Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Cage made himself a cacophonous cocoon with works like Silence and 4’33”. Bound in a nutshell Hamlet said he was yet the monarch of infinite space. Pop music, opera, dance and ballet are growing but the audience for classical instrumental music had been shrinking since the last decades of Cage’s life. It was cool for the Abstract Expressionists to name their works as if by musical notation. Now such a title would relegate the most wondrous painting to unfashionable codgerdom. They used to say, art aspires to the condition of music. But if music aspires to the condition of noise, .... ?