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Includes FREEMP3 version of this album. Provided by Amazon Digital Services LLC. Terms and Conditions. Does not apply to gift orders. Complete your purchase to save the MP3 version to your music library.
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Ah, yes how to describe this album? Well, basically Indeterminacy is just that; 90 stories read by Cage that have nothing to do with each other, while David Tudor provides random sound as accompaniment. Utterly Cage-ian and, thus, utterly unique. "*" - Rolling Stone Record Guide.
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Is Discontinued By Manufacturer
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No
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5.71 x 4.88 x 0.91 inches; 5.86 Ounces
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There are about 100 recordings of John Cage available at one time or another, and quite variable in performance quality, some (such as Rings with Jay Clayton vocals) are quite nice, others are unfortunately too often disappointing, dull or even jarring. This two-disc stands above the rest as perhaps the most worthy of possessing of Cages recordings and perhaps most clearly exemplifies his musical philosophy. Indeterminacy is a fine example of Cages introduction of Zen into classical music. Chance composition of piano, noises, silences, varied recordings, are friendly unexpected welcome guests to the ear,and are accompanied by 60 very short stories gently spoken by John Cage. Some of the stories are personal, others are Oriental philosophy lessons, and some are about his penchant for mushroom collecting. Some of the stories are in his book; Silence. All are quickly spoken in a voice not dissimilar from Vincent Price! A nice accompaniment to the Alan Watts lectures of the same period.
When you first experience indeterminacy and you See that you are the third person in the equation .You understand that John Cage the storyteller and David Tudor the musician cannot hear each other during the creative performance. Therefore, The end result being indeterminant is your experience. This piece from was a turning point in my understanding John Cages perceptions. And when my prescriptions changed –----What a joy!
I hoped base on reviews and sound clips that this would please me much more than it did. I enjoy Cage's voice and would have loved hearing his stories without intentional distractions. Just didn't work for me. Neither the stories nor the sound distractions amounted to much of anything, really. Too bad.
John Cage, sounds, voice. How to come up with a phrasing of this language? First a grid and then its failure? Too simple a step to explain "Indeterminacy". But an explanation must accompany if it is to become common between us. But what if what is common between us is a fact we will never know as fact (Gertrude Stein comes to mind)? That we can't know it. What if it is a solitude so total, a solitude in which the other of a voice, our own, or not-it could be a window looking back-we will never know whose it is? Only the instantaneous finality of its invisible hand. Many voices, and the reduction even to voice will never get away with its project finally. Here we are nothing amongst nothing. If I were to dedicate this to John Cage's "Indeterminacy", if I were to bear witness to it as he did, I would send him the sound of my fingers pressing keys and the airplane out the window, the adherent leaves quivering dead in the wind. His piece would be in the background as translated through what I hear. That is, the piece, any piece (flesh only steps up in afterthought, an enthymeme to stun the senses from their center into the pieces that they always have been before the hammer of cornerstones. It has nothing to do with language poetry. It is slow and semiotics has no respect for the phenomenal. Neither have time. Time is an afterthought. They are in tension, but need not be at peace or war. The challenge is to let their tension speak for itself. This is too philosophical for a poem and it is why I have given it to a paragraph. (Sorrowfully). One must justify one's motives, one's method. One must take care to be sure that this step and that are covered, and we will do so even if self-reflexive writing becomes an anachronism. There is nothing pretty in the above save maybe the leaves. And the recognition that they are phrases. I cannot write the sound of the ring as it taps on my desk. When the cat leaps to the floor, my head turns to the scene before I tell it to. The above is Buddhist enough to incite one to comfort in any possibility, but I am still worried about the milk coming in the morning and the trace disturbances echoing from my feet and eyes. The quiver I noted in the stutter that tried to hide itself, that I noted only after the question of disclosure had been tabled. On a mediocre night when I only wanted space to be filled, Cage said nothing to me in the strong sense. The one directive: at least offer a benediction. An old shoe would go well in here.
Reviewed in the United States on November 19, 1999
I first heard selections from "Indeterminacy" when I was driving on the freeway. I had to pull off and listen. I'd never heard anything like it. I filed it away in the back of my mind and one day wandered into a record shop in Ontario, Canada, where, what should I see, but "Indeterminacy" on a couple of LPs. When I finally found it on CD, I did the same thing I'd done with the LPs. Bought it immediately. The anecdotes Cage tells seem disarmingly simple and naive, but each one has larger ramifications: about how to listen to music, about how the world works or ought to work, about how music and the world are related, about questioning, etc. That is, about life's largest issues. And they're often very funny, told in Cage's unique dead-pan style--a precursor for many dead-pan narrators since. And David Tudor's background work is equally quirky, witty, surprising and inventive--sometimes punctuating Cage's stories, other times oblivious to the narrative, even smothering it. From the liner notes, Tudor and Cage had no connection to each other--they were working in different studios. Everything that happened in the "accompaniment" was indeterminate. In short, this is a good collection to introduce yourself to one of America's most original and provocative composer/philosophers. It always amazes me that the most amazing things, the wittiest, the most thoughtful, are among the least read or listened to items in the Amazon catalog. It's like the ads for movies: the larger the ad, the more you should avoid the film; hunt for the little things.
Though this work was recorded long ago, it's so innovative that even it sounds fresh and daring today. Buy this one and not the version by Susanne Kessel and Joachim Krol. As the stories were read in German by Krol, it's better to listen to the original version by Cage. Anyone who is interested in avant-garde music must not miss this record. It should be in the collection of every avant-garde music lovers.
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