Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[Joseph Zitt <>]

They do seem to be distinct ideas. I would tend toward 1). For 2), there would be the challenge of words that work differently syntactically and are ambiguous in different ways in different languages.

On 1), however, the other language would also have characters representing units as small as sounds, as English does, rather than entire words. While the latter case might work, I don't know enough of any of those languages to see how.

For a project I'm now doing, I generated a long text by processing another text through a (malfunctioning) travesty generator. I tried translating the result into Hebrew, but hit a lot of problems, particularly since the source text was from a man's point of view but the Hebrew would be spoken by women.

On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 6:52 PM Goldstein, Louis <> wrote:

Are there two separate ideas here?

1)    Translate the source texts and make new mesostics from them

2)    Translate each word of Cage's mesostics and chant that translation, disregarding the mesostic rules.

On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 2:27 AM Christian Kesten <> wrote:

Dear Joseph,

good point! Cage’s chanting of Empty Words for example always sounded very modal to me, but I have never done any analysis so far. Would be curious, if anyone has.

To translate the mesostics is an intriguing idea: first I thought, it’s impossible, since their form is based on and dependent from the source material. But if one takes the translations of the source material, or first translate that, and then proceed with the same methods Cage used, then it might be possible. Maybe worth a try!

Best,

Christian Kesten

http://christiankesten.de

Am 21.01.2022 um 09:59 schrieb Joseph Zitt <>:

Has anyone ever recorded any of the mesostics or other non-sensical texts in other languages? Would that even be possible? Listening to the recording of "Time (Three Autokus)" on Laura Kuhn's podcast yesterday, I wondered what they would sound like if they were in a language that I didn't know.

https://wavefarm.org/radio/wgxc/schedule/e6r61m

Also: has anyone done any analysis on the way that Cage chanted the texts? It seems to me that he used a pretty consistent set of musical phrases and a narrow range of pitches for them throughout his career. In the only time I met him, just after a performance of a section of Empty Words ate MOMA, I asked him if the pitch material was composed or improvised. He said "improvised" but didn't say more

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Joseph Zitt :: http://www.josephzitt.com

"Write what you dream. Shoot what you can. Edit what you have." -- Unknown

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Joseph Zitt :: http://www.josephzitt.com

"Write what you dream. Shoot what you can. Edit what you have." -- Unknown