Page 279 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

Perhaps no contemporary rock group has blended songwrit- ing with the manipulation of electronic audio more extensively than Radiohead (Figure 16.8). For their albums and concert tours, they use not only analog and digital synthesizers but also special- effects pedals and distortion filters to re-form the audio of their voices and instruments. All these electronic devices and computer processes help give the music of Radiohead a disembodied, oth- erworldly quality. Radiohead was the first major band to use the Internet to cut out the middle man—the record company—in the conversation between creator and listener. In 2004, it broke with record company EMI to sell directly to its fans by means of digital downloads.
John Cage (1912–1992) and Chance Music
If everything is more or less of equal value, as the Postmodern-
ists say, why not just leave art to chance? This is essentially what
American composer John Cage (Figure 16.9) decided to do. Cage was born in Los Angeles, the son of an inventor. He graduated as valedictorian of Los Ange- les High School and spent two years at nearby Pomona College before going to Europe to learn more about art, architecture, and music. Arriving in New York City in 1942, he worked variously as a wall washer at the YWCA, teacher of music and mycology (the science of mushrooms) at the New School for Social Re- search, and music director of a modern dance company.
From his earliest days as a musician, Cage had a special affection for percussion instruments and the unusual sounds they could create. His First Construction (in Metal) (1939) has six percussionists play piano, met- al thunder-sheets, ox bells, cowbells, sleigh bells, water gongs, and brake drums, among other things. By 1941, he had collected three hundred per- cussion objects of this kind—anything that might make an unusual noise when struck or shaken. Cage’s tinkering with percussive sounds led him to invent the prepared piano—a grand piano outfitted with screws, bolts, washers, erasers, and bits of felt and plastic all inserted between the strings. This transformed the piano into a one-person percussion band that could produce a great variety of sounds and noises—twangs, zaps, rattles, thuds, and the like—no two of which were exactly the same in pitch or color. In creating the prepared piano, Cage was merely continuing along the experi- mental trail blazed by his spiritual mentor, Edgard Varèse: “Years ago, after I decided to devote my life to music, I noticed that people distinguished between noises and sounds. I decided to follow Varèse and fight for noises, to be on the side of the underdog.”
Cage’s glorification of everyday noise began in earnest during the 1950s. Rather than engage in a titanic struggle to shape the elements of music, as had Beethoven, he decided to sit back, relax, and simply allow noises to occur around him. In cre- ating this sort of intentionally purposeless, undirected music, Cage invented what has come to be called chance music, the ultimate Postmodernist experimentation. In chance music, musical events are not carefully predetermined by the composer,
Figure 16.8
Musician Thom Yorke surrounded by some of the electronic equipment that gives his band Radiohead its distinctive “electronic” sound
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Figure 16.9
John Cage “preparing” a piano. By putting spoons, forks, screws, paper clips, and other sundry objects into the strings of the piano, the composer changes the instrument from one producing melodic tones to one generating percussive impacts.
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New York Times Co./Getty Images Frank Micelotta/Getty Images
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