Tag Archives: sound collage

Radio Music 2

Com­posed in 1956, Radio Music is Cage’s sec­ond work for radio, the first being Imag­i­nary Land­scape No. 4 from 1951. Guy de Bièvre has made some inter­est­ing com­ments about con­tem­po­rary per­for­mances of Radio Music, which are prob­lema­tized by the changes, tech­no­log­i­cal and oth­er­wise, that the medium has under­gone since the time the piece was cre­ated, claim­ing that it is not pos­si­ble to give a his­tor­i­cally accu­rate per­for­mance of the work, in other words to make Radio Music sound as it did at the time it was composed.

Imaginary Landscape No. 4 2

“When I wrote the Imag­i­nary Land­scape for twelve radios,” Cage explained, “it was not for the pur­pose of shock or as a joke but rather to increase the unpre­dictabil­ity already inher­ent in the sit­u­a­tion through the toss­ing of coins. Chance, to be pre­cise, is a leap, pro­vides a leap out of reach of one’s own grasp of oneself.”

ShortWaveMusic 0

The radio­heads among us may wish to know about Short­Wave­Mu­sic, Myke Dodge Weiskopf’s paean to the ran­dom poetry and inter­mit­tent sta­tic of short wave radio.