Music is Magic

            John Cage’s musical and aesthetic philosophies hinge on his fight against the separation of sound from music. In his 1937 manifesto, he expressed his desire for modern music to be about sound rather than structure and melody. His famous 4’33” explores this idea to the extreme, sacrificing pitch and rhythm all together and using silence itself as the prevailing sound, forcing the listener to pay close attention to the surprisingly dynamic nature of silence for the duration of the piece. In many ways, Cage’s music is a response to the rapid urbanization of America in the early 20^th Century. He wants to call to mind factories, streets, machinery, and other quintessentially urban sounds as music for a more and more city-dwelling Western world. This emphasis on noise is defined more clearly by a separate emphasis on chance, randomness, and even whimsy throughout Cage’s music. He uses the mechanics of the arbitrary to separate traditional structured music from the noise and sounds he is more interested in. Rather than keeping time with a metronome and choosing rhythmic and pitch value based on standards of traditional music theory, Cage uses a star chart to guide his composition in Atlas Eclipticalis. The locations and brightnesses of the stars create a new rhythmic and musical structure based on natural, extra-musical, and virtually arbitrary forces.

            Laurie Anderson’s music, by contrast, is much less revolutionary in terms of the mechanical workings of music. Rather, she uses fairly simple and essentially traditional means of music-making as tool for artistic commentary. While it is often worthwhile to discuss her manipulation of musical norms, such as the ambiguous sonority she creates by alternating between a first-inversion Ab major and a root position C minor in O Superman, her main focus is clearly on the implications of those manipulations and of her work as a whole. Anderson comes from the artistic traditions of Fluxus and performance art, and draws on many fundamentally feminist ideas throughout her repertoire. Fluxus is an avant-garde “anti-art” movement, pointing out the (European) artificiality of imitative traditional art and, conversely, the beauty and meaning of “non-art.” That same chordal dichotomy in O Superman is an example of this idea – the respective sonorities of Ab major first inversion and C minor root position are what create the beauty and meaning, not their endless manipulation. Performance art involves the effort to reintegrate the body into art in the Western world, a society with an enormous amount of discomfort with the human body and a troubling amount of normalized body shaming. Anderson uses her body as a core component of her music. Much of it could not really be performed by anyone else. She uses body percussion and dance elements to aggressively humanize her work.

            Osvaldo Golijov’s music is a celebration and exploration of the Latin American experience. Like Anderson, he is less concerned with changing the theoretical landscape of music and more concerned with using music as a tool to commentate, give voice, and raise cultural awareness and understanding. His La Pasión según de San Marcos specifically involves the Latin American experience of Christianity as well as his own interpretation of the story of Jesus as a non-Christian composer. It is indirectly a response to the Western European liturgical and sacred music traditions that have been (and mostly still are) the face of Christian church music and of concert music as a whole for hundreds of years. The arrest scene in La Pasión, for example, is set to a Latin American dance beat and uses a Brazilian capoeiran dancer – a stark contrast to the Passions of Bach.

            My musical and aesthetic philosophies are as follows:

·         Music is communication inherently and exists to be shared. Music cannot exist without a performer and a listener (even if these two parties are sometimes the same person).

·         Music is performed primarily for the good of the audience, not for the good of the performer. Music may be an expression of the performer and may draw specific physical and/or cognitive attention to the performer, but it must nonetheless be considered first from the perspective of the listener’s benefit, not of the performer’s benefit.

·         The musical benefit for the performer is nevertheless exceedingly important. Without active performer involvement, there is nothing to draw the listener’s attention, and therefore only one party is involved and the performance is unsuccessful.

·         Music can give voice to every culture, gender identity, sexuality, belief system, ethnicity, social and economic class, and ability. Music is a tool to prevent and counteract oppressive silencing.

·         Since music serves as a cultural voice, the cultural diversity inherent to music must be upheld and respected in all cases, and musical communication from oppressed groups must be given credence and authority.

·         Music and musical involvement are potentially therapeutic and healing for listener, performer, and composer alike, and this power is a fundamental reason for its existence.