Results tagged “john cage” from The Sunday Mail - Jayne's Jaunts

Last wednesday was quite, er, interesting...

The university new music group is dedicated to performing works by new (or relatively new) composers from the 20th century onwards. During the concert at Kings College Chapel we were treated to a night of John Cage.

I don't know if you know much about John Cage, but he is the composer that is most famous for his work 4"33

Youtube clip

The funniest thing is that people try to not make a sound during the piece, and inbetween the movements you hear the culmination of all the coughs and splutters that people have been holding in for the past few minutes :-)

We were treated to some great John Cage pieces such as 'Scottish Circus', which it as times quite melodic, and sometimes it is all over the place!

There was also 'Litany for the whale' which was for four voices placed at different parts of the hall. The music was composed so that it should sound like whale song, and it was even better in the echoey acoustic of Kings.

Then there was the piece for four transistor radios. Even though with all these pieces you could go into a debate about whether or not it is music, this particluar performance of the transistor radios was just great. It was great simply for the fact that when one radio was 'playing' solo, it tuned into Northsound 1 and by sheer coincidence there was a news report on at the same time. I thought it was great as from this one excerpt of the performance you had a great sense of time and place.

Well done New Music Group, your concert was great fun :-)