John Cage's "Rules"
- Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for awhile.
- General duties of a student--pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.
- General duties of a teacher--pull everything out of your students.
- Consider everything an experiment.
- Be self-disciplined--this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
- Nothing is a mistake. There's no win and no fail, there's only make.
- The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It's the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.
- Don't try to create and analyze at the same time. They're different processes.
- Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It's lighter than you think.
- Break rules. Even your own rules. Leave plenty of room for X quantities.
“If a lecture is informative, people can easily think that something is being done to them, and that they don’t need to do anything about it except receive. Whereas, if I give a lecture in such a way it is not clear what is being given, then people have to do something about it.” John Cage
ReplyDeleteThis website as some of Cage's sound pieces and interviews.
http://musicage.tumblr.com/