Jozef Cseres lectures on aesthetics and the philosophy of music, visual arts and intermedia at the Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. Main topics of his research are the problems of symbolism and representation in arts, the intermedia and multimedia, and the experimental and improvised music. Aside his scientific and pedagogic carrier, Mr. Cseres is active also as a curator and publisher. Since 1997 he is the director of the international project The Rosenberg Museum in Violín, Slovakia. In 1999 – 2010 he has been the editorial board member of the international journal for literature and arts Hungarian Workshop, and since 2008 he is the dramaturge of the international music festival Exposition of New Music in Brno, organized by Brno Philharmonic. Since 2001 he is running the Hermesʼ Ear label, devoted to the experimental and improvised music and intermedia creativity.
John Cage’s Sound Ecology and Its Consequences to the Aesthetics
As we know from the writings by John Cage, Jacques Attali, Raymond Murray Schafer, and other thinkers, sound and noise are the primal semantic media and means of human communication. While Cage established the non-musical sounds as a basis for modern music making and sound art, and Attali treated the noise as an anthropologic constant, a social-political phenomenon of human expression and inter-human communication, Schafer grasped the noise environmentally, as an “unwanted sound signal”. The paper reveals the significant affinities between these three attitudes to sound, explaining them in broader context of actual philosophy, aesthetics and sound studies. Its author emphasizes especially the contribution by John Cage whom he finds an important forerunner of sound ecology.