# So What is the Musical Equivalent of ...



## Stand The Thankless Vigil (May 23, 2016)

A pair of glasses sitting on the floor. Obviously I'm referring to the recent event in a San Francisco art museum where a student placed a pair of glasses on the floor to see if patrons would assume it was art. They did. And much hilarity ensued. So I thought to myself "What would be the musical equivalent?" Well, perhaps if someone dialed an analog radio to a random frequency such that the speaker was outputting white noise. Would people listen to static caused by a noisy filter in the output chain and call it "Music"? But of course they would. They already have.

OK, so that is not a precise description of "Radio Music" but it's not far enough away to matter. If one is looking for order in chaos, it doesn't matter much whether one varies the frequency or not. But it does illustrate the dilemma of modern conceptions about art. There has to be some way to differentiate an incidental action (like leaving a radio tuned to a certain frequency after the radio station goes off the air) from the purposeful action of an artist. And that differentiation must depend upon something other than the _ipse dixit_ of the artist himself. If a random action can for all intent and purposes duplicate exactly an artistic action, then art has been abolished in the process. We are left with nothing but the ego of the artist, and his assertion that he is capable of transmuting anything into art by the exercise of his will.

This stuff does damage. The artistic community may think this attitude profound, but the people outside the artistic community think it is pompous and ridiculous. The artistic community may despise the opinions of those people, but those people are (ostensibly) the people it is trying to reach. They will simply turn off, and the arts will be driven deeper and deeper into its own hermetically sealed world. It will end up suffering the fate of poetry, where thousands of poems are written to be published in academic books that are read by no more than three other academics. Ever. The discipline becomes more and more invisible, and entirely dependent upon public funding of the faculty who teach and write poetry. When it comes time to save money by cutting faculty, who is going to value those positions?

There is no future in Babbitt's isolation. It may be ego-gratifying to assert by self-proclaimed authority that one is on the cutting edge of artistic development. That doesn't make it true. The effort might instead be worthless. It might appeal to the artist only because his ego is invested in it. And how does he test the quality of his work when he cannot seek judgments outside his own cloistered universe? Or is it simply that he doesn't think there is an opinion outside of that universe that matters?


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

I would argue that if someone deliberately puts a pair of glasses on the floor of an art gallery to see if people think it's a work of art, then that person is creating a work of art. Even if they don't intend to!
The question then is, is it a _good_ work of art?

I wouldn't get my knickers in a twist about the musical equivalent. Many such works exist (depending on how loose you want your equivalence), but there's also plenty of new music that's not like that at all. Why rage against a niche within a niche?


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## Guest (May 27, 2016)

What if someone daubs some paint on a canvas. Is that art? Presumably this boils down to what one considers art; both the activity and the output.


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## Guest (May 27, 2016)

What if someone daubed paint on a cave wall?


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## dieter (Feb 26, 2016)

dogen said:


> What if someone daubs some paint on a canvas. Is that art? Presumably this boils down to what one considers art; both the activity and the output.


You got a problem with Blue Poles?


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## Xenakiboy (May 8, 2016)

Why does the definition of art have to be so controversial?


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## DeepR (Apr 13, 2012)

Some people, including myself, prefer the idea that art is something substantial and unique that can't be so easily created by everyone and their mother. I try to be open minded, but I'm afraid I can't see it in any other way.


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## Guest (May 27, 2016)

dieter said:


> You got a problem with Blue Poles?


On the face of it, they sound innocent enough, but you'll have to get me up to speed.


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## Ariasexta (Jul 3, 2010)

This is nothing but a Sociological experiment, which can be anything only thing that makes a differnce is how much attention people pay to it, if some celebrity sell their used cloths any piece from their wardrobe can be a piece of art that demands immense money. Definition of art is becoming more and more blurred in our modern age, but I am sure it can not be a part of the so called classical art. The musical equivalent can be atonal experiments.


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## dieter (Feb 26, 2016)

dogen said:


> On the face of it, they sound innocent enough, but you'll have to get me up to speed.


Jackson Pollock, a painting called Blue Poles. Gough Whitlam - the greatest Prime Minister we've had - he was struck down by a Conservative plot in the mid 70's - bought it for a million dollars, a nice bit of exchequer in them faraway days. Google it, then see if you can reproduce it if your bucket aim is straight...


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## dieter (Feb 26, 2016)

dogen said:


> On the face of it, they sound innocent enough, but you'll have to get me up to speed.


Also, I'm married to a Pole. None of them are innocent...


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## Hildadam Bingor (May 7, 2016)

Stand The Thankless Vigil said:


> This stuff does damage.


I don't think it does, though. If somebody could come up with something good to replace it, it'd be gone, but nobody can come up with anything. I think the problem here goes way deeper than a corrupt "artistic community": People just don't take art seriously any more. People who really want to change the world now feel they have to write non-fiction, so only pedants and popularizers make art any more. In retrospect this was all predictable: Art is like religion in that you can't prove there's any good reason to care about it, you have to accept it on faith. And we already stopped believing in religion.


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## isorhythm (Jan 2, 2015)

Stand The Thankless Vigil said:


> Well, perhaps if someone dialed an analog radio to a random frequency such that the speaker was outputting white noise. Would people listen to static caused by a noisy filter in the output chain and call it "Music"? But of course they would. They already have.


Someone did attempt a hoax like this once: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piotr_Zak

It didn't work. You may not be able to tell some kinds of music apart from static, but other people can. So just leave it to them and don't worry about it.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

The equivalent would be recording the sounds in one room and then playing it back to people in that same room or something along those lines. It has nothing to do with Milton Babbitt, clearly, whose music is fully in the tradition of Brahms, Schoenberg, and so forth, and doesn't deal in randomness or framing perceptual games of any kind.


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## CDs (May 2, 2016)

dogen said:


> What if someone daubs some paint on a canvas. Is that art? Presumably this boils down to what one considers art; both the activity and the output.


This is kind of like "Is John Cage 4'33" music." So can silence be music/art? 
I was at the Seattle Art Museum a number of years ago and I kid you not they had a piece of "art" that was just a blank piece of canvas. And there was a man sitting down looking at it. I looked at it for two seconds and walked away.....maybe I missed something.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

CDs said:


> This is kind of like "Is John Cage 4'33" music." So can silence be music/art?
> I was at the Seattle Art Museum a number of years ago and I kid you not they had a piece of "art" that was just a blank piece of canvas. And there was a man sitting down looking at it. I looked at it for two seconds and walked away.....maybe I missed something.


Like the glasses mentioned above and like Duchamp's Fountain, the point of 4'33" is in the framing and the presentation. If it is presented _as art_ and attended to _as art_, the idea goes, it is art.


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## CDs (May 2, 2016)

Mahlerian said:


> Like the glasses mentioned above and like Duchamp's Fountain, the point of 4'33" is in the framing and the presentation. If it is presented _as art_ and attended to _as art_, the idea goes, it is art.


I get how 4'33" is art and interesting to discuss but I wouldn't call it music.


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## Gordontrek (Jun 22, 2012)

Nereffid said:


> I would argue that if someone deliberately puts a pair of glasses on the floor of an art gallery to see if people think it's a work of art, then that person is creating a work of art. Even if they don't intend to!
> The question then is, is it a _good_ work of art?


I might argue that this is exactly the attitude that the young prankster in San Francisco was trying to get out of people whether they knew it was a joke or not. 
Now I will admit that when it comes to "art" in general I have little experience, but based on what I have learned, making it completely subjective has its shortfalls. Someone mentioned a piece in an art museum that is simply a blank canvas (the pictorial representation of 4'33 perhaps). To a handful of the "artistic elite" this piece might be worthy of some long spiel about "aesthetic boundaries" and the "cutting edge" of avant garde, but to everyone else such a "picture" makes a mockery of the arts. This is how I feel about much modern art, whether in pictures or music. If we don't carefully read through the ivory tower spiels of the artist's thought process or the composer's program notes, more than likely "art" will be the last thing that comes to mind when we see/hear the work. 
I have no objection to artists putting on canvas or staff paper whatever's in their hearts no matter how nonsensical it may seem, but even I can sometimes whether it's genuine expression or purely egotistical.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

CDs said:


> I get how 4'33" is art and interesting to discuss but I wouldn't call it music.


But the same argument applies. If something that is presented as music and attended to as music is music, then 4'33" is music. In the popular world, it's already accepted that any sound can be a part of music (not, note, that any sound is already music), but this idea has a difficult time gaining ground in the classical world.

And lest anyone think otherwise, my attitude towards these kinds of art in general and Cage in particular is profound ambivalence.


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## isorhythm (Jan 2, 2015)

Whether or not 4'33" "is music" has never struck me as an interesting question.

I agree that there's a lot of silliness that falls under conceptual art, but the risk of throwing out the good with the bad is much greater than...whatever the risk of allowing for conceptual art is supposed to be.


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## CDs (May 2, 2016)

Mahlerian said:


> But the same argument applies. If something that is presented as music and attended to as music is music, then 4'33" is music. In the popular world, it's already accepted that any sound can be a part of music (not, note, that any sound is already music), but this idea has a difficult time gaining ground in the classical world.


One man's trash is another man's treasure. That's why I love music so much! It's a never ending treasure hunt.
It's not just whether silence is music but what actually classifies music as music. I've heard many a people say death metal isn't music, hip hop isn't music, and free jazz isn't music. They say it's just nonsense just noise. But like you said *Mahlerian* "any sound can be a part of music" so if the aforementioned genres are music it also makes sense that silence is music since it is a sound. Thanks!


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## Reichstag aus LICHT (Oct 25, 2010)

CDs said:


> if the aforementioned genres are music it also makes sense that silence is music since it is a sound.


For me, the silence after the 4th of Webern's _Six Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6_ is as much a part of the music as the gigantic crescendo that precedes it. Also, a famous conductor (was it Barenboim?) once said that the _Tristan_ prelude starts, not with the interval of A to F, but with the interval from silence to the first A.


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## CDs (May 2, 2016)

Now would I want to see 4'33" more than once live? No. Would I go out of my way to see it performed live? No.
I actually can't even watch a whole performance of it on YouTube without skipping to the end. But I love the discussion that it brings.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Mahlerian said:


> Like the glasses mentioned above and like Duchamp's Fountain, the point of 4'33" is in the framing and the presentation. If it is presented _as art_ and attended to _as art_, the idea goes, it is art.


Yes. More generally, this is known among aestheticians as the institutional definition of art, and in fact it is a pretty reasonable one in many situations.

The OP's position reminds me of that invoked by the opponents of same-sex unions: that it will do irreparable damage to the institution of marriage. This is just silly. Traditional tonal and accessible music is not being displaced in concert halls by piles of radios, crickets, or digital samples of flushing toilets.


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## Guest (May 27, 2016)

EdwardBast said:


> Yes. More generally, this is known among aestheticians as the institutional definition of art, and in fact it is a pretty reasonable one in many situations.
> 
> The OP's position reminds me of that invoked by the opponents of same-sex unions: that it will do irreparable damage to the institution of marriage. This is just silly. Traditional tonal and accessible music is not being displaced in concert halls by piles of radios, crickets, or digital samples of flushing toilets.


I dunno, I still reckon it's the end of civilisation as all right-thinking people know it.


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## vallaths (Jan 13, 2016)

There are systems of objective beauty, of standards, in classical music. There used to be these systems in the visual arts and Im hopeful they will return after their extended hiatus. Regardless I don't think in classical music any music any less then solidly based in such objective standards has been remembered over the ages. That is the difference between it and the frankly lazy, pretentious extremes in modern visual art.


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## Guest (May 27, 2016)

vallaths said:


> There are systems of objective beauty, of standards, in classical music.


I've not heard of these. What are they, or can you provide some examples of the systems?


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

vallaths said:


> There are systems of objective beauty, of standards, in classical music. There used to be these systems in the visual arts and Im hopeful they will return after their extended hiatus. Regardless I don't think in classical music any music any less then solidly based in such objective standards has been remembered over the ages. *That is the difference between it and the frankly lazy, pretentious extremes in modern visual art.*


Presumably if abstract musical works could be commodified and sold for bizillions of bucks like their more solidly objectified visual counterparts they would be easier to remember? 

I, like my esteemed colleague dogen, am curious about these systems of objective beauty.


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## Xenakiboy (May 8, 2016)

CDs said:


> Now would I want to see 4'33" more than once live? No. Would I go out of my way to see it performed live? No.
> I actually can't even watch a whole performance of it on YouTube without skipping to the end. But I love the discussion that it brings.


I'm sure you've performed it yourself many times, how is it hard to listen to 5 minutes of "silence"?


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## Hildadam Bingor (May 7, 2016)

Xenakiboy said:


> I'm sure you've performed it yourself many times, how is it hard to listen to 5 minutes of "silence"?


Impossible. I always start whistling "Danny Boy."


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## CDs (May 2, 2016)

Xenakiboy said:


> I'm sure you've performed it yourself many times, how is it hard to listen to 5 minutes of "silence"?


Yep. Everyday at work.


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