Stream a Free 65-Hour Playlist of John Cage Music and Discover the Full Scope of His Avant-Garde Compositions
Posted: 30 Nov 2015 04:50 AM PST
john cage 65 hours
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/artist/1Z3fF5lZdCM0ZHugkGoH8s
John Cage’s The Ten Thousand Things:
https://open.spotify.com/album/64Vavb1X3czzYW3BbSJLnE
Creative Commons image via Wiki Art
We might as well get the self-writing joke about a 65-hour John Cage playlist out of the way up front: that’s a whole lot of silence! But of course, such a joke about the work of John Cage inevitably ends up as a joke about how little so many of us know about the work of John Cage. Most of us learn, at one time or another, of “4’33”,” his famous 1952 composition — or perhaps anti-composition — which instructs its players to, for the length of time reflected by its title, play nothing at all. But dig a little deeper into Cage’s motivations, and you find that he wanted the audience of “4’33″” to listen not to the silence, but to whatever sounds happen to remain in the absence of music — so that those incidental noises, in effect, become the music.
Many more such unconventional compositional ideas and resulting listening experiences await you in John Cage: A Chronological Collection, this decidedly non-silent Spotify playlist above (and if you don’t have Spotify’s free software yet, download it here) by Ulysses Classical, author of several of our favorite playlists, including this 50-hour classical compilation we featured in August.
The New World Symphony page below provides access to John Cage’s work without going through Spotify.
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