Re: [microsound] Cage and buddhism

[Joshua Maremont <thermal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> In a sense, Cage's absorption of Asian values was a form of appropriation.

How can expansive creative consciousnesses - in attempting to 
hybridize or synthesize - not appropriate?  In fact, has not cultural 
appropriation, in some cases quite cluelessly out of touch with the 
original cultural referents, been a significant part of the classical 
tradition - and nearly all other musical traditions excepting the 
neotraditionalist orthodoxies sometimes flying preservationist 
banners - for centuries?  To me the issue is not whether one 
appropriates - no-one is simply generating creative ideas out of the 
void - but whether one does so respectfully, insightfully, 
successfully.  To me Cage, by virtue of his study and to quite clear 
commitment both in words and in sound, was certainly respectful, and 
the ways in which he adapted Eastern forms, instruments, and ideas to 
the western academic tradition demonstrated the profundity and 
uniqueness of his grasp of all of these.  (And, even if, for the sake 
of argument, Cage's use of Asian ideas was superficial, how many 
other Western and non-Western composers have followed Cage with their 
own deep explorations of these areas?)  Whether he was successful is, 
of course, up to the listener, but I remember my shock after reading 
"Silence" in 1982 - just around the time that Laurie Anderson's 
tape-pop was beginning to assert itself on more mainstream radio - as 
I realized that much of certain realms of music current even then 
owed its existence at least in part to Cage's pioneering work.  One 
of the most interesting connections Cage made - and this I believe is 
mentioned in the liner notes to a stunning Wergo CD of works for 
cello and accordian by Cage and Toshio Hosokawa - was to the 
traditions of Japanese calligraphy; just as in calligraphy the white 
emptiness surrounding and suspending the black character is as much 
part of the writing as the character itself, so in Cage's later music 
the silence surrounding audible events acted as its own, I want to 
say, fullness, arranging the sounds as if across a parchment. 
Appropriation can itself be turned around as well.  One of the most 
interesting examples of this phenomenon to me in recent decades has 
been the rise of neo-exotica in Japan.  Exotica, as I understand it, 
originated in what now seems a quite comically clueless appropriation 
of what Americans decades ago imagined to be Asian-Pacific music by 
players and composers in the pop and jazz traditions; yet out of its 
naivete the members of this movement concocted something so odd, so 
silly, so unintentionally unique, and so referentially oblique as to, 
at last, send its own influence back over the Pacific, until YMO 
covered Martin Denny's "Firecracker" for an early single.  For me, 
"appropriation" - if so it must be named (I prefer to consider it 
"hybridization") - acts as a force of expansion and encourages 
evolution, even if we do have to endure the odd generic trance anthem 
sugared with Hindipop vocal loops from time to time.

ps - Anyone notice those quite microsonic station IDs on the SciFi 
channel (US cable TV) lately?

np - Paul Van Dyk (DJ set)
--
joshua maremont / thermal - mailto:thermal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
boxman studies label - http://www.boxmanstudies.com/