 |
|
| Quieting the Mind, Manifesting Mind: The Zen Buddhist Roots of John Cage's Early Chance-Determined and Indeterminate Compositions (Volume I); Motion Alarm I Ching (Volume II) | ||
| 作者 | Nelson, Mark Douglas (著) |
|---|---|
| 出版日期 | 1995 |
| 頁次 | 423 |
| 出版者 | Princeton University |
| 出版者網址 | http://www.princeton.edu/main/ |
| 出版地 | Princeton, NJ, US [普林斯顿, 紐澤西州, 美國] |
| 資料類型 | 博碩士論文=Thesis and Dissertation |
| 使用語言 | 英文=English |
| 學位類別 | 博士 |
| 校院名稱 | Princeton University |
| 系所名稱 | Department of Music |
| 指導教授 | Randall, J. K.; Mackey, Steve |
| 畢業年度 | 1995 |
| 關鍵詞 | Music; Zen; Cage, John; Mind; Aesthetics; Aleatory music; Religious music; Philosophy; Criticism; Nelson, Mark Douglas |
| 摘要 | John Cage's engagement with Zen Buddhism in the early 1950's precipitated profound changes in his aesthetic. In the late 1940's he had embraced the traditional Hindu notion that the purpose of music was to induce a 'quiet mind;' Zen Buddhism, with its exhortation that one cultivate preconceptual awareness and its corollary insistence that discursive thought mitigates such awareness, suggested to Cage that quiet-mindedness entailed an ego- and thought-free attentiveness to one's environment. He began to view music as a discipline comparable to sitting meditation, a vehicle with which one might curb the inveterate thinking that artificially separates human beings from the 'divine' flood of perceptual experience. Cage aspired to immerse musicians and listeners in this flood. Striving to preclude ego influences from his activity, he began to use chance operations to make decisions affecting musical continuity. The radical changes in his methods for harnessing chance operations in the 1950's--the evolution from an I Ching-governed concatenation of pre-composed arrays towards the use of superposed transparent materials to generate 'cameras' with which performers might take 'snapshots' of their sonic environment--reflect his abiding search for strategies which would (a) remove opportunities for his own tasteful shaping, (b) nurture thought-stilling perceptual acuity in performers and listeners, and (c) ensure that his work truly tapped the universe's natural processes and did not impose artificial, thought-full contours upon them. After recounting the circumstances which prompted Cage to seek alternative approaches to composition, this paper considers fundamental tenets of Zen Buddhist thought. A close examination of Cageian assimilations of that thought--with particular focus upon 'nothing,' the composer's adaptation of the Zen concept of 'emptiness'--forms the central foundation of this thesis. Such philosophical ground is then used as the basis for integrated discussion of the synergic evolutions of Cage's aesthetic perspective and musical style in 1948-1960. The indeterminate scores--which may be viewed as challenging puzzles for David Tudor, as incipient 'circus situations,' and as utterly flexible tools facilitating the mining of any facet of the unpredictable and manifold universe--are portrayed as apotheoses of Cage's Zen-informed activity of the 1950's. |
| 點閱次數 | 469 |
| 建檔日期 | 2001.05.21 |
| 更新日期 | 2022.04.14 |
建議您使用 Chrome, Firefox, Safari(Mac) 瀏覽器能獲得較好的檢索效果，IE不支援本檢索系統。
