Part 4 · Russolo to Cage to Cale
Noise, silence, drone
The Futurists wanted to make music out of noise. Forty years later, an American composer made music out of silence, and a Welsh viola player made it out of one note held for an hour. This part follows that line from 1913 to the Velvet Underground.
1913: noise
Read Luigi Russolo’s The Art of Noises again in Futurism & Fiume, Unit 4. Remember his six families of noise. Everything on this page is an answer to him.
1952: silence
John Cage’s 4′33″ (1952) asks a performer to sit at the piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds and play nothing. The music is whatever the audience hears in the room.
The first performance was given by the pianist in Woodstock, New York, on August 29, 1952. The piece has three movements. Tudor sat quietly at the piano and showed where each movement began and ended only by closing and opening the keyboard lid.
Cage and Zen
In his collection of one-minute stories, Indeterminacy, Cage tells how he went to D. T. Suzuki’s lectures on Zen Buddhism at Columbia University in New York. Planes from LaGuardia airport sometimes drowned out Suzuki’s voice, and Suzuki never repeated what was lost. Hear Cage tell it himself.
A dispute. D. T. Suzuki was the most famous teacher of Zen in the West. In Zen at War (1997), Brian Victoria, a Zen priest, argued that Suzuki’s writings supported Japanese militarism before and during the Second World War. Kemmyo Taira Sato, who knew Suzuki, answered with a 60-page study arguing that Victoria misread him, for example by quoting a 1959 revision as if it were the 1938 book. The argument is not settled.
1963: one note
- Before 1963John Cale studies music at Goldsmiths College, London, on a scholarship.
- 1963Aaron Copland recommends him for Tanglewood, and Cale travels to the United States.
- 9 September 1963With John Cage and others, Cale plays in the first complete performance of Erik Satie’s : 18 hours and 40 minutes at the piano.
- Early 1960s, New YorkCale plays viola in La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music: long , held and changed very slowly.
- 1964Cale and Lou Reed found the Velvet Underground. The viola drone goes with him.
Now hear the drone inside a Velvet Underground song. Listen for John Cale’s viola under the words.
Study questions
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