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Living Room Music
''Living Room Music'' is a musical composition by John Cage, composed in 1940. It is a quartet for unspecified instruments, all of which may be found in a living room of a typical house, hence the title (Pritchett, 1993, 20). ''Living Room Music'' is dedicated to Cage's then-wife Xenia. The work consists of four movements: "To Begin", "Story", "Melody", and "End". Cage instructs the performers to use any household objects or architectural elements as instruments and gives examples: magazines, cardboard, "largish books", floor, the wooden frame of a window, etc. The first and the last movements are percussion music for said instruments. In the second movement, the performers transform into a speech quartet: the music consists entirely of pieces of Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the Allegheny West neighborhood and raised in Oakland, Californ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives. Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition ''4′33″'', which is performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who present the work do nothing aside from being present for the duration specified by the title. The content of the composition is not "four minutes and 33 seconds of silence," as is often assumed, but rather the sounds of the environment heard by the audience during performance. The work's challenge t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Percussion
A percussion instrument is a musical instrument that is sounded by being struck or scraped by a beater including attached or enclosed beaters or rattles struck, scraped or rubbed by hand or struck against another similar instrument. Excluding zoomusicological instruments and the human voice, the percussion family is believed to include the oldest musical instruments.''The Oxford Companion to Music'', 10th edition, p.775, In spite of being a very common term to designate instruments, and to relate them to their players, the percussionists, percussion is not a systematic classificatory category of instruments, as described by the scientific field of organology. It is shown below that percussion instruments may belong to the organological classes of ideophone, membranophone, aerophone and cordophone. The percussion section of an orchestra most commonly contains instruments such as the timpani, snare drum, bass drum, tambourine, belonging to the membranophones, and cy ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the Allegheny West neighborhood and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life. She hosted a Paris salon, where the leading figures of modernism in literature and art, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Matisse, would meet.BBC Culture:Cath Pound. July 26, 2021. The shocking memoir of the 'lost generation'. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210726-the-scandalous-memoir-of-the-lost-generation In 1933, Stein published a quasi-memoir of her Paris years, ''The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas'', written in the voice of Alice B. Toklas, her life partner. The book became a literary bestseller and vaulted Stein from the relative obscurity of the cult-literature scene into ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
