1. John Cage was an American experimental musician of some note from the late 1930s until his death in 1992. It is not to exaggerate to state that Cage, along with others, changed what is regarded as music as we know it today. Besides making music, he was also a writer of some note on matters musical but also entangling these artistic matters in others more philosophical and cultural. This agenda began right from Cage's first book, Silence. This book was published in 1959 when no one had yet built a viable commercial synthesizer and magnetic tape was the cutting edge musical tool of the day. Cage, we may say, was at that time creating the future. But he wasn't yet in it and we can look back on specifics that he helped to bring about but could not describe in detail as we can today. One paradigmatic section of Silence, relevant here, is a short essay entitled “Experimental Music”.
So what is so great about this section of the book? What is so great, if it is to be put like this, is that Cage is not afraid to get embroiled in the big questions about music that many either assume in their ignorance or ignore in their stupidity. Cage is not afraid to take a stance on what music is and should be seen as. This is an important question and all the more so in the 60 years since he wrote in which any number of electronic musical genres have been invented (and, in some cases, passed away again). A definition of what music even is is important and for at least two reasons. It informs what it is you think you are doing if you make music and it gives hints as to how you should do it.
Most musicians and musical writers, even today, are primarily concerned with pitch. When picking up their instrument or sitting in front of it they primarily intend to affect pitches and weave them into a pleasing union. Indeed, many traditional instruments were made specifically as devices to produce and affect pitches as their primary function. Melody and harmony are the endgame. For such people so fixed can their ideology be, and so unthinking can their appreciation of music be, that it never occurs to them to think that music might be anything else. Music is melody and harmony as a statute. If something is not melodious or not harmonious then it is not music. It does not take a genius to realize that this definition completely destroys the claims of some forms of music to then be music at all. Specifically, these are electronic ones, ones that were coming to birth as Cage wrote (often with his help and participation). Fortunately, there are others who see things a different way and Cage was one of these. Cage came to regard such music as happily "experimental", including his own, a judgment many wouldn't quibble at today but which, in his day, was controversial.
The crucial factor in this, Cage finds, having realized that as long as he is alive there will always be some sound even if it is only the flowing of his blood or the high pitched whine of his nervous system, is to turn away from the idea that music is something deliberately done to the idea of music as sounds that are not intended. There will always be these sounds of course and for the musically conventional they would regard their task as to eliminate them as much as possible. But not Cage. Cage sees this fact and these sounds as his orchestra. Cage freely admits that many will see such a turn as giving everything away. If music is not a musician deliberately creating with authorial purpose then it is nothing for many people. But Cage retorts. Cage sees human beings as at one with all the sounds around them. In this context there can be no concept of music as some artificial, deliberate creation. Music is any sounds occurring "in any combination and in any continuity". As I would put this, "Music is any combination of sounds and silence". I summarize Cage's thought here as "Give up music as a collection of deliberately made and organized sounds. Realize that any combination of sounds is music."
It is this "any combination of sounds" idea that seems to scare many people though. And some people do seem bound to their idea of music as something deliberate, an authorial intent, a matter of canonized forms, sanctified approaches and authorized customs. Cage was right to say, even in the 1950's, that some people regard, for example, the use of noise or a random approach to a collection of sounds, as "not music at all". The years between his writing and our present day may have removed some of that anxiety as electronics gave birth to industrial music, ambient music and an appreciation for abstract forms or, alternatively, rhythms which endlessly replicate themselves and morph, seemingly forever. But this is not entirely so. There are still those who regard things without a tune as not music. For Cage, I think, this would be to focus on the lesser thing (that you can form pitches into melodies) to the exclusion of a much greater thing (that tones and timbres are all around us in any number of naturally occurring combinations).
For a number of years I have been an enthusiastic fan of the analog synthesizer enthusiast and educationalist, Marc Doty. Doty, known as Automatic Gainsay in the online world and a man who formerly worked as part of the Bob Moog Foundation to prosper the legacy of the great synthesizer inventor, Dr Robert Moog, before moving to work with instruments made by Moog’s former rival, Don Buchla, has for a number of years produced demonstration videos for numerous vintage analog synths on his You Tube channel. I freely admit that I have spent hours watching, and re-watching, many of his videos which I find to be both educational regarding the synthesizers he is demonstrating and in relation to synthesis itself. In my way, I have also found many of the videos musically significant as well for I have found music in the tones and timbres that these usually vintage synthesizers have produced. Indeed, I have found no difference musically between the theme songs Marc has written for his videos and his pawing at the keyboard during the demonstrations. Why is this? Its because, influenced by Cage, I am not seeing "music" as the production of deliberately intended tunes. I am not seeing "music" as a matter of deliberation or intention at all. Music is sounds in juxtaposition with one another. And nothing more is needed.
Of course, it takes a psychological shift to come to this position and Cage sees this. But Cage does not see it as a giving up of anything. He sees it as a gaining of so much more. "One may fly if one is willing to give up walking" is how he puts it. And this is very much how I see it. Recently, not least from watching Doty's videos, I have become somewhat disturbed and a little claustrophobic, musically speaking. I've wanted to shout at Marc as he was demonstrating "Stop flinging all these pitches at me!" I look at the synthesizers Marc is demonstrating and there they are in all their fixity with a keyboard attached as the user interface. A keyboard, of course, is an interface primarily designed to affect pitch and in some, but not all, keyboards pitch is all it does affect. How limiting, how narrow, how blind. In contrast, Cage talks about "sound space" and the technical possibilities of the use of magnetic tape which, in his 1950's context, was cutting edge. He speaks of being able "to transform our contemporary awareness of nature's manner of operation into art". Now, reading that, can you say that this task is even primarily a matter of pitch? Surely not.
I see this very much as Cage sees it in the end. Cage talks about a choice between wanting to "control sound" and, on the other hand, giving up the desire to control sound, clearing your mind of "music" and setting about discovering means to let sounds be themselves "rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expressions of human sentiments". I see pitch-based music, music that wants to be a tune, as very much music in the "I am a human who wants to control things" mold. And that kind of music disturbs me. Its not even a question of if such music is "good" or "bad", subjective judgments that are largely meaningless in the end anyway. To me that approach says something negative about human beings themselves and their motives in wanting to act that way. It seems blind to many of the insights Cage raises, not least that we are part of a greater whole and that fitting into this whole, letting things be what they will and being at peace with it, is a greater good than the ability to say "this and this will be so". "Pitch music", as I have started calling it, is narrow music and narrow not just musically but also in terms of what it means to be a human being expressing yourself that way. Cage, of course, did not see music as necessarily about expression and even less so as about meaning. For him sound just was and it was the human task to let it be what it will, to enjoy the intermingling of any and every sound together.
2. The former scientist and self-appointed culture arbiter, Richard Dawkins, in mid 2015 on his Twitter account, remarked regarding the musical piece 4'33" by John Cage that it was, and I quote, "pretentious". Quite what Dawkins, a man who used to abide by the rules of science until he found that popularity required less concern with things like evidence and prudence, meant in detail by this brief comment we will never know. He was merely dismissive and felt that this was enough to inform his acolytes of the correct disposition to have towards it. From the context of the tweet it seemed as if he was not too familiar with the piece either, as if he had only just been made aware of it before commenting. It seems that such off the cuff remarking now stands in place of considered comment and argument in the minds of scientists turned experts on all things.
For those who have more familiarity with the study of music, however, it is to be hoped that the piece 4'33" by John Cage is rather more well known, by reputation if not through an experience of it being performed. It is the prime example, in the work of Cage or of anybody else for that matter, of non-intentional music. Non-intentional music is somewhat of a hot potato amongst musical types and, I think, not always well understood. Many musicians seem to instinctively take against it for reasons they cannot find the words to express. This, in turn, leads to a sense of irrationalism on their part or, worse, the suggestion that their beliefs might simply be based in a conventionality that cannot be expressed nor that dare speak its name. In what follows I hope to use Cage and his paradigmatic composition as lenses to focus on non-intentionality in music and to bring forward some pertinent thoughts about it.
Philosophical Background
Conventional understandings of music (in the West) may be summarized in the following way: music is thought of as communicative, self-expressive and intentional. This, perhaps controversially, can be boiled down to a view of music as some kind of intended information or, essentially, knowledge. In contrast, the Cagian Turn that will be described in this essay is towards unintentional sound, interpenetration, chance and indeterminacy in music. This, as can be seen, is nothing to do with communication or expression and is expressly anti-intentional. If we see the conventional form of music as a way of communicating knowledge of some kind then Cage's conception of music may even be seen as swapping knowledge for wisdom of some kind instead. It is a way to approach sound aesthetically rather than the reproduction of a customary epistemology.
Cage himself was influenced by Eastern spiritual thinking early in his musical career in the 1940s. Under the Indian teaching he came to find important, at first through the teaching of Japanese Zen Buddhist, D.T. Suzuki, he found that music was regarded as something to calm the mind rather than as merely entertainment or as the communicative, expressive, intentional thing I mentioned above. In this view music takes on a more therapeutic guise. But more than this, in the tradition he learned of, music was to calm the mind in order to open it up to "divine influences". This need not be thought of religiously even if he received the idea in a spiritual context. Cage himself resolved that these influences were all the sounds of our environment, the sounds of nature, and nothing more "divine" than that. These influences can then be read as opening a person up to a loss of control, intention and determination since they are necessarily things co-existing with us in their own ways but not controlled by us. But we are getting slightly ahead of ourselves now and there seems to be a wider philosophical context that we can bring to bear here.
The Western mind, in recent centuries, might be taken as Descartes' image of the Cogito (from ‘Cogito ergo sum’, I think therefore I am). "I", the thinking subject, is in this viewpoint taken as the centre of the universe and me understanding myself and the things around me is regarded as enlightenment. I, and those like me, use this knowledge to control and manipulate the world around us. Music, our subject at this point in time, understood in this way of thinking cannot be anything other than an expression of this "I" and communication from and about it. It also stands to reason that this must be intentional since the Cogito is seen as the locus of rationality in a universe made rational by our ability, so it is claimed, to think, reason and see things clearly. So a music existing under this rubric must be rational, intentional and deliberative just as this worldview claims itself to be.
This was not the thought world from which Cage's new appreciation of music in the mid 1940s sprang. In Eastern philosophy, as we saw in the first section of this essay with Buddhism’s sister spirituality, Taoism, things are not thought to be in need of manipulation by autonomous subjectivities. Instead, all things exist in a relational harmony and the goal is balance. Hence the requirement for calmness and the letting go of control I mentioned previously. Music in this context becomes something different too, as we might expect, but it requires a philosophical and attitudinal change to appreciate this. Within this view personal likes and dislikes, which come from the ego, must be cast aside for they are literally the definition of a narrow mind. Instead, one must learn to see and hear things as just things. Based on the necessary philosophical change from West to East, the rational self of Western conception must be de-emphasized in terms of ego. What I like or dislike becomes unimportant and is replaced by a simple interest in things. As Cage phrases this for musical relevance: "Sounds should be honored rather than enslaved". This makes music primarily not entertainment or communication but discovery, an opening of self to possibility. Music, sound, is thus opportunity, not least for change.
Put crudely, then, we can contrast a Western controlling, manipulating vision based on information with an Eastern one of co-existing in harmony with all around. Apply this to music and divergent paths become apparent.
If you want a practical example of how this differing vision works in musical practice we need look no further than John Cage's regular work with the dancer and choreographer (and, incidentally, his partner since Cage was gay), Merce Cunningham. Cage wrote much music to go alongside dances arranged by Cunningham during his career but NOT as a musical accompaniment. Both said that they wrote work, whether dances or music, that was not written for the other but that just took place side by side at the same time. Cage did not write music to interpret the dancing and Cunningham did not compose dances to fit any of Cage's music. They just symbiotically existed in the same place, at the same time. This, it can be seen, imitates a view of the world in which lots of things just happen to co-exist simultaneously, each with their own causes and with any relation between them open to whatever interpretation can be given to it. A natural harmony of multiple things just being as they are then takes place.
Cage expresses this kind of thing as his ideal when he states that his wish is that art, and his music, "imitate nature in her manner of operation". That is, he wants his music to work as nature does, to be naturalistic rather than conventional. To understand this in musical terms we need to ponder for a while just how nature does work. Under modern scientific thinking this is not as a deterministic, mechanical universe but more chaotically and indeterminately such as that universe envisaged by the theories of quantum mechanics which are probabilistic in nature and question ideas of causality and determinism. For example, the so-called Uncertainty Principle questions the position, trajectory and momentum of things. The relevance of these ongoing scientific investigations to our understanding of music here seems to become more relevant the more our scientists explore, especially as fixity is questioned and chance or chaos come more to the fore.
But what follows from these philosophical ruminations? On the thinking that Cage takes up it stands to reason that here an art/life or music/life distinction vanishes. This is simply unnecessary if one now sees sounds not as communications or intentions but as simply things that exist in their own right. Sounds are just sounds and are a co-existing part of life. Thus, Cage expressed the desire that we just let sounds be themselves. So music need not be intentional sounds or sounds made with devices crafted with the intention of making music on them. So-called "noises" can be music or musically useful too. For if, taking this philosophy forward, "music is continuous" (since all sound is now music) then there can be no differentiation of sounds with some designated "musical" and others not. All are just components of a universal music of sound. Under a Cagian aesthetic the idea "musical sounds", as a distinction from other kinds of sounds, is annulled as nonsense. Life itself, the environment, is music. 4'33", to which I now turn, thus becomes the outworking of a theory of music as a theory of something much bigger than that and not simply a curiosity or a weird joke as many have often taken it to be.
4'33"
Upon its initial performance by the pianist David Tudor in 1952, John Cage's piece 4'33" (often reported, incorrectly, as a “silent piece”) was reported to have "infuriated and dismayed" the audience. Cage has it that someone even suggested they run him out of town. There was, so it is said, "uproar". We need to remember, in this case, that this first performance was given at an avantgarde concert attended by cutting edge artists of the time. So it is not as if the audience were the most conservative of folks. But why was there uproar as Tudor performed Cage's instructions to the letter, going through the three movements, one of 30 seconds, another of 2'23" and a third of 1'40" (making 4'33")? Some observations of mine:
- They expected something but got, as they thought, nothing. (This is actually not true. The piece had been meticulously composed by Cage, as he said, "note by note" using timings and measurements. It was not easily or simply conceived.)
- They expected what I described above as the musical conventions. They regarded music as intention but saw and heard none.
- They expected to understand the musical proceedings but didn't and so confusion was created.
- They were, as Cage would later say, "blinded by themselves".
- They expected intentional sound but, instead, got unintended sounds, the ambient noise of their surroundings. Thus, they were literally (and conceptually, ideologically) unable to hear the music.
At this point we need, once again, to be reminded of Cage's conception of music. This was that there is no difference between any sounds in terms of musical usefulness but also, in another discovery he made, between sounds and silence. This latter discovery was informed by entering an anechoic chamber meant to silence all sound. Whilst he was in it he realized he could still hear both the high-pitched noise of his nervous system and the lower pitched sound of his blood flow. But he also realized that the "silence" (which wasn't silent) had enabled these new sounds to be heard. The silence, in fact, he realized was a giving up of intention for in the silence there was still sound. Nothing yielded Something. The silence was a turning from noises made to noises that were just there, from intentional to non-intentional sound. Silence, thus, in his conception, was literally a change of mind, a new way to hear, a new way to conceive of things. I need to emphasize here that Cage equates music with sound. He says for example that "Music is continuous. It is only we who turn away." This is a recognition both of his discovery that nowhere is silent but also of how this same silence can open our ears to non-intentionality and the play of sounds as nature's music.
There is somewhere else that mentions a similar thought. In his famous book The Art of Noises from 1916 Luigi Russolo writes about health promoting "poeticized silences" made up of an "infinity of noises, and that these noises have their own timbres, their own rhythms, and a scale that is very delicately enharmonic in its pitches". He calls them "the smile of certain countrysides" for he is talking about the country and the natural world. This phraseology itself suggests just such a natural, non-intentional music as Cage refers to, something which in today's language we might refer to as "ambient noise".
John Cage himself thought that 4'33" was the music of the listener "rather than the composer's". In 4'33" the composer opens a metaphorical (and sometimes possibly an actual) door to new possibilities. He offers an opportunity to change your mind, to live in harmony with all the sounds around you, to hear differently. Cage contrasted this himself with record collections which, in his view, might be thought of as "the end of music". If you are following the line of thinking here you may be able to ascertain why.
Method
Some words about Cage's methodology may be in order here for context. Cage could not hear his music in his head. He did not follow a composerly method of hearing ideas and then trying to recreate them in sound nor did he even work experimentally with sounds until something clicked and he somehow fettled a piece from his sound sources. What's more, he signed off from traditional musical learning such as Solfege (which trains pitches), something he didn't want to learn as he saw it as a limitation on the possibilities of sound if they were reduced to training in tones. What you learn becomes the limits of your world. Meanwhile, in the mid 1930s, Arnold Schoenberg, the composer and music theorist, had been Cage's teacher for a year and told him that he had no sense for harmony and that this would eventually limit Cage like hitting a brick wall. Cage determined to bang his head against the wall forever if that became the case.
Cage's method was to compose pieces of music in order to hear what his music would sound like. He never heard this until or unless it was performed somewhere and, given the nature of his pieces, this would often be different on each occasion it was performed. So Cage wasn't composing with sounds as per the usual procedure. He wasn't constructing a building he had the plans for. He was constructing the conditions of intellectually conceived ideas in which sounds and combinations of sounds might take place. Sensory experience was a result of his intellectual, composerly activity. He did not know what the result of his ideas would be in anything except a general sense or in the sense that anyone can imagine how something might turn out. He didn't know what 4'33" would sound like on that day in 1952 when it was first performed. But he did compose and structure the conditions of its performance. The natural leeway built into many of Cage's works, both in terms of the instructions given for their performance and the equipment used (prepared pianos might not make consistent sounds, radios could splutter forth anything), only exacerbated the lack of foreknowledge he could have about how his compositions would sound. Cage's music was not about creating a physical copy of something in his head. It was something he arranged for without knowing what it would be, just as, in the specifics, nature is not known exactly in advance.
But this leads us to a question: If I construct an intellectual musical experiment, like Cage, to enable the hearing of sounds, am I then responsible for any and every sound that takes place within that experimental space that I conceived and designed in an intentional sense?
The answer, I think, has to be no. I think Cage would say no too since his compositions were expressly intended to explore and engage non-intentional sound. But if I am not responsible for every sound made in an intentional sense then we must accept that non-intentional sounds can play musical roles, at least, as a minimum, in such spaces. But once this door is opened it cannot be shut again for there is no reason to say that non-intentional sounds cannot be perceived or conceived as musical if a context is regarded as musical. So it is important to see that, even if one does not go as far as Cage in a philosophical sense, one has already admitted that non-intentional sounds have musical uses and can be musically perceived and conceived. We must admit that something like the self-generating modular synthesizer patch so common today can be musical even if the musician who arranged for it to take place is not personally making each sound happen. At a minimum, distance has been introduced between a composer and the composed in all its detail.
Intention
In speaking at a later point about 4'33" Cage mused that "...what they thought was silence... was full of accidental sounds". He described his musical purpose at one point as "I have felt and hoped to have led other people to feel that sounds of their environment constitute music which is more interesting than the music which they would hear if they went to a concert hall". The major intention of Cage was to introduce indeterminacy to music. This was far more radical a thing than chance operations in a piece's composition (Cage regularly used the Chinese I Ching or Book of Changes divination text to choose what would happen in his pieces at random and so remove the intentional element of a composition) for the latter could leave a piece of music still very deterministic. Chance operations only distance the composer from their likes, dislikes, thoughts and memories as composing is taking place. But it is indeterminacy of outcome or performance that changes the game, not knowing what you will hear. Indeterminacy is somewhere defined as an inability to foresee the greater part of the result of a composition or performance which is made up of non-intentional sounds. That silence played so great a part in John Cage's composing was therefore deliberate because, as already discussed, silence was equivalent to the hearing of non-intentional sounds.
This raises questions. Say one composes a piece using chance operations and that piece results in indeterminacy: in what sense can the music be said to be intentional? Surely one must, as a minimum, admit to levels or shades of intentional influence or even intent itself. One might want to speak of deferred intent. What is clear is that strategies can indeed by devised which threaten the intentional link some always seem to want to make. Improvisation is not one such strategy though for, by Cage's standards, it does not involve either chance or indeterminacy since an improvised performance involves performers constantly making educated, knowing choices, even if these are spontaneous. So it is not enough to improvise. One must take steps to design all the effects of personal likes and dislikes, memories and tastes out. This is just one reason why Cage's own pieces were so deliberatively designed for only by being so could he create the situation he hoped to produce.
There have been numerous performances of Cage's 4'33" and many have not been in accordance with Cage's clear aesthetic intentions in composing the piece. These were to encourage a change of mind from one way of hearing to another, to encourage the indeterminacy of non-intentional sounds, to focus attention. But in performances of the piece which have become pieces of theater or mimes or in which something distracting is done during the time period of the piece's performance this aesthetic intention is impugned. "Aha!" you may say. "So Cage did have intentions!" Well, indeed, yes he did. But these intentions did not extend towards the creation of intentional sounds so much as the creation of experimental (read: indeterminate) compositions. We must defer to this reality rather than steadfastly insisting that any intention at any stage of the composition or designing of a piece of music makes everything within the composition's space itself intentional. "Non-intentionality" in musical terms need not mean "to have no intentions whatsoever in any sense". This would be a reductio ad absurdum rendering such music composition impossible.
Cage quite clearly did have intentions - at the compositional level - since the purpose of his music was to have the purpose of mimicking nature in its manner of operation. He firmly believed that although 4'33" was written for any instrument, or combination of them, it did have a formal structure (which he had determined) and so was something which could potentially be violated. Regarding unfaithful performances of his pieces he said "I don't believe that a bad, thoughtless, undevoted performance of one of my works is a performance of it" (emphasis mine). So its as well here to remind people that Cage did not see his music as a con, a joke, a game, an elaborate hoax or as anything other than entirely serious musical compositions which explored composing non-intentionality at the level of performance using non-intentional sounds or silence (which are the same thing) to result in indeterminate musical outcomes. This is demonstrated not least in that within 4'33" as composed intentional sounds are themselves expressly not permitted. Cage had intentions for his works but these should be distinguished from intentionality within them.
Cage conceived that 4'33" could be performed at any length (but whilst keeping the same title). Yet, in contradistinction to the conventional notions of musical etiquette and practice, it attempts to express nothing and communicate nothing. Intentional as a compositional experiment, the sounds within its time frame are in no way intentional. It was designed to be so. The conventional ideas of music are, thus, subverted and refuted. This could then be said to be anti-music in which not just an art form but a philosophical tradition is exposed. Cage lost friends because he wrote this piece, or so he said, and so someone somewhere must have thought that something was at stake in 4'33" and maybe you reading this do too. But I do ask readers to consider one more thing here, the difference between cause and intention. All sounds have causes but not all sounds are intentional. That there are non-intentional sounds themselves should be a non-controversial thought. It is only their musical appropriateness that may bring them into disrepute with some who see music as purely an intentional matter. But how they justify that theoretically seems hard work indeed should they wish to justify their beliefs and their musical designations in the light of Cage’s Eastern-inspired practice of composition and attention to sound at all times and in all places.
3. In his book Empty Words, a collection of his writings from the mid to late 1970s, Cage has a paper entitled "The Future of Music". It is a fascinating paper to read and, to my contemporary ears, very prescient. Of course, the future of music is not a foreign subject to Cage for, since his first involvement with music in the 1930s, he had always had a far-sighted approach to what would be coming down the musical pipe and where we would be going. It was in 1937, in another writing of his, that he had predicted that music would become electronic and that then music, as we previously knew it, would change forever. He was, of course, utterly correct about that. Yet it is strange to read a paper first delivered in 1974 that is about the future for, of course, I writing this and you reading it are in it. This gives us an angle on Cage's thoughts and pronouncements that he couldn't possibly have had for we know what happened whereas he could only look and imagine. Nevertheless, Cage, as I have already suggested, seems to do remarkably well. Even from 1974.
In "The Future of Music" Cage is suitably modest. Were someone else writing the paper and not he they would have good reason to argue that Cage did his own fair share of heavy lifting to bring in the very future he talks about. When Cage refers to others (for he was surely not alone) who have worked to drag the future into the present he does not mention himself but, of course, he would have every right to do so. Cage was one of a number of those who worked early on with electronics. Before that he had invented the prepared piano, a modified kind of piano that survives to this day. He had pioneered the usage of other people's recorded music as something to be reused and altered in performance which later would be called sampling and become the basis for whole branches of electronic music. So Cage was no effete thinker sitting and observing what the future might be like as some academic philosopher of music. He was one of those making it, a practitioner, a doer. And not only did he work to smash the barrier between the acceptabilities of now and those that would be acceptable in the future, sometimes he erased the boundaries of musical acceptability too. Even today, in 2019, a time we would regard as much freer musically, there are those who tut and shake their head at Cage's name. His idea that all sound is music is anathema to them and still an unacceptable outrage.
And yet Cage in 1974 begins his paper thus: "For many years I've noticed that music - as an activity separated from the rest of life - doesn't enter my mind." He goes on to say that "Strictly musical questions are no longer serious questions" for him. There is something going on here and it has nothing to do with music as a discrete subject hacked off from life and treated as something you do in a sectioned off portion of it. Music and life are somehow intertwined here, inseparable. Cage, by this time already about 40 years into his entwinement with music, can look back at how music has changed over several decades. He can see how, when he started, people were still fighting for the idea that noises, then thought different to sounds, were something beyond the musical pail. He mentions Edgard Varèse and says he fought with him (against the musical establishment) on the side of noises. He recounts how, in the 1930s, the only notable piece of percussion music was a piece by Varèse himself ("Ionisation") but that, already by the 1940s, several hundred had appeared. This may strike us today as odd but I genuinely think that many of us know little of how radically music changed between the start of the 20th Century and when we perhaps came into it towards the latter part of it. We reading this now are the electronic music generation but Cage was one of those who made it happen and pioneered its introduction. He knew music before electricity whereas we do not. A musical comment of Cage's in his essay makes this point in a way I find vaguely amusing: "Sounds formerly considered out of tune are now called microtones."
So between the 1930s and 1970s Cage sees that music has changed and it was because of musicians being brave enough to step outside of its presumed boundaries and just do something different. This was not always an easy thing to do. Cage himself, for example, was often poor and relied on friends or sponsors to survive. His turn to indeterminate music did not help him in this because it made many a respectable musician (or potential sponsor) turn their back to him and regard him as persona non grata. But Cage was not for turning back and would struggle on with his own wayward, indeterminate thoughts in his head. Music for him, and those like him, was an exploration. Electricity made sounds and combinations of sounds possible that could not happen in the natural world and he was determined to explore them. There was a time this was called "experimental music" and Cage did not like this. But he came to accept that description for it. In "The Future of Music" he notes how the work done in the 40s and 50s presaged a change in the way we perceive both sounds and time and that aspects of both became tolerable that formerly were not. The picture as a whole is one of discovery, of widening boundaries. This, of course, will always scare those who perceive of themselves as protectors of the old or of orthodoxy and Cage, as the prime example, is a composer who divides people straight down the middle with his ideas and approaches. Cage notes that, in 1974, "Anything goes" but he states that, even then, "not everything is attempted."
One interesting distinction Cage makes here, and its one that has come very much into his future and our present, is the idea of music as process. Formerly, Cage reports, the guiding idea was "structure". "Structure," says Cage, "is like a piece of furniture, whereas process is like the weather." He means to suggest that structure is known and can be probed. It is defined and definite. Its about measuring and quantifying. You can look at a table or a chair and see where all the bits go and how they fit together. But with weather this isn't quite so. We can, of course, observe changes in it but we are never quite sure how it fits together or where the beginning and the end of the changes are. There is no sense, at any given moment, just exactly where we are. In structure we would know. We could pinpoint our place exactly on the table. Not so with weather, our symbol for process. Here we are forever in what Cage calls "the nowmoment" but we are never sure how that nowmoment relates to all the other nowmoments that shall be and shall pass away again. This metaphor, applied musically, changes things. This spatial sense seems to change music itself and alter time, a crucial aspect to music, and how you experience it. Imagine not knowing exactly where you are in your musical piece. Imagine being stuck in a moment and then working within that moment to negotiate your way to the next one. A musical structure is an object rigidly defined. But a process is not and neither can process be rigidly defined. Cage notes that "were a limit set to possible musical processes, a process outside that limit would surely be discovered." Process can include objects too but the reverse isn't true at all. If you are thinking this process conception is very much like a view of the world not conceived of as as discrete objects but as of all nature together as an environment, as was described above in the Tao Te Ching, I would very much agree with you.
Cage goes into a discussion of what he calls "closed-mindedness" and "open-mindedness" and this is a very important section of "The Future of Music". He calls the difference between these two "the difference between information about something... and that something itself." He quotes something written by Charles Ives to strengthen this point: "Nature builds the mountains and meadows and man puts in the fences and labels." Cage says that now "The fences have come down and the labels are being removed." That is, if we are open-minded. The closed-minded still take it that human beings should put up their artificial fences and apply their fabricated labels to the mountains and meadows of music as if they were inviolable elements. For the open-minded, as Cage sees it, they are not. "An up-to-date aquarium has all the fish swimming in one tank" is Cage's musical vision and this is a tank full of all the sounds and noises that are made, and that could be made, and the musics that could be made with them.
It is here that Cage surveys his musical history and gives reasons for why this spirit of musical open-mindedness has come about and they are interesting ones. First, because "many composers" took up battles for new musical expression, casting off old rules in the process. (This is where Cage could have used himself as a prime example but didn't quoting Henry Cowell and Varèse amongst others instead.) Second, Cage notes the changing technology which made changes in sound and therefore music inevitable. Cage is writing about a period in which tape recorders, sound systems, computers and the first properly usable synthesizers were invented. Of course such inventions would change music. Thirdly, Cage notes that even by the 70s there is what he calls "the interpenetration of cultures" happening. In some spheres, not least in our current moment at various places around the world, this is regarded as a bad thing and much political strife has ensued because of it. But, musically conceived, this has opened up cultures to other ways of conceiving things with the result that the whole is changed. It is to recognise that "music" is not how your culture conceives the rules for such a thing to be at all. Cage's final reason for the open-mindedness is that there are now more of us and more ways than ever to get in touch with each other. Cage could not have known in 1974 how this would exponentially increase. Speaking in his time and place writing his essay he was thinking of telephone and aeroplane. Now we can compose together live on electronic devices linked by wifi or over the Internet. We can musically collaborate with people we will never meet in real time. Cage's point is that when we are exposed to others it inevitably changes us. "Open-mindedness" is the inevitable result.
It is here that we begin to intuit again that, for Cage, music and life are not to be separated. There is some sense in which they are an indivisible organism. As the circumstances of life change, music will change. As in other places Cage will say we should be open to the life, and so the sounds, that we are living, so here the sense is that our changing lives will be changing music and we should not resist this. We should welcome the change and the new experience rather than, scared and timid, clinging on to rules, formulations and customs which give us a false and unnecessary sense of security. Cage's own change in attitude towards music came when he found he could no longer hold on to the orthodox view of music as communication. He found, he reports in an autobiographical statement, that people would sometimes laugh at music he intended to be somber. So for him the communicative model was a failure. Searching around, as already mentioned above, he found within the Buddhist tradition the notion that "Music's ancient purpose (was) to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences." In modern atheistic ears this sounds a bit queer yet we need to remember that Buddhists are not theists either and they believe in no god. So this cannot refer to actual divinities. The question then becomes what it could refer to and this is a riddle I think each musician should tackle for themselves. In any case, it is inescapable that one must recognise that Cage's musical appreciation after the mid 1940s is completely linked to his Buddhist education. Thus, I think, it is unarguable that this is why Cage sees music and life so entwined. But we do not need to be Buddhists ourselves to appreciate Cage's insights which can be taken on their own merits. This therapeutic use of music, if that is what it is, is much in evidence today (Cage's future) as ever more people listen to or play their own music as a means to relax, unwind or simply be taken out of the space in which their daily lives are going on.
Cage builds upon his reasons for open-mindedness and talks about "the non-political togetherness of people". In musical context he sees the future as being about the collapsing of distinctions between composers, performers and listeners. This has to be seen against a historic background in which these roles were rigidly defined and, indeed, separated. One strand here is the invention of indeterminate music (again, he examples others such as Feldman and Wolff as opposed to himself) which gives performers instructions about what to do but not necessarily what to play. So performers, those who have not written the music they play, then become part-time composers in playing within the instructions they have been given. The idea here is of "cooperation" which is another name for what is essentially the making of music socially. Again, and secondly, Cage mentions technology in this regard as it blurs the lines between the roles of composer, performer and listener. Cage, anachronistically to our ears, refers to the people of 1974 who could afford to buy a camera and so regard themselves as photographers. Today we have phones with music and video studios inside them. Should we not similarly regard ourselves as composers and performers? Cage emphasizes the social nature of this and, indeed, today "phone jams" are possible as people with the requisite technology play together to create music cooperatively on the fly. So Cage got this development bang on. A third way this distinction breaks down is, once again, because many diverse peoples have come into contact with each other. Places where these roles were never very distinct in any case have come into contact with those where they were and a reshuffling of the deck has taken place. Places where improvised music is normal have met those where it was not. And this changes, and opens, minds.
I stop my flow here to note something Cage says in passing. It is perhaps not widely known that John Cage was not a fan of recording his music or, indeed, of recorded music at all. He regarded recordings as, in some meaningful sense, dead music. He did not listen to much recorded music and was less than enthusiastic about the recording of his own works. Here he notes that "the popularity of recordings is unfortunate". He thinks this is so not only for musical reasons (think about all that is involved in a musical sense in the idea of setting one moment in time as a repeatable phenomenon) but also for social ones. The sense I get, and he may well make this explicit elsewhere, is that for him music is a living thing, a constant "nowmoment" or cornucopia of possible nowmoments. These happen live and cannot be captured or fettled into some perfect, preserved form. Nature, in its manner of operation, cannot be recorded so, therefore, if you think that music is all around us and alive because all sound is music then what could be the musical relevance of saving and repeating some of the sounds when an endless supply is always at hand? The captive form cannot compete with the living, unpredictable experience. Here in this case Cage argues that it is not the task of music to be collected together in some recording so that one person may experience it but it is, instead, the task of music to bring the actual people together, blur the roles of composer, performer and listener and bring all the people together instead. Thus, he will mention with favour the jam session and the music circus.
Cage goes on to note that musical changes have accompanied societal changes and, indeed, the world of the 1970s was not the world of the 1930s and 1940s. This societal change has only increased since Cage wrote and so has the music. Cage, like another electronic pioneer, Morton Subotnick, foresaw a time when ordinary citizens, not composers or musical performers, would have music-making possibilities in their own bags and pockets and, indeed, we are now in that time surrounded by more people of more differing backgrounds than ever before and with the possibility to converse and communicate musically with people from pretty much any country of the world. This cooperative, cross border music-making vision is something that chimes well with Cage's political beliefs as one who thought that the best government was the one that didn't govern (because it didn't need to). But there is another point embedded here in this which needs to be teased out. This is that while Cage conceived that "revolution remains our proper concern" he didn't think this was something we should plan or stop what we were doing to initiate. He thought that revolution was properly that thing that we were at all times already within. This is not simply a political point but a thoroughly musical one as well. It is, as he quotes M.C. Richards, "an art of transformation voluntarily undertaken from within". I wonder how many people conceive of their music as that or how many even realise that their music could be transformative? Is it the case that many are happy with their therapeutic twiddling, unaware of the power that lays in their hands? This is not thought of as an explosive, violent phenomenon but as revolution as evolution, the music that changes us and so the world.
You see, for Cage this all fits together as one organic whole. Music is not a discrete subject for him, governed by archaic and artificial man-made rules. Music is not something you set a time period aside for to do. Music is life and life is music. What you do in one, you do in the other. What you do musically reflects and affects who you are personally and, by extension, socially. Cage sees his band of future musicians as ready for a new world and as taking part in bringing it about. This is a very particular vision and it embroils music in things much wider than itself from the point of view of those who don't see things this way. So Cage is in an entirely different word from people, for example, who fetishize musical machines and instruments or regard what you use as important. We would not find him saying how great this equipment or that equipment is. He would not like the idea of electronic musicians being led by the nose by manufacturers who egg on the notion that unless you have this device then your musical life is somehow incomplete. Indeed, Cage expressly says in "The Future of Music" that "Musicians can do without government." Cage almost seems to suggest that the kinds of music you make will reflect the kind of person you are and the kind of society you envisage. He speaks of "the practicality of anarchy" and of "less anarchic kinds of music" that example "less anarchic forms of society". The message here seems to be that what you are and what you value will be shown through your music in an almost existential sense. Its as transparent as night and day if you have eyes to see. Do you value the authority figure, the "composer and conductor, the king and prime minister"? Is music for you about being dictated to from on high by the intentions of others? Or is it something else? Cage sides with social, non-authoritative, intercultural music, music that displays anarchic tendencies, for this is how he wishes the world to be.
But this should not be regarded as a dumbing down for Cage explicitly praises the virtues of musical hard work in "The Future of Music". There is a section of this essay in which Cage talks about "the demilitarization of language" which he regards as "a serious musical concern". The metaphor comes because language is regarded as syntactical in nature, like a marching military. Cage says that it dawns on him that "we need a society in which communication is not practiced, in which words become nonsense as they do between lovers, in which words become what they originally were: trees and stars and the rest of the primeval environment." But this concern is a matter of work for it will not come easily. As a former member of the military myself I know that such discipline and uniformity is taught for a reason. It is so in an emergency you will just do what is required without thinking. It has literally been drilled into you. But, when musically applied, this is seen negatively by Cage who, as stated, wants the intimacy of a lover's communication rather than the syntax of a military language. The response is work to make this so and the realisation that it may take Herculean efforts to bring it about. Cage notes that a number of his pieces are very hard to play and recounts how some of his commissions came with the request that they be easy to perform (which disappointed him) and his eyes light up at the players who, having realised what they are being asked to perform will be difficult, relish the opportunity. He praises those, such as David Tudor, who premiered many of Cage's works before he himself took up composing mostly electronic works himself, as one who worked hard to expand and modify his own playing techniques, in his case on the piano. Cage reserves special mention for the field of electronic music in which "there is endless work to be done". Cage gives his own definition of music (which he was often asked for) as "WORK". This, he says, is his conclusion 40 years into his musical career.
Cage closes his paper on the future of music with a story about Thoreau who, it seems, accidentally set fire to some woods in preparing some food. He ran to try and get help to put out the fire but the nearest settlement was too far away and he was too late and a decent area of the woods burned down. Yet Cage reports that Thoreau noticed that the people who finally came to dowse the flames were happy for the opportunity of an adventure (all except those whose property had burned down, that is). After this episode, Thoreau met someone skilled at burning brush and, observing his methods and talking to him, developed new ways for dealing with fires and fighting them successfully. He also listened to the noises fire made as it burned, remarking that you can hear this same sound sometimes in any small fire you might make yourself for domestic purposes. He also remarked that fire is not only to be regarded as a bad thing. Indeed, it is now more than ever widely understood that fire can serve a cleansing function in the environment. It ventilates the forest floor and provides a new start. It acts as a quite natural cleaning agent if left to itself in a world not bound up with fabricated and artificial human concerns.
But what's the musical application here you are wondering? It is that "everybody knows that useful is useful, but nobody knows that useless is useful, too." This is a reference to a saying of Zhuangzi in a book Cage received as he was writing "The Future of Music" and it seemed relevant to him. It is, as is normal for Cage, a reminder not to cast aside things because they are thought irrelevant to what is regarded as music conceived as a canon of ideas and practices, a discrete subject. It is a reminder that music is all sounds and not just some. I have reported here only a few of the ideas Cage mentions in his various essays yet his body of written works are overflowing with both ideas and directions for music to take in the future. Cage was truly prodigious, "a genius inventor" as his former teacher Arnold Schoenberg called him. It is from Cage that I get the notion that it is the spontaneity of the idea that is the primary currency of music and perhaps even the primary currency of life itself. Cage certainly, in terms of music and art more widely conceived, was one who saw little to stick to.
No comments:
Post a Comment