John Cage recital set to last 639 years recently witnessed a chord change

I kinda get that -- the 40000 Hz podcast gave it some good context:

https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/433-by-john-cage-twent...

Maybe they'll also explain the point of this. The piece is called "As Slow As Possible", but it's not as slow as possible. The slowest possible piece would have a fermata with an infinity sign over the first note, and that's it. Maybe the rest of it would be a jaunty little tune that would never be played in context. ("Shave and a haircut", perhaps?)

As a stunt, it's moderately interesting. How do you set up a contraption to play for hundreds of years? How do you maintain it without interrupting the performance? But it's less interesting than the 10,000 year clock.

But then the piece would never be completely played, which seems like a requirement for Cage's musical game / art / philosophical statement.

Moreover, your hypothetical piece could still technically be played at a high tempo. It seems like the point of the Cage piece is to play it at the slowest possible tempo, not over the greatest length of time possible (and that's why the fermata idea doesn't fit). (So while you're correct that 639 years doesn't represent the slowest tempo possible (just play it over 640 years instead, right?) it's the idea of extreme slowness that's interesting. Or perhaps "as slow as possible" refers to the tempo that really was as slow as possible (at the time it was set up) because of technological constraints.

Without having deeply researched the piece, I wonder if 639 years was chosen with any relation to Tesla's 3–6–9 idea.

Edit: It looks like the 639 years comes from the "performer(s)" who set up the equipment, not from Cage himself. The composer only gave the instruction to play it as slowly as possible, which plays into the technological-limitations idea above, I think.

From http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2728595.stm

> They settled on 639 years because the Halberstadt organ was 639 years old in the year 2000.

"Both Fuller and Marshall McLuhan knew, furthermore, that work is now obsolete. We have invented machines to do it for us. Now that we have no need to do anything what shall we do? Looking at Fuller's Geodesic World Map we see that the earth is a single island. Oahu. We must give all the people all they need to live in any way they wish. Our present laws protect the rich from the poor. If there are to be laws we need ones that begin with the acceptance of poverty as a way of life. We must make the earth safe for poverty without dependence on government."

https://monoskop.org/images/9/9c/Cage_John_Anarchy_New_York_... (PDF)

A shorter read here:

https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/09/15/john-cage-silence-...

The whole album explored beat, pulse and timings as it relates to how people can actually feel and interact with music. Really interesting!

In what way is it “possible” to play an infinitely long piece of music?

All you need is more than one source of sound and you can maintain each of them while they're not playing.

These performers choose a completely arbitrary number independent of technical limitations, and then ran into technical limitations.

The exploration of philosophy through art has its own beauty, it's not an easily digestible beauty but it's a kind of. What you show is just a complete lack of perception to other ways to appreciate art, and for that your soul is a bit more empty than it could be.

Instead of looking at art from this productivity view try to be more curious, challenge yourself on what is even the notion of art and what it can give to us that is ineffable in other forms... Right now you are just too miopic to even be able to appreciate art as a whole, you just want the product of art, not the process, meaning, and philosophical questions it can spark in you.

To understand art takes effort, it tells me a lot about people when they show how uncurious and set in their ways they are about art, they just simply aren't free people.

There are still non-modernist artists who focus on technique and sincerity, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_Nerdrum

You play it with an orchestra (or perhaps a quartet is enough). Players may take turns to eat, sleep, and even have work-life balance. They also may retire (or die) and be replaced by new musicians. (How much would it cost?)

Also worth noting the clock's name is from Brian Eno, who has expressed interest in developing chimes for the clock. So Cage's work was kinda presaging the clock.

This gets repeated a lot, but the reality is to many people, including philosophers, artists and appreciators of both, aesthetic beauty is a fundamental property of art without which it cannot survive.

The fact that contemporary art circles handwave away that relevance while arrogantly mumbling "you're just miopic, ignorant and misguided, learn more" doesn't really change that fact.

From the outside, it just shows that you too have been co-opted into the cult. You're free to subscribe to that view, but you don't get to gatekeep the meaning of art, no matter how many members that cult may have.

It's a pretty hopeful, optimistic view of the future in a time of high uncertainty, but also represents a positive argument: it's worth doing these things because they are interesting, weird, and fun, and because they represent a continuity with past and future people we will never meet.

Plus, you can already buy a ticket to the finale, so your distant descendants can go see it :)

https://vimeo.com/groups/832551/videos/549715999

Unfortunately I think too many people are still falling for that nonsense

"Fake intellectuals" is just... Sad, devaluing whole bodies of work simply because you cannot understand them, instead of attempting to curiously explore that you prefer to use a thought-terminating cliché and embrace your ignorance as supreme... All the while you live during a time where all information and knowledge in the world is there for you to access for free.

It's just... Sad to live that way but ignorance is bliss since it's just so much easier to reject anything that challenges you.

As with all things, the contraption is not the hard part. It’s the supporting civilization, society, economic context, and will of generations of people.

Cage’s game here is to question the entire scaffolding of art, not the pigments of the paint.

I'm not missing on absolutely anything by not appreciating a banana glued to a wall. In fact, nobody really appreciates that, it's just a bunch of sycophants pretending they have some artistic knowledge the rest of us, the poor populace, lack, that go on pretending with the charade.

The rest of the world, are just willing to tell you that the emperor has no clothes.

When exactly did art not need financial support from the State, or rich patrons, to be able to be made?

You are moving the discussion into a completely different territory now, and again showing how your view of art is principled in some kind of "productivity" measurement, which is so absurd that is not even wrong.

> I'm not missing on absolutely anything by not appreciating a banana glued to a wall. In fact, nobody really appreciates that, it's just a bunch of sycophants pretending they have some artistic knowledge the rest of us, the poor populace, lack, that go on pretending with the charade.

The banana glued to a wall is one work of art (and polemic for a reason), and you are using that to paint a broad stroke over all contemporary art as if there is nothing being told there... You don't know what you are missing exactly because you don't know what it is, you wouldn't know the colours you'd be missing if you were born with black-and-white sight, nor would know you are missing music if you were born deaf. The difference is that you are not born with an unchangeable characteristic to not appreciate art in different ways, you can work on that, you just choose not to.

There's no charade, the actual charade is why are you so vitriolic opposed to something you do not even understand, lol. It reeks of some sort of insecurity, since you do not understand you feel it's beneath you because makes you feel lesser that others might "get it" and you are out of the club? I don't know, look inside you to find an answer because the passionate rage about something you do not understand has deeper roots.

And, you know, power outages.

I wouldn't say that people who do not see this as art are wrong, that's the beauty of art isn't it? It's in the eye of the beholder. To me this recital sparks some hope or in any case makes me stop for a second and wonder about greater things than just my day to day.

I think it managed to hold off a bit more, we still have Bizet, Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, even Stravinsky and others composing great (fantastic, in some cases) pieces in the first half of the 20th century.

But then, a bunch of Jonh Cages came along...

> From the outside, it just shows that you too have been co-opted into the cult. You're free to subscribe to that view, but you don't get to gatekeep the meaning of art, no matter how many members that cult may have.

Isn't beauty in the eyes of the beholder though? I do see beauty in a lot of art deemed "part of the cult", how do you even attempt to objectively judge aesthetic beauty in a vacuum? Beauty exists in contexts, there is stuff that without the context just looks weird, with context it becomes beautiful, how do you assess the objective aesthetic beauty of such without delving into philosophical discussions?

You are all free to create an art movement that aspires to do what you believe art should be: aesthetically beautiful, devoid of philosophical meaning as pursuit of beauty, beauty for its own sake, etc., it will be included, admired, rejected, judged as misguided, so on and so forth, just like you are doing with contemporary art that you do not agree with.

Isn't that all art anyway?

This is a truism, and I don't even think it's that accurate. There are some universal aspects to our perception of beauty such as symmetry, balance, tension-and-release, contrast, recursion... whatever it may be. We don't need to know what it is to tell that it's there.

They have a huge blind spot that they aren’t even aware of, or worse just devalue the entire history of human thought and creation that doesn’t involve hard science.

“What is music” is one of those questions that leads to some truly subversive trains of thought and it’s amazing to read all of you so called hackers having trouble wrapping your head around a work that goes against your comfortable worldview.

This post is wild because “what is the point of this” seems to be complexly divorced from the human drive to create and express one’s self.

Where exactly have you got this narrative from? Or even better: please explain how Marxism relates to contemporary art, I can accept just a general line of ideals connecting to each other.

I tried to have some leveled way to see your opinions on my other comments but this went a bridge too far, you seem to be repeating a collage of unrelated stuff, as I said in another comment: it's so bad that it isn't even wrong.

We do still have a set of requirements for what is considered art, and we still have a set of hyper conservative gatekeepers that are resistant to change and will blame today’s boogeyman for everything that they feel is wrong with society

It’s actually a very optimistic work for Cage. The idea that we could have a continuous performance for hundreds of years, without ever being interrupted by wars or disasters.

I think it is amazing that someone has risen to the challenge to try and perform this, and if they are successful what that means for us as a society that it was allowed to happen

I have a pessimistic outlook. All it will take is one bad actor to interrupt this performance that could potentially involve thousands to maintain. It feels inevitable that this will fail. Nevertheless, this in itself is a statement on us as a species and what a wonderful work this is to have provoked such a thing.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/art-definition/

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

- the Emperor

I wish there was more stuff like this, both in my feed and in the world.

But I don't think many serious critiques of "this is not art" claims invoke Marxism. The Marxist perspective generalises the idea that art is incredibly difficult to define, but doesn't originate it.

That piece has already been written. It's called ॐ.

He gives an up tick indicating the beginning of the music, then the downbeat of the start of the first measure.

No sound is heard.

The conductor continues to mark time. The silence is deep...profound.

The conductor continues to mark the time of the passing measures.

The audience listens.

At some point, positive sound breaks the silence - suddenly, loudly destroying the stillness! Or possibly very nearly silently - at the uncertain threshold of perception, the audible music begins...

All the pretensions are maxed to legitimize the BS.

Then the talent-less, listless, bored children of the ultra rich have mommy and daddy force museums to put their kindergarten macaroni art on the walls of places that great artists used to be. (Aka banana taped to wall literally the same as macaroni child projects). The mental gymnastics to pretend it is more than that requires the irrational love for your untalented child.

Rich people have destroyed the global art community.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3BBgQPuPI0

In the case of a cathedral, I think it is relatively easy to commit to the project you won't see through, it has a significance to those people making the commitment. What becomes much more challenging is when future generations don't have the same level of commitment, it's a much bigger ask to stop. Maybe there is a better use of the resources that could impact people immediately; if it's a church, I'm thinking feeding the hungry and clothing the naked sorts of things. It's hard to stop something that "we've just been doing." It's also hard to ask "why are we doing this?"

In 200 years, suppose there is some crisis we cannot predict and the recital is to be interrupted or stopped. There will be an incredible amount of pressure on somebody to make a good choice. Pressure that was created by a distant ancestor, of sorts. That might be part of the beauty of it, that might be part of the bond that ties different people together throughout time and it might be wonderful. What if there is a caretaker that is ready to retire and cannot find the next caretaker? That seems like a horrible position to be in.

Japan is or was doing multi-generational mortgages a while back (I assume they might still be.) as it was the only way a family could afford to buy a property. I can see that being a tremendously loving act for your children or grandchildren in providing a property that they will own, but I could just as well see it being a gigantic burden to them, what if they want to live somewhere else? Them following their bliss effectively changes the living and working future of the parents.

right, so it begins when the music starts playing?

Blue was one of the most expensive colours because the ultramarine dye was derived from lapus lazuli, a rock imported from Afghanistan and ground with a labour-intensive process. Medieval European art typically depicted the Virgin Mary in blue. The expense indicated devotion.

Someone living in that time period would know anything in ultramarine is important.

Except Vermeer used it for whatever he wanted, including a blue turban on The Girl With the Pearl Earring (originally called Girl with a Turban). The pearl is expensive in the world of the painting, but the blue turban was expensive to create in real life. That is the central mystery of the painting.

But we literally cannot appreciate that because we did not grow up in a world where ultramarine blue was as expensive as gold, because synthetic ultramarine was invented in 1826. That's why you care about visual interest and aesthetics instead of reacting with "Holy shit! Why is this blue?"

Our descendants will likely feel the same about the art we create today, and ignore whatever aspects of it are trivialized by AI.

The cool thing about freedom is that we don't have to be rational monks that are slave to economic utilitarism.

In a sense he is exploiting a lack of rules that would prevent a piece from starting with this long of a rest.

In other words, he is hacking the process.

If you take too long building a cathedral the quarry might exhaust itself in the meantime. So even if you keep to the design it might not look right.

> The outside facing consists, due to the interrupted building process, of three different kinds of white marble.

a: vocal, instrumental, or mechanical sounds having rhythm, melody, or harmony

b: the science or art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3

Sure, you can create scenarios were that fails. You can do that for anything. The power lies in saying "we are willing to remove these paths from consideration because we as a people are committed to not letting them occur".

It's a model that fails if you apply first-order utilitarian calculus. But the intangible value of the hope and commitment in it likely overshadows any immediate gain. This isn't about how to maximize utilization or optionality. It's a bold statement about who we are, and a lodestar to aspire to. (Which is, ultimately, the job art does)

You could argue that the first bar is actually shorter than all the following ones and only starts on the first note, but… no one thinks like that that I ever heard of

You go to your hi-fi setup, a veritable temple of sound reproduction.

You peruse your library and select an album. Or perhaps you have a new one that you have carefully carried home from the store. Whichever.

You lift up the cover of your turntable.

Carefully, you extract the vinyl disc from its cardboard and paper sleeves. Taking care not to touch it by its surface, you place it on the turntable. Perhaps you clean its surface with a special lint-catcher designed for this.

You lift up the needle by its little handle. Delicately, you place it on the disc, in the space between the very edge and the visible band of the first track.

There is an anticipatory crackle. A fuzzy pop. The sounds of the needle skidding across the smooth surface of the disc, and dropping into the groove.

A pause.

And then the music begins.

Perhaps the music begins loud and fast. Perhaps it doesn't. Perhaps it's a few words from the bandleader, welcoming you to their new album. Perhaps it's a collage of natural sounds that gradually gives way to music.

When, precisely, did you begin the experience of "listening to music"?

----

It is 2025.

You take out your phone. You turn off its notifications.

You find your headphones and put them on. Perhaps they give off a beep complaining of being out of power, and you have to put them on the charger, and dig up your backup pair, possibly along with an adaptor to plug them into the headphone jack that no longer exists on your new phone.

You open up Spotify, Youtube, whatever you use to stream music. You type in the name of what you want to listen to.

You hit 'play'.

Your phone begins downloading music off the internet. Perhaps first there's an ad. Perhaps several ads. Perhaps not. Perhaps it takes a while to buffer. It's an indeterminate thing.

And then the music begins. As before, perhaps it hits the ground running immediately; perhaps there's some collection of anticipatory sounds, some pause, before the music really gets into gear. Perhaps it's interrupted five seconds in by your discovery that this is actually just the first five seconds of the track followed by an ad for Bitcoin, or the discovery that this is a track with a name similar to what you asked to be played, and you get to go back a few steps. Perhaps you actually get what you wanted.

At what point did you begin the experience of "listening to music"?

It won’t be the first time an artist has done this.

Still on the nose.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_art

Alastair Reynolds' book Chasm City touches on a bunch of this, in particular the class warfare angle of some wealthy travelers getting to enjoy the journey in peaceful cryosleep while the poor ones pay for their passage in servitude.

Well, in this case, "you can already buy a ticket to the finale, so your distant descendants can go see it." Selling tickets for an event that far in the future makes it the business of the ticket purchaser and whoever they leave the tickets for.

Is the money collected from the tickets being held in such a way that it can be refunded if/when this project fails before another 600 years have gone by? If not, it seems like a potential scam in that sense.

You take off for your destination, but when you get there you find out that humans back on earth made a faster ship 100 years after you left and beat you to the destination.

You spent generations expecting to be bold explorers pushing the frontier and getting to claim nice territory, and you show up to find you’re in second place.

You're essentially describing the time the audience sits waiting for the orchestra to walk onto the stage as being "part of the experience of going to the orchestra." Which is fine, but it's not considered part of the song (unless the composer's quirky and writes "walk onto the stage" at the beginning of the music sheets, which is basically what this guy did with the 17-month rest).

Moreover, nobody was actually sitting in that cathedral for 17 months listening to the first rest. If a 17-month rest is played in the middle of a forest and nobody hears it, was it really a 17-month rest? Who experienced that "experience?"

I think the original, parent comment was coming from a much more generous place. Like that top parent commenter, to me the Halberstadt organ piece isn’t about being highbrow or obscure; it’s about a kind of radical optimism—committing to something weird, beautiful, and long-term in a world that often feels very short-sighted. I don’t think you need to read Derrida or listen to Stockhausen to find meaning in that. Just as you don’t need to love AI or NFTs to appreciate innovation.

Many may think that's stupid or useless because it lacks utility (or any other reason) or seems arbitrary. Reasonable people can disagree, but I think such reactions are truly missing the point; that is simultaneously completely OK, but also personally dispiriting at times. There’s room for a lot of perspectives in how we engage with art, and I think it’s more interesting when we try to understand what someone finds meaningful before writing it off.

The Long Now Foundation is attempting to build a clock to last 10,000 years.

Construction began close to a decade ago, and there is no estimated completion date. Construction of the clock may well last 10,000 years.

That question itself is built on a radical assumption. Example:

Just skimming, it looks like 38 out of 48 of the fugues from Bach's WTC Books 1 & 2 begin with rests followed by several beats worth of melodies in the first measure[1]. If you think the piece only really starts when the first note of the melody is played, then you've got problems. Either:

1. You hear the first articulation of the melody as the downbeat. But that would mean the first measure is in a disparate (and probably irregular) meter. Radical!

2. You hear the incomplete first measure as an anacrusis, or a kind of unaccented lead-in, to the second measure: OMG even more radical!

You can use accent patterns on a modern piano to play any of these fugues using either of these methods, and it will sound silly to non-silly keyboard players.

What's more, non-silly keyboard players do feel the pulse for the first downbeat of these pieces when they perform. Most of them will even inhale before the downbeat, as if they are somehow singing the melody through their fingers.

Finally, lots of music begins with rests: not just conservative cases like Bach, but progressive cases like the beginning of Beethoven's Fifth, and of course the radical cases like Cage's.

This leads to one of the things I love about Cage's music: it compels criticisms that reveal fundamental misunderstandings about music. E.g., you don't buy the radical case-- perhaps reasonable. But you then speculate there are no cases-- which is at odds with common musical practice.

If Cage's music did nothing but compel these questions it would be worth its weight in pine nuts.

Edit:

1: Bach does this because nearly all the fugues have three or more independent melodies singing at the same time. If they are all singing on every downbeat it can quickly sound really clunky and predictable.

It’s so funny coming from a musical background and reading all these comments of people who have no idea what they are talking about criticizing one of the worlds most famous modern composers

Every performance ever done has been the performer interpreting the composer’s score and making it their own. Nobody want to hear a robotic perfectly accurate recreation of what is on the page, because even the act of transcription alters the composer’s intent. The score is not the art!

There is no perfection in art. It’s all subjective, by the literal definition of art.

Not that I'd expect a conductor to be needed for a soloist performance, but it makes the whole "when the conductor raises his hands" point a little off-topic.

I don't think most social conservatives would agree with your interpretation that they want everything to stay the same forever. Rather, the "values, tradition, and customs" that you're crapping on are something to reflect on and guide change in a hopefully more peaceful, sustainable, and manageable way.

"Conservatives want everything frozen in time forever" is a straw-man to support a false dilemma.

Just like life.

While the questions "what is art" and "what is beauty" are indeed interesting, this doesn't help in any way.

There's no substance, it wouldn't get a thousandth of this attention if it was made by a nobody and isn't even fit to be called a meme: it's something between outrage bait and an insipid conversation piece, a transparent (thus vulgar) case of "muddying the water to make it seem deep". But the whole intellectual "class" being so devoid of people upright enough to call out the naked emperor is much less benign than that: a clear symptom of decadence.

(as described in Vogt's "Far_Centaurus" short story.

I don't. Equating questioning a piece with willful ignorance and a safe-to-hate caricature all smell of bile to me.

"nerds too nerd to art" (more specifically in this case "hustler too hustle for art") is just a grade school putdown we use as artists to perpetuate the inaccessibility of art conversations and keep our cool mystique up.

To be fair, there are multiple lines of thought on that matter. Some conductors enjoy "making it their own," while other conductors attempt to discover and reproduce the composer's original intention as closely as possible. Toscanini comes to mind as a historical example of the latter, although I'm sure there are others.

At a certain point, a composer needs to provide information to compose a piece. What if someone wrote a "solo" that just said "improvise" and contained no notes at all? The argument being presented above is that Cage did the tempo equivalent of that. This is a philosophy argument at best, not "people who have no idea what they're talking about."

The point is both are impossible to achieve, not that nobody can make a related performance.

It simply can never be perfect. Down to the acoustics of the venue, there will always be aspects of a performance that are lost to time and can never be reproduced. And how can we even know, since no recordings exist (and if they did, that recording would introduce its own artifacts).

How many people dance to a boureé today? Can any performance of one really be be accurate outside the context of dance? Sitting politely in a huge recital hall is no at all accurate

And even then, the music falls on modern ears. We hear and understand music completely differently than ancient people did. Can we even consider anything to be accurate, since Art is experienced?

I love renaissance music, and listen to as many recordings as I can where the performer uses a vihuela, theorbo, lute, etc. It's a totally nerdy pursuit. But it’s only “accurate” to a point

The bottom line for me is that Art is subjective. Do it in the way that satisfies your urge to create. As soon as it leaves your body, it belongs to the rest of us to interpret and experience. There are no right or wrong ways to express yourself.

This isn't really so different from being born on Earth, except that we take being born on Earth for granted, and the population is really really big.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphans_of_the_Sky

Marxism is really a cancer that destroys everything it touches. Its final aim was always to destroy everything that is beautiful, elevated or pure about mankind, and we, as a society, have been sponsoring it with our taxpayer money that pays for the self anointed gatekeepers of intellectualism that populate a big part of our Academia - that is to say, all Academia that doesn't get judged by the outcomes of their ideas when applied in practice.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada

Longplayer: a one-thousand year long composition

https://longplayer.org/

It would be analogous to writing a screenplay, adding the note "produce the film using as much money as possible," and then having someone attempt to do that. It's technically impressive to spend $500 million on a film production, sure, but that small note at the end of the screenplay is not cinematically interesting.

I have a degree in humanities, another in business and another in computer science.... and while I still don't mind Cage that much, I do think most of contemporary art is absolute shit.

I don't have to agree with you for my opinion to have value. You need to learn to name call people less and make your points on the merits of arguments. It's tiring for everyone else to engage otherwise.

I'll rephrase my question: How many of those 8 billion people care about and/or are aware of Rene's art?

It’s not clear what’s making you angry about one obscure performance of an obscure piece of music, but you might have more in common with Cage than you imagine. Cage described himself as an anarchist, and pieces like 4’33” are, in part, a commentary on the rules of music that make fun of establishment. Maybe he’s saying the same thing you are about the emperor’s clothes.

Coincidentally the clock will ring with a cycle of chimes that repeats every 10,000 years

I don't dislike all strange music - Satie and Poulenc are some of my favorites. But a lot of John Cage's stuff is... no longer music.

Like I'm sorry, but 4'33" is not music.

I draw a line somewhere, and a lot of John Cage's stuff is wayyyyyyyyy the fuck over the line.

Sure maybe it's some kind of art, but it's not music.

Opting into an interstellar voyage is a significant reduction in opportunity for almost anyone.

And yes, the same could be said for a European colonist crossing the Atlantic to the Americas in the 16th century, and many of them did face starvation, exposure, etc, but it's different when you're largely committing yourself and your immediate family to those hardships, under the belief that the timeframe for "a better life" is the next generation. Committing intermediate generations is a different beast.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3#/media/F...

Haters gonna hate, but there's not much more to his work than using extreme pauses and tempos as art. Maybe it's meta art.

It’s one of those things that really lets you know how much you don’t know. Then when you comment about such things on the internet you might be open to learning more, as opposed to what many folk in this thread are doing.

Again, if they sell something they're calling a ticket to the final part of the performance, then they have a financial duty to keep the project going (or refund the ticket) and it's not "their business" to end the project early like the person I replied to was claiming. At the very best, they could invest the money and use only the interest to support ongoing operations, but they need to keep the original value available to refund or else they need to fulfill what the ticket's for-- if they do neither of those things, they ripped people off, period.

If they're just funding the project's continuation, it's on them for pulling the marketing stunt (and/or false advertising) of calling it a ticket for this event in 600 years instead of just taking donations, selling present-day tickets and/or merch, etc. Fine print saying "actually, this ticket isn't a real ticket, it's just for fun" doesn't make them look better to me, so I don't see how that'd be a defense in your mind.

Every decision is potentially committing descendants to the consequences of that choice (and to wit: life aboard a generation ship hardly need be a miserable or undesirable one, at the size of say, a large town and surrounding hinterland you have as much or more opportunity as anyone else at most times in history - I think generation ships force us to confront uncomfortable questions about what is the meaning of life on Earth which we try to sweep aside by deciding they're an impossible moral burden).

Man, that was wild.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment

I find the subject mildly interesting, but the paywalled internet is just another sign of end stage capitalism...

Again, I think you're inverting causality by blaming Marxism for post-modernism, when they are instead related results of the same overall trend, that was simply catalyzed by WWI (there's definitely a read on e.g. the 1917 Russian Revolution that it happens at least wildly differently without Tsarist Russia entering the war).

I am a strong tech person. Always have been.

That said, early in my life I took a chance on music and really enjoyed the performing arts. Through an unfortunate set of circumstances, I ended up doing Music education for my peers.

A beloved teacher had a health issue that left them unable to teach and the substitute did not have the same manner and appreciation for the music and after a few conflicts, they called me out and I (foolishly) accepted!

Now I just had to back it up with actions.

Short story, "my" class was a success. Students reached their goals, we placed well in competition and that teacher and I developed a great friendship.

You are dead on with your comment. And having had the chance to take music education, then turn right around and deliver it seriously was at once crazy and ultra enlightening!

I had the realization my chest thumping got me placed into a position where I had an obligation to educate my peers and rid them of that blind spot you wrote of the same as was done for me.

And that was the H in "hard." Running the class, prepping pieces for performance, debugging the choir all were what I thought was hard.

Nope.

Getting them to internalize the humanity of it, language of emotion and all that, is hard. Respect for the art, whatever it may be, is hard. Cultivating the culture of learning, shared vulnerability (in the case of group performing arts) and the intensely personal nature of it all is hard.

I grew half a decade doing that as a high schooler, who had no clue at all what they said yes to...

In the end, a walk through the humanities is both empowering and enlightening on a level many technical people fail to appreciate.

No fault of theirs. They just did not get what I and many others did or gave as the case may be.

I can put a notch sharper point on all this for passersby (assuming you and I talking is preaching to the choir):

The ones who do not take the trip through the humanities are often told what to do by the ones who did.

Thanks for doing the hard work you do. It is often underappreciated.

I agree 100%, which is part of what makes it such an easy scam to pull off!

You're attempting to sell this thing as a donation with a fake toy Monopoly-money not-actually-expected-to-be-redeemed ticket thrown in. The top commenter of this thread shouldn't have tried to include the ticket as a serious value-add if that's what it is. The comment specifically said "you can already buy a ticket to the finale, so your distant descendants can go see it [using the ticket]," not "so you can support the project out of the kindness of your own heart without any guarantee your descendants will get to see the finale."

We have plenty of examples where this has already happened. Traditions that were maintained at significant cost in the face of difficulties or opposition. Caretakers of something ancient who struggle to find an heir. We tend to view them positively.

> Japan is or was doing multi-generational mortgages a while back (I assume they might still be.) as it was the only way a family could afford to buy a property.

I suspect this has been misreported. Japanese mortgage terms are pretty normal and property prices are much lower than in the west (even the bubble only really affected central Tokyo). There's a practice of an elderly parent being able to get a mortgage that's then "inherited" by a child, in cases where the parent is retired or close to retirement, but it's pretty much a face-saving (and tax-avoidance) measure.

The pyramids are only half that old, and they've accumulated a fair bit of damage despite being solid stone.

> 1. You hear the first articulation of the melody as the downbeat. But that would mean the first measure is in a disparate (and probably irregular) meter. Radical!

> 2. You hear the incomplete first measure as an anacrusis, or a kind of unaccented lead-in, to the second measure: OMG even more radical!

Why? Why can't you just say the piece starts partway through a bar, and we notate that with a rest for convenience? Just as when a piece ends partway through a bar we would generally accept that it ends when the last note ends (and while we might notate that as being a full bar in the case of a long held note, we don't always play it that way), not after some trailing rests, and we wouldn't consider this as being some kind of radical accented thing.

A theme that turns up in Starfield as well...

https://archive.ph/Ko4pe

Why is this radical at all? This is exactly how most humans perceive it: as a lead-in to the second (I might even argue first) measure. It's very strange to me to say that most humans are supposed to understand the piece to have started before any sound is played. In fact that's quite preposterous: play a song that starts with a rest to 1000 people and ask them to gesture as soon as the song starts, and every single one of them will gesture on the first note played. How are they supposed to perceive the song to have started any earlier than that? A song "starting with rests" is written that way to make it understandable to the performer who is reading the notation. It's a purely notational thing. The notation is not the song, the sound is the song.

It’s like saying a dodecahedron isn’t that impressive when viewed sitting on a 2D plane because it’s just a triangke and there are more interesting 2D shapes. True, but so reductive it’s tautological.

…and yet that answer entirely misses the point that the question is about the choice of definition.

Love this thought. You disagree with an extreme interpretation, do you take the exact opposite? If not, up to where do you go?

This idea is applicable to so much

At least that's the case for the co-cathedral in Zamora, Michoacán which had its construction interrupted for almost a century due to the Mexican Revolution, the Cristero War and its subsequent expropriation by the government. In this context, the mismatching facade remains as a testament of the building's history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocesan_Sanctuary_of_Our_Lady...

I think you're framing this in the wrong way. Anyone buying a ticket knows there is no guarantee that this finale will occur, or that even if it does, that whatever entity in is in charge of it by then will honor the tickets. They treat this as a donation to something they care about, and the ticket is a cute gift of appreciation. And on top of that, the descendants of the ticket-purchasers may have lost the tickets generations ago, not even know about them, or not even care.

Suggesting that people are getting "screwed over" is unnecessarily dramatic.

Just reading that line alone brightened up my morning. You can admire something and still find it a bit silly.

You can certainly play a recording of the piece at whatever speed you desire, and decide if it has rhythm, melody, harmony, unity, and continuity. Extremely slowing the piece down does not remove those things.

I feel like such ideas are of a time, namely the 1950s when things were looking up. Nowadays I feel like everyone is aware that Earth is basically finished but we have no way off of it, so they just try to squeeze as much joy as they can before they die without any thought towards the future at all.

This even comes out in smaller cycles like writing software that works today with no thought about how it will look in a decade. I feel like the stuff they were doing even in 90s was done with the intention of being around for a very long time. Now it's like, yagni, just write any old shit that works.

That's painting things with a broad brush and a wrong one at that.

Ironically, there's plenty of avant-garde art that is 100% about the aesthetics, to the point people complain they were "made without technique".

That you are primarily driven by music and aesthetics, and others are primarily driven by science and technological creation, and most of us are driven by both in varying degrees - that is what makes us human.

The problems appear when you start assigning a monetary value to everything you do.

Of course, the expensive paint is a part of the history of the period, and paintings like this one become a symbol of the period as a whole. Appreciation for the period is certainly part of the appreciation for the painting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12354195

Regarding the YAGNI stuff, that applies to whole companies. All you have to do is stack the cobbled-together shit high enough to get bought and exit. Even the founders aren't in it for a sustainable long term business. In fact that goal is derisively called a "lifestyle business".

Sometimes for me, I need to take myself out of trying to "solve" the art piece and be intentional about viewing it with a different, less literal mindset. It's still me doing the thinking, but it kind of short-circuits my normal interaction with the world.

Or maybe that's just a bunch of blowhard bullshit, I don't know, but it is what I do.

There is simply no way that a conservative worldview brings any art form forward, not even from classically-inspired backgrounds, by pure definition it attempts to keep the status quo, and all they achieve is a soulless repetition of what art was from the period they considered as "golden".

Not much dissimilar to what you are trying to do, to be honest.

You are just part - probably only a satellite - of the self pleasing circle of modern art critics that ultimately live on the backs of the working man.

People that write stuff like this about a urinal on a wall:

"Arensberg had referred to a 'lovely form' and it does not take much stretching of the imagination to see in the upside-down urinal's gently flowing curves the veiled head of a classic Renaissance Madonna or a seated Buddha or, perhaps more to the point, one of Brâncuși's polished erotic forms."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vv_bXRMTJog

Fair warning, it sounds very jarring and disjointed.

Did the Renaissance painters who used single-point-perspective do so in service of seizing the means of production? Obviously not. But they did do so knowing full well that it was a break from the previous art styles, and that such a break was a good thing. Likewise for the rise of the novel, the fall of meter in poetry, digital and electronic art, etc etc

At the end of the day, one of the better (although still incomplete) differentiators between art and simply craft is the deliberate pursuit of novelty of expression. That is, an artist is always trying to say something new, or say something in a new way. You can be exceptionally good at producing the exact same painting, but that doesn't make you an artist, simply a craftsman (and there is nothing wrong with being a craftsman).