Aria by Cage

This Aria was one of the most surprising things I’ve ever listened to. With the random melody notes that were sang, and the animal sounds, and the weird crackling sound that gave the piece a weird 50’s movie feel, I was tempted to say that this is not music. And it really goes both ways. Some things about the piece are music, like the woman singing. But then some things aren’t music, like all the miscellaneous, random sounds that one can hear in the background.

I remember something that Professor Joyce said in one of the first classes, that it’s not always about melodies and such, music can sometimes just be about the way it makes you feel. This piece makes me feel very busy. I would actually listen to something like this if I was walking down the streets of New York. The singing almost just sounds like small little fractions of people’s expressive voices talking that I would hear while strolling down Manhattan.

Cage was one of the first pioneers of indeterminacy music. Indeterminacy music, as defined by John Cage himself, is “the ability of a piece to be performed in substantially different ways.” What this makes me think is that his pieces were encouraged to be perceived in many different ways. He wanted everybody to have a different perspective on the piece. Cage also had a weird fascination with neglecting musical instruments, or using very little of them. In a normal sense, this is very strange. Why would somebody refrain from using things that were made to make music? It just seems a bit backwards, but it’s Cage’s idea of music and he was famous so…

On the contrary, I found the background noise (all the stuff that wasn’t singing) to actually be a little percussive. I think many people will interpret it as many different things, but I feel like there was some sort of method to the madness. There is a part of the piece at around 6:15 after some singing where the static noise in the background actually has some rhythm, which I thought was very interesting. Cage finds creative ways to use sounds that are not interesting or unique to us in everyday life, but makes them interesting because he’s a creative guy.

Something I would use in this piece in other pieces is the strange, unsettling sound of background noise. Although I wouldn’t use it in a piece like what Cage did, I would add a nice melody over the top with some chords. Some newer music uses some background noise like the one in this piece that I find pleasant to listen to. One of these songs is Frontier Psychiatrists by The Avalanches. I would recommend this song if you liked this piece, but maybe wanted something a little easier to listen to.