Results for "John Cage"
John Cage
Born:
In 1952, David Tudor sat down in front of a piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds and did nothing. The piece 4?33--written by John Cage, is possibly the most famous and important piece in twentieth century avant-garde. 4?33--was a distillation of years of working with found sound, noise, and alternative instruments. In one short piece, Cage broke from the history of classical composition and proposed that the primary act of musical performance was not making music, but listening. Born in Los Angeles in 1912, Cage studied for a short time at Pamona College, and later at UCLA with classical composer Arthur Schoenberg
Instrumental Duos
by Karl Ackermann
The early days of jazz were not always harmonious. Converted dance orchestras often sounded like unbalanced acoustic junkyards; a single violin, cornet, trombone, clarinet, tuba, drums, banjo, and piano, all fighting for attention. The piano was meant to be the glue holding the shrill and boisterous elements together. In 1921 a prodigy pianist named Zez Confrey ...
Fred Frith & Ikue Mori: A Mountain Doesn’t Know It’s Tall
by Mark Corroto
Have you experienced a performance of John Cage's composition “4:33"? If you are not familiar, while studying Zen Buddhism, Cage wrote “four minutes, thirty-three seconds" to be performed solo or in any combination of instruments or players. The instructions were for the performers to NOT play their instruments for the allotted 273 seconds. Their 'silence' was ...
Nixon Mohohlo & The Collective Heads of Knuckle: The Queen of Complaints
by Karl Ackermann
For good or bad, drummer Nixon Mohohlo has worn his heart on his sleeve for most of his musical career. Following a brief experience with monastic silence he recorded an album-length version of John Cage's “4'33." It met with outrage and was pulled from the market. In 1999, he recruited Dutch percussionist Horst Van Clutter for ...
Roberto Bonati: Vesper and Silence
by Maria Giovanna Barletta
Un luogo di raccoglimento, come una strada nascosta che conclude nel ritrovamento di se stessi. Una sorta di clausura feconda dove potersi ritrovare. Se potesse parlare di sé questo progetto direbbe, come Rilke «Sto, dentro al lavoro, come il nocciolo nel frutto». Questo lavoro in solo di Roberto Bonati è stato registrato dal vivo ...
Joost Lijbaart: Free Conversations With Myself
by Ian Patterson
For an artist, making any album is something of a journey—the birthing of ideas, the moulding and sculpting of concepts, the creative trial and error, the emotional highs and lows, and in the end, the satisfaction of a work completed. Dutch drummer/percussionist and composer Joost Lijbaart has travelled that road many times in a thirty-year career, ...
Joost Lijbaart: Free
by Ian Patterson
As a student in the 1980s, Dutch drummer-percussionist Joost Lijbaart first dreamt of making a solo album, inspired by the examples of Tony Oxley, Pierre Favre, Art Blakey, Max Roach and Jack DeJohnette. A successful recording and touring career with Yuri Honing—and with his own groups—left little time for such a focused project. In 2014, Lijbaart ...
Rahsaan Roland Kirk: An Alternative Top Ten Albums Guaranteed To Bend Your Head
by Chris May
Jazz musicians are rarely called shamanistic but the description fits Rahsaan Roland Kirk precisely. Clad in black leather trousers and heavy duty shades (he was blind from the age of two), a truckload of strange looking horns strung round his neck—two or three of which he often played simultaneously--twisting, shaking and otherwise contorting his body, stamping ...
Deerhoof: Love-Lore
by Troy Dostert
"Where, in short, are the flying cars?" So asked David Graeber in 2012, in a widely-circulated essay entitled “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit." Graeber, an anthropologist of a decidedly unconventional bent, dedicated much of his academic career to challenging preconceived wisdom concerning the allegedly unlimited potential of capitalist economics and its attendant ...
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