“Voyeur” Part 1
Ben Marcus [author of this article] defends experimental fiction against critics, Jonathan Franzen in particular, who disparage it.
If not the best novelist of his generation, then certainly the most anxious—eager for fame, but hostile to the people who confer it—Jonathan Franzen has excelled most conspicuously at worrying about literature’s potential for mass entertainment. It’s a fair worry to have, if vain, but he’s been a strange and angry contender for the role, and the results have been spectacular, depressing, and confusing all at once. In reviews, essays, and lately even a short story, he has taken wild swings at some unlikely culprits in literature’s decreasing dominance. In the process he has also managed to gaslight writing’s alien artisans, those poorly named experimental writers with no sales, little review coverage, a small readership, and the collective cultural pull of an ant.
[Whoa! I had no idea that Jonathan Franzen felt this way about experimental fiction. This is a great article, but I’m gonna have to side with Franzen on this one. Click on the link and read the article, it’s worth a look.]
To Cage, it no longer suffices to state that silence and sound are mutually dependent in order to exist, or that sound emerges from silence. Cage reverses this idea: silence resounds in sounds. Silence becomes more prominent when traces of silence in sounds are detected. ‘Music already enjoys inaudibility (silence)’, Cage writes (Kostenaletz, p.116).
At first, Cage conceives of silence in a traditional way, as the absence of sound, or as minimal sound activity. Already, however, silence is not just a negativity to Cage. The attention to silence aids in uncovering musical structure since this can only be determined by duration (see above). By assigning the primacy of the musical parameters to duration, Cage not only opens music to silence, but to all sounds of any quality or pitch. Music becomes an empty (silent?) concept from which any type of sound may emerge. Silence acquires an important role: only through silence can the musical material adopt many types of sounds.
Music is an art form whose medium is sound. Common elements of music are pitch (which governs melody and harmony), rhythm (and its associated concepts tempo, meter, and articulation), dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture.
…great what else is new?
“Stress” Part 1
“Hump”
“Free Pics” Part 2
“Free Pics” Part 1
“Details Part 2”
“Eclecticism is used to describe a composer’s conscious use of styles alien to his nature”
…I love that description
