Frownland

^I'm quite aware of what I'm saying. The fact that it is a composition is simply that: a fact, it doesn't make a point in either direction.

The idea of the piece is that musical sounds exist beyond the performers' instruments. The original example was the audience in an orchestral hall, but it could also be anything else in the material world. The piece doesn't call for an audience, and if it did, I wouldn't put it past Cage to actually write that on the composition.

Steely Dan were a group who made (kind of) complex tunes that were too much for them to perform live. So they didn't.

EDIT: Bat, whenever I talk about the compositional process of 4'33", it refers to the conceptualization of the piece, not just writing it down on paper. That might be where some of the confusion comes from.

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Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

The Batlord

You mean the basic idea of having a performance where the performers don't perform (or however you want to describe it). Regardless, the unnecessary nature of the physical composition still points me toward the whole thing being an intellectual endeavor about music, rather than an actual musical one.

What separates 4'33 from being performance art about music, and being music?

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Chula Vista

Steely Dan chose to become strictly a studio band for a number of years but they toured both before then and have off and on since 1993 after a decade long retirement.

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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

The Batlord

Irrelevant to the point. Unless you'd agree that Steely Dan weren't music if they didn't tour.

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Chula Vista

Bringing Steely Dan into the conversation was what was irrelevant.

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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

The Batlord

His point was about performing. If he'd said late-era Beatles or Darkthrone then it would have been the same point.

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