Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[Rob Haskins <>]

No, you're right, and I realized as soon as I replied. (It's been a long semester.) Could it be that Nyman derived the quote from something like a radio interview that he transcribed (and forgot he transcribed)? For years I've tried to identify a Cage quote that appears in Experimental Music and have NEVER found it; Nyman told me he was sure it was a print source when I asked him about it, but perhaps the print source was some sort of transcript of an interview that was never published or published in a very obscure location. This Ives quote, because it is a somewhat embellished version of something in print, is like the quote I was looking for, which made me start thinking that perhaps it might have originated in an interview.

On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 11:07 PM, Josh Ronsen <> wrote:

No, the passage in A Year from Monday (at least in the second printing of 1970 in front of me) reads (as much as I can decipher his handwriting):

"There are two other things I would like to point out that interest me [.] One is what I would like to call the mud of Ives [.] It's all the part that is not referential [.] Oout [?] of this mud are complex superimposition lines that makes a web in which we cannot clearly perceive anything that's what I mean by the mud come rising up as it were these American tunes hymns tunes and what not that don't interest me [.]" -pg. 42

Is there another passage I'm missing?

-Josh

---

From: Rob Haskins <>
To: Josh Ronsen <>; Silence <>
Sent: Thursday, December 1, 2011 5:25 PM
Subject: Re: [silence] Source of Cage quote about Ives...

It's in A Year from Monday, in the "Two Statements on Ives."

On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 4:20 PM, Josh Ronsen <> wrote:

Pwyll ap Sion (senior lecturer at Bangor University) is looking for the source of this quote by Cage:

'What interests me are not the Americana aspects, the tunes and all that, but what I call the mud, the complexity of many things going on at once, in which I am not able to know where I am, or what's happening. Invariably in this mystery, something begins to happen to my mind, to change it, because of what I'm hearing. But in my experience, that
change of my mind is interrupted by the emergency from the mud of some well-known tune, generally some Protestant church tune, and I find myself in a place familiar to others, but carefully avoided by me, in the land so to speak of melodies and accompaniments or, I suppose Ives would prefer it if he's listening, if I would say melodies and
precedents."

Michael Nyman used this quote in a paper at the First American Music Conference, Keele University, in 1975, and mentions the this viewpoint of Cage is more developed from Cage's "Two Statements on Ives" in A Year from Monday, so we figure it must come in between 1967 and 1975. A few times Cage mentions Ives and mud in the same breath, but not "Protestant church tune" that I can find. I am guessing his mention of church tunes comes from his work on Apartment House/Renga, but that is just my guess.


Thanks for any help,

-Josh Ronsen
http://ronsen.org

--
Rob Haskins, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and
     Coordinator, Graduate Studies
Department of Music, College of Liberal Arts
University of New Hampshire
M-105, Paul Creative Arts Center
30 Academic Way
Durham, NH 03824
603-862-3987 (office)
603-862-3155 (fax)
<http://unh.edu/music/>
<http://robhaskins.net>
<http://musicandmiscellaneous.blogspot.com/>

-- 
Rob Haskins, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and
     Coordinator, Graduate Studies
Department of Music, College of Liberal Arts
University of New Hampshire
M-105, Paul Creative Arts Center
30 Academic Way
Durham, NH 03824
603-862-3987 (office)
603-862-3155 (fax)
<http://unh.edu/music/>
<http://robhaskins.net>
<http://musicandmiscellaneous.blogspot.com/>