Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[Dionysis Boukouvalas <>]

I offer to do it in Greek

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From: <> on behalf of Joseph Zitt <>
Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2022 11:10:21 AM
To: Rod Stasick <>
Cc: silence <>
Subject: Re: [silence] Performing Mesostics and the Other Non-sensical Texts

 

> I think the source text translation followed by the mesostic creation 

> would be closer to Cage’s ideal desire …

Yup, I think so too.

It would be cool to see those of us who speak different languages take a common brief mesostic and try this, maybe recording and publishing them (with the permission of the Cage Trust, if needed) as an 110th birthday commemoration. I could handle Hebrew, though I would ask a native speaker to do the initial translation.

The Chinese version that you mention is fascinating, though I can't quite picture it, knowing very little about Chinese. I would love to see/hear it.

> Concerning the reading of texts, Cage has said (especially in his comments to

> Klaus Schöning about Roaratorio) that he pretty much tried different ways of

> reading texts out loud and made a decision to improvise in a chosen style.

Ah, I don't remember that. Time to listen to Laughtears again.

On Sun, Jan 23, 2022 at 9:46 AM Rod Stasick <> wrote:

I think the source text translation followed by the mesostic creation 

would be closer to Cage’s ideal desire … 

… plus, translations of already created Cage mesostic texts would completely 

divorce themselves from the original intent that one would wonder what the point

of doing so would be. Tho’ I do think that there may be another way of utilizing them

in other creative ways (perhaps a “Circus” situation in a different country/language).

An idea that I’ve long wanted to see explored begins as a Chinese one where 

the created mesostic consists of radical compounds in which the mesostic line 

(in this case it would travel horizontally across the page instead of the vertical line 

that we know of in English) would represent multiple meanings rather than 

individual letters, so you could have an instance whereby the mesostic line 

doesn’t just build on individual letters to, finally, get to a meaning of a word, 

but each logogram can represent an ever changing concept based on its 

position in the Chinese text. In short: a “mesostic” <sic> built on ideas rather 

than letters. In Chinese and other languages there are all kinds of these 

opportunities to explore. They wouldn’t be called “mesostics,” but the 

process could spawn individual names based on whichever language 

was being used to create the texts. It would be these texts translated 

to English that I’d like to read after hearing the non-English version.

Lately, because of the last year of political events in the US, 

I’ve noticed that the use of the term “autogolpe” has gained 

some attention. This is the Spanish version of the English word, 

“autocoup” which makes me feel a bit embarrassed when I smile at 

hearing either term. A self-coup should probably be spoken of in murmurs.

Concerning the reading of texts, Cage has said (especially in his comments to

Klaus Schöning about Roaratorio) that he pretty much tried different ways of

reading texts out loud and made a decision to improvise in a chosen style.

stay safe folks,

R

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

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