The broadcast does raise a question, though: are you supposed to listen to the ambient noise from the concert hall, or the stuff around you at home? Do two sets of ambient noise make it a completely different work?
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Either way, you can still listen yourself and make up your own mind about it. The video is 7'20" – it's the 12" remix* (*It isn’t. I am a child)
aug 29, 2025, 9:15 am • 58 1 • view
One of the intriguing things about Cage’s work, though, is that it has precedents. Erwin Schulhoff’s ‘In Futurum’ is the central movement of a work from 1919 called Five Picturesques. The New Yorker describes most of the piece as “boisterous, clanging chords”, but... well, here is that middle bit
aug 29, 2025, 9:16 am • 19 3 • view
And here’s the sheet music. It’s different to Cage’s: covered in marks, almost all of which are signs for rests, but it’s a page which is *busy* with resting (and the Italian phrase at the top means “the entire song with as much expression and feeling as you like, always, right to the end!”)
aug 29, 2025, 9:17 am • 29 2 • view
Schulhoff was an avant-garde composer with an enthusiasm for jazz and Dada, and the New Yorker says there are “directions that are not merely challenging but downright nonsensical, like the time signatures—3/5 in one hand, 7/10 in the other”. Oh, and the smiley faces are original elements
aug 29, 2025, 9:18 am • 11 0 • view
This is the piece in the context of the whole work, and I can’t help wondering, given when it was written, if the frenetic, choppy bits, contrasting with the calm of In Futurum (and the final movement) aren’t in some way a response to what had been happening from 1914-18
aug 29, 2025, 9:20 am • 10 0 • view
(Mind you, as an aside, this is his Erotic Sonata, which “calls for a female singer to moan orgasmically”, and is also from 1919 – three years before Molly Bloom said “yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”)
aug 29, 2025, 9:20 am • 14 0 • view
Unfortunately, Schulhoff was a Czech Jew, and – what with that, and being artistic, non-conformist, and politically radical – he didn’t survive the *next* world war. He tried to get to Russia (which wasn’t exactly safe for Jews either), but was caught and died (of TB) in prison in 1942
aug 29, 2025, 9:22 am • 12 0 • view
This is the full New Yorker piece. There isn’t a huge amount out there about Schulhoff, who was rather forgotten about after his early death, but this piece (from 2004) marked a weekend dedicated to his work, so he is starting to be heard more again
aug 29, 2025, 9:23 am • 6 0 • view
And, strangely, even Schulhoff had a forerunner – although this wasn’t performed. Marche funèbre composée pour les funérailles d’un grand homme sourd (Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man) was ‘composed’ by French writer Alphonse Allais as a joke in 1897
aug 29, 2025, 9:25 am • 8 0 • view
What a thread!
aug 29, 2025, 9:29 am • 1 0 • view
Now this is an interesting footnote, because it reminds me of another work of Allais’...
aug 29, 2025, 9:40 am • 9 0 • view
this is literally just someone making counting rests as unnecessarily complicated as possible
aug 29, 2025, 10:49 am • 0 0 • view
I was there. The orchestral version is inferior to that for solo piano. Another piece (where the conductor just moved his arm in a circle, to "represent the passing of time" while the orchestra played three different works simultaneously) was so ludicrous that one violinist just burst out laughing.
aug 29, 2025, 10:32 am • 2 0 • view
LOL
aug 29, 2025, 9:25 am • 0 0 • view
Yes
aug 29, 2025, 1:19 pm • 1 0 • view
My thought exactly. 😄
aug 29, 2025, 1:45 pm • 1 0 • view
www.antiquatedfuture.com/stickers/joh...
aug 29, 2025, 11:10 am • 1 0 • view
Oh, I like that
aug 29, 2025, 11:12 am • 0 0 • view