John Cage deemed himself a poet and philosopher as well as a composer, but he is mostly lauded as a composer, even called one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century. Now, a composer is someone who creates music which others play and still others listen to. One measure of a composer's success is, uh, his compositions; and one measure of that is the number of entries in music catalogues like the Penguin Guide to CDs and DVDs (hereinafter PG). I have one of the last of those guides (it's not published any more as CDs fade into history), the 1500+-page 2003/4 edition. There is one, count them 1, entry for Cage. Of course his most famous composition, 4'33", cannot be recorded. This memorable piece consists of a pianist sitting down at a piano and, for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, doing nothing, not touching a key, and then standing up and walking away. Professor Harold Hill would be jealous he hadn't thought of that.
It would be unfair to compare Cage with the great composers of prior centuries, like Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Liszt, Wagner, Verdi, Brahms et al, each of whom has hundreds of entries in the PG. Actually, I'm not sure why that's unfair. Mozart lived only 35 years, Schubert only 31, while Cage lived 79, so he had twice as long to compose as his predecessors and yet seems to have produced just about nothing. But let's compare him instead to his contemporaries.
Olivier Messiaen was born 4 years after Cage. The PG has over 30 of his compositions. Aaron Copland, born 8 years before Cage, has over 50, Leonard Bernstein, born 10 years after Cage, has over 40. More to the point, there can be few music lovers who are unfamiliar with Messiaen, none who don't regularly listen to Copland and Bernstein. Who listens to Cage? I was a student at the Yale School of Music when Cage was in his forties; I don't remember his name ever being mentioned, much less his music ever being played.
So, to this video. I watched it for as long as I could, but most of the time there was no music, or only music in the background being spoken over, and what little music there was sounded like a small boisterous child banging away at some instrument. Actually, I apologize for that reference; I have taught small children with Orff instruments and they can make much nicer sounds. As for the philosophy, it would make a bright middle school student blush for its faux profundity. No, there's nothing to this video, which is a fair documentary of its subject.
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