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the tool is the message, failure



Kim has mentioned before his play on McLuhan - "the tool is the message." While
I have  reservations about this, I did run across this statement in reading
today. The author, Richard Toop, is talking  about Cage's Cartridge Music. 

"But returning to the consequences of Cage?s piece, it gave a whole new impetus
to the  relationship between composing and instrument building. This is a
factor not unfamiliar to  traditional music historians ­ you?d hardly discuss
Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven in depth without giving some thought to the
development of the piano at the turn of the 19th century ­ but here it assumes
a different dimension. In many cases, the piece exists primarily to expose the 
instrument."

In that article, there's a funny story of Cage's. It's worth reading.

http://www.ssla.soc.usyd.edu.au/conference/toop.html

For me, though, Cage's intention isn't to expose the instrument. It was one
more example of  focusing on the sound in the composition rather than formal
compositional method (such as serialism). In Part 1 of Indeterminancy, he talks
of a concert he and David Tudor gave in North Carolina. He told the audience
that this music was music with the purpose of making people listen rather than
distance themselves trying to figure out what a composer meant with a
particular arrangement of sounds. That seems pretty far away from "the tool is
the message" to me. That's why I've maintained that the tool is relatively
inconsequential, or that this method of developing a piece (purely for the goal
of calling attention to the instrument) is a  dead-end approach. Failure can be
an interesting event (as Cage repeatedly describes in the Indeterminancy piece
? the juke box, the pen display), but as an end of the composition, I'm not
sure. Those 19th century composers, I believe, weren't trying to scream at the
audience "This is a piano, damn it!" They were just concerned with the best
piano and tuning for expressing their ideas about sound (I think... should
verify this...).

Still, every time I undertake learning a new tool (as I am with Wigout at the
moment), I revisit this argument. 

I don't want to downplay the importance of glitches. They are an important part
of the palette. Still, to focus on them while ignoring the broader consequences
of their use, the wider soundscape of the piece, seems like misplaced purposes
to me.

Have I just written a troll? :-/ Somebody set me straight.

Renick

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Renick Bell
http://www.the3rd2nd.com

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