When we were in elementary school, our pastor’s wife took my sister and I to see a University orchestra perform. <\/p>\n
It was my first experience seeing a live orchestra (we listened to orchestra music all the time at home though!) and I don’t remember a terrible lot about the performance itself. What I do remember was that our pastor’s wife clearly enjoyed the first work – and clearly didn’t<\/em> enjoy the second.<\/p>\n Did she talk about why she didn’t like the second half of the performance? Is that where I got the impression that the composer of the final piece was a modern (or postmodern) fellow who she wasn’t a fan of?<\/p>\n I have no idea.<\/p>\n But as the kids and I work our way through the library’s collection of music, we’ve listened to several albums of John Cage’s work.<\/p>\n And I’m almost certain that John Cage composed the second half of the performance our pastor’s wife despised.<\/p>\n At least, I feel the same tightness in my lips that I saw in hers, the same “let’s just get through this” expression in my eyes.<\/p>\n I explained to Tirzah Mae: “The reason we aren’t really enjoying this music we’re listening to is because John Cage didn’t want to follow the rules of music – and it’s the rules that make music beautiful.”<\/p>\n Back then, I was too engrossed in the novelty of the live orchestra, or maybe I just didn’t have words to articulate the sounds I was hearing. At any rate, I didn’t take conscious note of the lack of melodiousness in that second bit of music. But I know in my bones that this is that. And now I have words to describe it. <\/p>\n Music that tries to ignore the rules is no music at all. It’s just noise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When we were in elementary school, our pastor’s wife took my sister and I to see a University orchestra perform. It was my first experience seeing a live orchestra (we listened to orchestra music all the time at home though!) and I don’t remember a terrible lot about the performance itself. What I do remember … Read more Music that doesn’t follow the rules<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19326"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19326"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19328,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19326\/revisions\/19328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}