The Freeman Etudes

Speaking of vanity. I bobbled a vanity search a little bit, and did "I Ching" and "Freeman" in Google without my last name. I came up with a number of references to John Cage.

It turns out that Cage wrote a series of horrendously difficult violin etudes (commisioned originally by a violinist named Freeman). It was written, I think, as a response to a request for a piece that was notated precisely.

Cage's response was to write a piece in which every possible parameter of style, dynamic, type of attack etc. is notated explicitly. Its difficulty lies in requiring multiple changes style and attack in rapid succession.

Cage sees it as a commentary on the "practicality of the impossible," the notion that the extraordinary difficulty of the problems our society faces is not a reason for despair, but rather a reason for extraordinary effort.

It was written, by the way, using I Ching hexagrams to select the controlling parameters.

It seems the oracle is using the search-engine oracle, or the Oracle of Cage, to give me a clue...

In other news, I've gotten a considerable amount feedback since the last -- despairing? No, let's say jittery-sounding -- post. Oddly, a good deal of it seems to be unrelated to people reading this blog... kind of uncanny...

Thanks for your confidence; I'll stick to my guns...