“Forerunners of Modern Music” (1949)

[59. Huan / Dispersion [Dissolution]. 6 IN THE THIRD PLACE, NINE AT THE TOP. Changing to 48. Ching / The Well.]

                I’ve decided to listen to Cage’s String Quartet in Four Parts (1950) while writing this post. Cage started working on it shortly after “Forerunners of Modern Music” was published, but nevertheless, I believe the work is similar in tone to this essay—it contains a sense of transition between new ideas and old. 

Cage spent the majority of 1949 in Europe on a Guggenheim fellowship (his first after several applications), where he met Pierre Boulez, discovered Satie’s Vexations (mentioned in this post), and expanded on the idea of the “gamut” technique in the String Quartet. As I look back over my notes, I realize that James Pritchett made the same observation, linking “Forerunners,” “Defense of Satie,” the String Quartet, and “Lecture on Nothing” (which I’ll examine next week), with the notion of stillness and static time, or, in one of Cage’s favorite aphorisms “to sober and quiet the mind.” Likewise the I-Ching reading has a notable connection – the two hexagrams are opposite sides of the trigram images of K’an, or water, and Sun, or wind. In the primary reading, the image is that of dispersion or dissolution, of wind driving over the water, dissipating or thawing, with implications of individual dissipation in the changing lines, while the inverse in the Well, transforms the image of water over wind, which is then read as wood, giving the image of a wellspring, and in this reading the well is:

…the symbol of that social structure which, evolved by mankind in meeting its most primitive needs, is independent of all political forms. Political structures change, as do nations, but the life of man with its needs remains eternally the same-this cannot be changed. Life is also inexhaustible. It grows neither less not more; it exists for one and for all. The generations come and go, and all enjoy life in its inexhaustible abundance.

“Forerunners” is a strange essay, written in choppy language with a host of scattered ideas, many of them flowing from section to section without any discernable logic. Cage admitted that this essay represented a “concentration of all that I [was] aware of at the time,” and the style is very much like a series of claims. In fact the final section even takes on the legalese of a patent specification, with section headings and footnotes. I feel it reads much like a David Foster Wallace essay, with countless allusions and terse citations or references to contemporary ideas, leaving the reader to decode the logic (or lack thereof) while parsing the essay.

The essay was written for a short-lived journal, The Tiger’s Eye, edited by Ruth and John Stephan in Greenwich Village, and it represents just one of the blossoming literary and artistic journals emerging from the New York School. Like the 8^th street Artist’s Club and the Cedar Tavern (which I’ll say more on next week), these small print art journals helped to solidify the aesthetic positions of many artists within the small lower Manhattan community. It was not until the famous 9^th Street exhibition by Leo Castelli in 1951 that the group received any outside notoriety, and by this point Cage and his circle were already beginning to depart from the fundamental tenants of mainstream Abstract Expressionism.

One interesting earlier contribution, the single issue entitled Possibilities (1947-8), was edited by Cage alongside Robert Motherwell and art critic Harold Rosenberg. This volume is notable for first introducing the drip or pour technique of Jackson Pollock, followed by a detailed essay on mythology by Andrea Caffe, and an early incarnation of Rosenberg’s definition of “Action Painting.”

In “Forerunners” Cage picks at three basic ideas. The first is a continuation of his material definition of music, echoing the earlier sentiments in “Defense of Satie” and “Grace and Clarity,” and repeating once again the “four characteristics of sound: pitch, timbre, duration, loudness, etc.” Cage reiterates many of the problems with atonality and neoclassicism (“The twelve tone row offers bricks but no plan. The neo-classicists advise building it the way it was before, but surfaced fashionably”), and then stops at an interesting midpoint—a pivot if you will—to the next section. Here he inserts an “Interlude” consisting of a single quote from the 13^th century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart:

“But one must achieve this unselfconsciousness by means of transformed knowledge. This ignorance does not come from lack of knowledge but rather it is from knowledge that one may achieve this ignorance. Then we shall be informed by the divine unconsciousness and in that our ignorance will be ennobled and adorned with supernatural knowledge. It is by reason of this fact that we are made perfect by what happens to us rather than by what we do.”

It is hard to tell if this quote has any direct bearing on the other arguments in the article, or if it was simply a striking passage that Cage was pondering at the time–I am inclined to think the latter. James Pritchett argues that the passage must be understood in the larger context of the specific Eckhart sermon Cage is quoting. By ignorance, Eckhart refers to a state of indifference or detachment from the inner will, a poverty of the mind that allows for a spiritual awakening, where silence and stillness allow for a moment of epiphany—hence “sober and quiet the mind.” This explains the following section, to an extent, where Cage reviews the concept of rhythmic structure in the context of stillness. In between, however, Cage jots down a number of ideas in a section titled “at random,” that point to the scattering of thoughts at this moment. Here are a few of the most relevant:

Music means nothing as a thing.

Imitating either oneself or others, care should be taken to imitate structure, not form (also structural materials and structural methods, not formal materials and formal methods), disciplines, not dreams; thus one remains “innocent and free to receive anew with each Now-moment a heavenly gift.” (Eckhart)

Then Cage states a new problem: “Before making a structure by means of rhythm, it is necessary to decide what rhythm is.” Pritchett argues that this is a key turning point in the concept of structural rhythm. Whereas before, rhythm was maintained as a ratio or divisibility of parts in conjunction with a gamut of sounds or collection of phrases (such as the connections to dance choreography mentioned earlier), here Cage points to an all-encompassing definition of rhythm in relationship to nature and time. The following passage hints at this new definition:

In the case of a year, rhythmic structure is a matter of seasons, months, weeks, and days. Other time lengths such as that taken by a fire or the playing of a piece of music occur accidentally or freely without explicit reference of an all-embracing order, but nevertheless, necessarily within that order. Coincidences of free events with structural time points have a special luminous character, because of the paradoxical nature of truth is at such moments made apparent. Caesuras on the other hand are expressive of the independence (accidental or willed) of freedom from law, law from freedom.

It seems that Cage was at  a tipping point here to move into a metaphysical or ontological realm again, but the final section outlined in the “claim” section reverts to a technocentric notion of sound and silence—the ever-present opposite pole of spiritualist rhetoric inherent in Cage’s aesthetic. Here he gives an early definition of the aesthetic of silence:

Claim:

Any sounds of any qualities and pitches (known or unknown, definite or indefinite), and contexts of these, simple or multiple, are natural and conceivable within a rhythmic structure which equally embraces silence.

Cage points out that “such a claim is remarkably like the claims to be found in patent specifications for and articles about technological musical means.” But how? Is a scientific definition of acoustics similar to a spiritual definition of ontological being?

The last section focuses on several ideas surrounding the synthetic or virtual space of music, which is what I think Cage was trying to articulate, but was not really ready to voice a clear opinion on. He mentions the work of Norman McLaren, the Canadian filmmaker who constructed abstract films and worked with sound phonography and other means of artificially producing sound, and he hints at the nascent magnetic tape technology—which I will focus on later. But one point stands out like a sore thumb in this final section, something that only recently has really been examined by art historians. Cage mentions briefly “sand-painting,” in reference both to a lecture he gave at the Artist’s Club in 1949 and to the repeated theoretical arguments surrounding Harold Rosenberg’s critique of Jackson Pollock. In the footnote to this comment, Cage says the following:

This is the very nature of the dance, of the performance of music, or any other art requiring performance (for this reason, the term “sand painting” is used: there is a tendency in painting (permanent pigments), as in poetry (printing, binding), to be secure in the thingness of a work, and thus overlook, and place nearly insurmountable obstacles in the path of, instantaneous ecstasy).

The “thingness of a work” is a crucial point here, as painters, particularly Pollock, were beginning to dissolve the grammar and medium-specificity of the actual act of painting, moving it into a performative environment. Pollock’s technique was in direct confrontation with Cage’s artistic program, presenting an opposition to the aesthetic of silence by positioning the individual self expression of action, motion, environment and space into an imprint on canvas; in essence a recording of an action or event that had many parallels to recording technology of sound—hence the concern with the virtual space of performativity or action. I’ll leave it at that for today, and end with my favorite example of “action painting,” the 1950 documentary on Jackson Pollock by Hans Namuth, with a very Halloween-esque score by none other than Morton Feldman (just imagine the Times review in 1951 that coined the term “Jack the Dripper”).

“A Composer’s Confessions” (1948)

[7. Shih / The Army, six in the fourth place, six at the top. Changing to 64. Wei Chi / Before Completion.]

I like the fact that the I-Ching keeps popping into the weekly conversation – today I was given Shih – the Army. I am going to spend a lot of time on labor and politics, and Muzak, something that seems (and was) antithetical to Cage’s artistic program. Let’s start with a little Muzak in the background. I am particularly fond of this little excerpt, which incorporates elevator noise into the short recording of some typical elevator music.

“A Composer’s Confessions” is a striking text for those only familiar with the main texts from Silence. Cage refused to publish it until the end of his life, primarily because of the final section, which, as many have noted, upset the traditional “Cagean Lore” history of his famous silent piece, 4’33”. The essay was an address at Vassar College, and it outlines his career in detail up until that point, ending with two pages of some “recent ideas” that paint a different history of the Aesthetic of Silence.

I’ll focus mainly on the latter aspects, but a few notes on the overall history section of the essay. This is the first point in Cage’s career where he “sums up” the past in a convenient autobiographical narrative, illustrating a narrative of progress from each step in his career toward the logical conclusion in the present, and ending with some possible future directions. We all tend to do this in our own lives, and for artists or anyone of note, the autobiographical narrative is an important and problematic aspect of a career to parse. On the one hand, autobiography does provide many cues into a life story that would be impossible for an individual to research with any efficiency, and on the other, it provides a very biased—perhaps the most biased—version of a career. In the case of Cage, this narrative was just beginning to find a tone, a rhythm, and a direction that points to the climactic period of the early to mid 1950s, when the New York School was formulating around Cage and his circle.

The idea of a logical imperative—that everything leading up to a definitive point has, in looking back, made complete sense—is a natural part of the human psyche, an attempt to “make sense” of all of the possible paths our lives could have travelled, and to read into connections between events and notice how they led to the present course of action. To blame Cage for fabricating just one story for his career is to miss the point. Yes, the version of Cage’s career presented in “Confessions” is biased toward certain directions, and yes, it selectively removes certain influences and other uncomfortable aspects of the dirty business of life—the colorful over the prosaic if you will—to create a narrative that is positive. Cage, or anyone for that matter, could easily illustrate an opposite narrative of “where it all went wrong,” as most do at other darker points in life, and I have a feeling that he did something to this effect in the years prior to “Confessions.”

You cannot remove psychology from biography, especially autobiography. They are in a sense, one and the same. The story of a life, of how a person came to be a person, is the story of the development of a personality, one who was affected by external circumstances, and through the living of a life, essentially fashioned into a narrative with a beginning (as a child I discovered music through my Aunt Pheobe….), a middle, (it was then that I discovered….) and an end (looking back I realized….).

What I believe Cage realized around this time was something akin to Joseph Campbell’s notion of the “monomyth,” the universal story of individual struggles and obstacles in the face of life, and he was coming to terms with his own career at an early checkpoint (he was then 36 years old). Campbell’s thesis has been thoroughly saturated in modern media, particularly in the epic stories of George Lucas and other blockbuster cinematic spectacles. The “Hero’s Journey,” which was outlined in The Hero With A Thousand Faces (1949), outlined a story common to all creation myths in civilization of an individual struggle with life’s obstacles and the parallel development of the individual psyche. This was heavily influenced by the psychologist Carl Jung and Jungian analysis, which attempts to interpret dreams and other symbolism in the unconsciousness in order to analyze an individual psychological condition and prescribe methods of spiritual treatment.

As I have said before, Cage was very close to Campbell, and it was Campbell that first introduced many of the spiritual texts that Cage first examined during the mid 1940s. There is no question that a key element in Cage’s search for meaning and psychological investigation had to do with his sexual identity, and that the repressive cultural politics in midcentury America forced a subdued rhetoric of passivity and nonconfrontation that can be read according to the lines of identity politics. I think at some point during this time Cage began to part with Campbell, who himself was typical of the “rugged American” masculinity that Cage would soon come to abhor. In addition, Campbell’s thesis was immediately attacked by mythologists and anthropologists as a simplistic reading of history—“armchair anthropology” if you will—and today it is generally relegated to the popular culture images of Luke Skywalker waving a laser around a fantasy land of glossy commercial kitsch.

The Hero's Journey

Just follow the blockbuster template - It's so easy!

 Despite all this I must say there is something very compelling about Campbell’s thesis. Being an academic, I am confined to relegate spirituality as but one aspect of the sum totality of a given research project, yet when I visited the solemn confines of the Campbell archives at Pacifica University along a quiet stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway near Santa Barbara, I could not help but feel a sense of calm while sifting through the extensive and methodical notes in his library.

The Joseph Campbell Library http://www.pacifica.edu/innercontent-m.aspx?id=2888

Anyways, focusing on “Confessions” again, I’ll sum up the narrative Cage chose to convey briefly, and then focus on the endpoint. Cage’s early career focused on piano and the tutelage of his Aunt Pheobe and other Los Angeles musicians. He considered a career as a minister, but instead went to Pomona college for a year, only to skip out and head to Europe to pursue a career as either a writer or architect. Here he discovered modern music and painting, and returned to Los Angeles to attempt a career in one of the two. He organized a series of lectures in Santa Monica on contemporary painting and music, and through this met pianist Richard Buhlig, who taught him some composition fundamentals and then suggested he meet Henry Cowell. After a botched performance of an early work in Carmel, CA, Cage decided to move to New York to study with Cowell and Schoenberg pupil Adolph Weiss, and returned to Los Angeles to study with Schoenberg in 1935. He “discovered” percussion and the freedom it allowed for the “sounds as sounds” thesis I have mentioned, and looked toward new technological means for creating sounds. At the Cornish school in Seattle he “invented” the prepared piano and experimented with radio broadcast in the first Imaginary Landscape composition, and it was through modern dance choreography and several commissions that he decided to approach music via rhythmic structure. He spent several years attempting to establish a center for experimental music to no avail, made a “stop in Chicago” to teach at Moholy-Nagy’s School of Design, and, riding the popular appeal of his radio play The City Wears a Slouch Hat (mentioned in this previous post), went on to New York “expecting to be received with open arms by the highest officers of the Columbia Broadcasting System.” After several successful years, Cage then asked himself the question: “To what end does one write music?”

Here we are first introduced to several of the spiritual texts Cage read during his lifetime. It is difficult if not impossible to parse all of the intersections that these texts have with the aesthetic of silence here, but it is important to note that they were all loosely and indiscriminately applied to whatever particular concerns Cage had at any given period in his career. In many ways they functioned much like the colorful aphorisms in Silence, anecdotes that loosely illustrate, but do not define, a personal autobiographical aesthetic position. Cage gave a special consideration to Jung’s The Integration of the Personality (the first English translation from 1939), such as the following quote:

I began to read Jung on the integration of the personality. There are two principle parts of each personality: the conscious mind and the unconscious, and these are split and dispersed, in most of us, in countless ways and directions. The function of music, like that of any other healthy occupation, is to help to bring those separate parts back together again. Music does this by providing a moment when, awareness of time and space being lost, the multiplicity of elements which make up an individual become integrated and he is one.

It is at this point that the essay takes a dramatic turn. On the following page, Cage firsts introduces the term “disinterestedly,” which rings a bell for anyone familiar with the aesthetic of silence, but explains the term as making music “without concern for money or fame but simply for the love of making it.” He follows with a number of opinions: he does not believe that any particular finished work is that important, does not sympathize with the idolization of masterpieces, posterity, aesthetics, ideas of genius, self-expression, and art appreciation. Okay, fairly standard stuff for any up and coming artist attempting to delineate a boundary between their work and the past. But the final two pages take a different turn somewhat unusual for Cage. He begins with an article in the Sunday Times, “Composing for Cash,” which profiles composer Roy Harris. In the article, Harris explains, “I have proved that a composer of serious music can get paid for his work,” and goes on with a very pragmatic justification for the merit of paying a composer for his output.

Cage attacks this position with a level of consumer critique unparalleled in later essays, claiming it echoes the “rising crescendo of modern industrialism,” and represents “sheer materialistic nonsense.” He then goes on to mention the contemporary strike of the American Federation of Musicians, headed by union boss and likely mobster, the Chicago-based James Petrillo.

AFM

James Petrillo 

Cage would have been intimately familiar with the musicians strike in 1942 while in Chicago. The claims were fairly reasonable: unions demanded that record companies pay better royalties for recordings. Until this point, record “labels” as they are known today, treated the final recording product, and the recording artist, as a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporate blanket of the radio communications industry. The early history of record companies such as the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) is a dark and troubled story of corporate and military interests, and the final product—musical recordings or otherwise—was hardly central to their corporate agendas, which were primarily focused on telecommunications and broadcast technology for the military. All the same, union interests suddenly shook up an otherwise complacent subsidiary of larger corporate interests, and for a brief period, musicians refused to record for labels. The success of the earlier ban prompted a second labor mobilization in 1948 by Petrillo in response to the Taft-Hartley Act, and lasted for most of 1948.

Cage, in a statement not unlike the earlier proclamation in “Other People Think” discussed previously, issued the following statement:

Since Petrillo’s recent ban on recordings took effect on the New Year, I allowed myself to indulge in the fantasy of how normalizing the effect might have been if he had the power, and exerted it, to ban not only recordings, but radio, television, the newspapers, and Hollywood. We might then realize that phonographs and radios are not musical instruments, that what the critics write is not a musical matter but rather a literary matter, that it makes little difference if one of us likes one piece and another another; it is rather the age-old process of making and using music and our becoming more integrated as personalities through this making and using that is of real value.

To equate a political and economic labor movement to Jungian analysis may be a stretch, but in my mind it is in line with the majority of Cage’s sharp intellectual turns. Politics, expression, psychology, economics, they all blend into a general discourse concerned with the individual ontological searching, and hearing, or audition, is the eventual ground Cage comes back to in the end.

But there is more, as many have noted. In the next section, Cage goes on with some new compositional ideas:

However, as long as this desire exists in us, for new materials, new forms, new this and new that, we must search to satisfy it. I have, for instance, several new desires (two may seem absurd but I am serious about them): first, to compose a piece of uninterrupted silence and sell it to Muzak Co. It will be 3 or 4 ½ minutes long—those being the standard lengths of “canned” music—and its title will be Silent Prayer. It will open with a single idea which I will attempt to make as seductive as the color and shape and fragrance of a flower. The ending will approach imperceptibility. And, second, to compose and have performed a composition using as instruments nothing but twelve radios. It will be my Imaginary Landscape No. 4.

As Douglas Kahn has famously argued in Noise Water Meat, the idea for work entitled Silent Prayer could have come from another lesser-known source in Cage’s existential library: Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy. Kahn points to two chapters in the book, one titled “Silence,” and the other “Prayer.” Kahn's argument is a bit too dense to summarize in this already long post, but I will leave it here with two quotes from each chapter to spark the imagination of anyone who may be interested in the connection.

From the chapter “Silence”

The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire—we hold history’s record of all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence. That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio, is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the ear-drums. It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions—news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but merely create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas. And where, as in most countries, the broadcasting stations support themselves by selling time to advertisers, the noise is carried from the ears, through the realms of phantasy, knowledge and feeling to the ego’s central core of wish and desire. Spoken or printed, broadcast over the ether or on woodpulp, all advertising copy has but one purpose—to prevent the will from ever achieving silence. Desirelessness is the condition of deliverance and illumination. The condition of an expanding and technologically progressive system of mass production is universal craving. Advertising is the organized effort to extend and intensify craving—to extend and intensify, that is to say, the workings of that force, which (as all the saints and teachers of all the higher religions have always taught) is the principal cause of suffering and wrongdoing and the greatest obstacle between the human soul and its divine ground.

and from the following chapter, “Prayer,” which goes a bit further then Cage:

“What God is in Himself,” “God and his mysteries as they are in themselves” —the phrases have a Kantian ring. But if Kant was right and the Thing in itself is unknowable, Bourgoing, De Condren and all the other masters of the spiritual life were engaged in a wild goose chase. But Kant was right only as regards minds that have not yet come to enlightenment and deliverance. To such minds Reality, whether material, psychic, or spiritual, presents itself as it is darkened, tinged and refracted by the medium of their own individual natures. But in those who are pure in heart and poor in spirit there is no distortion of Reality, because there is no separate selfhood to obscure or refract, no painted lantern slide of intellectual beliefs and hallowed imagery to give a personal and historical colouring to the “white radiance of Eternity.” For such minds, as Olier says, “even the ideas of the saints, of the Blessed Virgin, and the sight of Jesus Christ in his humanity are impediments in the way of the sight of God in his purity.” The Thing in itself can be perceived—but only by one who, in himself, is no-thing.

I leave it there with this final question: what do these statements have in relationship to this?

Defense of Satie (1948)

  [25. Wu Wang / Innocence (The Unexpected), six in the third place, nine in the fifth place. Changing to: 30. Li / The Clinging, Fire.]

Before I say anything, I encourage anyone reading this to listen to the following Satie example, Vexations (ca. 1893). The excerpt is ten minutes of a performance that, for those unfamiliar with the work, is projected to last a little over 24 hours.

In addition, I thought I would include two excerpts from the I-Ching reading. These struck me as very Cagean mottos, dealing with nature, time, and unimpedeness:

25. Wu Wang/Innocence (The Unexpected)

Ch'ien, heaven is above; Chên, movement, is below. The lower trigram

Chên is under the influence of the strong line it has received from above,

from heaven. When, in accord with this, movement follows the law of

heaven, man is innocent and without guile. His mind is natural and true,

unshadowed by reflection or ulterior designs. For wherever conscious

purpose is to be seen, there the truth and innocence of nature have been lost.

Nature that is not directed by the spirit is not true but degenerate nature.

Starting out with the idea of the natural, the train of thought in part goes

somewhat further and thus the hexagram includes also the idea of the

fundamental or unexpected.

30. Li/The Clinging, Fire

THE IMAGE

That which is bright rises twice:

The image of FIRE.

Thus the great man, by perpetuating this brightness,

Illumines the four quarters of the world.

Each of the two trigrams represents the sun in the course of a day. The two

together represent the repeated movement of the sun, the function of light

with respect to time. The great man continues the work of nature in the

human world. Through the clarity of his nature he causes the light to spread

farther and farther and to penetrate the nature of man ever more deeply.

I’ve just returned from a brief backpacking trip to the Ansel Adams Wilderness, so this post may float a little off the academic path, at least for a few moments. But don’t worry, Adorno is lurking around the corner to ruin the party. To give you an idea of my mood, here are a few of my favorite photos I snapped on the trip:

Okay, so now to Satie. Cage’s first major involvement with Satie (as far as I know) was in 1948, when he helped organize a series of concerts at the infamous Black Mountain College summer session. The essay was delivered to a group of German refugees, and many have pointed to the startling tirade against Beethoven as one of the most significant aspects of the essay, but I consider the argument set forth here a natural extension of ideas already covered in the previous posts. This essay should really be considered in parallel to “A Composer’s Confessions” (which I’ll cover next week), as the two “midpoint” essays in Cage’s ontological excursion toward the aesthetic of silence. If we weed out the polemic against Germanic music (and save it for another day), there are a number of significant points here of interest.

To briefly summarize, the essay is not really about Satie. Instead, it is an extension of the ideas set forth in “Grace and Clarity” on the ontological status of music. Cage opens the essay with a problem: contemporary music is burdened with the weight of a classical tradition, and in turn desperately seeks out a sense of “newness” or originality. Without an established tradition, or, moreover, without a cultural basis for understanding sonic continuity, listening audiences are without a “ground” to critique or even interpret new works. As he then explains:

Now I would like to ask and answer the questions: What kinds of things in art (music in particular) can be agreed upon? and What kinds of things can not be agreed upon? [sic] For I suspect that our admiring two opposite positions, that of the traditional artist and that of the individualist, indicates a basic need in us for this pair of opposites. We need, I imagine, an art that is paradoxical in that it reflects both unanimity of thought and originality of thought.

This is an articulate point, and is often overlooked in Cagean aesthetics. Without a reference point to a tradition, a listening subject has no basis to interpret a work. It was this very problem that drove Cage to seek out larger existential questions. After Cage’s divorce from Xenia Kashevaroff in 1945, he underwent a very dark period of personal struggles with sexual identity. This, coupled with a struggle with the concept of interpretation in music led to an extensive period of “soul searching.” Guided largely by the mythologist Joseph Campbell, Cage read voraciously any and every spiritual text that might give him some insight into very complex questions of interpretation, meaning, structure, form expression, etc. – all concepts with no real boundaries and lots of intellectual circularities.

As my advisor famously put it recently, “In some academic circles, aesthetics is a dirty word,” and the questions Cage poses in “Defense” are decidedly conventional for a “struggling” artist coming to terms with interpretation and creation. Largely because of people like Cage, there are countless methods for critical investigation of artworks, be it material, sociological, identity-based, or otherwise that provide an endless series of arguments for the means, use, and critique of artworks, and to an extent, these can all be broadly defined as “aesthetic” (although even as I say this, some may cringe). In semiotics, there is a brilliant definition by Jean-Jacques Nattiez of the “grey” zone between intention and interpretation that really does help to elucidate the problem all artists eventually have to come to terms with. In music in particular, the specific “meaning” of a work is  perhaps the most difficult to articulate.

The majority of aesthetic discussions focus on the sociological and material merits of musical artworks. For example, a piece of music that is shown to have an articulate structure or form, or provides a sense of lyrical or emotional expression, is in many circles (even today) considered a well-crafted and successful work. Sociological critiques argue that “good” music is the product of a society's normative expectations, and that the interplay between economic and cultural forces ultimately dictate societal tastes. Cage outlines something similar to the former critique in the next section. He is working through a basic definition of music that is startlingly new. Music is not just sound, but the continuity of sound, as he observes, and structure is the divisibility into parts, while form is the “morphological line of the sound-continuity.” Cage provides an example of this categorical distinction: “we all have in common the fact of our structure as human beings, but the way in which we live, that is, the form of our life, is individual. The continuity of actions for each one of us is different.”

Cage then makes several comparisons to linguistic structure in poetry with his ontological example of a human being. Here his argument gets a little obscure:

We are left here with the question of structure, and here it is equally absurd to imagine a human being who does not have the structure of a human being, or a sonnet that does not have the relationship of parts that constitutes a sonnet. There may, of course, in life be dogs rather than human beings – that is, other structures – just as in poetry there may be odes rather than sonnets. There must, however, as a sine qua non in all fields of art and life, be some kind of structure – otherwise chaos. And the point here to be made is that it is in this aspect of being that it is desirable to have sameness and agreed-upon-ness.

Just what constitutes the “sameness” or “agreed-upon-ness” is a very difficult question to parse in regards to contemporary music. In the classical tradition, music could be analyzed and interpreted according to the normative structure of the tonal harmonic language. Works were measured against this standard as progressive or conservative, innovative or outdated, etc. Contemporary music, according to Cage has undergone a new “contemporary awareness of form,” that is “static, rather than progressive in character,” and as he argues, the only defining characteristic of contemporary music is, once again, time lengths.

I have already spoke some on the concept of duration and ratio in regards to choreomusical relationships and Cage’s basic material definition of music, and Cage reminds his audience once again the mantra that never leaves his writings:

Sound is characterized by its pitch, its loudness, its timbre, and its duration, and silence, which is the opposite…is characterized only by its duration.

The following portion of the essay is perhaps a little regressive. Cage posits Webern and Satie as the forerunners of contemporary sonic awareness of duration, and proceeds to really dig into Beethoven. here are a few choice excerpts:

Was Beethoven right or are Webern and Satie right? I answer immediately and unequivocally, Beethoven was in error, and his influence, which has been as extensive as it is lamentable, has been deadening to the art of music.

…Beethoven represents the most intense lurching of the boat away from its natural even keel. The derivation of musical thought from his procedures has served not only to put us at the mercy of the waves, but to practically shipwreck the art on an island of decadence.

I think Cage’s bias here really obscures an otherwise good argument. Beethoven, or any tonal harmonic composer for that matter, was without a doubt conscious of continuity and duration. Rhythmic structure is as much a part of the Moonlight Sonata as it is in Music of Changes. If anything, Cage would have benefited by proposing an inclusive rather than exclusive analytical model for the basic ontological definition of music. But he, like any other artist, had an agenda, an ideological camp, and a musical career to pursue, and his modernist push for differentiation from the past is hardly unique. His examples in the next section are rather difficult to parse. He gives two examples from Webern and Satie, which were probably played during the lecture. Luckily, like everything nowadays, these are easily available on youtube:

Then he goes on to examine the different characteristics of the two works: Webern focuses on brevity and continuous invention, whereas Satie focuses on the banal and cliché. Cage’s prescriptive analysis of Satie focuses on time-structures, and he provides an extensive outline of the proportional relationships between phrases in the Satie excerpt. In the end, however, I think Cage lost his argument here and elsewhere. His reading of other composers, particularly his confidants in the New York School, was based solely on his individual ideas on the aesthetic of silence. Proportional notation, or rhythmic ratios, were the defining characteristic of sound continuity, and the material held within – the actual sonic phenomena – were of less importance than the framing structure of duration.

This is a tenable basis for defining music, and we can see Cage leaning toward this idea in “Defense.” He ends the essay by stressing the prescriptive or normative in statements such as “Structure can and ought to be agreed upon, and the underlying necessary structure of music is rhythmic.”

The last thesis statement is again a little convoluted:

The function of a piece of music and, in fact, the final meaning of music may now be suggested: it is to bring into co-being elements paradoxical by nature, to bring into one situation elements that can be and ought to be agreed upon – that is, Law elements – together with elements that cannot and ought not to be agreed upon – that is, Freedom elements – these two ornamented by other elements, which may lend support to one or the other of the two fundamental and opposed elements, the whole thereby forming an organic unity.

It is hard to stomach the idea that Cage was, at one time, pushing for a model of organicism that seems so antithetical to the aesthetic of Silence, but in effect, he was, and did. What is interesting here however, is the final paragraph, where Cage seems to have caught his own temporary slip into ultramodernist rhetoric:

Music then is a problem parallel to that of the integration of the personality: which in terms of modern psychology is the co-being of the conscious and the unconscious mind, Law and Freedom, in a random world situation. Good music can act as a guide to good living. It is interesting to note that harmonic structure in music arises as Western materialism arises, disintegrates at the time that materialism comes to be questioned, and that the solution is rhythmic structure.

But is it? I have been listening to Vexations while writing this post, and the only discernible rhythmic structure is the phrase articulations of the performer. For those familiar, this was the piece that Cage discovered while on a trip to Europe in 1949, and later staged in a famous concert in New York in the 1960s. But that is for another day. 

For More New Sounds (1942)

[33. TUN / Retreat, nine in the third place and nine at the top. changing to: 45. Ts'ui / Gathering Together (Massing)]

We turn now to Chicago, where, for a brief period, Cage lived with his wife Xenia before moving on to New York. Cage found a small job at the Chicago School of Design, founded by Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy in 1938. The gig wasn’t as great as Cage thought, and it took some time for Moholy-Nagy’s school to really get going; today it is incorporated into the Illinois Institute of Technology. Cage and Xenia were never really fond of Chicago. In the 1940s it was still a growing industrial city, emerging from the crime and corruption vividly portrayed in books like The Jungle. Cage noted to several friends that this was really a “filthy city,” and their studio loft was constantly covered in industrial soot. I know several friends in downtown Los Angeles that have to deal with diesel soot, and I cannot imagine how many carcinogens were spit out of the regulation-free factories of the 1940s.

Cage and Xenia set up in a loft just south of downtown on East Cermak Road. They decorated the space (which cost them a whopping $5 a month) with bamboo mats and blinds, covered the walls in burlap, and painted the floor blue.  All of the furniture was homemade, painted white with natural varnish on the tabletops. I only wish a picture of the space survived. The building has since been demolished, but you can get a sense of what their living space was like from the building across the street at 330 Cermak:





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Anyways, around this time Cage wrote a number of articles for Modern Music. Much like Dance Observer, just reading through this magazine paints a portrait of midcentury American contemporary music like no other. I am particularly fond of George Antheil’s reports from the “Hollywood Front,” where he mockingly provided a military-esque correspondence report on the Hollywood film music industry. Minna Lederman, the journal editor, was unwavering and charismatic, and she constantly solicited reports and reviews from composers rather than critics. Almost everybody chimed in at some point, and Cage was particularly active in the mid 1940s – probably to build a name for himself.

I picked one essay from the collection published in the Kostelanetz anthology, because it again focuses on Cage’s main concerns at the time: technology, sound, acoustics, engineering, and, of course, percussion. By this point Cage had a battery of percussion works, and was skilled at organizing ensembles and promoting concerts. In fact, most of his income from the period came from performing, as the teaching job at the School of Design really only amounted to a few small courses for first-year design students. The essay reads a lot like Cage’s “Credo,” with information on new technological approaches to synthesizing music. Here, as in many points in Cage’s writings, we are given some startlingly astute predictions. Cage first cites an article from 1939 from the Journal of the Acoustical Society, that notes:

“what appears to be needed is an instrument similar to that developed by Bell Telephone engineers for the artificial production of speech, - a type of “Voder” that not only can imitate or suggest the sounds of nature…but can produce myriads of sounds heretofore unheard of or even imagined. Some of these new sounds fashioned from thermal noise could be made definitely musical by filters that select tonal bands forming a harmonic series; varied transitions from the tonal and harmonic to the atonal and inharmonic could be made continuously or by discrete steps.”

Then Cage goes on to note:

“Many musicians, the writer included, have dreamed of compact technological boxes, inside which all audible sounds, including noise, would be ready to come forth at the command of the composer. Such boxes are still located in the future.”

Statements like this in Cage’s writings are interesting to deal with. After World War II, the gradual development of electronic synthesis technology eventually led to the modern day electronic, and later digital synthesizer, and the basic concept of electronic music synthesis followed the model outlined by Cage. But what do we take from a statement looking back at history? Was Cage incredibly good at predicting the future, or was he just really good at research, echoing the basic conclusions that most engineers and scientists at the time agreed upon?

The idea of a compact “technological box” in and of itself is not really that path-breaking, if you think about it. Already there were many small electronic devises at work in the daily lives of Americans. Yes, there was certainly a drastic difference between rural and urban technology, but only in breadth. Farming technology had drastically improved, and mechanical engineering improvements were readily adopted by progressive businessmen seeking to make a greater profit in all areas of commerce. In the early days of electronics, devices were easily understood by anyone with a basic knowledge of circuitry and a good eye for mechanical engineering, traits that certainly describes Cage.

What I am hinting at here in a very poor way is a bigger concept that academics stay up late at night worrying about when discussing technology: determinism. I have other stuff I want to cover today, but I’ll dance around this for a moment in a simplistic manner. Take the example of Steve Jobs, whose recent death has sparked an endless series of reminiscences and reviews of his career and its effect on our daily lives. I don’t think anyone would argue against the social and economic impact of Apple products, but as many have noted, the ascendency of Apple was as much the result of Jobs’ cunning business skills as the products themselves. Apple notoriously and shrewdly cornered markets, adopted and reconfigured competitor’s technologies, and maintained an unbelievable profit margin and dividend payout for its shareholders.

Design and brand-loyalty were hallmarks of Jobs’ business strategy, but in my mind this was really just a business strategy, not a way of life. The real Jobs was very un Zen-like, despite the carefully crafted public persona. But that’s not really a criticism, Jobs acted no differently than any other successful businessman. I am obviously not much of an Apple fan, and I would be curious to find out what Cage’s opinion of the brand was. I favor technological devices that are malleable, that can be reconfigured to my choosing and, in a sense, mine. Devices are extensions of ourselves in a way, and Apple’s intuitive interface is interesting, but it is just one of many successful designs that happened to push out the competition.

Anyways, back to the question: when we look back on a new technology, how do we look back on it? What does it mean for something to be “revolutionary,” and what role do individuals have in the construction of new technologies? The iPod really did change music consumption habits, effectively destroying the traditional corporate model of copyright, but what role should we give a particular product in this revolution? The iPod was no different than many other portable devises on the market, it was simply the easiest to navigate and the one best marketed.

So we are back to Cage’s “technological box” in 1942. Was this really a revolutionary statement? I don’t think so. Cage did work closely with Robert Moog in the 1960s, but he really did not have much to do with the modern day keyboard synthesizer or any of the technologies that eventually dominated mainstream music culture in the 1970s.  In fact, the idea of a keyboard interface was antithetical to Cage’s artistic program – he criticized this approach in “Credo” explicitly, noting “most inventors of electric musical instruments have attempted to imitate eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instruments, just as early automobile designers copied the carriage.”

Again Cage returns to one of his fundamental material dictums in the end: that rhythm is the only unifying element with any new approach to musical composition, be it percussive or electronically synthesized:

“The sounds cannot be organized through reference to an underlying fundamental tone since such a tone does not exist. Each sound must be considered as essentially different from and independent of every other sound…because of the nature of the materials involved, and because their duration characteristics can be easily controlled and related, it is more than likely that the unifying means will be rhythmic.”

The rest of the essay discusses the idea of  “experimental radio music,” which stemmed from Cage’s little-known project for the Columbia Radio Workshop in 1942. Cage composed music for a radio play by poet and author Kenneth Patchen entitled “The City Wears a Slouch Hat.” This was a particularly unique collaboration in Cage’s career – for an extensive history of the collaboration, I defer to James Pritchett’s excellent liner notes here. I bring up this example because it is the only point in Cage’s career when he develops the idea of sound “effect.” I can play with this term a few ways here: “Sound” effect, and, lastly “sound effect,” to give you an idea of what I am thinking about. Sound design and sound effect technology was still in its infancy in the 1940s, but it was already making drastic technological strides.  

There were many tricks and gimmicks that are still used today to mimic commonplace sounds, and what I find interesting – and what Cage hinted at here – was the disparity between the actual sounds created and their application in the narrative soundscape. This is something sound theorist Michel Chion calls “synchresis,” the indelible weld produced between a sound and visual action when they occur simultaneously. For here, any number of sounds can work, regardless of whether they actually occur this way in nature. The best example is the punch in a fight scene. ADR and Foley artists have slowly perfected the crunch sound over the years, and the bizarre array of objects that they actually smash on a sound stage has little in common with the sounds that occur when someone is punched in real life.  

Cage later recalled walking around the “Loop” in downtown Chicago listening to the city soundscape in order to get ideas for the texture he wished to convey in “Slouch.” Every time I have visited the Cage archives at Northwestern, I try and take a moment to listen to the same sounds in this area. Here are some YouTube clips of the area today (I especially like the second one from a "noise activist"):

I found a small clip from the play, and luckily it is from one of the most bizarre sections. Patchen was going through a period of deep depression and suffering from a crippling back injury, and the play is dark, serene, and confused. The narrative follows a protagonist that wanders the city, and the work emerges as a surreal amalgam of pulp, noir and science fiction. But listen closely to Cage in the background, and remember, all of this was performed live in a studio, with very primitive sound effect technology. For every sound, be it a phone ringing, a baby crying etc., Cage and his ensemble had to cue individual record recordings, dropping the needle at just the right moment to create the sound.

Four Statements on the Dance, Part I

[60. Chieh / Limitation, nine in the first place, six in the third place. Changing to 48. Ching / The Well]

The four statements on the dance printed in Silence are the few essays by Cage in his major writings that discuss dance choreography. The final two statement briefly discuss the Cage/Cunningham aesthetic, and as I see it, there is a logical outgrowth from Cage’s ideas on temporal mapping of musical duration and the choreomusical relationships in the Cage/Cunningham dance event. Cage’s writings on the dance in general ultimately deferred to Cunningham, particularly later in life, and in these essays Cage is primarily concerned with temporal structures. I think I’ll stick to the first two essays today, because the latter two deal with a different concept of choreomusical relationships.

“Goal: New Music, New Dance” (1939)

This is one of three contributions Cage made to the small magazine Dance Observer, and was part of a series “Percussion Music and Its Relation to the Modern Dance,” which included articles by Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, Franziska Boas, and William Russell. Dance Observer was, like many instrument or arts journals, a way for artists to communicate cross-country informally, and to discuss current aesthetic and ideological issues of concern to working artists. Quirky and informal at times, the magazine is one of the best source materials for documenting the American dance world from 1934-60 that I have found. As I read again through some of the “postcards from Europe” by Cunningham in the 1940s, brief announcements of concerts, acrid reviews by stuffy husbands of dancers (Joseph Campbell and George Beiswanger are among my favorites), I can almost feel the tense atmosphere of excitement and intellectual curiosity that was fueling the modern dance scene in America. In addition, there is some brilliant photography of some of the most important midcentury American dancers. Here are a few of my favorites:

From the first Cage/Cunningham collaboration, Credo in US (1942)

The cover for the 1944 edition featuring Cage's "Grace and Clarity" 

From the premiere of Martha Graham's Appalachian Spring

Founded by composer and choreographer Louis Horst in 1934, Dance Observer regularly invited composers to engage in the dialogue on contemporary dance. Cage’s contribution to the series on percussion music can be traced back to Cowell’s 1937 article in the journal “Relating Music and Concert Dance,” where he notes that “some of the best modern dances have a percussion accompaniment, and there is a recent tendency to expand and cultivate the percussion music idea to a point where it will express civilized subtleties. But the danger of use of percussion, suited as it is by nature to go with the dance, is that the whole thing will degenerate into a going back on the primitive, and that the dance and its percussion will be merely an inexpert attempt to revive a primitive ceremonial, usually with a bit of sophisticated tinsel mixed in”

That percussion music alternately augmented and fetishized the concept of “primitive” was a regular issue in the magazine. I think there is a deeper debate going on here, one that comes out in some of the other articles in the magazine by Franziska Boas, daughter of the famous anthropologist Franz Boas, and Juana Laban, daughter of the famous Rudolph Laban, whose theory of “Choreutics” is today one of the defining methods of spatial identification of individual movement. Anthropological investigations of bodily movement were deeply intertwined with modern dance, not only with these two artists, but also with filmmaker Maya Deren. There are even some Labanian analyses of Martha Graham dances in the magazine.

Some examples of Labanian analysis of movement, from "Reevaluating Rudolf Laban’s Choreutics" Jeffrey Scott Longstaff 

Labanian Analysis from Dance Observer

Thus the debate Cage jumped into in 1939 had as much to do with the general aesthetic of dance choreography than percussion music in particular. When you consider the term, choreography comes from the Greek term khoreia "dance" (see chorus) + graphein "to write" (see -graphy), and choreography was debated in the magazine as a concept rather than a practice. Choreomusical relationships were part of an overall experience of the movement of body in space, and the debate over tension and release, or the points of “contact” where a dancer reacts or moves in relationship to the audible phenomenon was a difficult and enlightening concept to parse.

This concept was not necessarily covered to any extent in the first series on percussion music, especially with Cage’s contribution. Instead, the article first takes up the points outlined by Cowell, where Cage notes that “conscientious objectors” to percussion music will “say that we are interested in superficial effects, or, at most, are imitating Oriental or primitive music.” Cage is adamant in stating, even with the opening line that “Percussion music is revolution. Sound and rhythm have too long been submissive to the restrictions of nineteenth-century music. Today we are fighting for their emancipation. Tomorrow, with electronic music in our ears, we will hear freedom.” These proclamations were typical of Cage around this time, most evident in “The Future of Music: Credo,” discussed a few weeks ago.

Cage’s two year stint in Seattle at the Cornish School (1938-1940) was a major turning point in his career. He was hired as an accompanist, and as the “Cagean lore” story goes, “discovered” the idea of the prepared piano out of necessity. With limited space on stage and limited access to percussion instruments and performers, Cage began inserting items into the piano, creating percussive sounds in a small space – perhaps one of the first examples of a primitive keyboard synthesizer interface. His first work for the prepared piano, “Bacchanal,” was written for the stunning dancer Syvilla Fort in 1940.  

 John Cage Bacchanal (1940), Margaret Leng Tan, Prepared Piano 

Dancer Syvilla Fort in the 1950s (yes, that's James Dean in the Background) - for more details look here

Cage’s “goal” in the essay is a seamless blending between choreography and sound. Neither is at the forefront, both work simultaneously to create a temporal audiovisual experience. What he is really hinting at here is a concept of “form” in the greatest sense. Choreography can certainly follow specific musical phrases or attack points, but in the end dancers ultimately resort to an endless series of dance steps, carefully planning and rehearsing each movement and gesture. What Cage realized is that dancers did not necessarily need the music to rehearse the steps. Rhythm suddenly took on a new meaning. In a certain sense, rhythm is merely the articulation of a ratio – this note lasts a certain length in relationship to the others around it, the tempo of a piece, and the grouping of beats into time signatures, from the micro to the macro scale. Cage’s famous early percussion works such as First Construction in Metal (1939) were based on the principle of ratios, and the overall form was determined by what he and others described as “square toot” or “micro-macrocosmic” form. Rhythmic “modules” of sound, percussive or otherwise, were related on a number of levels to the overall form of a work. The phrase structure was proportional to the larger form of the work (this is a rather simplistic description – anyone interested in details can read this).

I think the concept of ratio has been largely overlooked in Cage's early works. Ratio and proportion would later take on a deeper philosophical significance in the Cage aesthetic: ratio of seasons, of affect, of material, of space, etc., but in these early works ratio is characterized as temporal structure – a question that largely emerged out of dance choreography. For anyone memorizing dance steps, there is a certain internal flow of ratio that is ultimately “felt” in the sense that bodily awareness of space is in harmony with the progressive flow of movement and step. Awareness of one’s own physicality in this space is integral to the articulation of space and movement, something modern dance was very concerned with. Rather than focusing on strict memorization of a classical battery of steps and movement in a strict organization of spectacle, modern dance increasingly focused on the relationships between movement and awareness.

“Grace and Clarity” (1944)

To me this seems to be the underlying subject of Cage’s 1944 essay in Dance Observer, “Grace and Clarity.” It is elegantly written, likely because it received a lot of editorial revisions from Joseph Campbell and Richard Lippold, two contributing editors to the magazine during the same time. There was a much larger debate going on in the pages of Dance Observer in 1944 addressing the concept of expression and meaning in modern dance, and there are many echoes of a war-torn society struggling to find meaning in any sense of the word.

Cage opens the essay with an indirect attack on some of the big names at the time: Martha Graham, Hanya Holm, José Limón etc., and laments that the many summer courses (Bennington, Mills College etc.) were already beginning to adhere to a specific style interpreted by the “masters” of modern dance, and that younger artists (read: Cunningham) were unable to break through the boundary. He makes several observations on contemporary ballet, criticizing the obvious faults (dependence on spectacle, worn out stock balletic dance moves etc.) but noting that “good or bad, with or without meaning, well dressed or not, the ballet is always clear in its rhythmic structure.” This is what is inherently lacking in many modern dances, argues Cage, and if “the common denominator of the completely developed time arts, the secret of art life, is discovered by the modern dance, Terpsichore will have a new and rich source of worshipers.”

All this is typical dialogue from Dance Observer at the time. One side laments the new styles, the other argues that the young are being oppressed by the old, the styles are becoming cliché etc. – all good fodder for a magazine. But where Cage really makes a turn is the final section of the article where he develops an idea of “Grace” versus “Clarity.” I think I will just repeat his prose here:

“With clarity of rhythmic structure, grace forms a duality. Together they have a relation like that of body and soul. Clarity is cold, mathematical, inhuman, but basic and earthy. Grace is warm, incalculable, human, opposed to clarity, and like the air. Grace is not used here to mean prettiness; it is used to mean the play with and against the clarity of the rhythmic structure. The two are always present together in the best works of the time arts, endlessly, and life-givingly, opposed to each other.”

This is a beautiful dichotomy, one that presents rhythmic structure as the basis of a temporal organization of space and environment, where the actual action – the movement, the sounds and their interaction – are acted out in space. This is an early hint at the idea of temporal mapping – one of the central ideas in Cage’s musical aesthetic – where, in a given time and a given place, a specific event or events “happens,” but happens within a specific duration. The temporal mapping is the controlling arm of a “work,” because an event, in order to be an event, must have a duration.

One parallel I think is apt to this essay is the brief film by the “legendary” MayaDeren, A Study in Choreography for Camera, made just a year later. Deren originally intended to have a Cage compose a prepared piano score for the film, but the collaboration never materialized. Just over three minutes in length, Study followed the movements of dancer Talley Beatty through a series of landscape backdrops in the Palisades, Deren’s Morton Street loft, and the Egyptian Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The entire film encompasses a continuous false tracking shot that positions Beatty at various portions within the frame. I think this provides a perfect example of the balance between space, bodily articulation, and ratio that artists like Cage, Cunningham, Deren and others were beginning to explore.