My girlfriend listens to John Cage

I thought it might be interesting to hear a different perspective on this blog, so I subjected my girlfriend, who is not a fan of Cage's music and has had to endure my interest in it for several years, to five of his compositions (well, or two-minute excerpts from them), and noted her comments.

Rozart Mix (1965)
We jump in at the deep end with Rozart Mix, probably one of Cage's least accessible pieces. She says that "it's just not music"; listening to it is "like being drunk" and "like being ill", and it "will cause tinnitus". I asked her what she rated it out of 5 and she said 0. I pointed out that I was using a 1 to 5 scale, and she said: "I don't care. It is 0." 0/5

Raga 16 from Solo for Voice 58 (1970)
An improvement. "I can listen to it" - however, since this probably translates to "I can listen to it without wanting to throw the computer out the window", that's maybe not such a big compliment. Indeed, in the end she felt that it's the sort of thing you'd hear as "background music in a new age shop", and gave it: 2/5

Quartets I-VIII (1976)
I was expecting this to go down the easiest, as it's definitely the most musically conventional of the bunch. In fact, it was perhaps rather too conventional for her: better than most Cage stuff, she said, but boring and unmemorable. It had no interesting melody; no hook to grab you and that you could remember. She suggested that it would be best used as "advert music". 2/5

Freeman Etudes VIII (1980)
"It's just a lot of annoying squeaking." "I'd like to smash the violin over his head." "It's tuneless." When I pointed out that a tune is simply a succession of musical notes, and hence this is not tuneless, she sighed and said that it's not mellifluous. This one is another 0/5.

Fourteen (1990)
This was her favourite. She said that it reminded her of film music, especially for some sort of weird sci-fi. It brings to mind a different world. It would however "be better without the annoying squeaky sound at the end" (in fact, I faded it out after only two and a half minutes... I'm not sure she would have been so positive about it had she heard the enitre fifteen minute piece). 3/5

Update: she wanted to read this post, after which she text me: "I just relived the trauma of it again!" It looks like it might be a while before we do "my girlfriend listens to John Cage, part 2".