A Song a Day

I'm a great fan of John Cage, you can hardly underestimate his influence on today's music. Besides posting his Indeterminacy texts on my blog I just started reading the biography Roaring Silence by David Revill. Compared to other prominent artists I've always felt that Cage was a genuinely good and honest person, somehow you could easily have been friends with.

I'm not going to go into any theorizing about his work, but I want to emphasize that his work is - despite being so experimental - it is also quite entertaining. Cage said one problem for him was that - both his musicians and his audience - took his work either too seriously or not serious enough. I think there's no problem to keep the balance.

Both clips are performances of Water music. The first one is performed by the artist himself, 1960 on a TV show! The second is a more recent performance by Brown New Music's Clara Schuhmacher & Whit Bernard at the Grant Recital Hall, Brown University.