Categories
BLOG

Dan Lopatin on John Cage

“There’s a moment from in love with another sound where Cage describes the experience of observing two Coke bottles as unique instances, subject to differing shades of light and positions in space. He is likening his experience of the bottles to the importance of generating variety in the arts, in forgetting history and striving for newness in a repetitive social reality, which is stifled by a preoccupation with memory. For Cage, all of that might boil down to a matter of patterns at the grocery store. He was a guy who saw his work as fused to his immediate reality in the most unambiguous and uncomplicated way, while interacting with the most paradoxical aspects of it. He communicated an unpretentious awareness of everything around the things we hold to be true — the Coke bottle, the orchestra and the quiet, all equal and subject to fascination.”