IDDON - Nono

-Hates John Cage, in his essay at Darmstadt says, John Cage has exerted an influence directly and
indirectly, the past few years, which determined a particular musical situation in Europe, in increasingly
confusing ways.
-What is free? What is truly new?
-Thought Cage put himself as the gospel beginning and end, of this new movement.
-Schillinger believes no one is free because we are historically, culturally, and geographically conditioned.
-Schillinger argues to escape this, we depend on the scientific method.
-Nono says this is absurd because art and freedom are synonymous, and adherence to a schematic
principle has never breathed life into an artwork. Only the synthesis of the principle and its
implementation achieves this freedom.
-Any systematic procedure on its own is useless, and avoiding careful and responsible consideration was
already a product of its own epoch.
-Compositional Responsibility Cage believes material is freely available for use, regardless of
era/culture/baggage, and can be put alongside other elements without the composer having to be
responsible to show the link between the two.
-Nono believes this is unethical as it arises from colonial thinking. Nono believed this collage method
allowed a composer to appropriate at will, without needing to be concerned with ones relationship
with that culture.
-Improvisation is usually cultic, in Eastern cultures, always concerned with a high being, in the music of
Tudor and other, it still occurs, but instead of a higher being at the center, it is ones own ego.
(Clearly didnt understand the painstaking lengths Tudor went to preparing scores).
-To replace ones own decisions with chance and its acoustic results as if it will bring insight can only be
the method of one who is afraid to make his or her own decisions, who is afraid when faced with
freedom of the spirit.
-Basically, neither the absolute restriction nor total freedom of spontaneity can lead to artistic freedom.
-Everything doesnt need to be new, collage method is bad.
-Composers first responsibility was to the Geist, one is obliged to carry out the work which is
appropriate and vital for the teleological thrust of ones own age.

REVELL - ZEN
-Suzuki Lectures at Columbia
-First talked about by cage ins 1952 Juilliard Lecture.
-You could easily ask yourself if you learned or understood anything sometimes it came later,
sometimes never at all.
-I didnt study music just anybody, I studied with Schoenberg. Likewise, I studied Zen with Suzuki. Ive
always gone to the president of the company when possible.
-Zen arose as a response to the rigid formality of samurai Japan.
-Cage liked the unmediated, spontaneous spiritual path that Zen took him in.
-The world proceeds without our permission: trees fall, machines make sounds, etc. The Enlightenment
and the ideals of the modern era told us that humans can determine the world by their minds; Zen
suggests humility: Each moment presents what happens; everything is present in the foreground.
- A mistake is beside the point, for once anything happens it authentically is. No eraser.
- Accept what happens and roll with it. Accept the situation you are in.
- I dont think were really interested in the validity of things; were interested in the experience of
things. (1960s Cage)
- The central focus is the present moment, Uniqueness is extremely close to being here and now.
-Unimpededness = each being is at the center; interpenetration = were all intertwined.