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Paper should be edible, nutritious. Inks used for printing or writing should have delicious flavors. Magazines or newspapers read at breakfast should be eaten for lunch. Instead of throwing one's mail in the waste-basket, it should be saved for the dinner guests.
John Cage
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The Indians long ago knew that music was going on permanently and that hearing it was like looking out a window at a landscape which didn't stop when one turned away.
John Cage
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Combine nursing homes with nursery schools. Bring very old and very young together: they interest one another.
John Cage
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I never had a hat, never wore one, but recently was given a brown suede duck-hunting hat. The moment I put it on I realized I was starved for a hat. I kept it warm by putting it on my head. I made plans to wear it especially when I was going to do any thinking. Somewhere in Virginia, I lost my hat.
John Cage
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The grand thing about the human mind is that it can turn its own tables and see meaninglessness as ultimate meaning.
John Cage
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The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.
John Cage
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So somebody has talent? So what? Dime a dozen. And we're overpopulated. Actually we have more food than we have people and more art. We've gotten to the point of burning food. When will we begin to burn our art?
John Cage
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One day when I was studying with Schoenberg, he pointed out the eraser on his pencil and said, 'This end is more important than the other.' After twenty years I learned to write directly in ink.
John Cage
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The responsibility of the artist consists in perfecting his work so that it may become attractively disinteresting.
John Cage
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All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear I know nothing.
John Cage
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If this word "music" is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.
John Cage
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The function of Art is to imitate Nature in her manner of operation. Our understanding of her manner of operation&Rdquo; changes according to advances in the sciences.
John Cage
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Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments. Every film studio has a library of "sound effects" recorded on film. With a film phonograph it is now possible to control the amplitude and frequency of any one of these sounds and to give to it rhythms within or beyond the reach of the imagination. Given four film phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heartbeat, and landslide.
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Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.
John Cage
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Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.
John Cage
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Food, one assumes, provides nourishment; but Americans eat it fully aware that small amounts of poison have been added to improve its appearance and delay its putrefaction.
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It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.
John Cage
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An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality.
John Cage
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Music is edifying, for from time to time it sets the soul in operation.
John Cage
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A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection.
John Cage
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Art's purpose is to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens.
John Cage
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I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the use of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard. Photoelectric, film and mechanical mediums for the synthetic production of music will be explored.
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WHEREAS, IN THE PAST, THE POINT OF DISAGREEMENT HAS BEEN BETWEEN DISSONANCE AND CONSONANCE, IT WILL BE, IN THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE, BETWEEN NOISE AND SO-CALLED MUSICAL SOUNDS.
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They say, 'you mean it's just sounds?' thinking that for something to just be a sound is to be useless, whereas I love sounds just as they are, and I have no need for them to be anything more than what they are. I don't want them to be psychological. I don't want a sound to pretend that it's a bucket or that it's president or that it's in love with another sound. I just want it to be a sound.
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I imagine that as contemporary music goes on changing in the way that I'm changing it what will be done is to more and more completely liberate sounds from abstract ideas about them and more and more exactly to let them be physically uniquely themselves. This means for me: knowing more and more not what I think a sound is but what it actually is in all of its acoustical details and then letting this sound exist, itself, changing in a changing sonorous environment.
John Cage
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Quote of the day
Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.
Georges Bataille
John Cage
Born:
September 5, 1912
Died:
August 12, 1992
(aged 79)
Bio:
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, and artist.
Most used words:
sound
music
time
film
life
musical
feeling
work
changing
hear
wall
thought
operation
love
talking
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