's hard to teach music appreciation before a group of humans can agree where music begins and ends :) At the end of the day, like everything else it's a certain degree of statistics and a certain degree of subjectivity.
Does it in fact have rhythm, melody, harmony, unity, or continuity? If it's too slow for any human to actually observe those qualities in it then I'd argue that it does not.
Are you talking about the composition or this particular performance of that composition. This performance may be too slow for any human to actually observe, but the composition is just a piece of sheet music you can read and judge like any other composition. This is far from the first performance of this piece, it's just that most other performances have been in the 20 minute to 20 hour range.
Do photons and electrons not exist, because we cannot observe them directly?
You can certainly play a recording of the piece at whatever speed you desire, and decide if it has rhythm, melody, harmony, unity, and continuity. Extremely slowing the piece down does not remove those things.
Regardless of the philosophy of it (which is certainly interesting), many pieces uncontroversially start with a rest. If the first bar doesn’t start on a note, then the piece starts on a rest.
You could argue that the first bar is actually shorter than all the following ones and only starts on the first note, but… no one thinks like that that I ever heard of
> Surely it doesn't really start until the first note is played?
That question itself is built on a radical assumption. Example:
Just skimming, it looks like 38 out of 48 of the fugues from Bach's WTC Books 1 & 2 begin with rests followed by several beats worth of melodies in the first measure[1]. If you think the piece only really starts when the first note of the melody is played, then you've got problems. Either:
1. You hear the first articulation of the melody as the downbeat. But that would mean the first measure is in a disparate (and probably irregular) meter. Radical!
2. You hear the incomplete first measure as an anacrusis, or a kind of unaccented lead-in, to the second measure: OMG even more radical!
You can use accent patterns on a modern piano to play any of these fugues using either of these methods, and it will sound silly to non-silly keyboard players.
What's more, non-silly keyboard players do feel the pulse for the first downbeat of these pieces when they perform. Most of them will even inhale before the downbeat, as if they are somehow singing the melody through their fingers.
Finally, lots of music begins with rests: not just conservative cases like Bach, but progressive cases like the beginning of Beethoven's Fifth, and of course the radical cases like Cage's.
This leads to one of the things I love about Cage's music: it compels criticisms that reveal fundamental misunderstandings about music. E.g., you don't buy the radical case-- perhaps reasonable. But you then speculate there are no cases-- which is at odds with common musical practice.
If Cage's music did nothing but compel these questions it would be worth its weight in pine nuts.
Edit:
1: Bach does this because nearly all the fugues have three or more independent melodies singing at the same time. If they are all singing on every downbeat it can quickly sound really clunky and predictable.
> 2. You hear the incomplete first measure as an anacrusis, or a kind of unaccented lead-in, to the second measure: OMG even more radical!
Why is this radical at all? This is exactly how most humans perceive it: as a lead-in to the second (I might even argue first) measure. It's very strange to me to say that most humans are supposed to understand the piece to have started before any sound is played. In fact that's quite preposterous: play a song that starts with a rest to 1000 people and ask them to gesture as soon as the song starts, and every single one of them will gesture on the first note played. How are they supposed to perceive the song to have started any earlier than that? A song "starting with rests" is written that way to make it understandable to the performer who is reading the notation. It's a purely notational thing. The notation is not the song, the sound is the song.
> If you think the piece only really starts when the first note of the melody is played, then you've got problems. Either:
> 1. You hear the first articulation of the melody as the downbeat. But that would mean the first measure is in a disparate (and probably irregular) meter. Radical!
> 2. You hear the incomplete first measure as an anacrusis, or a kind of unaccented lead-in, to the second measure: OMG even more radical!
Why? Why can't you just say the piece starts partway through a bar, and we notate that with a rest for convenience? Just as when a piece ends partway through a bar we would generally accept that it ends when the last note ends (and while we might notate that as being a full bar in the case of a long held note, we don't always play it that way), not after some trailing rests, and we wouldn't consider this as being some kind of radical accented thing.
> This leads to one of the things I love about Cage's music: it compels criticisms that reveal fundamental misunderstandings about music. E.g., you don't buy the radical case-- perhaps reasonable. But you then speculate there are no cases-- which is at odds with common musical practice.
Love this thought. You disagree with an extreme interpretation, do you take the exact opposite? If not, up to where do you go?
If the first note isn't on the 1, you'll write rests before it, so that the person reading your sheet music understands what's going on. That doesn't mean the music has started yet. The notation is not the music.
In a live orchestra performance, the conductor raises his hands. The audience quiets in anticipation.
He gives an up tick indicating the beginning of the music, then the downbeat of the start of the first measure.
No sound is heard.
The conductor continues to mark time. The silence is deep...profound.
The conductor continues to mark the time of the passing measures.
The audience listens.
At some point, positive sound breaks the silence - suddenly, loudly destroying the stillness! Or possibly very nearly silently - at the uncertain threshold of perception, the audible music begins...
You go to your hi-fi setup, a veritable temple of sound reproduction.
You peruse your library and select an album. Or perhaps you have a new one that you have carefully carried home from the store. Whichever.
You lift up the cover of your turntable.
Carefully, you extract the vinyl disc from its cardboard and paper sleeves. Taking care not to touch it by its surface, you place it on the turntable. Perhaps you clean its surface with a special lint-catcher designed for this.
You lift up the needle by its little handle. Delicately, you place it on the disc, in the space between the very edge and the visible band of the first track.
There is an anticipatory crackle. A fuzzy pop. The sounds of the needle skidding across the smooth surface of the disc, and dropping into the groove.
A pause.
And then the music begins.
Perhaps the music begins loud and fast. Perhaps it doesn't. Perhaps it's a few words from the bandleader, welcoming you to their new album. Perhaps it's a collage of natural sounds that gradually gives way to music.
When, precisely, did you begin the experience of "listening to music"?
----
It is 2025.
You take out your phone. You turn off its notifications.
You find your headphones and put them on. Perhaps they give off a beep complaining of being out of power, and you have to put them on the charger, and dig up your backup pair, possibly along with an adaptor to plug them into the headphone jack that no longer exists on your new phone.
You open up Spotify, Youtube, whatever you use to stream music. You type in the name of what you want to listen to.
You hit 'play'.
Your phone begins downloading music off the internet. Perhaps first there's an ad. Perhaps several ads. Perhaps not. Perhaps it takes a while to buffer. It's an indeterminate thing.
And then the music begins. As before, perhaps it hits the ground running immediately; perhaps there's some collection of anticipatory sounds, some pause, before the music really gets into gear. Perhaps it's interrupted five seconds in by your discovery that this is actually just the first five seconds of the track followed by an ad for Bitcoin, or the discovery that this is a track with a name similar to what you asked to be played, and you get to go back a few steps. Perhaps you actually get what you wanted.
At what point did you begin the experience of "listening to music"?
You typed a really long comment, but you're not talking about the same thing. Listening to an ad before a song starts is very obviously not part of the music, even if it's part of "the experience of listening to music (on a streaming service)." The ad before a song plays is not included in the song's official runtime.
You're essentially describing the time the audience sits waiting for the orchestra to walk onto the stage as being "part of the experience of going to the orchestra." Which is fine, but it's not considered part of the song (unless the composer's quirky and writes "walk onto the stage" at the beginning of the music sheets, which is basically what this guy did with the 17-month rest).
Moreover, nobody was actually sitting in that cathedral for 17 months listening to the first rest. If a 17-month rest is played in the middle of a forest and nobody hears it, was it really a 17-month rest? Who experienced that "experience?"
There doesn't seem to be a conductor at all in this performance, and there certainly wasn't one for the entire 17 months that the rest lasted. (The person in charge of this project, Rainer Neugebauer, is not conducting; the linked article makes mention of a speech before the note was changed, but nothing about marking time.)
Not that I'd expect a conductor to be needed for a soloist performance, but it makes the whole "when the conductor raises his hands" point a little off-topic.
Technically it's okay to be confused and wrong, but it is not really okay to be vocal about it. It just steals people's time. Maybe it is deliberate trolling, how should we know? Better to be moderated out
You're not missing the performance. It's playing right now, and will play your entire life. You just don't get to see what comes next, how it changes, and how it ends.
To be a bit pedantic, those recordings are played at real time for normal speech, and have gaps between anything being played of centuries. They don't play continuously for that long, unlike this project which does play continuously.
Something you realise about a melody is its not about the notes, it's about the intervals. Nor is rhythm about the time at which it is played, rather it is about the relative time between events. So you could argue the music is only really happening when things change, as they did on this day. So I see this more as a time capsule similar to Seldon crises rather than a piece that is continually playing, but your interpretation can be different. Cage's 4'33" certainly challenges my interpretation.
Oddly enough, Bach's BWV 639 is one of my favourite (organ) pieces. But it appears to be just a coincidence, since the length was decided as the number of years since the construction of the first organ in Halberstadt to the new millennium.
This is one of the core tenets in the mythology of social conservatism. This notion that somehow thigns cam somehow stay the same... forever. This is usually expressed with wording around values, tradition and customs.
As opposed to the core tenant of the mythology of social liberalism, the notion that somehow things can continuously change, at infinite speeds to an infinite degree, without blowing everything up at some point?
I don't think most social conservatives would agree with your interpretation that they want everything to stay the same forever. Rather, the "values, tradition, and customs" that you're crapping on are something to reflect on and guide change in a hopefully more peaceful, sustainable, and manageable way.
"Conservatives want everything frozen in time forever" is a straw-man to support a false dilemma.
Here's a video (with sound) of one of the other chord changes. It didn't occur to me they'd just swap in a pipe instead of pressing a key on a keyboard.
Less known than 4'33" being "silent" (which it's not) is that John Cage was an anarchist.
"Both Fuller and Marshall McLuhan knew, furthermore, that work is now obsolete. We have invented machines to do it for us. Now that we have no need to do anything what shall we do? Looking at Fuller's Geodesic World Map we see that the earth is a single island. Oahu. We must give all the people all they need to live in any way they wish. Our present laws protect the rich from the poor. If there are to be laws we need ones that begin with the acceptance of poverty as a way of life. We must make the earth safe for poverty without dependence on government."
> In theory, a pipe organ can sound indefinitely, so long as it receives adequate power and its pedals are pressed continually. [..] Thus, the only threats to this performance are the survival of the organ, the will of the unborn and the erratic tides of arts funding.
Part of the wonder with this work is thinking of how to overcome such a problem
It’s actually a very optimistic work for Cage. The idea that we could have a continuous performance for hundreds of years, without ever being interrupted by wars or disasters.
I think it is amazing that someone has risen to the challenge to try and perform this, and if they are successful what that means for us as a society that it was allowed to happen
I have a pessimistic outlook. All it will take is one bad actor to interrupt this performance that could potentially involve thousands to maintain. It feels inevitable that this will fail. Nevertheless, this in itself is a statement on us as a species and what a wonderful work this is to have provoked such a thing.
If it’s contemporary art, then they may well have planned to have someone come in with a sledgehammer and smash it to bits in front of audience who paid to hear the next note change or on some other date of significance.
It won’t be the first time an artist has done this.
Maybe they'll also explain the point of this. The piece is called "As Slow As Possible", but it's not as slow as possible. The slowest possible piece would have a fermata with an infinity sign over the first note, and that's it. Maybe the rest of it would be a jaunty little tune that would never be played in context. ("Shave and a haircut", perhaps?)
As a stunt, it's moderately interesting. How do you set up a contraption to play for hundreds of years? How do you maintain it without interrupting the performance? But it's less interesting than the 10,000 year clock.
> The slowest possible piece would have a fermata with an infinity sign over the first note, and that's it.
But then the piece would never be completely played, which seems like a requirement for Cage's musical game / art / philosophical statement.
Moreover, your hypothetical piece could still technically be played at a high tempo. It seems like the point of the Cage piece is to play it at the slowest possible tempo, not over the greatest length of time possible (and that's why the fermata idea doesn't fit). (So while you're correct that 639 years doesn't represent the slowest tempo possible (just play it over 640 years instead, right?) it's the idea of extreme slowness that's interesting. Or perhaps "as slow as possible" refers to the tempo that really was as slow as possible (at the time it was set up) because of technological constraints.
Without having deeply researched the piece, I wonder if 639 years was chosen with any relation to Tesla's 3–6–9 idea.
Edit: It looks like the 639 years comes from the "performer(s)" who set up the equipment, not from Cage himself. The composer only gave the instruction to play it as slowly as possible, which plays into the technological-limitations idea above, I think.
Saying “As slow as possible” isn’t followable any more than putting an infinity sign next to a note. You can’t know how long a piece of equipment lasts unless you decide to break it at an arbitrary time.
These performers choose a completely arbitrary number independent of technical limitations, and then ran into technical limitations.
I'd argue that "As slow as possible" is a note to the performer, not an absolute statement. Play it as slow as _you_ feel you possibly can. For some performers that's an hour, for some it's 8, for some it's 24 hours, and for this particular performance it's 639 years.
It’s so funny coming from a musical background and reading all these comments of people who have no idea what they are talking about criticizing one of the worlds most famous modern composers
Every performance ever done has been the performer interpreting the composer’s score and making it their own. Nobody want to hear a robotic perfectly accurate recreation of what is on the page, because even the act of transcription alters the composer’s intent. The score is not the art!
There is no perfection in art. It’s all subjective, by the literal definition of art.
> Every performance ever done has been the performer interpreting the composer’s score and making it their own.
To be fair, there are multiple lines of thought on that matter. Some conductors enjoy "making it their own," while other conductors attempt to discover and reproduce the composer's original intention as closely as possible. Toscanini comes to mind as a historical example of the latter, although I'm sure there are others.
At a certain point, a composer needs to provide information to compose a piece. What if someone wrote a "solo" that just said "improvise" and contained no notes at all? The argument being presented above is that Cage did the tempo equivalent of that. This is a philosophy argument at best, not "people who have no idea what they're talking about."
You are right, but the choice to attempt a historically accurate reproduction is also subject to interpretation.
It simply can never be perfect. Down to the acoustics of the venue, there will always be aspects of a performance that are lost to time and can never be reproduced. And how can we even know, since no recordings exist (and if they did, that recording would introduce its own artifacts).
How many people dance to a boureé today? Can any performance of one really be be accurate outside the context of dance? Sitting politely in a huge recital hall is no at all accurate
And even then, the music falls on modern ears. We hear and understand music completely differently than ancient people did. Can we even consider anything to be accurate, since Art is experienced?
I love renaissance music, and listen to as many recordings as I can where the performer uses a vihuela, theorbo, lute, etc. It's a totally nerdy pursuit. But it’s only “accurate” to a point
The bottom line for me is that Art is subjective. Do it in the way that satisfies your urge to create. As soon as it leaves your body, it belongs to the rest of us to interpret and experience. There are no right or wrong ways to express yourself.
I think you may be misinterpreting “possible” here. I’m shocked that it’s possible to get funding and interest to make a 639 year piece happen. It is unclear if it will be possible to complete. I do not think it would be possible to make a 10,000 year piece happen.
As with all things, the contraption is not the hard part. It’s the supporting civilization, society, economic context, and will of generations of people.
Cage’s game here is to question the entire scaffolding of art, not the pigments of the paint.
Adam Neely and his band Sungazer did an interesting live experiment with his audiences, to figure out the slowest beat or pulse that people would be able to "feel" and dance to. Slowest possible isn't really as interesting in my opinion as slowest practical, which I think Neely and co's experiment explored. The track was Threshold on the album Perihelion.
The whole album explored beat, pulse and timings as it relates to how people can actually feel and interact with music. Really interesting!
is that also the album/live shows that had the audience dancing to the beats 1,2,3,4 which they thought was 4/4 but in such a way that the underlying time-signature was different?
No musical performance is ever a 100% literal translation of the score. That’s pretty much impossible for any work. A score is not a set of MIDI instructions and a performer is not a sound card.
This post is wild because “what is the point of this” seems to be complexly divorced from the human drive to create and express one’s self.
> How do you set up a contraption to play for hundreds of years? How do you maintain it without interrupting the performance?
You play it with an orchestra (or perhaps a quartet is enough). Players may take turns to eat, sleep, and even have work-life balance. They also may retire (or die) and be replaced by new musicians. (How much would it cost?)
Sort of interesting that the Clock of the Long Now and Cage’s ORGAN2/ASLSP were conceived around the same time — 1989 and 1987, respectively.
Also worth noting the clock's name is from Brian Eno, who has expressed interest in developing chimes for the clock. So Cage's work was kinda presaging the clock.
The Girl With the Pearl Earring is considered a masterpiece because of the technological limitations of the time.
Blue was one of the most expensive colours because the ultramarine dye was derived from lapus lazuli, a rock imported from Afghanistan and ground with a labour-intensive process. Medieval European art typically depicted the Virgin Mary in blue. The expense indicated devotion.
Someone living in that time period would know anything in ultramarine is important.
Except Vermeer used it for whatever he wanted, including a blue turban on The Girl With the Pearl Earring (originally called Girl with a Turban). The pearl is expensive in the world of the painting, but the blue turban was expensive to create in real life. That is the central mystery of the painting.
But we literally cannot appreciate that because we did not grow up in a world where ultramarine blue was as expensive as gold, because synthetic ultramarine was invented in 1826. That's why you care about visual interest and aesthetics instead of reacting with "Holy shit! Why is this blue?"
Our descendants will likely feel the same about the art we create today, and ignore whatever aspects of it are trivialized by AI.
I see what you mean, but I don't think this is super accurate. There are similarly large (and larger) patches of blue in many paintings by Vermeer and others from the Dutch Golden Age. Ultramarine was as expensive as you, but it was demonstrably used in many paintings from the Renaissance at large. The historically expensive blue paint is not the primary thing people think about when considering this painting, nor is it the reason this painting is uniquely loved among paintings of the period.
Of course, the expensive paint is a part of the history of the period, and paintings like this one become a symbol of the period as a whole. Appreciation for the period is certainly part of the appreciation for the painting.
This is not the art that's being destroyed by AI (in fact, I would say this academic ideas art is exactly the kind of art least likely to be supplanted by AI)
Art also is a massive money laundering operation. Why make 10,000 fake invoices when you can make one $10mil invoice for something with zero definable value.
All the pretensions are maxed to legitimize the BS.
Then the talent-less, listless, bored children of the ultra rich have mommy and daddy force museums to put their kindergarten macaroni art on the walls of places that great artists used to be. (Aka banana taped to wall literally the same as macaroni child projects). The mental gymnastics to pretend it is more than that requires the irrational love for your untalented child.
Rich people have destroyed the global art community.
Your view about art is just too constrained by an appeal to aesthetic beauty. Art's beauty can come in many obtuse ways, and doesn't even need to encompass aesthetic beauty.
The exploration of philosophy through art has its own beauty, it's not an easily digestible beauty but it's a kind of. What you show is just a complete lack of perception to other ways to appreciate art, and for that your soul is a bit more empty than it could be.
Instead of looking at art from this productivity view try to be more curious, challenge yourself on what is even the notion of art and what it can give to us that is ineffable in other forms... Right now you are just too miopic to even be able to appreciate art as a whole, you just want the product of art, not the process, meaning, and philosophical questions it can spark in you.
To understand art takes effort, it tells me a lot about people when they show how uncurious and set in their ways they are about art, they just simply aren't free people.
Yes, art needs to have both aesthetic beauty and technical skill behind it. Contemporary art has neither of those things, and thus it is an embarrassment to the label of "art".
> Your view about art is just too constrained by an appeal to aesthetic beauty.
This gets repeated a lot, but the reality is to many people, including philosophers, artists and appreciators of both, aesthetic beauty is a fundamental property of art without which it cannot survive.
The fact that contemporary art circles handwave away that relevance while arrogantly mumbling "you're just miopic, ignorant and misguided, learn more" doesn't really change that fact.
From the outside, it just shows that you too have been co-opted into the cult. You're free to subscribe to that view, but you don't get to gatekeep the meaning of art, no matter how many members that cult may have.
In this particular case for me I see a certain kind of artistic beauty in the recital. The fact, that we as a society try to keep something going for 639 years, just a sliver of a thread connecting all those different lives together. Not knowing if it will work, how it will end up, if it will fail spectacularly or just fizzle out into obscurity.
I wouldn't say that people who do not see this as art are wrong, that's the beauty of art isn't it? It's in the eye of the beholder. To me this recital sparks some hope or in any case makes me stop for a second and wonder about greater things than just my day to day.
I don't even mind this particular piece, but I do mind most of what gets labeled as contemporary art. Or pretty much anything since Duchamp's Fountain or maybe Yoko Ono's Cut Piece before that.
> The fact that contemporary art circles handwave away that relevance while arrogantly mumbling "you're just miopic, ignorant and misguided, learn more" doesn't really change that fact.
> From the outside, it just shows that you too have been co-opted into the cult. You're free to subscribe to that view, but you don't get to gatekeep the meaning of art, no matter how many members that cult may have.
Isn't beauty in the eyes of the beholder though? I do see beauty in a lot of art deemed "part of the cult", how do you even attempt to objectively judge aesthetic beauty in a vacuum? Beauty exists in contexts, there is stuff that without the context just looks weird, with context it becomes beautiful, how do you assess the objective aesthetic beauty of such without delving into philosophical discussions?
You are all free to create an art movement that aspires to do what you believe art should be: aesthetically beautiful, devoid of philosophical meaning as pursuit of beauty, beauty for its own sake, etc., it will be included, admired, rejected, judged as misguided, so on and so forth, just like you are doing with contemporary art that you do not agree with.
> Isn't beauty in the eyes of the beholder though?
This is a truism, and I don't even think it's that accurate. There are some universal aspects to our perception of beauty such as symmetry, balance, tension-and-release, contrast, recursion... whatever it may be. We don't need to know what it is to tell that it's there.
Maybe, but all of those are context-dependent and can operate at high levels of abstraction. The beholder needs to be able to recognize them to appreciate them. A Rothko or Pollock has those things, but that doesn’t make them automatically appreciated. Assuming you’re from a western culture, listen to some Thai classical music and see how obvious the beauty is to you.
Tastes are by nature subjective. But if 99% of people think X is beautiful and Y is ugly, and 1% think it's the other way around, there probably is an objective reason the ratios are as they are.
Sure, keep being uncurious and ignorant, it's all your choice, it's you who is missing out.
"Fake intellectuals" is just... Sad, devaluing whole bodies of work simply because you cannot understand them, instead of attempting to curiously explore that you prefer to use a thought-terminating cliché and embrace your ignorance as supreme... All the while you live during a time where all information and knowledge in the world is there for you to access for free.
It's just... Sad to live that way but ignorance is bliss since it's just so much easier to reject anything that challenges you.
The fact that this modern "art" needs to be subsidized by the people that actually works with their taxes, is all the argument needed to tell you that indeed this is nothing more than fake intellectualism.
I'm not missing on absolutely anything by not appreciating a banana glued to a wall. In fact, nobody really appreciates that, it's just a bunch of sycophants pretending they have some artistic knowledge the rest of us, the poor populace, lack, that go on pretending with the charade.
The rest of the world, are just willing to tell you that the emperor has no clothes.
What taxes or subsidies are you talking about?? The Halberstadt project is funded on voluntary donations by people who want to see it happen.
It’s not clear what’s making you angry about one obscure performance of an obscure piece of music, but you might have more in common with Cage than you imagine. Cage described himself as an anarchist, and pieces like 4’33” are, in part, a commentary on the rules of music that make fun of establishment. Maybe he’s saying the same thing you are about the emperor’s clothes.
Erudite music (i.e. what we call classical Music)?
I think it managed to hold off a bit more, we still have Bizet, Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, even Stravinsky and others composing great (fantastic, in some cases) pieces in the first half of the 20th century.
> The fact that this modern "art" needs to be subsidized by the people that actually works with their taxes, is all the argument needed to tell you that indeed this is nothing more than fake intellectualism.
When exactly did art not need financial support from the State, or rich patrons, to be able to be made?
You are moving the discussion into a completely different territory now, and again showing how your view of art is principled in some kind of "productivity" measurement, which is so absurd that is not even wrong.
> I'm not missing on absolutely anything by not appreciating a banana glued to a wall. In fact, nobody really appreciates that, it's just a bunch of sycophants pretending they have some artistic knowledge the rest of us, the poor populace, lack, that go on pretending with the charade.
The banana glued to a wall is one work of art (and polemic for a reason), and you are using that to paint a broad stroke over all contemporary art as if there is nothing being told there... You don't know what you are missing exactly because you don't know what it is, you wouldn't know the colours you'd be missing if you were born with black-and-white sight, nor would know you are missing music if you were born deaf. The difference is that you are not born with an unchangeable characteristic to not appreciate art in different ways, you can work on that, you just choose not to.
There's no charade, the actual charade is why are you so vitriolic opposed to something you do not even understand, lol. It reeks of some sort of insecurity, since you do not understand you feel it's beneath you because makes you feel lesser that others might "get it" and you are out of the club? I don't know, look inside you to find an answer because the passionate rage about something you do not understand has deeper roots.
It's not up to you guys to say we "do not even understand". It's too handwavy and a false premise. We could argue the same... you guys "don't understand" how much bullshit there is in contemporary art to the point it's basically noise at this point.
To take a reductive view, art is people saying stuff. It's one thing to think that what is being said is not worth saying; but you seem to claim that nothing is being said. And that's just bragging about your own ignorance.
The few hundred people who visited during the 17-month rest are just as silly as someone who'd be convinced to see a random forum poster's millennium rest, that's the kicker.
Sure, if you want to make it about the engineering accomplishment rather than the music itself. Somewhat to your point, I guess I have more respect for Rainer Neugebauer and the team actually attempting to put this performance on than for John Cage simply writing it down vaguely.
Totally agree. I think Cage's work is vaguely interesting in an abstract sorta way, but the actually interesting part of this piece is the organ itself. I think they're both art, but I personally value the latter more.
Some art-haters in the comments, so to defend this piece of contemporary art for a moment: one thing I love about it is a commitment to the long future of art, creativity, and civilization. What does it take to keep an instrument playing for six hundred years? To commit to that idea -- like the century-long projects of cathedral building in the middle ages, or the idea of planting trees you won't live to see mature -- is (to me) the awesome thing about the Halberstadt performance. All rendered in a medium (church organ) that has existed for an even longer time.
It's a pretty hopeful, optimistic view of the future in a time of high uncertainty, but also represents a positive argument: it's worth doing these things because they are interesting, weird, and fun, and because they represent a continuity with past and future people we will never meet.
Plus, you can already buy a ticket to the finale, so your distant descendants can go see it :)
I'm not disagreeing with you, but you should invert the question and think about it.
In the case of a cathedral, I think it is relatively easy to commit to the project you won't see through, it has a significance to those people making the commitment. What becomes much more challenging is when future generations don't have the same level of commitment, it's a much bigger ask to stop. Maybe there is a better use of the resources that could impact people immediately; if it's a church, I'm thinking feeding the hungry and clothing the naked sorts of things. It's hard to stop something that "we've just been doing." It's also hard to ask "why are we doing this?"
In 200 years, suppose there is some crisis we cannot predict and the recital is to be interrupted or stopped. There will be an incredible amount of pressure on somebody to make a good choice. Pressure that was created by a distant ancestor, of sorts. That might be part of the beauty of it, that might be part of the bond that ties different people together throughout time and it might be wonderful. What if there is a caretaker that is ready to retire and cannot find the next caretaker? That seems like a horrible position to be in.
Japan is or was doing multi-generational mortgages a while back (I assume they might still be.) as it was the only way a family could afford to buy a property. I can see that being a tremendously loving act for your children or grandchildren in providing a property that they will own, but I could just as well see it being a gigantic burden to them, what if they want to live somewhere else? Them following their bliss effectively changes the living and working future of the parents.
There's always an opportunity cost to making art. Taking your argument to it's extreme people should never paint or make music but instead spend all their time growing food and building homes (and distributing those goods because that's a big crux, we could feed everyone on the planet if we got food to the right people).
The cool thing about freedom is that we don't have to be rational monks that are slave to economic utilitarism.
This conundrum comes up sometimes in the context of generational starships, about intermediate generations being born into bondage board, committed by their ancestors to a shitty life in a metal tube, with their only purpose being a preordained duty to keep a few systems operational and produce the next generation of slaves just so that eventually someone can birth the arrival generation.
Alastair Reynolds' book Chasm City touches on a bunch of this, in particular the class warfare angle of some wealthy travelers getting to enjoy the journey in peaceful cryosleep while the poor ones pay for their passage in servitude.
> being born into bondage board, committed by their ancestors to a shitty life in a metal tube, with their only purpose being a preordained duty to keep a few systems operational and produce the next generation of slaves just so that eventually someone can birth the arrival generation.
This isn't really so different from being born on Earth, except that we take being born on Earth for granted, and the population is really really big.
Ehhh I see where you're coming from but I don't think it's quite the same. Here on Earth is the default, and while each individual's opportunities are greatly affected by the circumstances of their birth and parentage, with effort and luck there's a fair chance to change one's stars.
Opting into an interstellar voyage is a significant reduction in opportunity for almost anyone.
And yes, the same could be said for a European colonist crossing the Atlantic to the Americas in the 16th century, and many of them did face starvation, exposure, etc, but it's different when you're largely committing yourself and your immediate family to those hardships, under the belief that the timeframe for "a better life" is the next generation. Committing intermediate generations is a different beast.
You're assuming life after the journey was guaranteed to be better, but not all colonists and immigrants happened to head to the world's future superpower.
Every decision is potentially committing descendants to the consequences of that choice (and to wit: life aboard a generation ship hardly need be a miserable or undesirable one, at the size of say, a large town and surrounding hinterland you have as much or more opportunity as anyone else at most times in history - I think generation ships force us to confront uncomfortable questions about what is the meaning of life on Earth which we try to sweep aside by deciding they're an impossible moral burden).
We're all living in the world created by our ancestors. All their short sighted fuckups (lead poisoning, climate change) or triumphs (tech, art) is ours to bear.
Life is conditioned and unfree get used to it.
I spend too much time thinking about all the stuff that can go wrong on generation ships.
You take off for your destination, but when you get there you find out that humans back on earth made a faster ship 100 years after you left and beat you to the destination.
You spent generations expecting to be bold explorers pushing the frontier and getting to claim nice territory, and you show up to find you’re in second place.
I won't spoil it here, but you might really enjoy Chasm City; I recommend giving it a read. :)
incessant obsolescence
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12354195
And that the highly-refined citizens of that future era think that your BO and deodorant are incredibly overpowering.
(as described in Vogt's "Far_Centaurus" short story.
> You take off for your destination, but when you get there you find out that humans back on earth made a faster ship 100 years after you left and beat you to the destination.
A theme that turns up in Starfield as well...
Heinlein also tackled some of these problems with generation ships in Orphans of the Sky[1].
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphans_of_the_Sky
> In 200 years, suppose there is some crisis we cannot predict and the recital is to be interrupted or stopped. There will be an incredible amount of pressure on somebody to make a good choice. Pressure that was created by a distant ancestor, of sorts. That might be part of the beauty of it, that might be part of the bond that ties different people together throughout time and it might be wonderful. What if there is a caretaker that is ready to retire and cannot find the next caretaker? That seems like a horrible position to be in.
We have plenty of examples where this has already happened. Traditions that were maintained at significant cost in the face of difficulties or opposition. Caretakers of something ancient who struggle to find an heir. We tend to view them positively.
> Japan is or was doing multi-generational mortgages a while back (I assume they might still be.) as it was the only way a family could afford to buy a property.
I suspect this has been misreported. Japanese mortgage terms are pretty normal and property prices are much lower than in the west (even the bubble only really affected central Tokyo). There's a practice of an elderly parent being able to get a mortgage that's then "inherited" by a child, in cases where the parent is retired or close to retirement, but it's pretty much a face-saving (and tax-avoidance) measure.
They couldn’t even quarry the Washington Monument out of a single color of stone. It’s not that visible in pictures but if you go see it on a sunny day it’s hard to ignore that stupid line in the middle.
If you take too long building a cathedral the quarry might exhaust itself in the meantime. So even if you keep to the design it might not look right.
> The outside facing consists, due to the interrupted building process, of three different kinds of white marble.
For some cathedrals that visible mismatch in the materials might be a feature, not a bug.
At least that's the case for the co-cathedral in Zamora, Michoacán which had its construction interrupted for almost a century due to the Mexican Revolution, the Cristero War and its subsequent expropriation by the government. In this context, the mismatching facade remains as a testament of the building's history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocesan_Sanctuary_of_Our_Lady...
Maybe a crisis will occur and maybe our descendants will have to make a tough choice, but that could enrich the story of the performance. If they choose to end the performance for whatever reason, that’s their business. The hopes and desires of one generation can only hold sway over the next for so long.
> If they choose to end the performance for whatever reason, that’s their business.
Well, in this case, "you can already buy a ticket to the finale, so your distant descendants can go see it." Selling tickets for an event that far in the future makes it the business of the ticket purchaser and whoever they leave the tickets for.
Is the money collected from the tickets being held in such a way that it can be refunded if/when this project fails before another 600 years have gone by? If not, it seems like a potential scam in that sense.
No need to speculate wildly or cast unsupported aspersions. The funds from the “Final Ticket” sales are explicitly a financial contribution to supporting the project. Nobody buying one is unaware of that fact, there’s no potential for scam.
It's not wild to speculate that a ticket I buy for an event 600 years in the future might not be honored. People get screwed over on pre-orders with timetables far smaller than that.
Again, if they sell something they're calling a ticket to the final part of the performance, then they have a financial duty to keep the project going (or refund the ticket) and it's not "their business" to end the project early like the person I replied to was claiming. At the very best, they could invest the money and use only the interest to support ongoing operations, but they need to keep the original value available to refund or else they need to fulfill what the ticket's for-- if they do neither of those things, they ripped people off, period.
If they're just funding the project's continuation, it's on them for pulling the marketing stunt (and/or false advertising) of calling it a ticket for this event in 600 years instead of just taking donations, selling present-day tickets and/or merch, etc. Fine print saying "actually, this ticket isn't a real ticket, it's just for fun" doesn't make them look better to me, so I don't see how that'd be a defense in your mind.
> It's not wild to speculate that a ticket I buy for an event 600 years in the future might not be honored. People get screwed over on pre-orders with timetables far smaller than that.
I think you're framing this in the wrong way. Anyone buying a ticket knows there is no guarantee that this finale will occur, or that even if it does, that whatever entity in is in charge of it by then will honor the tickets. They treat this as a donation to something they care about, and the ticket is a cute gift of appreciation. And on top of that, the descendants of the ticket-purchasers may have lost the tickets generations ago, not even know about them, or not even care.
Suggesting that people are getting "screwed over" is unnecessarily dramatic.
Again, the terms of the purchase are explicitly laid out. Maybe go read them? It’s not a marketing stunt, not false advertising, and it is a real ticket. It’s a financial contribution to the project, same as any donation. You can rationalize your speculation and assumptions but the terms of the deal aren’t confusing anyone buying these tickets. Donations with merch attached to them as ‘thank yous’ are absolutely standard practice, and there’s nothing wrong with it. Regardless, I guarantee nobody who buys one will be alive to redeem the ticket. Your best choice, if you were hoping to be there, or if you don’t want to contribute is to not purchase a Final Ticket. Aside from that, there’s really no call for muckraking. Zero people will be duped, they are extremely clear with their intent.
> Regardless, I guarantee nobody who buys one will be alive to redeem the ticket.
I agree 100%, which is part of what makes it such an easy scam to pull off!
You're attempting to sell this thing as a donation with a fake toy Monopoly-money not-actually-expected-to-be-redeemed ticket thrown in. The top commenter of this thread shouldn't have tried to include the ticket as a serious value-add if that's what it is. The comment specifically said "you can already buy a ticket to the finale, so your distant descendants can go see it [using the ticket]," not "so you can support the project out of the kindness of your own heart without any guarantee your descendants will get to see the finale."
Jesus, maybe dial the cynicism down a bit. This is not that serious. It's a fun thing where people get to donate to a bit of art they care about, and get a token of appreciation in return. I doubt any of these "purchasers" really care all that much if their descendants actually end up able to go to a finale in 600 years, outside of the "wouldn't it be cool if..." sense.
Smh. It’s not a scam, and it is a serious value add, and a real ticket. For someone, just not you. And only if the project survives, which is why they’re fundraising. https://www.aslsp.org/the_final_ticket.html
That's the beauty of a long-term commitment. You are stating so much confidence about the future that you say "yes, we can have a functioning society and set aside these resources".
Sure, you can create scenarios were that fails. You can do that for anything. The power lies in saying "we are willing to remove these paths from consideration because we as a people are committed to not letting them occur".
It's a model that fails if you apply first-order utilitarian calculus. But the intangible value of the hope and commitment in it likely overshadows any immediate gain. This isn't about how to maximize utilization or optionality. It's a bold statement about who we are, and a lodestar to aspire to. (Which is, ultimately, the job art does)
It's not surprising that people who love AI and NFTs are willfully ignorant about what makes art meaningful. It's a sadly transactional view of the world.
It’s obvious that many people in this industry believe themselves to be supremely intelligent and curious hacker types, yet they obviously never taken a humanities course.
They have a huge blind spot that they aren’t even aware of, or worse just devalue the entire history of human thought and creation that doesn’t involve hard science.
Your comment will rattle a few cages here but I honestly think about this all the time, as one of the minority of music educators around HN. The blind spots (or perhaps a STEM vs STEAM upbringing) are unfortunate. We are possibly the only — or one of an incredibly small number of — species that even makes sounds solely for enjoyment and aesthetics. The humanities are what make us us.
We're also the only species that can use abstraction to assign meaning to and relations between symbols in any way we choose. The humanities and the sciences are both extremely important to what makes us human, and saying that only one is 'what makes us us' will alienate those who are different from you.
That you are primarily driven by music and aesthetics, and others are primarily driven by science and technological creation, and most of us are driven by both in varying degrees - that is what makes us human.
Indeed!
I am a strong tech person. Always have been.
That said, early in my life I took a chance on music and really enjoyed the performing arts. Through an unfortunate set of circumstances, I ended up doing Music education for my peers.
A beloved teacher had a health issue that left them unable to teach and the substitute did not have the same manner and appreciation for the music and after a few conflicts, they called me out and I (foolishly) accepted!
Now I just had to back it up with actions.
Short story, "my" class was a success. Students reached their goals, we placed well in competition and that teacher and I developed a great friendship.
You are dead on with your comment. And having had the chance to take music education, then turn right around and deliver it seriously was at once crazy and ultra enlightening!
I had the realization my chest thumping got me placed into a position where I had an obligation to educate my peers and rid them of that blind spot you wrote of the same as was done for me.
And that was the H in "hard." Running the class, prepping pieces for performance, debugging the choir all were what I thought was hard.
Nope.
Getting them to internalize the humanity of it, language of emotion and all that, is hard. Respect for the art, whatever it may be, is hard. Cultivating the culture of learning, shared vulnerability (in the case of group performing arts) and the intensely personal nature of it all is hard.
I grew half a decade doing that as a high schooler, who had no clue at all what they said yes to...
In the end, a walk through the humanities is both empowering and enlightening on a level many technical people fail to appreciate.
No fault of theirs. They just did not get what I and many others did or gave as the case may be.
I can put a notch sharper point on all this for passersby (assuming you and I talking is preaching to the choir):
The ones who do not take the trip through the humanities are often told what to do by the ones who did.
Thanks for doing the hard work you do. It is often underappreciated.
Most of them don't value hard science either.
barbrook wrote an essay about this 30 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology
Still on the nose.
Ok but why would you need a "humanities course" to appreciate art?
You don’t. It’s a great way to get an introduction to a field outside of your typical realm of expertise though.
It’s one of those things that really lets you know how much you don’t know. Then when you comment about such things on the internet you might be open to learning more, as opposed to what many folk in this thread are doing.
I don't know, I don't want to become an expert. I just enjoy my books and paintings and sculptures and architecture...
The problems appear when you start assigning a monetary value to everything you do.
I can appreciate art, and play music at a pretty damn good level myself, but still think that John Cage is totally wack.
I don't dislike all strange music - Satie and Poulenc are some of my favorites. But a lot of John Cage's stuff is... no longer music.
Like I'm sorry, but 4'33" is not music.
I draw a line somewhere, and a lot of John Cage's stuff is wayyyyyyyyy the fuck over the line.
Sure maybe it's some kind of art, but it's not music.
We call this people "Fachidioten" in Germany, people who are really good at their craft but absolute morons in every other field. Unfortunately, these are the people that dominate tech and you can see this in how technology develops.
Google Translate renders this in English as "Specialist idiots" and I like that.
But that word equally describes artists
It can. Qualitatively - having spent the first half of my working life in the arts, and now the second nearly-half in tech - all I can say is that serious artists are every bit as smart and driven and interesting as are the serious people in tech. They just don't make as much money, so they don't get much respect.
Celebrities !== Artists
I don't see how that follows. Avant-garde music of this type is basically an NFT already. All of its value is in the novelty, none is in the aesthetics. The meaning of the piece is completely externalized to the identity of its author and the history of its composition and cannot be derived from observing the piece itself. That describes NFTs to a tee! The only thing missing the layer of cryptography on top.
> Avant-garde music of this type is basically an NFT already. All of its value is in the novelty, none is in the aesthetics.
That's painting things with a broad brush and a wrong one at that.
Ironically, there's plenty of avant-garde art that is 100% about the aesthetics, to the point people complain they were "made without technique".
This is an incredibly reductive dismissal of a very diverse group of people who don't find Cage's art in particular to be meaningful.
Why are you making such sweeping assumptions about us? I studied architecture and art history for over a year, I'm the son of a painter, I have an uncle who's a Grammy-winning musician and an aunt who's a musical scholar who literally has a doctorate degree on John f* Cage of all people... which is to say I grew up surrounded by art. I've visited every museum you can name this side of the Berlin Wall's remains, many more than once.
I have a degree in humanities, another in business and another in computer science.... and while I still don't mind Cage that much, I do think most of contemporary art is absolute shit.
I don't have to agree with you for my opinion to have value. You need to learn to name call people less and make your points on the merits of arguments. It's tiring for everyone else to engage otherwise.
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I get the frustration with art discourse that it can feel exclusionary or pretentious. There are definitely versions of that discussion that are more about gatekeeping than appreciation.
I think the original, parent comment was coming from a much more generous place. Like that top parent commenter, to me the Halberstadt organ piece isn’t about being highbrow or obscure; it’s about a kind of radical optimism—committing to something weird, beautiful, and long-term in a world that often feels very short-sighted. I don’t think you need to read Derrida or listen to Stockhausen to find meaning in that. Just as you don’t need to love AI or NFTs to appreciate innovation.
Many may think that's stupid or useless because it lacks utility (or any other reason) or seems arbitrary. Reasonable people can disagree, but I think such reactions are truly missing the point; that is simultaneously completely OK, but also personally dispiriting at times. There’s room for a lot of perspectives in how we engage with art, and I think it’s more interesting when we try to understand what someone finds meaningful before writing it off.
Art Appreciation is such a mystical skill! I would have never even remotely thought of OP's take upon reading a description of this art piece. I'm just not wired to come up with takeaways like that. When I hear about "weird" art project, my mind usually just thinks "Well, I guess that's just how this guy wanks" and I just don't seem to have the brain to divine the kind of stuff that OP wrote about!
I think you do have the brain, but maybe you're framing it wrong! When you come across art that seems unapproachable or strange to you, the last question you should ask is "What did the artist mean by this?" Instead, first think "What does this make me feel?" The answer may often be nothing, but then in the spirit of curiosity follow it up with "What might others who love this art be responding to?"
Sometimes for me, I need to take myself out of trying to "solve" the art piece and be intentional about viewing it with a different, less literal mindset. It's still me doing the thinking, but it kind of short-circuits my normal interaction with the world.
Or maybe that's just a bunch of blowhard bullshit, I don't know, but it is what I do.
You should mind that old saying about not being so open-minded that your brain falls out.
While the questions "what is art" and "what is beauty" are indeed interesting, this doesn't help in any way.
There's no substance, it wouldn't get a thousandth of this attention if it was made by a nobody and isn't even fit to be called a meme: it's something between outrage bait and an insipid conversation piece, a transparent (thus vulgar) case of "muddying the water to make it seem deep". But the whole intellectual "class" being so devoid of people upright enough to call out the naked emperor is much less benign than that: a clear symptom of decadence.
I think it’s possible to critique art, institutions, or trends without assuming everyone who finds meaning in something is deluded or complicit in cultural decline. Dismissing curiosity or optimism as decadence seems like its own kind of absolutism. Reasonable people can still find value in things even when you don’t, which is kind of my main point. Your comment makes me a little sad, but not for me.
> I think the original, parent comment was coming from a much more generous place.
I don't. Equating questioning a piece with willful ignorance and a safe-to-hate caricature all smell of bile to me.
"nerds too nerd to art" (more specifically in this case "hustler too hustle for art") is just a grade school putdown we use as artists to perpetuate the inaccessibility of art conversations and keep our cool mystique up.
Sorry, you've got me wrong: I'm referring to the original, OP parent comment of this full thread. So, three comments up from mine in the tree. The one that begins "Some art-haters in the comments, so to defend..."
It's a neat goal to keep an organ playing for hundreds of years. I just don't think that's related to the musical composition itself, which is not impressive to me. The fact that Cage added the phrase "as slow as possible" is not, in my opinion, musically interesting.
It would be analogous to writing a screenplay, adding the note "produce the film using as much money as possible," and then having someone attempt to do that. It's technically impressive to spend $500 million on a film production, sure, but that small note at the end of the screenplay is not cinematically interesting.
Cage created art that transcends music and you are rightfully noting that it is not that impressive when judged solely on musical merit.
It’s like saying a dodecahedron isn’t that impressive when viewed sitting on a 2D plane because it’s just a triangke and there are more interesting 2D shapes. True, but so reductive it’s tautological.
In what way does it transcend music? What other form of art, other than music, is he operating in?
Assume you already know about this given your interests, but just in case: https://longnow.org/
Yeah, something has been lost in current generations. I'm reminded of Asimov's Foundation books where the protagonist dies at the beginning but leaves behind the foundations of a thousand-year plan to rebuild civilisation after the collapse that he predicts including a time capsule that opens following predicted crises.
I feel like such ideas are of a time, namely the 1950s when things were looking up. Nowadays I feel like everyone is aware that Earth is basically finished but we have no way off of it, so they just try to squeeze as much joy as they can before they die without any thought towards the future at all.
This even comes out in smaller cycles like writing software that works today with no thought about how it will look in a decade. I feel like the stuff they were doing even in 90s was done with the intention of being around for a very long time. Now it's like, yagni, just write any old shit that works.
Some Anathem vibes too!
Regarding the YAGNI stuff, that applies to whole companies. All you have to do is stack the cobbled-together shit high enough to get bought and exit. Even the founders aren't in it for a sustainable long term business. In fact that goal is derisively called a "lifestyle business".
Does the ticket come with a snorkeling set?
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"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you have ever dabbled in philosophy at all, your notion of “real art” would be the first thing you would have to challenge.
“What is music” is one of those questions that leads to some truly subversive trains of thought and it’s amazing to read all of you so called hackers having trouble wrapping your head around a work that goes against your comfortable worldview.
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The set of requirements evolved and changed throughout history as our did our culture and society.
We do still have a set of requirements for what is considered art, and we still have a set of hyper conservative gatekeepers that are resistant to change and will blame today’s boogeyman for everything that they feel is wrong with society
By God, you are truly a trifecta of clichés converging.
Where exactly have you got this narrative from? Or even better: please explain how Marxism relates to contemporary art, I can accept just a general line of ideals connecting to each other.
I tried to have some leveled way to see your opinions on my other comments but this went a bridge too far, you seem to be repeating a collage of unrelated stuff, as I said in another comment: it's so bad that it isn't even wrong.
That is general knowledge, but if you really want to go down that way of "where did you get this narrative from" to try and avoid the subject. Well, you can see it, for instance, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for starters. [1]
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/art-definition/
By just about any reasonable accounting, the willful deconstruction of the concept of art reached its peak during and after World War I (e.g. Dadaism), specifically because of the wanton and apparently pointless destruction of an entire generation of French, British, Germans, and Russians (and others besides, but they bore the brunt of it). There was a very widespread questioning of traditional mores, which arguably bolstered the broader Marxist cause, but its definitely an inversion of causality to say that Marxism caused existentialism.
But, Dadaism, for instance, was a far left movement. Its followers, were people that held radical or even far left views. [1]
Marxism is really a cancer that destroys everything it touches. Its final aim was always to destroy everything that is beautiful, elevated or pure about mankind, and we, as a society, have been sponsoring it with our taxpayer money that pays for the self anointed gatekeepers of intellectualism that populate a big part of our Academia - that is to say, all Academia that doesn't get judged by the outcomes of their ideas when applied in practice.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada
Broadly speaking, all existentialism was leftist in character because its core tenet was a rejection of old ways. Definitionally, you cannot reject the old order without being liberal/progressive/leftist/etc. Which, again, was in response to the 15-20 million killed during WWI, the most deadly 4 years in Europe since the plague years.
Again, I think you're inverting causality by blaming Marxism for post-modernism, when they are instead related results of the same overall trend, that was simply catalyzed by WWI (there's definitely a read on e.g. the 1917 Russian Revolution that it happens at least wildly differently without Tsarist Russia entering the war).
If your definition of leftism is "progressive" then I'm sorry to tell you: all advances in art were made by people you'd consider "leftists".
There is simply no way that a conservative worldview brings any art form forward, not even from classically-inspired backgrounds, by pure definition it attempts to keep the status quo, and all they achieve is a soulless repetition of what art was from the period they considered as "golden".
Not much dissimilar to what you are trying to do, to be honest.
I'm not sure if you realized, but you are not any kind of intellectual authority in any matter related to art. The idea that all artists are leftist is just imbecile, to say the least.
You are just part - probably only a satellite - of the self pleasing circle of modern art critics that ultimately live on the backs of the working man.
People that write stuff like this about a urinal on a wall:
"Arensberg had referred to a 'lovely form' and it does not take much stretching of the imagination to see in the upside-down urinal's gently flowing curves the veiled head of a classic Renaissance Madonna or a seated Buddha or, perhaps more to the point, one of Brâncuși's polished erotic forms."
I don't think all artists are leftists, but I do believe that all art that has a broad impact is progressive in character, if not in intent.
Did the Renaissance painters who used single-point-perspective do so in service of seizing the means of production? Obviously not. But they did do so knowing full well that it was a break from the previous art styles, and that such a break was a good thing. Likewise for the rise of the novel, the fall of meter in poetry, digital and electronic art, etc etc
At the end of the day, one of the better (although still incomplete) differentiators between art and simply craft is the deliberate pursuit of novelty of expression. That is, an artist is always trying to say something new, or say something in a new way. You can be exceptionally good at producing the exact same painting, but that doesn't make you an artist, simply a craftsman (and there is nothing wrong with being a craftsman).
What about Marxism?
> A sixth, broadly Marxian sort of objection rejects the project of defining art as an unwitting (and confused) expression of a harmful ideology.
But I don't think many serious critiques of "this is not art" claims invoke Marxism. The Marxist perspective generalises the idea that art is incredibly difficult to define, but doesn't originate it.
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Cage died in 1992 , this is not contemporary art
> Contemporary art is a term used to describe the art of today, generally referring to art produced from the 1970s onwards.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_art
639 years? Big deal, The Long Now foundation built a clock to last 10,000 years. I hate John Cage since I got his massive world-wide hit 4′33″ stuck in my head.
> The Long Now foundation built a clock to last 10,000 years
The Long Now Foundation is attempting to build a clock to last 10,000 years.
Construction began close to a decade ago, and there is no estimated completion date. Construction of the clock may well last 10,000 years.
I think at one point the Van Horn TX clock was considered a "prototype" or another one that would be built incorporating lessons learned, although I don't know if that's still the plan.
Coincidentally the clock will ring with a cycle of chimes that repeats every 10,000 years
> The Long Now Foundation is attempting to build a clock to last 10,000 years.
The pyramids are only half that old, and they've accumulated a fair bit of damage despite being solid stone.
I just need you to know that I went and googled "John Cage 4'33" " and now I am quite upset with you for this comment!!!
It's quite an ear worm!
Every time I listen I notice something new in it.
The foundation cocktail place in SF has some art on the wall that changes every minute. I can't remember if by John Cage or someone else..
One thing I like about 4′33″ is that it is very compressible, especially the studio version. The live version, a little less so.
I like it stretched. The 800% slower version is amazing.
You joke but my current goal in life is to be able to wake up somewhere that I can enjoy 4'33" every day. I'm just so sick of the noise.
I am so happy that this is in my HN feed today.
I wish there was more stuff like this, both in my feed and in the world.
>The anticipation was palpable, with at least six other tourists wandering the cold brick hall, there to hear the final hours of this loud and, after a time, torturous sound.
Just reading that line alone brightened up my morning. You can admire something and still find it a bit silly.
I find many things admirable because they're silly. :-)
It doesn't make sense to me that the piece should start with a 17 month rest. Surely it doesn't really start until the first note is played?
It’s a deliberate provocation, he certainly anticipated exactly this sort of response.
In a sense he is exploiting a lack of rules that would prevent a piece from starting with this long of a rest.
In other words, he is hacking the process.
To be fair, while the piece is a deliberate provocation, like some of his others, the rest wasn’t imagined by Cage to take 17 months, that’s just an artifact of someone else’s decision to play the piece for 639 years. In typical performances while Cage was alive, the opening rest wasn’t more than a few seconds.
Ever been to see an orchestra play? In my opinion, the part where the conductor puts his hands up and the audience and orchestra both grow quiet in anticipation of the start of the piece is semantic.
Especially given how loud and sometimes discordant the tuning process is.
Pedantic note, the tuning is typically before the conductor raises the baton. Depending on the concert, it is often done before the conductor even comes on stage.
Beethoven’s 5th symphony (da-da-da-DAA) starts with a rest too, it’s not unusual to notate like this. Many pieces have “pickup” measures which are not complete and much shorter than a full measure. But when the pickup is more than 50% of a normal measure, it’s no longer much of a pickup and starting with a rest to make up the complete measure makes sense.
That's all fine and dandy when you're talking about a genuine piece of music. But for something like this, counting a rest that goes for 17 years is taking it way too far.
Please explain what makes a composition “genuine” and show your work
This is as genuine a piece of music as the original.
17 months. But in what sense isn’t this a genuine peice of music? It certainly meets Merriam-Webster’s definition:
a: vocal, instrumental, or mechanical sounds having rhythm, melody, or harmony
b: the science or art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity
An exploration of what is and is not a piece of music, like this work explicitly is, needs to acknowledge the possibility that the answer might be “no, this isn't”. Dictionary definitions are entirely irrelevent except insofar as they provide the inspiration to ask “wait, but is that _really_ all a work of music is?”
One of HN's few(?) music appreciation professors here: in fact, I start every term posing this question. It's hard to teach music appreciation before a group of humans can agree where music begins and ends :) At the end of the day, like everything else it's a certain degree of statistics and a certain degree of subjectivity.
Does it in fact have rhythm, melody, harmony, unity, or continuity? If it's too slow for any human to actually observe those qualities in it then I'd argue that it does not.
Are you talking about the composition or this particular performance of that composition. This performance may be too slow for any human to actually observe, but the composition is just a piece of sheet music you can read and judge like any other composition. This is far from the first performance of this piece, it's just that most other performances have been in the 20 minute to 20 hour range.
Do photons and electrons not exist, because we cannot observe them directly?
You can certainly play a recording of the piece at whatever speed you desire, and decide if it has rhythm, melody, harmony, unity, and continuity. Extremely slowing the piece down does not remove those things.
It’s playing a chord, so harmony exists by definition. It also has 600 years of continuity planned in.
And if a tree falls in a forest with no one to hear it, it makes a sound by definition.
…and yet that answer entirely misses the point that the question is about the choice of definition.
Not the 639 year recital?
Complaining about a rest (however long) in a piece by the composer of 4'33'' is certainly A Take.
Regardless of the philosophy of it (which is certainly interesting), many pieces uncontroversially start with a rest. If the first bar doesn’t start on a note, then the piece starts on a rest.
You could argue that the first bar is actually shorter than all the following ones and only starts on the first note, but… no one thinks like that that I ever heard of
> Surely it doesn't really start until the first note is played?
That question itself is built on a radical assumption. Example:
Just skimming, it looks like 38 out of 48 of the fugues from Bach's WTC Books 1 & 2 begin with rests followed by several beats worth of melodies in the first measure[1]. If you think the piece only really starts when the first note of the melody is played, then you've got problems. Either:
1. You hear the first articulation of the melody as the downbeat. But that would mean the first measure is in a disparate (and probably irregular) meter. Radical!
2. You hear the incomplete first measure as an anacrusis, or a kind of unaccented lead-in, to the second measure: OMG even more radical!
You can use accent patterns on a modern piano to play any of these fugues using either of these methods, and it will sound silly to non-silly keyboard players.
What's more, non-silly keyboard players do feel the pulse for the first downbeat of these pieces when they perform. Most of them will even inhale before the downbeat, as if they are somehow singing the melody through their fingers.
Finally, lots of music begins with rests: not just conservative cases like Bach, but progressive cases like the beginning of Beethoven's Fifth, and of course the radical cases like Cage's.
This leads to one of the things I love about Cage's music: it compels criticisms that reveal fundamental misunderstandings about music. E.g., you don't buy the radical case-- perhaps reasonable. But you then speculate there are no cases-- which is at odds with common musical practice.
If Cage's music did nothing but compel these questions it would be worth its weight in pine nuts.
Edit:
1: Bach does this because nearly all the fugues have three or more independent melodies singing at the same time. If they are all singing on every downbeat it can quickly sound really clunky and predictable.
> 2. You hear the incomplete first measure as an anacrusis, or a kind of unaccented lead-in, to the second measure: OMG even more radical!
Why is this radical at all? This is exactly how most humans perceive it: as a lead-in to the second (I might even argue first) measure. It's very strange to me to say that most humans are supposed to understand the piece to have started before any sound is played. In fact that's quite preposterous: play a song that starts with a rest to 1000 people and ask them to gesture as soon as the song starts, and every single one of them will gesture on the first note played. How are they supposed to perceive the song to have started any earlier than that? A song "starting with rests" is written that way to make it understandable to the performer who is reading the notation. It's a purely notational thing. The notation is not the song, the sound is the song.
> If you think the piece only really starts when the first note of the melody is played, then you've got problems. Either:
> 1. You hear the first articulation of the melody as the downbeat. But that would mean the first measure is in a disparate (and probably irregular) meter. Radical!
> 2. You hear the incomplete first measure as an anacrusis, or a kind of unaccented lead-in, to the second measure: OMG even more radical!
Why? Why can't you just say the piece starts partway through a bar, and we notate that with a rest for convenience? Just as when a piece ends partway through a bar we would generally accept that it ends when the last note ends (and while we might notate that as being a full bar in the case of a long held note, we don't always play it that way), not after some trailing rests, and we wouldn't consider this as being some kind of radical accented thing.
> This leads to one of the things I love about Cage's music: it compels criticisms that reveal fundamental misunderstandings about music. E.g., you don't buy the radical case-- perhaps reasonable. But you then speculate there are no cases-- which is at odds with common musical practice.
Love this thought. You disagree with an extreme interpretation, do you take the exact opposite? If not, up to where do you go?
This idea is applicable to so much
Check out his other work 4'33". It's an even more extreme try at silence as music.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3
It looks like this is his gimmick.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3#/media/F...
Haters gonna hate, but there's not much more to his work than using extreme pauses and tempos as art. Maybe it's meta art.
It certainly got him attention.
Not unless it was a "meaningful", aka "musical", rest
Lots of music starts with rests. If the first note isn't on the 1, you'll have rests before it. Not usual at all.
If the first note isn't on the 1, you'll write rests before it, so that the person reading your sheet music understands what's going on. That doesn't mean the music has started yet. The notation is not the music.
In a live orchestra performance, the conductor raises his hands. The audience quiets in anticipation.
He gives an up tick indicating the beginning of the music, then the downbeat of the start of the first measure.
No sound is heard.
The conductor continues to mark time. The silence is deep...profound.
The conductor continues to mark the time of the passing measures.
The audience listens.
At some point, positive sound breaks the silence - suddenly, loudly destroying the stillness! Or possibly very nearly silently - at the uncertain threshold of perception, the audible music begins...
> the audible music begins...
right, so it begins when the music starts playing?
It is 1973.
You go to your hi-fi setup, a veritable temple of sound reproduction.
You peruse your library and select an album. Or perhaps you have a new one that you have carefully carried home from the store. Whichever.
You lift up the cover of your turntable.
Carefully, you extract the vinyl disc from its cardboard and paper sleeves. Taking care not to touch it by its surface, you place it on the turntable. Perhaps you clean its surface with a special lint-catcher designed for this.
You lift up the needle by its little handle. Delicately, you place it on the disc, in the space between the very edge and the visible band of the first track.
There is an anticipatory crackle. A fuzzy pop. The sounds of the needle skidding across the smooth surface of the disc, and dropping into the groove.
A pause.
And then the music begins.
Perhaps the music begins loud and fast. Perhaps it doesn't. Perhaps it's a few words from the bandleader, welcoming you to their new album. Perhaps it's a collage of natural sounds that gradually gives way to music.
When, precisely, did you begin the experience of "listening to music"?
----
It is 2025.
You take out your phone. You turn off its notifications.
You find your headphones and put them on. Perhaps they give off a beep complaining of being out of power, and you have to put them on the charger, and dig up your backup pair, possibly along with an adaptor to plug them into the headphone jack that no longer exists on your new phone.
You open up Spotify, Youtube, whatever you use to stream music. You type in the name of what you want to listen to.
You hit 'play'.
Your phone begins downloading music off the internet. Perhaps first there's an ad. Perhaps several ads. Perhaps not. Perhaps it takes a while to buffer. It's an indeterminate thing.
And then the music begins. As before, perhaps it hits the ground running immediately; perhaps there's some collection of anticipatory sounds, some pause, before the music really gets into gear. Perhaps it's interrupted five seconds in by your discovery that this is actually just the first five seconds of the track followed by an ad for Bitcoin, or the discovery that this is a track with a name similar to what you asked to be played, and you get to go back a few steps. Perhaps you actually get what you wanted.
At what point did you begin the experience of "listening to music"?
You typed a really long comment, but you're not talking about the same thing. Listening to an ad before a song starts is very obviously not part of the music, even if it's part of "the experience of listening to music (on a streaming service)." The ad before a song plays is not included in the song's official runtime.
You're essentially describing the time the audience sits waiting for the orchestra to walk onto the stage as being "part of the experience of going to the orchestra." Which is fine, but it's not considered part of the song (unless the composer's quirky and writes "walk onto the stage" at the beginning of the music sheets, which is basically what this guy did with the 17-month rest).
Moreover, nobody was actually sitting in that cathedral for 17 months listening to the first rest. If a 17-month rest is played in the middle of a forest and nobody hears it, was it really a 17-month rest? Who experienced that "experience?"
The experience begins when the conductor starts marking time.
There doesn't seem to be a conductor at all in this performance, and there certainly wasn't one for the entire 17 months that the rest lasted. (The person in charge of this project, Rainer Neugebauer, is not conducting; the linked article makes mention of a speech before the note was changed, but nothing about marking time.)
Not that I'd expect a conductor to be needed for a soloist performance, but it makes the whole "when the conductor raises his hands" point a little off-topic.
That's like saying "my meal begins from the time I start driving to the restaurant". It's just not true.
It’s more like saying your meal begins when you sit down at the table, which is a proposition that a lot of people would agree with.
Certainly every chef-run fine dining restaurant would agree with that.
Incorrect. A rest is as important to music as a note.
Found the jazz musician :)
It's nothing like that, but you're entitled to be confused and wrong.
Technically it's okay to be confused and wrong, but it is not really okay to be vocal about it. It just steals people's time. Maybe it is deliberate trolling, how should we know? Better to be moderated out
Remember where you were when the eighth drop of pitch fell in Queensland?
Man, that was wild.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment
Someone must have played it sped up? Is the music public?
Here's a 90 second edit of a 24 hour performance where they have just included the chord changes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vv_bXRMTJog
Fair warning, it sounds very jarring and disjointed.
Yes, but the piece is specifically composed to be played "as slowly as possible" fwiw.
You're missing the point.
We’re missing the performance otherwise. Unless you’re immortal.
You're not missing the performance. It's playing right now, and will play your entire life. You just don't get to see what comes next, how it changes, and how it ends.
Just like life.
I think you're starting to make progress towards the point.
Is there a point?
This makes me think of the Hari Seldon recordings which play over the course of centuries in the "Foundation" books by Isaac Asimov.
To be a bit pedantic, those recordings are played at real time for normal speech, and have gaps between anything being played of centuries. They don't play continuously for that long, unlike this project which does play continuously.
Something you realise about a melody is its not about the notes, it's about the intervals. Nor is rhythm about the time at which it is played, rather it is about the relative time between events. So you could argue the music is only really happening when things change, as they did on this day. So I see this more as a time capsule similar to Seldon crises rather than a piece that is continually playing, but your interpretation can be different. Cage's 4'33" certainly challenges my interpretation.
https://archive.ph/rHOsC
Oddly enough, Bach's BWV 639 is one of my favourite (organ) pieces. But it appears to be just a coincidence, since the length was decided as the number of years since the construction of the first organ in Halberstadt to the new millennium.
Ah dammit, just take it once again from the top
avant garde is so 20th century
I weep for the future of post-post-modernism.
I bet every generation before us thought the same and every generation after us will think the same.
This is one of the core tenets in the mythology of social conservatism. This notion that somehow thigns cam somehow stay the same... forever. This is usually expressed with wording around values, tradition and customs.
As opposed to the core tenant of the mythology of social liberalism, the notion that somehow things can continuously change, at infinite speeds to an infinite degree, without blowing everything up at some point?
I don't think most social conservatives would agree with your interpretation that they want everything to stay the same forever. Rather, the "values, tradition, and customs" that you're crapping on are something to reflect on and guide change in a hopefully more peaceful, sustainable, and manageable way.
"Conservatives want everything frozen in time forever" is a straw-man to support a false dilemma.
Here's a video (with sound) of one of the other chord changes. It didn't occur to me they'd just swap in a pipe instead of pressing a key on a keyboard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3BBgQPuPI0
Less known than 4'33" being "silent" (which it's not) is that John Cage was an anarchist.
"Both Fuller and Marshall McLuhan knew, furthermore, that work is now obsolete. We have invented machines to do it for us. Now that we have no need to do anything what shall we do? Looking at Fuller's Geodesic World Map we see that the earth is a single island. Oahu. We must give all the people all they need to live in any way they wish. Our present laws protect the rich from the poor. If there are to be laws we need ones that begin with the acceptance of poverty as a way of life. We must make the earth safe for poverty without dependence on government."
https://monoskop.org/images/9/9c/Cage_John_Anarchy_New_York_... (PDF)
A shorter read here:
https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/09/15/john-cage-silence-...
Related:
Longplayer: a one-thousand year long composition
https://longplayer.org/
Finally some good news.
> In theory, a pipe organ can sound indefinitely, so long as it receives adequate power and its pedals are pressed continually. [..] Thus, the only threats to this performance are the survival of the organ, the will of the unborn and the erratic tides of arts funding.
And, you know, power outages.
TIL that there were no organ works in the history of humanity until electrical power was invented
Oh I didn't realize we had donkeys powering this organ 24/7 for 600 years.
Part of the wonder with this work is thinking of how to overcome such a problem
It’s actually a very optimistic work for Cage. The idea that we could have a continuous performance for hundreds of years, without ever being interrupted by wars or disasters.
I think it is amazing that someone has risen to the challenge to try and perform this, and if they are successful what that means for us as a society that it was allowed to happen
I have a pessimistic outlook. All it will take is one bad actor to interrupt this performance that could potentially involve thousands to maintain. It feels inevitable that this will fail. Nevertheless, this in itself is a statement on us as a species and what a wonderful work this is to have provoked such a thing.
If it’s contemporary art, then they may well have planned to have someone come in with a sledgehammer and smash it to bits in front of audience who paid to hear the next note change or on some other date of significance.
It won’t be the first time an artist has done this.
Halberstadt seems to last have had a power outage in 2023. I wonder if the organ has battery backup...
If the music pauses for less than 1/64 note, has it really stopped?
If it's meant to never pause, yes.
How about that
Paywalled.
https://archive.ph/Ko4pe
Obligatory XKCD reference: https://xkcd-time.fandom.com/wiki/Hugo_Award#Acceptance_Spee...
This is the same guy who wrote 4'33", the silent piece.
I kinda get that -- the 40000 Hz podcast gave it some good context:
https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/433-by-john-cage-twent...
Maybe they'll also explain the point of this. The piece is called "As Slow As Possible", but it's not as slow as possible. The slowest possible piece would have a fermata with an infinity sign over the first note, and that's it. Maybe the rest of it would be a jaunty little tune that would never be played in context. ("Shave and a haircut", perhaps?)
As a stunt, it's moderately interesting. How do you set up a contraption to play for hundreds of years? How do you maintain it without interrupting the performance? But it's less interesting than the 10,000 year clock.
> The slowest possible piece would have a fermata with an infinity sign over the first note, and that's it.
But then the piece would never be completely played, which seems like a requirement for Cage's musical game / art / philosophical statement.
Moreover, your hypothetical piece could still technically be played at a high tempo. It seems like the point of the Cage piece is to play it at the slowest possible tempo, not over the greatest length of time possible (and that's why the fermata idea doesn't fit). (So while you're correct that 639 years doesn't represent the slowest tempo possible (just play it over 640 years instead, right?) it's the idea of extreme slowness that's interesting. Or perhaps "as slow as possible" refers to the tempo that really was as slow as possible (at the time it was set up) because of technological constraints.
Without having deeply researched the piece, I wonder if 639 years was chosen with any relation to Tesla's 3–6–9 idea.
Edit: It looks like the 639 years comes from the "performer(s)" who set up the equipment, not from Cage himself. The composer only gave the instruction to play it as slowly as possible, which plays into the technological-limitations idea above, I think.
> Without having deeply researched the piece, I wonder if 639 years was chosen with any relation to Tesla's 3–6–9 idea.
From http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2728595.stm
> They settled on 639 years because the Halberstadt organ was 639 years old in the year 2000.
Saying “As slow as possible” isn’t followable any more than putting an infinity sign next to a note. You can’t know how long a piece of equipment lasts unless you decide to break it at an arbitrary time.
These performers choose a completely arbitrary number independent of technical limitations, and then ran into technical limitations.
I'd argue that "As slow as possible" is a note to the performer, not an absolute statement. Play it as slow as _you_ feel you possibly can. For some performers that's an hour, for some it's 8, for some it's 24 hours, and for this particular performance it's 639 years.
In other words “interpretation”
It’s so funny coming from a musical background and reading all these comments of people who have no idea what they are talking about criticizing one of the worlds most famous modern composers
Every performance ever done has been the performer interpreting the composer’s score and making it their own. Nobody want to hear a robotic perfectly accurate recreation of what is on the page, because even the act of transcription alters the composer’s intent. The score is not the art!
There is no perfection in art. It’s all subjective, by the literal definition of art.
> Every performance ever done has been the performer interpreting the composer’s score and making it their own.
To be fair, there are multiple lines of thought on that matter. Some conductors enjoy "making it their own," while other conductors attempt to discover and reproduce the composer's original intention as closely as possible. Toscanini comes to mind as a historical example of the latter, although I'm sure there are others.
At a certain point, a composer needs to provide information to compose a piece. What if someone wrote a "solo" that just said "improvise" and contained no notes at all? The argument being presented above is that Cage did the tempo equivalent of that. This is a philosophy argument at best, not "people who have no idea what they're talking about."
You are right, but the choice to attempt a historically accurate reproduction is also subject to interpretation.
It simply can never be perfect. Down to the acoustics of the venue, there will always be aspects of a performance that are lost to time and can never be reproduced. And how can we even know, since no recordings exist (and if they did, that recording would introduce its own artifacts).
How many people dance to a boureé today? Can any performance of one really be be accurate outside the context of dance? Sitting politely in a huge recital hall is no at all accurate
And even then, the music falls on modern ears. We hear and understand music completely differently than ancient people did. Can we even consider anything to be accurate, since Art is experienced?
I love renaissance music, and listen to as many recordings as I can where the performer uses a vihuela, theorbo, lute, etc. It's a totally nerdy pursuit. But it’s only “accurate” to a point
The bottom line for me is that Art is subjective. Do it in the way that satisfies your urge to create. As soon as it leaves your body, it belongs to the rest of us to interpret and experience. There are no right or wrong ways to express yourself.
Nothing stops someone interpreting an infinity sign.
The point is both are impossible to achieve, not that nobody can make a related performance.
I think you may be misinterpreting “possible” here. I’m shocked that it’s possible to get funding and interest to make a 639 year piece happen. It is unclear if it will be possible to complete. I do not think it would be possible to make a 10,000 year piece happen.
As with all things, the contraption is not the hard part. It’s the supporting civilization, society, economic context, and will of generations of people.
Cage’s game here is to question the entire scaffolding of art, not the pigments of the paint.
> The piece is called "As Slow As Possible", but it's not as slow as possible.
In what way is it “possible” to play an infinitely long piece of music?
Adam Neely and his band Sungazer did an interesting live experiment with his audiences, to figure out the slowest beat or pulse that people would be able to "feel" and dance to. Slowest possible isn't really as interesting in my opinion as slowest practical, which I think Neely and co's experiment explored. The track was Threshold on the album Perihelion.
The whole album explored beat, pulse and timings as it relates to how people can actually feel and interact with music. Really interesting!
is that also the album/live shows that had the audience dancing to the beats 1,2,3,4 which they thought was 4/4 but in such a way that the underlying time-signature was different?
Yeah that's right, it was fun watching the crowd try to organise themselves to the right rythm based on those around them
No musical performance is ever a 100% literal translation of the score. That’s pretty much impossible for any work. A score is not a set of MIDI instructions and a performer is not a sound card.
This post is wild because “what is the point of this” seems to be complexly divorced from the human drive to create and express one’s self.
> How do you set up a contraption to play for hundreds of years? How do you maintain it without interrupting the performance?
You play it with an orchestra (or perhaps a quartet is enough). Players may take turns to eat, sleep, and even have work-life balance. They also may retire (or die) and be replaced by new musicians. (How much would it cost?)
Sort of interesting that the Clock of the Long Now and Cage’s ORGAN2/ASLSP were conceived around the same time — 1989 and 1987, respectively.
Also worth noting the clock's name is from Brian Eno, who has expressed interest in developing chimes for the clock. So Cage's work was kinda presaging the clock.
> The slowest possible piece would have a fermata with an infinity sign over the first note, and that's it.
That piece has already been written. It's called ॐ.
> How do you set up a contraption to play for hundreds of years? How do you maintain it without interrupting the performance?
All you need is more than one source of sound and you can maintain each of them while they're not playing.
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While any mass produced off the shelf baloney runs the risk of being transformed into art at a moment’s notice.
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The Girl With the Pearl Earring is considered a masterpiece because of the technological limitations of the time.
Blue was one of the most expensive colours because the ultramarine dye was derived from lapus lazuli, a rock imported from Afghanistan and ground with a labour-intensive process. Medieval European art typically depicted the Virgin Mary in blue. The expense indicated devotion.
Someone living in that time period would know anything in ultramarine is important.
Except Vermeer used it for whatever he wanted, including a blue turban on The Girl With the Pearl Earring (originally called Girl with a Turban). The pearl is expensive in the world of the painting, but the blue turban was expensive to create in real life. That is the central mystery of the painting.
But we literally cannot appreciate that because we did not grow up in a world where ultramarine blue was as expensive as gold, because synthetic ultramarine was invented in 1826. That's why you care about visual interest and aesthetics instead of reacting with "Holy shit! Why is this blue?"
Our descendants will likely feel the same about the art we create today, and ignore whatever aspects of it are trivialized by AI.
I see what you mean, but I don't think this is super accurate. There are similarly large (and larger) patches of blue in many paintings by Vermeer and others from the Dutch Golden Age. Ultramarine was as expensive as you, but it was demonstrably used in many paintings from the Renaissance at large. The historically expensive blue paint is not the primary thing people think about when considering this painting, nor is it the reason this painting is uniquely loved among paintings of the period.
Of course, the expensive paint is a part of the history of the period, and paintings like this one become a symbol of the period as a whole. Appreciation for the period is certainly part of the appreciation for the painting.
This is not the art that's being destroyed by AI (in fact, I would say this academic ideas art is exactly the kind of art least likely to be supplanted by AI)
There are still non-modernist artists who focus on technique and sincerity, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_Nerdrum
Get a brush and be the change you want to see.
Art also is a massive money laundering operation. Why make 10,000 fake invoices when you can make one $10mil invoice for something with zero definable value.
All the pretensions are maxed to legitimize the BS.
Then the talent-less, listless, bored children of the ultra rich have mommy and daddy force museums to put their kindergarten macaroni art on the walls of places that great artists used to be. (Aka banana taped to wall literally the same as macaroni child projects). The mental gymnastics to pretend it is more than that requires the irrational love for your untalented child.
Rich people have destroyed the global art community.
Your view about art is just too constrained by an appeal to aesthetic beauty. Art's beauty can come in many obtuse ways, and doesn't even need to encompass aesthetic beauty.
The exploration of philosophy through art has its own beauty, it's not an easily digestible beauty but it's a kind of. What you show is just a complete lack of perception to other ways to appreciate art, and for that your soul is a bit more empty than it could be.
Instead of looking at art from this productivity view try to be more curious, challenge yourself on what is even the notion of art and what it can give to us that is ineffable in other forms... Right now you are just too miopic to even be able to appreciate art as a whole, you just want the product of art, not the process, meaning, and philosophical questions it can spark in you.
To understand art takes effort, it tells me a lot about people when they show how uncurious and set in their ways they are about art, they just simply aren't free people.
Yes, art needs to have both aesthetic beauty and technical skill behind it. Contemporary art has neither of those things, and thus it is an embarrassment to the label of "art".
> Your view about art is just too constrained by an appeal to aesthetic beauty.
This gets repeated a lot, but the reality is to many people, including philosophers, artists and appreciators of both, aesthetic beauty is a fundamental property of art without which it cannot survive.
The fact that contemporary art circles handwave away that relevance while arrogantly mumbling "you're just miopic, ignorant and misguided, learn more" doesn't really change that fact.
From the outside, it just shows that you too have been co-opted into the cult. You're free to subscribe to that view, but you don't get to gatekeep the meaning of art, no matter how many members that cult may have.
In this particular case for me I see a certain kind of artistic beauty in the recital. The fact, that we as a society try to keep something going for 639 years, just a sliver of a thread connecting all those different lives together. Not knowing if it will work, how it will end up, if it will fail spectacularly or just fizzle out into obscurity.
I wouldn't say that people who do not see this as art are wrong, that's the beauty of art isn't it? It's in the eye of the beholder. To me this recital sparks some hope or in any case makes me stop for a second and wonder about greater things than just my day to day.
I don't even mind this particular piece, but I do mind most of what gets labeled as contemporary art. Or pretty much anything since Duchamp's Fountain or maybe Yoko Ono's Cut Piece before that.
> The fact that contemporary art circles handwave away that relevance while arrogantly mumbling "you're just miopic, ignorant and misguided, learn more" doesn't really change that fact.
> From the outside, it just shows that you too have been co-opted into the cult. You're free to subscribe to that view, but you don't get to gatekeep the meaning of art, no matter how many members that cult may have.
Isn't beauty in the eyes of the beholder though? I do see beauty in a lot of art deemed "part of the cult", how do you even attempt to objectively judge aesthetic beauty in a vacuum? Beauty exists in contexts, there is stuff that without the context just looks weird, with context it becomes beautiful, how do you assess the objective aesthetic beauty of such without delving into philosophical discussions?
You are all free to create an art movement that aspires to do what you believe art should be: aesthetically beautiful, devoid of philosophical meaning as pursuit of beauty, beauty for its own sake, etc., it will be included, admired, rejected, judged as misguided, so on and so forth, just like you are doing with contemporary art that you do not agree with.
Isn't that all art anyway?
> Isn't beauty in the eyes of the beholder though?
This is a truism, and I don't even think it's that accurate. There are some universal aspects to our perception of beauty such as symmetry, balance, tension-and-release, contrast, recursion... whatever it may be. We don't need to know what it is to tell that it's there.
Maybe, but all of those are context-dependent and can operate at high levels of abstraction. The beholder needs to be able to recognize them to appreciate them. A Rothko or Pollock has those things, but that doesn’t make them automatically appreciated. Assuming you’re from a western culture, listen to some Thai classical music and see how obvious the beauty is to you.
So, how (in truth, "when") do you recognize that the emperor is missing his clothes?
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Tell me more about these fake intellectuals who degrade discourse by telling everyone else they’re doing it wrong?
Tastes are by nature subjective. But if 99% of people think X is beautiful and Y is ugly, and 1% think it's the other way around, there probably is an objective reason the ratios are as they are.
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Truly, they do not belong in our True Intellectual kingdom. We must close the gates to keep them out!
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The last three or so comments of yours prove you don’t do much self-reflection and that you hold others to a standard you cannot make yourself.
Hear, hear! This point is beautifully made by philosopher Roger Scruton in his "Why Beauty Matters"
https://vimeo.com/groups/832551/videos/549715999
Unfortunately I think too many people are still falling for that nonsense
I like art that can spark conversation. This recital is a masterpiece :)
If I could go back in time and shoot 2 painters, well the second one would be Monet, whose damn water lilies started us down this awful path.
Sure, keep being uncurious and ignorant, it's all your choice, it's you who is missing out.
"Fake intellectuals" is just... Sad, devaluing whole bodies of work simply because you cannot understand them, instead of attempting to curiously explore that you prefer to use a thought-terminating cliché and embrace your ignorance as supreme... All the while you live during a time where all information and knowledge in the world is there for you to access for free.
It's just... Sad to live that way but ignorance is bliss since it's just so much easier to reject anything that challenges you.
The fact that this modern "art" needs to be subsidized by the people that actually works with their taxes, is all the argument needed to tell you that indeed this is nothing more than fake intellectualism.
I'm not missing on absolutely anything by not appreciating a banana glued to a wall. In fact, nobody really appreciates that, it's just a bunch of sycophants pretending they have some artistic knowledge the rest of us, the poor populace, lack, that go on pretending with the charade.
The rest of the world, are just willing to tell you that the emperor has no clothes.
What taxes or subsidies are you talking about?? The Halberstadt project is funded on voluntary donations by people who want to see it happen.
It’s not clear what’s making you angry about one obscure performance of an obscure piece of music, but you might have more in common with Cage than you imagine. Cage described himself as an anarchist, and pieces like 4’33” are, in part, a commentary on the rules of music that make fun of establishment. Maybe he’s saying the same thing you are about the emperor’s clothes.
What do you think about the state of music? Do you also feel that since the 19th century it has only been down hill?
Erudite music (i.e. what we call classical Music)?
I think it managed to hold off a bit more, we still have Bizet, Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, even Stravinsky and others composing great (fantastic, in some cases) pieces in the first half of the 20th century.
But then, a bunch of Jonh Cages came along...
> The fact that this modern "art" needs to be subsidized by the people that actually works with their taxes, is all the argument needed to tell you that indeed this is nothing more than fake intellectualism.
When exactly did art not need financial support from the State, or rich patrons, to be able to be made?
You are moving the discussion into a completely different territory now, and again showing how your view of art is principled in some kind of "productivity" measurement, which is so absurd that is not even wrong.
> I'm not missing on absolutely anything by not appreciating a banana glued to a wall. In fact, nobody really appreciates that, it's just a bunch of sycophants pretending they have some artistic knowledge the rest of us, the poor populace, lack, that go on pretending with the charade.
The banana glued to a wall is one work of art (and polemic for a reason), and you are using that to paint a broad stroke over all contemporary art as if there is nothing being told there... You don't know what you are missing exactly because you don't know what it is, you wouldn't know the colours you'd be missing if you were born with black-and-white sight, nor would know you are missing music if you were born deaf. The difference is that you are not born with an unchangeable characteristic to not appreciate art in different ways, you can work on that, you just choose not to.
There's no charade, the actual charade is why are you so vitriolic opposed to something you do not even understand, lol. It reeks of some sort of insecurity, since you do not understand you feel it's beneath you because makes you feel lesser that others might "get it" and you are out of the club? I don't know, look inside you to find an answer because the passionate rage about something you do not understand has deeper roots.
It's not up to you guys to say we "do not even understand". It's too handwavy and a false premise. We could argue the same... you guys "don't understand" how much bullshit there is in contemporary art to the point it's basically noise at this point.
To take a reductive view, art is people saying stuff. It's one thing to think that what is being said is not worth saying; but you seem to claim that nothing is being said. And that's just bragging about your own ignorance.
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The clothes you like still exist. Anyone who can't see my new clothes is a dullard.
- the Emperor
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Let us know when you convince a few hundred people it's interesting enough to visit!
The few hundred people who visited during the 17-month rest are just as silly as someone who'd be convinced to see a random forum poster's millennium rest, that's the kicker.
Maybe if they were visiting just for the music, but perhaps the organ itself is of some interest?
Sure, if you want to make it about the engineering accomplishment rather than the music itself. Somewhat to your point, I guess I have more respect for Rainer Neugebauer and the team actually attempting to put this performance on than for John Cage simply writing it down vaguely.
Totally agree. I think Cage's work is vaguely interesting in an abstract sorta way, but the actually interesting part of this piece is the organ itself. I think they're both art, but I personally value the latter more.
Are you kidding me? I have 8 billion listeners. And a new one born every second.
How many of them do you think know your name?
So art is all about the identity of the author?
I'd say it's about connecting with the consumer. The connection doesn't need to extend to the author, but it should probably extend to the art itself.
I'll rephrase my question: How many of those 8 billion people care about and/or are aware of Rene's art?
"A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose bark their name is not written" - ancient Chinese proverb.
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So, an organ changed to a new chord, and I'm supposed to pay to _read_ about it?
I find the subject mildly interesting, but the paywalled internet is just another sign of end stage capitalism...