Re: Source of Cage quote about Ives...

It's in A Year from Monday, in the "Two Statements on Ives."

On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 4:20 PM, Josh Ronsen <[email protected]> wrote:

> Pwyll ap Sion (senior lecturer at Bangor University) is looking for the
> source of this quote by Cage:
>
> 'What interests me are not the Americana aspects, the tunes and all that,
> but what I call the mud, the complexity of many things going on at once, in
> which I am not able to know where I am, or what's happening. Invariably in
> this mystery, something begins to happen to my mind, to change it, because
> of what I'm hearing. But in my experience, that
> change of my mind is interrupted by the emergency from the mud of some
> well-known tune, generally some Protestant church tune, and I find myself
> in a place familiar to others, but carefully avoided by me, in the land so
> to speak of melodies and accompaniments or, I suppose Ives would prefer it
> if he's listening, if I would say melodies and
> precedents."
>
> Michael Nyman used this quote in a paper at the First American Music
> Conference, Keele University, in 1975, and mentions the this viewpoint of
> Cage is more developed from Cage's "Two Statements on Ives" in A Year from
> Monday, so we figure it must come in between 1967 and 1975. A few times
> Cage mentions Ives and mud in the same breath, but not "Protestant church
> tune" that I can find. I am guessing his mention of church tunes comes from
> his work on Apartment House/Renga, but that is just my guess.
>
>
> Thanks for any help,
>
> -Josh Ronsen
> http://ronsen.org
>



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