“Pardon my ignorance, but what is the John Cage defense?
John Cage was an odd composer. One of his works was a piece consisting of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence.
In the Zimmerman trial, MoM had presented the jury with 4 minutes of silence, the amount of time that whereabouts were unaccounted for. “
Now I get it. Hadn’t heard about Cage’s piece, 4 minutes 33 seconds. Wasn’t really into his kind of music. However, I briefly knew John Cage, barely, but I did know him. When young and attending the Univ. of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, I had a part-time job in the Music Bldg, at the Music Library, checking out books and/or sheet music. I was about 18 years old and it was in the 60-70’s. This was the time of experimental music, and U of I had a rather large experimental music group amongst the faculty at the time.
John Cage became a Visiting Professor at U. of I. for a period of time, can’t remember how long, at least a half year, possibly a year. He would come in the Music Library a lot to check out books. I might add that Cage himself was an author, and a mushroom enthusiast, so his books would be interspersed with commentary on mushrooms, his passion in life besides music. As I worked a fair amount, I frequently would check out books for Cage, and banter with him. He was a very clever man, short, witty when he wanted to be, and also very gay. He would dress what was for then quite flamboyantly as a Professor, and used a cigarette holder to add to his effect. I got quite a kick out of him, and always enjoyed it when he came in. I was fairly good looking back then, but it made not a whit of difference to Cage, as he was much more interested in the young musical men than any women around him, although he was friendly to the female sex in an asexual way.
Cage held a great musical pageant while at U. of I. that was the talk of the town for weeks. It was held at the U. of I. Assembly Hall, a giant mushroom shaped building (that’s probably why he like it; it looked like a mushroom top, or in the alternative, like a flying saucer). These were the psychedelic days, and so was his event. As you entered, you were hit with long strips of psychedlic painted cloth hanging from above, being blown by huge fans as you ran the gauntlet of these cloth strips in order to get to the main floor of the building.
Once inside the main arena, there were harpsichordists (literally), many up on platforms, playing their instruments. High up in the corner rafters of the building (remember, it is mushroom shaped, so the assembly hall chairs went up high in rows, and at the top, the ceiling arched up from the last row) were tape recorders blaring assorted random sounds at the same time as the harpsichordists below were playing away in various parts of the main floor, their being strewn arbitrarily about. Many of these harpsichordists were quite famous players. I remember one renowned harpsichordist woman was an import from either France or Switzerland, I believe. Well, the whole evening was a blast, and we all had a lot of fun, as well as experiencing a very odd musical event. Fond memories.
One other Cage story. I attended another one of his performances, being held in a small performance hall in the Music Bldg itself. Cage was playing (and I use that word loosely) one of his pieces where he would put pieces of stuff, objects, on the strings of the piano in order to emit different sounds, and one of the music students (a total oddball in his own right) stood up in the middle of the performance and started arguing with Cage about how he was bastardizing music. Of course he got kicked out, but not before he and Cage really got into it verbally.
As an aside, this music student used to appear periodically in the student downtown area on campus where all the bars were, and parade down the streets with a male sidekick, both dressed in kilts, and Carlos, that was his name, would be playing his bagpipes. He would weave in and out of the bars while playing the pipes, and was quite well known on campus for his eccentricity. Eventually he was charged by the campus police when caught hiding sheet music and books from the Music Library where I worked in the basement, and had been dismantling one of the Music Dept’s harpsichords piece by piece and hiding his booty in the steam pipe rooms down in the basement. This is all true, not fabricated out of whole cloth in the recesses of my mind. Nothing was boring back in those days.
Great stories about John Cage.
When I was 12 or 13 I was into modern classical music, the more avant-garde the better. My contemporaries were into rock music. Of course I knew all about John Cage.
One of the proudest moments of my youth was winning a special prize given at a lecture for a group of young musicians. It was awarded for being the only person to correctly identify the instrument in a recording played for the audience—it was John Cage playing a prepared piano.
Nowadays, many years later, I listen to rock music, not John Cage. What this says about my musical taste I don’t want to know...
Thank you for that interesting story!