Dear John Cage,

Writer for the New Yorker, Alex Ross, muses on possible explanations why John Cage is still held in such disdain while so many of his contemporaries like Rauschenberg and Pollock are hailed as visionaries. Perhaps the answer to his question rests in the nature of aleatoric music itself. Although Cage did experiment with other techniques, [...]

Harry Partch and the Better(stranger) Tomorrows

In stark contrast to the exploration of latent musical patterns that appear to be present in all cultures that Bobby McFerrin explored(as mentioned in yesterday’s post), Harry Partch was one of the systematic innovators of music in the twentieth century. He sought to imitate natural sounds of machinery and speech more closely than the traditional [...]