Don't mind me; just being the most significant musician of all time

Don't mind me; just being the most significant musician of all time.

LITERALLY who?

Roger Waters from Pink Floyd desu

That's not Kendrick

I hope you're memeing

What's wrong?

There are many more important and significant composers in the western canon

Name one who fundamentally altered music to the extent John Cage did.

Monteverdi only brought music back to a prior time.
Beethoven only brought more secular emotion and rapture into the same tradition.
Debussy only freed harmony and form.

John Cage is the only one to inspire entirely new ideas.

John Cale

music started in 1910 you dumb bitch

Now I'm not trying to discredit Cage, and I never liked how much posters on /classical/ do. He genuinely is an important an influential figure. But Bach's innovations in harmony were definitely more important, especially since these are techniques and ideas that have remained prevalent in music since his death. A lot of the ideas that Cage bought forth, while influential, have only lasted in the contemporary music and popular music since he was a composer. If his ideas become as integral to music as someone like Bach's or Guido D'Arezzo, then maybe you'd be right. But now, you can't claim that Cage's contributions outweigh those that I've mentioned, or even those that you mentioned.

Cage has affected every field of music though

Pretty much every branching path of vaguely contemporary music owes itself to Cage

I thought the same thing at first glance and was writing up a mean reply

To cage and a wealth of other contemporary composers. And in what way has he affected every field. Most of his influence is in his experimentation of timbre. Recent developments in other parts of music could be attributed to composers like Stravinsky and Schoenberg

I like Cage but he really isn't as significant as you think.

Between Imaginary Landscape No. 1, Williams Mix, Sonatas and Interludes, 4'33", etc. yeah he's super important. I'd say Stockhausen is just as important, though.

But OP refers to him as a "musician", which is retarded.

And saying "most important of all time" is pretty ridiculous and indefensible no matter who you're talking about. Especially when there's plenty of stuff that owes nothing to him.

>Most of his influence is in his experimentation of timbre.

ehh, I dunno. I'd say that about maybe Jean-Claude Risset, but not really Cage.

Well, him too, but I really do see Cage's influence as being mostly timbrel. Where else do you see his influence?

He's technically right, for he has formulated the all-including contemporary definition of music. In this new, far more reasonable and objective definition of music, things such as harmony and melody are mere toys. People praise the advancement of harmony, while the mere fact that these guys were using a 12tone system was already exceedingly arbitrary as a choice, from Cage's point of view.
Cage music was meant to be something that could be understood by itself, without the need of an external context (which is the case for most tonal music).

In this sense Cage stands above everyone else in the musical/philosophical hierarchy, for all of his music is truly free.

Still, you may disagree and find excellence through other criteria. Cage has, for example, a fixation for truth, which was something that would have been despised by Debussy, who saw the necessity of lying in art, or it would have been contested by someone like Beethoven, who treated his impressions and sentiments as something objective and real. It's really all about your philosophical and aeathetic leanings.

My objection is that Cage's stuff doesn't explore timbre in the sense of spectralism or computer music or whatever. There's no rigor to it. His contributions are more in the domain of percussion, live electronics and indeterminacy. And just the general idea of nonjudgmental listening.

>And just the general idea of nonjudgmental listening.
That I understand. In that sense he really is one of the most influential. Of course that's a pretty divisive issue, but that's neither here nor there

>There's no rigor to it

No shit

I think it's more reasonable to say that Cage was sort of a central component of a movement that was working in that direction.

It's kind of silly to attribute everything to Cage when he borrowed heavily from Duchamp, Cowell, etc. It's like saying Brian Eno invented ambient music.

I think he doesn't really invent and revolutionize everything so much as bring together disparate ideas and articulate their importance.

Those concepts may have not been new in visual and performance art, but they were pretty much unexplored by the music community. Sure you can give some credit to the first rumorists and dadaists, but at the same time that the way in which those movements were formulated were far too circustantial to be adopted all thorough history. Cage gave an academic and philosophical face to the absolute freedom of music, formulating the most all-encompassing definition of music (above all prejudices) in a series of essays and compositions that enthralled musicians and composers for 60 years now, in a manner that is far too structural for it to become obsolete.