Читать книгу Silence - John Cage - Страница 8
ОглавлениеFOREWORD TO 50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
Kyle Gann
Silence by John Cage is the book I’ve reread most often in my life. It’s that kind of book. I kept rereading it partly because what it seemed to mean kept changing. I first read it in 1971, so while this publication marks the fiftieth anniversary of the book, it is the fortieth anniversary of my engagement with it. I was fifteen, and it had a profound, enlivening impact on me. At seventeen I read it again and realized I hadn’t really understood it the first time. At nineteen I revised my impression still more. And probably at twenty-one or twenty-two, and at twenty-five, and a few times in the 1980s and ’90s, periodically finding its meaning in kaleidoscopic flux. Now, rereading it again, intently, cover to cover, at age fifty-five, I get a picture of it I’ve never had before. But I am reluctant to conclude that my current reading is any more real or authentic than the earlier ones. The text remains the same; I change.
For instance, when I was fifteen I thought that Cage’s preparing six answers to give after the “Lecture on Nothing” no matter what questions people asked was a hilariously clever way to get his point across. At fifty-five, I think it must have just been off-putting. Am I right now, or was I right then?
It’s not that Cage is an obscure writer: quite the contrary. He’s breezy, charming, precise, a little stylized at times. He’s even repetitive. The “miserable shaggy nag” story comes up again and again, and the anechoic chamber, and the important question of what do you think about Bach. You get the point. But what is the point? Or are there multiple points? Or, more in accordance with Cage’s popular reputation, is there perhaps no point at all? Cage can be didactic at times, and pontifical, and he does try now and then to convince you that experimental music is preferable to classical music, or that you should enjoy audience coughs and babies crying as much as a symphony, or that he, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown were the only composers in the 1950s tuned in to the zeitgeist. “As contemporary music goes on changing in the way I am changing it,” he jovially thunders in “45′ for a Speaker”; such boldness is bracing for the young, threatening to the old. But along the way he challenges conventional wisdom, deflates pretensions, wipes away misassumptions, erases the slate for us all to start over. Do you see how much easier it is to get people to think for themselves by asking questions than by making pronouncements? Hmm?
And then there are all those wonderful stories that make up the performance piece Indeterminacy, which are probably the dominant items that many people take away from the book. Some of them have become famous in the music world: the aunt who loves her washing machine more than she does Uncle Walter, the trip to New Zealand that never materializes, the nonsequiturs from the autocratic Schoenberg, the fables about Zen monks, the mushroom trivia. The way Cage tells them, devoid of emotional nuance, makes the world itself seem absurd, and all its inhabitants slightly nuts, Cage alone excepted. They are endearing; some, you realize, would come off as pedestrian if anyone but Cage were telling them. People who enjoy Cage’s books but can’t handle his music often call him a philosopher, but this bypasses the more obvious point: that, unlike your average philosopher, he was a brilliant writer, with a distinctively elegant style and a comic delight in paradoxes. And, in fact, writing was what he wanted to do before he turned to music.
And since people draw conclusions more intelligently from words than they do from music, it took this book to get Cage’s ideas noticed in the public world. Arriving as it did just at the onset of the 1960s, with a new generation eager for a new pace of living, it had a literary impact like an atom bomb. Silence has a reputation as the most influential book written by an American composer—do we need the word “American”?—and it is difficult to argue otherwise. Other such books, and we might mention Henry Cowell’s New Musical Resources, Charles Ives’s Essays before a Sonata, and Harry Partch’s Genesis of a Music, have encouraged several generations of composers and musicians to think differently. But Silence was different. It encouraged everyone to think differently.
So before I run through the results of my latest rereading, let’s ask: Who was John Cage before he published Silence? And who was he afterward?
We need only sketch the relevant details. There were two great turning points in Cage’s life: the change in his music in 1951, at age thirty-eight, and the change in his public career—brought about by this book—at age forty-nine. He was born September 5, 1912, in Los Angeles. His father was an inventor; you’ll read the famous story of his submarine in the book, and many other stories of growing up in Los Angeles. A precocious but unassertive child, at age twelve Cage devoted himself to playing the piano works of Edvard Grieg, partly because that composer broke the prohibition against parallel fifths, which Cage interpreted as a liberation. Cage graduated high school as valedictorian and briefly attended Pomona College, more attracted to religion and then literature at the time than to music. Rebelling against the curriculum, he left college after a year to take a parentally financed tour of Europe in 1930 and ’31. He studied Gothic architecture with Ernö Goldfinger (1902–87), while also taking piano lessons at the Paris Conservatoire. When Goldfinger mentioned that in order to become an architect one must devote one’s life to architecture, Cage took flight.
Cage returned to Los Angeles just in time for the Depression. His early attempts at music he regarded as overly mathematical, and threw them away. He studied composition with Henry Cowell (1897–1965), the guru of everything avant-garde in music in 1930s America. Cowell, in turn, recommended that Cage work with Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), who had come to America in 1933 to escape the Nazis, and who was already world famous for pioneering both atonal music and the twelve-tone technique, which he had invented in 1921. Twelve-tone method, to which Cage refers frequently in Silence, starts with an ordering of the twelve notes of the musical scale and derives every pitch structure in the piece from some transposition of that row, or else from its backward or inverted form, with the intent of imposing a kind of super-unity on the piece—a unity that may not always be perceptible as such. After Schoenberg’s death, the musicologist Peter Yates informed Cage that Schoenberg had referred to him as his one interesting American student, but also called him “not a composer, but an inventor—of genius.” I am sick and tired of these words. They have been too often adduced to acknowledge Cage’s innovations while downplaying the quality of his wonderful music; still, Cage trumpeted the praise proudly, and bears the blame for its frequency of citation. However, when asked in 1950 to list his best American students, Schoenberg came up with twenty-eight names, Cage’s not among them, so I’ve come to consider this story a little dubious.1
Cage’s early career took the form of providing mostly percussion music for dance in the San Francisco and Seattle areas, where he made an important contact in the slightly younger composer Lou Harrison (1917–2003); it was Harrison who, in the stories, uttered the immortal line, “If you think I came to the loony bin to learn to play bridge, you’re crazy.” To write for unpitched percussion, Cage needed a new idea of structure, since all the traditional musical forms revolved around pitch and harmony. He arrived at “macro-microcosmic” rhythmic structure, sometimes called square-root structure, in which each phrase of a piece embodies the same rhythmic proportions as the entire piece. For instance, his First Construction in Metal (1939) is divided into sections with the proportions 4+3+2+3+4, which adds up to 16, so each of the 16 sections is also 16 measures divided 4+3+2+3+4. The more technical articles in Silence make frequent reference to this kind of structure, which he continued using even into his nonpercussion works of the 1950s.
The earliest article in Silence, “The Future of Music: Credo,” is a talk delivered to a Seattle arts society in 1937 at the invitation of dancer Bonnie Bird, a Martha Graham protégée. Cage’s major innovation of the Seattle period was the prepared piano, an instrument he invented in 1940 by inserting screws, bolts, weather stripping, and other materials between the strings of a grand piano in order to turn it into a percussion instrument of indeterminate pitch. The bulk of his music of the 1940s, much of it quiet, lyrical, and even proto-minimalist, was written for this instrument, and it remains the most widely accepted part of his output. “Half intellectually and half sentimentally,” he recalls in the “Lecture on Nothing,” “when the war came along, I decided to use only quiet sounds. There seemed to me to be no truth, no good, in anything big in society. But quiet sounds were like loneliness, or love or friendship. Permanent, I thought, values, independent at least from Life, Time, and Coca-Cola” (p. 117).
Cage continued to move wherever he was offered a job, and, following a 1941–42 season in Chicago, ended up in New York City at the invitation of Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim. The enterprising Cage convinced the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) to give him a concert venue. Guggenheim, however, had intended to have Cage’s percussion music at the opening of her new gallery, and when she learned of the MOMA show, she told Cage to leave her house. Cage wept at the reversal, and was comforted by the presence of the painter Marcel Duchamp; this is the incident referred to at the end of “On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work” (p. 107). Luckily, the dancer Jean Erdman offered him her apartment. Erdman was working with the pianist David Tudor, who became Cage’s tireless and most brilliant interpreter, and it was Erdman’s husband, the distinguished expert on world mythology Joseph Campbell, who introduced Cage to Asian art and philosophy, which came to inform so much of his musical outlook (though his interest in Zen had first been sparked by a 1936 lecture in Seattle by Nancy Wilson Ross, on “Dada and Zen Buddhism”).
Campbell’s circle also included Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877–1947), curator of Indian art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, who gets credit for having introduced Indian art and its aesthetics to the Western world. It may be Coomaraswamy’s writings that introduced Cage to the fourteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart (1260–1328), to whom he refers often in the “Indeterminacy” lecture and elsewhere. Coomaraswamy championed Eckhart as being closer to Mahayana Buddhism than to conventional Christianity or modern philosophy, calling Eckhart’s sermons “an Upanisad of Europe.”2 In the “Lecture on Something” Cage lists Eckhart among several Western authors (with R. H. Blyth, Joseph Campbell, and Alan Watts) from whom one can learn the principles of Zen if the Zen writings themselves seem too alien.
In 1949 Cage gave the aforementioned “Lecture on Nothing” at the Artists’ Club in New York. “The Club,” as it was generally referred to, had been founded by the painter Robert Motherwell in 1948, and many of its regulars were caught up in the Zen craze. Visual artists Mark Tobey, Ad Reinhart, Franz Kline, David Smith, Philip Pavia, Motherwell, and others had been impressed by, and were in some cases imitating, Japanese calligraphy and Ukiyo-e paintings, the “floating world” genre of Japanese prints.3 Some of these people, at least, would have been in the audience for the “Lecture on Nothing” and also that on “Something” a year later. Poets and literary figures like Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder were Zen enthusiasts of the time as well, but among composers of his generation Cage seems virtually unique in this respect (for which reason he has had a tremendous impact awakening musicians to alternative and occult spirituality). His increasing interest led him to study with Diasetz Suzuki (1870–1966), a lay historian and philosopher who had an unparalleled impact on the understanding of Buddhism in the West. Cage, self-admittedly, had a faulty memory for dates, and his claims in various writings that he attended Suzuki’s classes between 1945 and 1951 must be mistaken. Suzuki arrived in New York in the late summer of 1950, first lectured at Columbia in March 1951, and taught no courses until the spring of 1952.4 Cage’s first printed reference to Suzuki comes in his “Juilliard Lecture” of that same year.5
The MOMA percussion-ensemble concert, on February 7, 1943, resulted in a bemused two-page spread on Cage in Life Magazine. Nice as the publicity was, it failed to rescue Cage from genteel poverty, and he spent the rest of the decade writing mostly keyboard works that could be performed solo. The 1940s brought the beginnings of a historic collaboration between Cage and the dancer Merce Cunningham (1919–2009); Cunningham choreographed much of Cage’s music, and Cage was the founding music director of the world-famous Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Then in 1950 Cage met two of the three protégés whose names figure heavily in this book: Morton Feldman (1926–87) and Christian Wolff (b. 1934), the latter only sixteen at the time. Encouraged by Cage to follow his muse, Feldman began writing pieces (Projections I–V, 1950–51) on graph paper, indicating only relative registers of notes played (high, medium, low), and leaving the pitch to the performer. Although Feldman resumed conventional pitch notation soon afterward, these chance-accepting pieces made a big impression on Cage, possibly even moving him closer to the idea of chance composition himself, and their technique is referred to often in Silence.
Wolff was the son of publishers, and made Cage a gift of a book his parents had just published: the first English translation of the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes. Intended as both philosophical system and divinatory oracle, the I Ching contains commentaries on sixty-four hexagrams, patterns of six broken and unbroken lines, which are meant to be obtained at random by drawing yarrow sticks or, more often today, tossing a set of three coins six times. Cage began consulting the I Ching for all problems of his everyday life; then, in a massive piano piece titled Music of Changes (1951), he used the oracle to generate random numbers to determine pitch, duration, dynamics, and other aspects of notes, to create a music totally independent of his own tastes and preferences. This was radical, but not as radical as the piece he wrote the following year, using the I Ching to determine only durations, and leaving out pitches and sounds altogether: 4′33′′. At the August 29, 1952, performance in Woodstock, New York, David Tudor sat at the piano for that amount of time, four minutes and thirty-three seconds, and played—nothing. The piece the audience listened to consisted of whatever sounds occurred during the interval.
4′33′′ was a scandal, but contrary to what one might assume from its iconic status today, it did not alter Cage’s reputation overnight. (You’ll notice that, even though it remains his most famous piece, 4′33′′ is only mentioned twice in Silence, never by name, but as “my silent piece”: in the introduction to “On Robert Rauschenberg” and in the concluding “Music Lover’s Field Companion,” where a private performance is humorously described.) Cage continued scraping by on temporary jobs, though several events in the ’50s expanded his fame and influence. In October 1954 he and David Tudor began a two-month tour of performances at Donaueschingen, Cologne, Paris, Brussels, Stockholm, Zurich, Milan, and London; Cage later complained that they were treated as idiots and clowns.6 Nevertheless, in Germany he became good friends with Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007), as he had with Pierre Boulez (b. 1925) in Paris in 1949, though you might not think so from the sidelong glances he throws them both in “Erik Satie” and other articles. From 1956 to ’60 Cage taught a course in Experimental Composition at the New School for Social Research in New York, where his students (including Toshi Ichiyanagi and his wife Yoko Ono) would go on to form the Fluxus movement, which pioneered conceptual art under his influence. On May 15, 1958, Cage’s friends presented a Twenty-Five-Year Retrospective Concert for him at Town Hall in New York, attended by a thousand people, some of whose catcalls and disruptive clapping (but also wild cheers) can be heard on the recording of the event. And a few months later Cage and Tudor were invited to the new-music festival at Darmstadt, where they were taken more seriously than in 1954, and started to have an impact on European music. It was here that the three lectures grouped together as “Composition as Process” (“I. Changes,” “II. Indeterminacy,” and “III. Communication”) were delivered.
Cage’s sunny personality and odd performances brought him publicity beyond the closed circuits of contemporary music. In January 1959 he appeared on an Italian quiz show Lascia o Raddoppio, on which he won five million lira by correctly answering extremely detailed questions about mushrooms; he also performed his pieces Sounds of Venice and Water Walk. In January 1960 he appeared on the popular American television show I’ve Got a Secret, hosted by Garry Moore, with fellow guest celebrity Zsa-Zsa Gabor. Again Cage reprised Water Walk, and Moore called him “the most controversial figure in the musical world today” (the episode is multiply archived on YouTube). In June 1960, the publisher C. F. Peters agreed to publish Cage’s musical works, a significant boost for his more serious reputation. At the same time, Cage left the New School because he had been invited by composer Richard Winslow to teach for a year at the Center for Advanced Study at Wesleyan University.
Winslow also contacted Wesleyan University Press about the possibility of publishing a book of Cage’s writings—and in October 1961, Silence hit the bookstores. More than anything else to that point, it made Cage famous. “I’ve had more response from the book,” he said, “than I’ve ever had from the publication of a record, the publication of music, the giving of a concert, the giving of a lecture or anything.” Seven thousand copies sold by 1968; today, the number exceeds half a million, including numerous foreign language editions.7 Thousands of lives were changed as a result of the book’s publication. To cite one of the most celebrated examples, composer John Adams received Silence as a present from his mother in 1969, and his enthusiasm remains vivid in his memoir from four decades later: “what he represented stood in sharp contrast to the depressing tone of the postwar European avant-garde and the pseudoscience of serialism. I read Silence and A Year from Monday, and I kept going back to them almost as if they were sacred texts. The personal style of Cage’s prose was refreshing, inviting, and inclusive.”8
Not only is there little mention in Silence of 4′33′′, but also there are few mentions of the prepared piano, and not much about percussion. There is, instead, plenty of talk about electronics, serialism (the expansion of the twelve-tone idea to all aspects of music), and a younger generation of artists, including Feldman, Wolff, Rauschenberg (whom Cage met in New York City in 1951), and Jasper Johns. Silence offered Cage the enviable opportunity, at age forty-nine, to reinvent himself for a younger generation—to a point that the previous Cage of quiet, lyrical prepared-piano music almost disappeared from his popular image. And the book’s timing was serendipitous: a new generation was poised to swing away from its parents in open revolt, embracing everything that had hitherto been banished. In subsequent books, Cage became less focused on music, and presented himself along with Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, Norman O. Brown, and others as a group of thinkers engineering a new kind of society. Silence would remain his supreme statement on music.
Let us turn to the book. The twenty-three articles, essays, and lectures in Silence range in date from 1937 to 1961. Cage’s next book after Silence, A Year from Monday (1967), opens by noting David Tudor’s disappointment that his 1952 “Juilliard Lecture” wasn’t included in Silence, so he includes it there, but the material in that lecture overlaps so much with the “Nothing” and “Something” lectures that to group them would have seemed repetitious. No other items in A Year from Monday are pre-1961. In short, Silence seems to contain everything that Cage felt was most important in his writing up to that point. Intriguingly, a late 1959 memo to Wesleyan University Press in which Cage listed the book’s potential contents is almost identical to the book’s actual contents, except that instead of the essays on dance there was originally to be “A Few Ideas about Music and Films.”9
Given the impact Silence had not only in music but in the other arts, it is odd to note how musically technical some of the articles are, notably the first two Darmstadt lectures and the detailed descriptions of how he composed Music of Changes, Imaginary Landscape No. 4, and Music for Piano. These are balanced, though, by the four brief statements on dance and the extensive article on Rauschenberg, which has been ubiquitously quoted in the literature on that artist. The cream of the book, for me, has always been the four long pieces at the end: “Lecture on Nothing,” “Lecture on Something,” “45′ for a Speaker,” and “Where Are We Going? and What Are We Doing?” All have in common their unconventional layout on the page denoting that they are performative lectures, to be read aloud and heard, with silences interspersed, rather than read on the page. The peculiarity makes these articles more inconvenient to read, but I have wondered if that in itself doesn’t actually increase their effectiveness. Gaps in mid-sentence lead one to pause and take the words in more than one possible sense. Skimming is inherently discouraged. The technique makes one regard each word independently, much as Cage’s music invites attention to each separate sound. Would these words have so sunk into our souls had they been printed in paragraph format for us to breeze through? And the occasional live performance—I once had four students read “Where Are We Going?” in class, carefully timed—is a pleasure.
Were the book not centered upon music, “Nothing” might have been as suitable a title as “Silence.” Cage opens, “Nothing is accomplished by writing a piece of music.” Time has done little to allay the shock of these words. At best one could utter them cynically, at worst nihilistically. Let us fuse them, however, with what may be the book’s most famous sentence, from “Lecture on Nothing” (and let us give the complete citation for once): “I have nothing to say and I am saying it, and that is poetry as I need it” (p. 109). Now recast the original passive sentence actively: “I have nothing to accomplish, and I have accomplished it—by writing a piece of music.” Just as provocative is a statement in the “Lecture on Something”: “Every something is an echo of nothing” (p. 131).
What is this nothing that poetry says and that every something echoes? The question is the same as that raised by Heidegger’s elaborate disquisition on nothing in What Is Metaphysics? (1929): whether “nothing” can be a noun rather than simply a logical negation. Taking nothing as what is left when one excludes the entirety of the “what-is,” Heidegger posits it as something one becomes aware of and experiences in the feeling of dread. Working himself into a frenzy of saying what lies beyond words, he arrives at a phrase that the logical positivist philosopher Rudolf Carnap would later deride: “the Nothing nothings” (Das Nichts nichtet).
But as Cage’s contemporary Paul Wienpahl (1916–80), a Western philosopher whose training in Zen Buddhism went somewhat further than Cage’s, has shown in a commentary on Heidegger, a statement or question that is logically meaningless can still have a use. Wienpahl’s example is the Zen koan, the seemingly nonsensical question and answer the study or contemplation of which can bring about enlightenment or direct perception of reality. Since, in common-language philosophy based on Wittgenstein, we discover a word’s meaning in its use, a koan, being useful, can therefore mean something even if that meaning lies outside the realm of logic. “The positivist,” Wienpahl writes, “arrived at meaninglessness on the intellectual level—and shied away from it. The Buddhist heads into it, takes the next step, and gets to it on the physical or non-verbal level. The positivist got to the notion of the meaningless. The Buddhist gets to the thing.”10
Cage wants to get to the thing, which lies outside the realm of logic. To parse his understanding of nothing, let’s examine what he’s talking about in his lecture on “something.” He starts with a platitude that most of us could hear without raising an eyebrow: “Art should come from within; then it is profound.” From here he opens an attack on the psychology instilled in composers by the cultural expectation of making their music profound (I will forego the unconventional typography):
When a composer feels a responsibility to make, rather than accept, he eliminates from the area of possibility all those events that do not suggest the at that point in time vogue of profundity. For he takes himself seriously, wishes to be considered great, and he thereby diminishes his love and increases his fear and concern about what people will think. There are many serious problems confronting such an individual. He must do it better, more impressively, more beautifully, etc., than anybody else. And what, precisely, does this, this beautiful profound object, this masterpiece, have to do with Life? It has this to do with Life: that it is separate from it. (p. 130)
This is excellent advice for a young (or not-so-young) composer, or artist in any medium, and one need not study at the feet of Daisetz Suzuki to be bowled over by it. To start out writing a piece conscious of the internalized pressure to be “profound”: this is a recipe for tiresomeness. The platitude Cage begins with is the innocuous-looking surface of a musical condition that, by the 1950s, had reached a point of neurosis. The structure of classical music society encourages an infectious snobbism where-by people who listen to “deep” classical music are more cultured, better, than other people. The contemporary composer is thus placed in a bind that Beethoven himself never faced (though perhaps Brahms, who heard Beethoven’s footsteps behind him, did). The eighteenth-century composer was free to write music based on perceived needs and values in his immediate environment, and was not competing with the past. The music-school-educated, twentieth-century composer inherited a mandate to build upon, and exceed in some way, the music of his predecessors.
By the 1950s, the one-upmanship of composing had reached a fever pitch. In postwar European music, the intricacy of the one-stave-per-instrument orchestration, the complexity of the rhythms, the detail of the notated dynamics and phrasing, even the size of the scores had undergone a rapid crescendo into intimidating opacity and excess. Since we have hammered into us that profound music is often not understood at first, composers learned that music that was not understood would be assumed profound. To this day, the Darmstadt era of the 1950s and ’60s represents a high-water mark in the professional prestige of the composer, especially in Europe, that many composers look back to with nostalgia. Those composers were accomplishing something, and the world took notice.
Cage, with his quiet sounds that were like loneliness, had dropped out of the musical rat race even before his absorption in Zen. In Silence he declares independence from Europe. He tells the Dutch musician, “It must be very difficult for you in Europe to write music, for you are so close to the centers of tradition” (p. 73). He quotes the painter Paul Klee: “I want to be as though new-born, knowing nothing, absolutely nothing, about Europe” (p. 65). In 1951 he began using the I Ching to determine the disposition of musical materials, thus removing himself from the results and severing any connection between his personal tastes and his music. And in 1952 he presented nothing most vividly in the form of 4′33′′. No aspect of Cage’s music, I suspect, offended people more than what was perceived as a deliberate abnegation of the ambitions a composer was assumed to nurture. But for those similarly disillusioned, his turning away from this rampant one-upmanship, his willingness to make music-making fun and risky and humble again, is surely a primary cause of Silence’s popularity.
In this context, let’s turn next to a more polemical essay, “History of Experimental Music in the United States” (1959). Experimental music is a term greatly propagated by Cage. Many composers have objected to it (most vociferously, Robert Ashley);11 Cage talks, at the beginning of his “Experimental Music” article, of having had doubts himself. Cage, though, posits a strict definition: music based on actions “the outcome of which is not foreseen” (p. 69). Since Cage, the term has worked its way through musical society in a vaguer sense, denoting music that does not rely on the conventions of the European classical repertoire, as synonymous with what used to be called “new music,” or “Downtown music.” Michael Nyman wrote a book, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (1974), championing a music open to accidents, surprises, and unpredictable processes, and tracing that music’s history to Cage. Peter Garland writes of an American experimental tradition, broadened to include not only Cage but Partch, Lou Harrison, Pauline Oliveros, Henry Cowell, Morton Feldman, and others.
Cage’s view in his history is more severe and at times ungenerous. Aspects of music by Varèse, Ives, Ruggles, Luening, Ussachevsky that were once innovative are “no longer necessary.” Cage’s teacher Cowell is barely given a pass because of the indeterminate order of the movements in his Mosaic Quartet. By implication, experimental music is superior or preferable to nonexperimental music, or at least more timely. It turns out that the only composers whose music Cage approves as truly experimental—that is, necessary—are his friends Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, and Morton Feldman. To give this argument an air of objectivity Cage embraces historicism, the idea that the quality of a piece of music depends in part on whether it appears at the appropriate point in history. He betrays, in doing so, a twinge of guilt: “ ‘Why, if everything is possible, do we concern ourselves with history (in other words, with a sense of what is necessary to be done at a particular time)?’ And I would answer, ‘In order to thicken the plot’ ” (p. 68). But to thicken the plot was Sri Ramakrishna’s explanation for why there is evil in the world—an admission that this historicism may not be so self-evident after all.
A peculiarly related complaint is that Cage felt that music should not express the personality of its composer. There are charges one could bring against Edgard Varèse, but the one Cage brings—that his telegraphic repeated notes are a personal signature and therefore draw attention to Varèse rather than to the sounds—seems an odd one, unless we can depart with him from the conventional European musical viewpoint. Cage speaks in his article on Varèse of the advantageous use of discontinuity in order to “divorc[e] sounds from the burden of psychological intentions” (p. 83). This Zen-inspired insistence that art should be freed from psychological intent is one that most people, I think, would find counterintuitive, though it did eventually have a widespread influence on younger artists. In “Where Are We Going?” Cage praises the new experimental music expressly for its indifference to emotion: “Another thing we’re doing is leaving the things that are in us in us. We are leaving our emotions where they are in each one of us. One of us is not trying to put his emotion into someone else. That way you ‘rouse rabbles’; it seems on the surface humane, but it animalizes, and we’re not doing it” (p. 250).
To quote from the Juilliard Lecture, for a moment, words that would have been in place in Silence: “the most that can be accomplished by the musical expression of feeling is to show how emotional the composer was who had it. If anyone wants to get a feeling of how emotional a composer proved himself to be, he has to confuse himself to the same final extent that the composer did and imagine that sounds are not sounds at all but are Beethoven.”12
Cage, instead, emphasizes the listener’s responsibility for the musical experience, the extent to which the way one listens determines what is heard. We filter what we hear, even at concerts where listening is our chief focus, and our filtering habits are culturally conditioned: “It becomes evident that music itself is an ideal situation, not a real one. The mind may be used either to ignore ambient sounds, pitches other than the eighty-eight, durations which are not counted, timbres which are unmusical or distasteful, and in general to control and understand an available experience. Or the mind may give up its desire to improve on creation and function as a faithful receiver of experience” (pp. 31–32).
In “The Future of Music: Credo” Cage points out that when we ignore noise, it disturbs us, while “when we listen to it, we find it fascinating” (p. 3). The listening mode he describes is one associated with Zen meditation; it has been said that if a faucet is dripping nearby during such meditation, each drip will be registered in the mind with the same intensity as every other. Cage imagines a listener listening without expectations and without daydreaming, someone who, in the words of Huang-Po’s Doctrine of Transmission of Mind, lets go of his or her own thoughts “as if they were the cold ashes of a long dead fire.” This ideal listener seems sometimes to be equivalent to the “Ground” of Meister Eckhart, the divine spark, the intersection between the individual and the divine,13 that he keeps bringing up in the “Indeterminacy” lecture: a consciousness unclouded by categories, intellectual concepts, or desires. Cage urges for the heroic listener, and he uses that word in the sense of the nine Indian permanent emotions, or rasas, that he would have read about in Coomaraswamy (erotic, heroic, odious, furious, mirthful, terrible, pathetic, wondrous, and tranquil), in which context heroic connotes a willingness to accept whatever must be.
But this fearlessness only follows if, at the parting of the ways, where it is realized that sounds occur whether intended or not, one turns in the direction of those he does not intend. This turning is psychological and seems at first to be a giving up of everything that belongs to humanity—for a musician, the giving up of music. This psychological turning leads to the world of nature, where, gradually or suddenly, one sees that humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world together; that nothing was lost when everything was given away. In fact, everything is gained. (p. 8)
And, parenthetically, let us compare this with what Heidegger says about how life changes once we’ve confronted the fact of nothingness unflinchingly: “Only because nothing is revealed in the very basis of our Dasein [being in the world] is it possible for the utter strangeness of what-is to dawn on us. Only when the strangeness of what-is forces itself upon us does it awaken and invite our wonder.”14
A consequent sticking point in Cage’s writings is the suggestion that all sounds are equal, that we should not filter or make distinctions, that, in the words of Hamlet (repetitiously quoted by one of Cage’s favorite Zen authors, R. H. Blyth), “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” We think of the story about the Roshi’s reaction to a “wretched performance of an excerpt from a third-rate Italian opera”: the young Cage was embarrassed, but the expression on the Roshi’s face was “absolutely beatific” (p. 6). Cage, by implication, learned how to be that Roshi. It gave him a rather dubious reputation as the “anything goes” composer, someone for whom all sounds—and by extension all pieces of music, and all performances—were equally acceptable. Cage spent his subsequent life clarifying, often using the formulation he uses in “45′ for a Speaker”: “Anything does go—but only when nothing is taken as the basis” (p. 160).
This heroic listener, devoid of preconceptions or ideas, may seem an unrealizable ideal, but as Cage notes, music itself sometimes brings us to that state: “No one can have an idea once he really starts listening” (p. 191). There is a parallel here with my favorite sentence in the book, from the end of “Lecture on Nothing”: “All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear that I know nothing” (p. 126). As a composer myself, I have always found this powerfully resonant. It evokes the state of right-brain absorption that can take place during composing, in which the passage of time ceases to be noticed, and logical concepts fall away, in which the will is moving spontaneously and without charts or crutches. Perhaps in such moments the composer (or at least his or her ego) truly accepts rather than makes. Is this escape from left-brain verbal analysis the nothing that lies beyond logic? Again, “composing in such a way that the process of composing is boring induces ideas. They fly into one’s head like birds” (p. 12). Is getting the chattering left brain out of the way analogous to (or the same as) getting the ego out of the way? Cage wrote at a time when right-brain/left-brain terminology had not yet entered cultural consciousness, but today much popular Zen meditation writing centers on right-brain activity. Cage seems to suggest that right-brain attention to sound itself can bring us into the Zen consciousness he valorizes.
What is this “nothing” that must be taken as the basis, then? The Heideggerian nothing, the Eckhartian Ground, the heroism that accepts whatever comes, a right-brain absorption in sonic experience? Cage calls for a vast expansion in music’s available materials and structures, and, as a counterpart, also a kind of radical humility on the part of the composer—along with, symmetrically, a radical openness on the part of the listener. He’s interested in how music that “takes nothing as the basis” changes how, and what, we hear. As he writes in “Composition as Process”:
What happens to a piece of music when it is purposelessly made? What happens, for instance, to silence? That is, how does the mind’s perception of it change? Formerly, silence was the time lapse between sounds, useful towards a variety of ends, among them that of tasteful arrangement … Where none of these or other goals are present, silence becomes something else—not silence at all, but sounds, the ambient sounds … Where these ears are in connection with a mind that has nothing to do, that mind is free to enter into the act of listening, hearing each sound just as it is, not as a phenomenon more or less approximating a preconception. (pp. 22–23)
Does this imply a new kind of music that has little in common with the old? If so, what happens to the old? To what extent can the listening habits of a society be deliberately or systematically revolutionized? Is a relationship to Zen required? Or do we simply need to relearn to hear music with the left brain out of the way? Do Cage’s desiderata require a new musical practice altogether? Or simply a change of attitude that will allow us to go on listening to music as we have before, only with “the feet a little off the ground”? The Roshi beamed beatifically at the third-rate Italian aria, but what if it had been a superbly played Beethoven symphony? Or a piece by Stockhausen? And how should we feel about Bach?
Part of what keeps us all coming back to Silence, I suspect, is the impossibility of answering these questions, within the outlines of Cage’s text, in a way that rings true for everyone, or even consistently for oneself. Another part is that by firing these conundrums, Cage blasted through the thick layers of accreted ice that had accumulated around the classical music tradition, and gave us all space to breathe again. All those precepts learned in music schools needed no longer to be taken for granted. Cage was no philosopher. He didn’t outline for us what to think, or how. But with these startling propositions so difficult to parse unequivocally, he freed us to think for ourselves. Begin to follow him, and even if you can’t follow everywhere he goes, you find yourself somewhere different from where you started out.
I will step outside the scope of the text enough to remark that Cage, whom I knew from 1974 on, though never well, was an extraordinary person. Richard Fleming, a philosopher who has written and taught much about Cage (and also Leonard Bernstein), tells a story about Cage in his book Evil and Silence. Once in Cage’s apartment building a fire alarm malfunctioned, beeped intermittently all night, and kept everyone awake. Everyone except Cage, that is, who told Fleming that “I remained in bed, listened carefully to its pattern, and worked it into my thoughts and dreams; and I slept very well.”15 Personally, I have tried, at Cage’s urging, to enjoy a baby crying at a concert, not letting it ruin a piece of modern music; so far I’ve failed. But that’s why I keep coming back to Cage, because I keep thinking that if I could evolve or relax a little more, I could enjoy babies crying and fire alarms ringing, and feel as comfortable with the universe as he always seemed to be. He thought his way out of the twentieth century’s artistic neuroses and discovered a more vibrant, less uptight world that we didn’t realize was there. Silence is the traveler’s guide to that world. Every visit to it lifts the feet a little more off the ground.
Now, if you will now permit me, I will do for you what I wish someone had done for me in 1971, namely, introduce you to the more celebrated names in Cage’s Indeterminacy stories.
Xenia née Kashevaroff, of course, was Cage’s wife from 1935 to 1945, also a bookbinder and artist.
Sonya Sekula (1918–63) was a Swiss artist who moved to New York City in 1936 and became associated with the surrealists and abstract expressionists. Plagued by psychotic breakdowns, she moved back to Zurich and hanged herself in her studio there at age forty-five. Though she is all but forgotten today, her paintings are well worth seeking out.
Morris Graves (1910–2001) was a mystic and Zen enthusiast who lived in the Seattle area and painted, mostly pictures of birds. He met Cage by attending one of his percussion concerts and creating such a disturbance that he was thrown out. It was to him and the painter Mark Tobey that Cage unveiled the prepared piano.
Richard Lippold (1915–2002) was a sculptor who made delicate, weblike sculptures from wire in complex geometric patterns. He lived in the same New York apartment house with Cage in the 1950s, and they collaborated on a film about Lippold’s The Sun.
Lois Long (1918–2005) was a textile designer and artist who collaborated with Cage on two books, The Mushroom Book (1972) and Mud Book: How to Make Pies and Cakes (1983). Her detailed drawings of mushrooms are exquisite.
Vera Williams (b. 1927) was, and is, an author and illustrator of children’s books who graduated from Black Mountain College in 1949. Her architect husband Paul Williams designed the glass house Cage lived in, in Stony Point.
M. C. Richards (1916–99) was a writer, poet, and potter who taught at Black Mountain College and participated with Cage in the first Happening.
Minna Lederman Daniel (1896–1995) was a cofounder of the important League of Composers in the 1920s, and from 1924 to 1946 the editor of the journal Modern Music, for which Cage wrote briefly. He considered her his best critic.
Dorothy Norman (1905–97) was a photographer and lover of the photographer Alfred Stieglitz; also his first biographer.
Giuseppe Santomaso (1907–90) was a Venetian painter who cofounded the progressive Italian art group Fronte Nuovo delle Arti.
Guy Nearing (1890–1986) was a horticulturalist, writer, poet, landscape painter, and chess master; also the author of The Lichen Book.
Maurice Grosser (1903–86) was a landscape painter who lived in Manhattan and devised the scenarios for the operas of Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein.
Betty Isaacs (1894–1971) was a sculptor from New Zealand and friend of Duchamp.
Patsy Lynch Wood (Patsy Davenport at the time), who asked the question about Bach, was a student at Black Mountain College who participated in Cage’s Erik Satie festival there. She went on to become a music educator, specializing in early music and Hildegard of Bingen.
And I believe “labyrinths in whack” refers to the parts of your inner ear working correctly, or at least not out of whack. I puzzled over that one for decades.
To read this fabulous book is to think about it the rest of your life. Enjoy.
Notes
1. Michael Hicks, “John Cage’s Studies with Schoenberg,” American Music 8, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 113–14.
2. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Transformation of Nature in Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934).
3. Helen Westgeest, Zen in the Fifties: Interaction in Art between East and West (Waanders Uitgevers: Museum voor Moderne Kunst, 1997), 61 and following.
4. David Patterson, “Cage and Asia: History and Sources,” in David Nicholls, ed., The Cambridge Companion to John Cage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 53–54.
5. David Revill, The Roaring Silence (New York: Arcade, 1992), 108.
6. Richard Kostelanetz, “Conversation with John Cage,” in Kostelanetz, ed., John Cage (New York: Praeger, 1970), 17.
7. Kenneth Silverman, Begin Again (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 176; latter statistic from Wesleyan University Press.
8. John Adams, Hallelujah Junction (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008), 56.
9. Cage, letter to Richard Winslow, December 9, 1959.
10. Paul Wienpahl, “On the Meaninglessness of Philosophical Questions,” Philosophy East and West 15, no. 2 (April 1965): 138.
11. See, for instance, Ashley’s indignant liner notes to Superior Seven and Tract (New World Records 80460).
12. Cage, A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 97.
13. “Meister Eckhart,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/meister-eckhart/#6, accessed February 1, 2011.
14. Martin Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” in Existence and Being (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1949), 347–48.
15. Richard Fleming, Evil and Silence (Boulder: Paradigm, 2010), 104.
