Judith Wegmann, Andreas Kunz - Morton Feldman: For John Cage (2023)

John Cage was an evangelist for a new mode of listening in which we would listen to everything with the same attention that we bring to music. For John Cage proposes instead that we listen to this music as if it were everything. While these two instruments are playing there is nothing else, just a violin and a piano. Even the process of remembering, normally so important in helping us make sense of what we hear, is altered: the ‘tenuous’ rhythms of For John Cage articulate patterns in which notes and figures are reiterated or subtly varied, the music becoming its own memory. Eventually it finishes and we remember: what? That we were listening to a violin and a piano and that it was quiet and beautiful.