Muso-pukle

From the article "History of Experimental Music in the United States" published in 1959 (pp 71-72):

"[...] in connection with musical continuity, Cowell remarked at the New School before a concert of works by Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, and myself, that here were four composers who were getting rid of glue. That is: Where people had felt the necessity to stick sounds together to make a continuity, we four felt the opposite necessity to get rid of the glue so that sounds would be themselves.

Christian Wolff was the first to do this. He wrote some pieces vertically on the page but recommended their being played horizontally left to right, as is conventional. Later he discovered other geometrical means for freeing his music of intentional continuity. Morton Feldman divided pitches into three areas, high, middle, and low, and established a time unit. Writing on graph paper, he simply inscribed numbers of tones to be played at any time within specified periods of time.

There are people who say, "If music's that easy to write, I could do it." Of course they could, but they don't. I find Feldman's own statement more affirmative. We were driving back from some place in New England where a concert had been given. He is a large man and falls asleep easily. Out of a sound sleep, he awoke to say, "Now that things are so simple, there's so much to do." And then he went back to sleep."

- John Cage (1912-1992)

MUSIC (aka sound is not a commodity. Obviously, the world at large does not work in accordance to this principle. Despite this minor hindrance to any argument based on the former statement, one can trust that the principle remains true. Thanks to the internet for the volume of free advertising and ease of involvement on the part of the supplier and consumer, respectively, it is possible to put text, image, audio, and video files into a public domain with none of the cost and few of the time requirements previously necessary for such a thing. Certainly there are price restrictions in the materials required for such an endeavor (a means of producing audio or video, not to mention the computer equipment itself), but if met, they are a fraction of those of even ten years ago, as well as usually being one-time expenditures (e.g. a digital camera can transfer pictures directly to a computer, as opposed to needing to get film developed at cost repeatedly).
Of course, none of this seems like that much of a big deal. Technology has become so integrated into everyday life that it's hard to notice the rate at which it increases. However, it is a far cry from what an individual was capable of just ten years ago. Now the internet is an ideal forum for the distribution of almost any form of media. Thankfully one can find free resources online to help oneself along in starting an outpost of personal culture. I cannot dictate what is right for everyone, but I find sending these missives out into the aether to be much like some sort of prayer. Not to a higher being, but to the exact opposite: the collective subconscious.