“THE
PRINCIPLE OF FORM WILL BE OUR ONLY CONSTANT CONNECTION WITH THE PAST. ALTHOUGH
THE GREAT FORM OF THE FUTURE WILL NOT BE AS IT WAS IN THE PAST”…
I
found the statement above to be sort of a general theme between both writings.
I think music today has lost in a sense its form and its purpose. It feels to
me like every song has a similar rhythm and melody and underlying meaning, and
that is what Cage is saying. Music today cannot compete and does not reflect
the great form that the music is the past brought us. And although I enjoy music within the past couple decades more, it is important to understand the origin
from which our music today has evolved from.
The
organization of sound is something that we don’t appreciate today. When we
watched “It’s Gonna Rain” in class I actually felt terrified, it felt so
demonic to me. I’ve come to realize that I hate sounds, cars driving by, hair
dryers, the vaccum running, the lawn mower, the dump truck picking up trash
every Tuesday, all these sounds are so disturbing to me. I’ll have to disagree
with Cage when he claims that when we listen to noise, it fascinates us. But I do
strongly agree with his statement “when we ignore it, it disturbs us,” because
that is spot on. I think we all have a form of selective hearing, and for me, the
sounds I hate, I seem to hear the most of and at a higher frequency.
An
Introduction, or My (Ambiguous) life
with Technology gave me a deeper understanding as to the process of Reich’s
work, and made me appreciate the audio more because of the process of layering
different audio’s and experimenting with different edits and synthesizers, ect.
I think this will be a good starting point for our first project because it
reiterates the fact that the importance of a piece like this one is the meaning
and the purpose and the technology behind it, rather than what we are hearing. And
I think Cage and Reich’s work is found to be so genius because they found a new
way to think about something, to listen to something, and to create something.
“Noise is just another form
of information”
“In our day and age, the
basic idea of how we create content in our minds is so conditioned by media
that we are in a position that no other culture has ever been in human history”
aka we are screwed. I don’t think this can be reversed.
I think that both readings correlate. Reich and Cage write about acknowledging the everyday sounds/noises we hear everyday such as vehicles, rain, wind, etc, and using those noises as musical instruments. I like how Steve Reich mentions that “every software has a story, every sound has an origin” and John Cage refers to a composer as an organizer.
ReplyDeleteI thought Steve Reich’s writing was more detailed and thorough but also more complicated. He writes about sounds, composers, and the technology that is being used to create “music” or organized sounds. The technology/software part of his writing was more difficult for me to understand since I am not familiar with composing music and using such technology myself.