An Approach to Introducing Ambient Music :: Graduate Admissions Essays

An Approach to Introducing Ambient Music   John Cage (1912-1992) presents an lovable challenge to a practice of medicine GSI teaching a class of non-majors. As much an report man as a pen-on-paper composer, Cage proposed with his writings and artistic approach that all sound, whether deliberate or accidental, whether inner or outside of the concert hall, is in fact a macro-series of musical comedy events. In effect, according to this direction of thinking, all ambient sound is music. Considering the way most of us have been brought up to think about(predicate) music, this is a significant imaginative leap as well as an strategic door to open for those who mightiness not come across the idea elsewhere.   It began on a whim during sensation particular session art object the students were busily at work on an unrelated quiz, I took tender from the auditory environment in the classroom. That is, I wrote down (as one might write down music) the inadvertent sounds mad e by the students as they wrote the test. This is a sound world familiar to all teachers the students, suddenly resolute, are anxiously scribbling away and producing involuntary sounds sighs, grunts, low moans, inhalations, ruffling, pencil-clicks and chair-squeaks. Incorporating the low hum of the ventilation system, I compiled the sounds into a neat musical total by drawing the sounds as they occurred over a twenty-second time span. I then entitle my piece Twenty Seconds of Music 20A Taking a Quiz.   The following week, at a strategic point in a password on Cages works and ideas, we listened as a class to the ambient sounds surrounding us in the room. As always, the variety and richness of these sounds was surprising. I asked them Is this music? closely said no. I then handed out photocopies of my score discussed above and posed my question again. At this point, there was some discussion now that there was musical intent in my creating a piece, about one third of the room felt that these sounds were in fact music. Finally, we recreated the ambient sounds I recorded by performing the piece as a class. Dividing the parts up as one would for a choir, we charge some students as the chair-squeakers, some as the sighers, some as the inhalers, and one (who had been the student who had clicked his mechanical pencil during the actual dictation) as the pencil-clicker.