remarks on John Cage's theory of music
maybe you know famous quote of John Cage, who said "i have nothing to say, so i say it". his ideal of music was music that means nothing, that has no meaning. he was attempting to get close to this ideal in his music activity, trying to compose with means of composition that are as much impredictable as possible. it's really difficult to compose things that you can't predict, like with creating mathematical algorhitm to generate random numbers. it depends on the ammount of numbers, how big will be the unpredictability, but in the same time you need to make a frame of which you can start to generate those random numbers, numbers that are without any visible link between them. the only visible link should be the command to make the sequence of numbers impossible to predict. Cage was saying that there is no more beutifull sounds for him than sounds of the enviroment. he claimed that those sounds can have no meaning, that they communicate nothing. It's also difficult task and everything relies on the set of events you can link to specific sign, signal, or symptom. first thing is your repertoir of those means to code and decode the information. with music it gets more and more confusing. let's go after Cage's intuition. we are somewhere in the city listening to the sounds. lets consider that we can link a lot of sounds considered as signs, signals and symptoms to the things that are generating those sounds. we can compare it with listening to white noise. they say that white noise is a container of every possible sounds human ear can here. the problem is how to pick up the minimal sound events that white noise is comprised of. the second problem is the definition of coummunication and information. if communication is considered as the way to transform the information into something you can understand, link to some event you know, and if information is considered as something you can differentiate from the background, then the bigger repertoir of common sounds you have, the harder your capability to receive sounds you don't know is. let's assume that Cage definition of music was to receive something you don't know and to be curious about it. with this scope there is a problem to get this with traditional means of music composing and most of efforts in XX century music were focused on diversifying compositional means to create music. just to make it interesting if you want to hear something you never heard before. everything depends on your own actual knowledge and your psychological and phisical capacity to look further.
let us try to look further. is it possible to communicate nothing? or it is just rhetorical gimmick that means nothing and is forcing people to misuse their intelectual powers?