{"id":5228,"date":"2011-10-19T23:24:24","date_gmt":"2011-10-19T22:24:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/?p=5228"},"modified":"2011-10-19T23:24:24","modified_gmt":"2011-10-19T22:24:24","slug":"the-perpetual-now-or-nothing-is-as-nostalgic-as-the-modernity-of-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/2011\/10\/the-perpetual-now-or-nothing-is-as-nostalgic-as-the-modernity-of-the-past.html","title":{"rendered":"The Perpetual Now, or “nothing is as nostalgic as the modernity of the past”"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Contemporary music is not the music of the future nor the music of the past but simply music present with us: this moment, now, this now moment.”
\n— John Cage, Composition as Process, 1958.<\/p>\n

“The mainstream public didn’t really know about them that much. They were a very minor group in that aspect.”
\n— Doug Yule, interview, 1995.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s a truism that the Velvet Underground were really obscure and unpopular when they were a going concern, isn’t it? Later in that Yule interview<\/a>, he mentions touring the UK in 1972 as The Velvet Underground and no-one noticing or caring that the band had none of the original members from the first two LPs.<\/p>\n

The wonderful Other Minds Archive has posted a recording of the world premiere<\/a> of John Cage’s composition 33 1\/3<\/em>, at the University of California at Davis on 21 November, 1969. The composition is Cage at his most anarchic: the audience was invited to a room with no performers, no seating, 24 record players, several hundred records, and no instructions. The punters soon get the idea, and a 40-minute collage of simultaneous musics and audience noises ensues.<\/p>\n

I’m trying to remember where I read that interview with Cage about the piece, the one where he talks about acquiring the records. He contacted a record distributor and asked for a random selection of different titles. The wholesaler, as you might expect, sent several crateloads of their slowest-selling albums. Cage cheerfully recalls that by the end of the gig a number of records had gone missing, having finally found a happy home with someone in the crowd.<\/p>\n

In the Other Minds recording, several minutes into the tentative start of 33 1\/3<\/em>, comes the unmistakeable sound of side 2 of The Velvet Underground and Nico<\/em>. It’s much louder than anything else. After a couple of minutes it suddenly disappears, only to reappear again soon after, from the top. This time it gets all the way through “Heroin” and “There She Goes Again” before it’s suddenly snatched away again, never to return. I wonder what was happening around that record player for those 15 minutes, and whether that album found a new owner that night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Contemporary music is not the music of the future nor the music of the past but simply music present with us: this moment, now, this now moment.” — John Cage, Composition as Process, 1958. “The mainstream public didn’t really know about them that much. They were a very minor group in that aspect.” — Doug […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5228"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5228"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5231,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5228\/revisions\/5231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}