But Listen to the Music; He's Evil!

Another chord was struck Thursday [5 January 2006] in the world's slowest, and longest-lasting, concert, which will take 639 years to finish, Agence France Presse reported. The performance of "organ2/ASLSP" [composed by] John Cage (1912–1992) is taking place in a church in Halberstadt, Germany, having begun on September 5, 2001. In addition to the new chord – an A, C, and F-sharp – two Es have been playing since July 2004 with special weights to hold down the keys of the organ.

I guess it takes more than 80 years to wrest all significant meaning from the concept of "music."

In my effort to learn how to listen to music better, I've learned that there's a lot more math to music than I imagined. [Now I know why music was in the mediæval quadrivium with astronomy, arithmetic, and geometry. As it happens, I got "Pre-calculus In 119 Pages" a while ago; its author approaches trigonometry via acoustics, not navigation and surveying.] I don't know if Windows Media Player's "Bars and Waves | Scope" visualization really represents what's playing, but I assume it does, and there are usually perceptible patterns along the waveform. It's only with "music" that I find it difficult to perceive any patterns. So it seems to me that any music worthy of the name probably makes broad use of rational mathematical relationships between the tones it employs. I know dissonant elements are not uncommon, but they're a tool for creating musical contrast. If the composer diminishes the power of contrast — by using dissonance overwhelmingly, or (as in this case) by maintaining the duration of the tones (and, in fact, the piece itself) beyond human time scales —, it's hard to tell what's musical about it (in the former because [I'd bet] it's [mathematically] irrational, and in the latter because it's imperceptible).

It seems that, historically, the concept of music accomodated a subset of sounds, with certain characteristics (whatever they are). It's that distinction that makes it useful. It is my impression of Cage (based upon what I've read in newspapers and program notes), though, that his conception of music was more contextual than compositional: that what makes music is when and where and how you listen to sounds. In other words, musicality is external to the sounds. I know that in the visual-arts world, there has been some explicit consideration of this perspective, and it's one of the great bugbears of contentiousness between anthropologists and art-historians. I think, though, that the inescapable temporal dimension of sound reduces its susceptibility to this kind of re-framing.