“Experimental Music: Doctrine” (1955)

[32. Hêng / Duration, six in the fifth place, six at the top. Changing to  44. Kou / Coming to Meet.]

QUESTION: But, seriously, if this is what music is, I could write it as well as you.

ANSWER: Have I said anything that would lead you to think I thought you were stupid?

The next three essays I am mulling over are quite a contrast from the last three weeks. Whereas the Something/Nothing/Julliard triptych formed a mosaic of performative ideas, the essays at the beginning of Silence concerning experimental music are informative and explanatory. It is from these essays, along with ”History of Experimental Music in the United States” that scholars have culled many of the fundamental definitions of experimentalism in the United States (experimentalism at least according to Cage). It is odd that Cage chose to put the first two essays at the beginning of Silence, following “The Future of Music: Credo” (1940), and to tuck “History” further back after “Forerunners of Modern Music.” It seems that Cage was hoping to create his own triptych at the beginning, linking his ideas from the 1930s to those in the late 50s. Here we would have a logical progression: 1.) an early proclamation on electronic music (“Credo”), 2.) an examination of the concept of experimentalism in practice (“Experimental Music” (1957), and 3.) a question and answer session in “Doctrine.”

However there are many problems here. First, as I mentioned, the dating of “Credo” is incorrect, and there are many reasons to question its final publication format. Presenting these three essays in succession alludes to a logic of continuity in what, as I have noticed with this project, is a continuous yet scattered progression of ideas from the 1930s to the 50s. Moreover, the following triptych, “Composition as Process” was if anything an overtly polemic assault against the Darmstadt hard-edged serialism dominating the European front in the 1950s. To take this a step further, the first 75 pages of Silence could be read as a direct provocation of European serialism, supplanting it with a laudatory definition of American compositional approaches to contemporary music, technology, method, and philosophy.

Theories like this make academics tingle, but that is not exactly what this project is about. What I find most revealing in the “Experimental Music” essays are the subtexts alluding to Cage’s thought process. As with almost all of his theoretical writing, I get a sense of Cage grasping around for theories, philosophies, and ideas to help pin down a very complex theoretical platform. Add to this the difficult and scattered chronology presented in Silence, I am presented with a challenge to rather meticulously extrapolate, if you will, some sense of a theory of the aesthetic of Silence.

To begin with, there is the basic statement: “There is no such thing as silence.” Even the title of the book, Silence, alludes to something that is an absence, yet the pages are full of ideas. To put it another way, there is no way to define silence, other than through a negation. We can think of nothing as not-something, or whatever the opposite of something is, but it can never actually materialize: it is only an idea, and hence it exists only abstractly. And yet, the process of thinking this through—to “think through the negative," as French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty famously posited—is as much a part of the idea as the idea itself. If anything, that is what the idea is: a process. Take the opening paragraph of “Doctrine”:

Objections are sometimes made by composers to the use of the term experimental as descriptive of their works, for it is claimed that any experiments that are made precede the steps that are finally taken with determination, and that this determination is knowing, having, in fact, a particular, if unconventional, ordering of the elements used in view. These objections are clearly justifiable, but only where, as among contemporary evidences in serial music, it remains a question of making a thing upon the boundaries, structure, and expression of which attention is focused. Where, on the other hand, attention moves towards the observation and audition of many things at once, including those that are environmental—becomes , that is, inclusive rather than exclusive—no question of making, in the sense of forming understandable structure, can arise (one is a tourist), and here the word “experimental” is apt, providing it is understood not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as an act the outcome of which is unknown. What has been determined?

Cage defines experimental music as “an act the outcome of which is unknown,” a statement that formed the basis of Michael Nyman’s 1974 study Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, and, much like Reich’s dictum of “music as a gradual process” in minimalism, remains to this day one of the fundamental tenants of the movement. Nyman refines Cage’s statement by noting: “Experimental composers are by and large not concerned with prescribing a defined time-object whose materials, structuring and relationships are calculated and arranged in advance, but are more excited by the prospect of outlining a situation in which sounds may occur, a process of generating action (sounding or otherwise), a field delineated by certain compositional “rules”.

Cage’s formulation is elegantly simple and precise. If he were an ordinary language philosopher he could have called it a day. But Cage was a bit of everything: modern, romantic, vitalist, oriental, phenomenologist, analytic, transcendental, etc. - you name it, it’s somewhere in his writings. I think there is little question that at this time Cage was skimming several other contemporary philosophers, but he deliberately avoided direct citations because they were, well, Europeans. The most obvious candidate here would be French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (although not for this essay, as the first English translation was not released until 1956). Existentialism was all the rage in the Abstract Expressionist world, however, so for Cage to admit any linkage in his work to such thinkers would be antithetical to the neo-avant-garde crusade.

But it’s not just that Cage avoided mentioning someone like Sartre, I think. He often provided a dash when discussing nothing, i.e. no-thing, meaning no thing in particular, rather than absence or void, and this is the real dividing point (and I find it amusing that spell check has highlighted “no thing” as grammatically incorrect). I am reminded of a section from Cage’s famous interviews with French philosopher and musicologist Daniel Charles (who was largely responsible for introducing the aesthetic of silence to French intellectuals). During a discussion of Cage’s study with Daisetz Suzuki, Charles asked Cage for a more specific definition of the term nothing, particularly in regard to the French translation of his works of either “rien,” or “le rien,” nothing or nothingness. Cage’s response was ultimately more concerned with what he described as the “nothing in between” which moves beyond the distinction between Being and Nothingness, in favor of a reciprocal terminology outside or beyond the relationship between Being and Nothingness.

He went on to explain that ”each time we establish a relationship, each time we connect two terms, we forget that we have to go back to zero before reaching the next term. The same goes for Being and Nothingness! We talk about and try to think through these notions – like sounds in music – and we forget what really happens. We forget that we must always return to zero in order to pass from one word to the next…when we think, we continually return to those opposed pairs, sound and silence, Being and Nothingness. We do this to simplify experience which is far beyond that simplicity. Ultracomplicated and not at all reducible to the number two.” Following this argument, Cage again presents chance composition as a way to “reject exclusions, radical alternatives between opposites.” Cage also likened this to an “alternating current” of perceptual activity, the cycle between positive and negative fluctuation, which, while reaching into alternate depths, never reaches a point of absolute.

The “alternating current” metaphor has already come up in the Something/Nothing lectures, and I think it is a better metaphor than many of the South Asian and Zen dictums that Cage defaulted to in his essays, primarily because it links Cage’s technological rhetoric of “sound as sounds” back to the notion of silence. It also has interesting parallels to the anechoic chamber anecdote, which by now was a central metaphor in Cage’s philosophy. For anyone unfamiliar, I will repeat it from next week’s essay, “Experimental Music.”

For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such a room is called an anechoic chamber, its six walls made of special material, a room without echoes. I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.

Anechoic Chamber at Harvard University

 Current flows within the nervous system, blood is pulsing through the body, and these things are audible in the inner ear, but more so as feeling sensations than regular audition. Yes we “hear” these things, but not in the same way that we hear things outside our body, so to speak (think of the way you hear your own voice). To accept bodily sounds as sounds admits a certain degree of separation between the mind and the body, which is an idea I simply do not agree with, and with which Cage seemed to fluctuate. To hear an object is to identify its existence. The famous anecdote Cage culled from German animator Oskar Fischinger of the indexical relationship between objects and sounds is apt here. The anecdote from Fischinger involves a eureka moment in his own work, when his wife dropped a key in the adjacent room, and Fischinger realized that the sound was of one particular key and no other – it defined the existence of the object through aural sensation, and thus contained its own “spirit”- an idea that was inextricably linked to Cage’s concept of sound-as-sounds.

This point never varies in Cage’s writings, and it has to do with the linkage between scientific, or empirical, definitions of objects and matter. Noticeably, what it avoids, except for the anechoic chamber metaphor, is our own bodies, identities, and to an extent identity in general. This was the dividing line between later “post-Cage” artists and Cage. The body is complicated, it has problems, deformities, it is constantly in a state of disrepair and renewal, emotions are constantly ruining things, and it’s very animal existence is far less elegant than a pure sound. Here is what Cage thinks of sounds in “Doctrine”:

A sound does not view itself as a though, as ought, as needing another sound for its elucidation, as etc.; it has no time for any consideration—it is occupied with the performance of its characteristics: before it has died away it must have made perfectly exact its frequency, its loudness, its length, its overtone structure, the precise morphology of these and of itself.

Sounds are not ideas, they do not prescribe, they are inhuman. Musical expression is human. It reflects the emotion of the individual, relaying the affect of an individual voice, exposing the inner psyche and conjuring up new images of whatever may be, given cultural surroundings, mood, or, as Cage would say what I am planning on cooking for dinner. But Cage wants us to listen in a different way, to avoid messing with sounds, because it would make them human, expressive, and culturally specific. He goes on:

Urgent, unique, uninformed about history and theory, beyond the imagination, central to a sphere without surface, its becoming is unimpeded, energetically broadcast. There is no escape from its action. It does not exist as one of a series of discrete steps, but as transmission in all directions from the field’s center. It is inextricably synchronous with all other, sounds, non-sounds, which latter, received by other sets than the ear, operate in the same manner.

If we just stay out of the way, sounds are sounds, right? Again, this is what makes the Experimental music definition so elegantly precise. Cage goes on:

In view, then, of a totality of possibilities, no knowing action is commensurate, since the character of the knowledge acted upon prohibits all but some eventualities. From a realist position, such action, though cautious, hopeful, and generally entered into, is unsuitable. An experimental action, generated by a mind as it was before it became one, thus in accord with the possibility of no matter what, is, on the other hand practical. It does not move in terms of approximations and errors, as “informed” action by its nature must, for no mental images of what would happen were set up beforehand; it sees things directly as they are: impermanently involved in an infinite play of interpenetrations.

As a final note for this week, I should mention that the subtext of both of these essays involves Cage’s involvement with magnetic tape composition and the resulting aesthetics involved with recorded sound manipulation. Cage was quite familiar with Musique concrète and the theories surrounding the French engineer and sometime composer Pierre Schaeffer. However, it must be stressed that all of these essays do have a very anti-European backlash to them, and thus the final links are only found in Cage’s unpublished writings, which are a bit beyond this project.  

As one last point, I think it is important to note that, like many ideas coming from analytic philosophy, in the end we are really only talking about very simple yet precise formulations, and the rest of the world might as well only exist in the mind. As a result, the conclusions are just as simple and precise:

QUESTION: Then what is the purpose of this “experimental” music?

ANSWER: No purposes. Sounds.  

“Julliard Lecture” (1952)

[ 22. Pi / Grace, Nine in the first, 6 in the second. Changing to:  18. Ku / Work on what has been spoiled [ Decay ]]

There is all the time in the world for studying music, but for living there is scarcely any time at all. For living takes place each instant and that instant is always changing.

I am a little behind today, because halfway through writing, FedEx arrived with a wonderful package: the 50^th anniversary edition of Silence, along with a new foreword by Kyle Gann. I’ve been waiting patiently to read his thoughts, and they did not disappoint.

Out with the Old and In with the New?

Let me first explain that I am a bibliophile as much as a scholar. This project is in a sense my way of indulging in a dark pleasure: holding and perusing books. I spent many years as an archivist and rare book cataloger, and as a result I have developed a deep appreciation for first editions, crumbling dust jackets saved by crisp Mylar, the inevitable mold and mildew smell, delicate spines and fading pages, etc., etc. —I could go on forever. There is something very satisfying about the tactile nature of books, and my coveted first edition of Silence ranks high on the shelf of personal treasures. Pulling a book off of a shelf is for me a daily ritual; a library is a window into the psyche, and no matter how scattered my shelves become, the carefully marked citations, sticky-notes, and bookmarks will forever remind me that the facts are solid, material, and real. That says nothing of my ideas, which are always, and will always be, completely scattered, immaterial, and more often than not, false.  

On the other hand I am no Luddite, and my digital library is even larger than my book collection, but certain texts in particular are just understood better in my hands. This act of weekly reading is becoming a ritual, and while I am not particularly religious, reading Silence does have many ritualistic connotations; (but at the same time, so does any deep study - I could just as easily be studying mechanical engineering, or the writings of Fichte; or Harry Potter for that matter).

Looking at the two texts side by side I am a little upset that Wesleyan University Press scaled the new edition to a cheaper smaller size.  M, A Year From Monday, and Silence are all scaled elegantly at 24x21 centimeters, and they have always struck me as unique. Very few books use this ratio, which is the standard height for American hardcover first editions, but the width is a very noticeable inch and a half longer, giving these books a unique look and feel. They act like hardcover first editions, but there is just something a little different; it just protrudes a bit further, and holding it is a unique experience. I imagine this was a necessary scale for the unique typescript and layout, but nevertheless it has helped these books to stand out.

The dust jacket has a new design that is nice, but it tends to feel a bit overstated, and they replaced the elegant endpapers of Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra with an ugly blue texture paper. The paper stock is thinner and has a slightly glossy matte, and the actual text is quite blurry. I have a feeling the original was somehow copied digitally (which is considerably cheaper), but even in my 50-year old edition, the text still jumps out on the page (A Year From Monday is another story, either I have a bad copy or the paper used in the original printing was considerably more acidic). The ugly yellow backstrip is bound with glue, compared to the durable sewn strip in the original edition. These are all of course, signs of the times in the publishing industry, and we are all at fault for not willing to pay money for finer books. The original purchase price for Silence, $5.75, adds up to about $41.43 in 2010 dollars, and I bought my new copy off of Amazon (I know, I’m sorry, but I am a poor student that rarely leaves his apartment) for the whopping discounted sum of $19.60, with, of course, free shipping.

Despite these nitpicky bibliophile shortcomings, the new edition does come with an excellent foreword by Kyle Gann. Gann is a perceptive and intuitive writer, and his prose is both elegant and precise. My clumsy academic writing (institutionalized prose, if you will) will forever trot along behind him and others, and I am thankful for his many contributions to contemporary music scholarship. Gann provides something that, as he recalled, would have been very helpful to early readers: a brief biography and context for the book, along with some speculations regarding its overarching influence in the 1960s (although I will point out one fact that was overlooked yet again – the publication date of “The Future of Music: Credo” was without a doubt not 1937, since Cage had not yet even moved to Seattle yet, as I mentioned in the earlier post). Silence is by far the most successful book written by any modern composer; to date it has sold over a half of a million copies, and its release catapulted Cage into the 1960s, transforming Cage into “Cage,” or, as Nam June Paik put it, “from gadfly to guru,” and Gann is sure to press this point. 

Gann points out one of the ideas implicit in this blog in the very first sentence: “Silence by John Cage is the book I’ve reread most often in my life. It’s that kind of book. I kept rereading it partly because what it seemed to mean kept changing…The text remains the same; I change.” Reading into Gann reading into Cage, I can see the relationship that this book provokes. In the end, Cage does not necessarily give us a complete philosophy; we are really left with questions, processes, and ideas to spark our own feelings. Of course, Gann put this much better:

Part of what keeps us all coming back to Silence, I suspect, is the impossibility of answering these questions, within the outlines of Cage’s text, in a way that rings true for everyone, or even consistently for oneself…with these startling propositions so difficult to parse unequivocally, he freed us to think for ourselves…He thought his way out of the twentieth’s century’s artistic neurosis and discovered a more vibrant, less uptight world that we didn’t realize was there. Silence is the traveler’s guide to that world. Every visit to it lifts the feet a little more off the ground.

(And with that little interlude (which includes the ritual cutting of a new Mylar dustjacket to keep my grubby fingers off the pristine black cover), I now turn to “Julliard Lecture ” (1952))   

Cage did not publish “Julliard Lecture” in Silence, even though it follows the Something/Nothing lectures chronologically, and I have often wondered why he chose to omit the third part of this trilogy. He did publish it later in A Year From Monday, and it is quite out of place in the collection of 1960s essays. Cage noted in the forward to AYFM that Tudor’s first comment after reading Silence was, “too bad the Julliard Lecture isn’t in it,” and I imagine others in the circle wondered the same thing.

There are several contextual points that are essential for understanding this essay. The first, as I mentioned last week, is the relationship between Cage and Feldman, and especially Cage’s reading of what Feldman’s music represented. Second is the issue of performativity. I see an evolution of the Cagean idea of performance-lecture in this trio of writings, beginning with the solo addresses to the Artists’ Club and culminating here with his address to musicians and composers at Julliard. As Cage explains in the forward, the lecture was equal parts performance and demonstration of the ideas he was exploring. David Tudor performed a number of pieces during the lecture by Cage, Feldman and Wolff, and of the three lectures I imagine this was met with the loudest criticism. Julliard has never been known as a progressive institution; if anything it represented, like the Artists’ Club, an authority figure that Cage and his circle were directly provoking.

With this and other introductions, I get a sense of Cage relishing, or perhaps even gloating:

While the lecture was being given, Feldman was sitting on the stage. Both of us answered questions put to us afterward. When neither of us could think what to say in response to some angry “question,” Henry Cowell, who was present in the audience with his wife Sydney, put in a word for us, for which we were very grateful. Afterward as we tried to get through the halls to reach a room where punch was being served, students, surrounding us, continued their arguments. Cowell was always right beside us.      

So here again we get a vivid image of some cramped room, Cage delivering a sermon, the people protesting, the 26 year-old Feldman awkwardly sitting center stage, and the reclusive Tudor doing his infamous musical acrobatics at the piano. This is probably a good time to insert the famous “New York School” photograph of the Cage/Tudor/Feldman/Wolff/Brown coterie.

This really is one of the few situations where I can imagine people actually getting angry about musical aesthetics. In my mind, the tone was likely less controversial, and more confused. The deadpan delivery style and strange background music created an atmosphere less like an address, and more like a performance. I can’t imagine listeners were able to focus on every word Cage was saying amidst the music in the background. To really get a sense of the atmosphere, I would suggest playing any one or all of the following in any order at any time in the background, and then read aloud the essay:

“Julliard Lecture” is printed in the same format as “Something” and “Nothing,” and Cage followed the same rhythmic delivery strategy, coordinating Tudor’s performance with a set of chronometers. This general format would be the standard performance-lecture arrangement for Cage and Tudor, culminating in the Darmstadt addresses in 1958. A year ago I spent a considerable amount of time at the Wesleyan archives, where all of Cage’s manuscripts for his written publications are held, and I noticed and confirmed an observation on the overall layout and organization of the Something/Nothing/Julliard series: There are a number of ideas, phrased at times just slightly differently, that are repeated in many different places. Each essay follows an approximate trajectory, threading an argument, but all three are deeply intertwined with this additional layer of references. Some are similar to the anecdotes printed between each essay (which were, as Cage observed, meant to mimic the oddball news snippets that filled in the extra column space in small town newspapers), and you can witness new ideas emerging from Cage’s philosophical and spiritual readings. “Nothing” focuses more on self-reflexive structure, “Something” explores the Book of Changes divination texts and Meister Eckhart sermons, and “Julliard” introduces the infamous friendship between Cage and popular Zen scholar Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki.

If we look at the essay from a compositional standpoint, it follows a similar “gamut” technique found in early chance works, where a small group of musical ideas are then randomized over time via the I-Ching or other “chance procedures.” The only difference here is that the gamuts are the aphorisms and anecdotes rather than musical ideas. This is confirmed in another essay from the time, “1000 words” in the archives, where each individual idea is grouped on a single page. One could imagine that Cage was able to easily “shuffle the deck” as it were (and as other composers, such as Stockhausen and Brown, actually did with sheets of music), to give the final layout of the essay. This is a different strategy than later works, where Cage sets up increasingly complex precompositional strategies and rules for text, font, succession, and grouping.

That being said, I think it is best to discuss “Julliard” in particular by addressing the individual snippets of ideas rather than look for a logical succession, a critical reading strategy that I will increasingly employ as the mosaic of meaning in the texts get more complicated. Here are some groups of ideas that are worth noting:

1.) The Suzuki “men are men and mountains are mountains” aphorism:

In the course of a lecture last winter on Zen Buddhism, Dr. Suzuki said: “Before studying Zen, men are men and mountains are mountains. While studying Zen things become confused: one doesn’t know exactly what is what and which is which. After studying Zen, men are men and mountains are mountains.” After the lecture the question was asked: “Dr. Suzuki, what is the difference between men are men and mountains are mountains before studying Zen and men are men and mountains are mountains after studying Zen?” Suzuki answsered, “Just the same, only somewhat as though you had your feet a little off the ground.”

This is just one version of the aphorism, and everybody who knows Cage knows that this was high on the list of his favorite quotes. So what do we make of the aphorism? Is it meant to imbue contemporary music with the same elevating qualities of philosophy? Or is it just a joke? I think it is a little of both. Cage’s aphorisms, which I’ll discuss more later, were as important as the actual texts and lectures; they appear everywhere and are an integral part of his personality and persona.

2.) The great question: “Are sounds just sounds or are they Beethoven?” – This one comes up a lot, dating as far back as “The Future of Music: Credo.” One interesting variation in “Julliard” of this statement: I remember now that Feldman spoke of shadows. He said that the sounds were not sounds but shadows. They are obviously sounds; that’s why they are shadows; every something is an echo of nothing. Here we have a great example of variation, subtly altering the logic of a statement and morphing two seemingly unrelated ideas together in a hybrid idea.

3.) The Christian Wolff anecdote on open windows (This one comes up a lot as well):

I remember one day hearing him play a piano piece of his that had silences in it. It was a pleasant day and the windows were open. Naturally, in the course of the piece, noises of traffic, sounds from the boats’ horns, children playing in the hall, could all be heard coming from the piano. So much so that a friend who had been trying with great difficulty to hear the music asked at the end if Christian would play it over again after he’d closed the windows. Christian said he’d be glad to play the piece again, but that it wasn’t urgently necessary since the piece had been played and the sounds that had accidentally occurred while it was being played were in no sense an interruption.

4.) Kansas and/or Texas. I don’t know about this one, but I am guessing it has to do with one of Cage’s many cross-country trips, quite possibly one of the most important, when he returned from New York in 1934 with Henry Cowell to start his Schoenberg studies. I mentioned this one in the “Nothing” discussion, because it really does exemplify the idea of succession, visual movement and rhythm:

As we go along, who knows? an idea may occur in this talk. I have no idea whether one will, or not. If one does, let it. Regard it as something seen momentarily, as though from a window while traveling, if across Kansas, then of course, Kansas. Arizona is more interesting. To accept whatever comes regardless of the consequences, is to be unafraid or to be full of that love which comes from a sense of at-oneness with whatever.

5.) Here Comes Everybody (H.C.E.) – I am particularly fond of this one.

There are of course many more, and David Patterson has outlined a number of key rhetorical tropes in his study of the catchphrases in Cage’s writings, but suffice to say it is helpful for me to take these essays together as a continuous whole, a succession of ideas, each building on the last, in a mosaic rhetorical structure. This is hard to do if one reads Silence cover to cover, because the essays are not in any particular order; in fact, the organization in many ways hides these connections, and was probably deliberate.

I will point out one section here that I think is an important transition. Noticeably, there is no mention of Cage’s Silent Piece, 4’33”, nor does the anechoic chamber come up – I’ll get to these soon (they did not happen until after the essay was delivered, hence no mention), but there is one section that takes the “sound-as-sounds” thesis a step further and gives a hint of what was stewing in Cage’s mind during the chaotic address to a group of conservative conservatory composers:

…from any other leaf even of the same tree. If it were the same as another leaf it would be a coincidence from which each leaf would be free because of its own unique position in space. Uniqueness, having a particular suchness, is extremely close to being here and now. And I imagine that as contemporary music goes on changing in the way that I am changing it what will be done is to more and more completely liberate sounds from abstract ideas about them and more and more exactly to let them be physically, uniquely, themselves. This means for me: knowing more and more not what I think a sound is, but what it actually is in all of its acoustical details and then letting this sound exist itself, changing in a changing sonorous environment. 

“Lecture on Something” (ca. 1950)

[24. Fu / Return (The Turning Point), Six in the Fifth Place, Six at the Top. Changing to:  42. I / Increase.]

Here comes Everybody. The light has turned. Walk on. The water is fine. Jump in.

Let’s preface today’s essay with some early Feldman:

I’ve just returned from the national meeting of the American Musicological Society in San Francisco, where I gave a paper on John Cage and the Sculptor Richard Lippold during the session, “Cage and Friends,” co-chaired by Gordon Mumma and Michelle Fillion. Much like the 2009 AMS panel, “Cage and Company,” the paper topics were diverse and eclectic. It was a great chance to catch up with several Cage scholars, and to chat again with Gordon Mumma, whose personal recollections are a valuable historical resource for Cage scholarship. Philip Gentry had perhaps one of the best paper titles at the conference (highlighted recently on Alex Ross’s blog): “Writing Silence,” which examined the relationship between Cage and Wesleyan University Press and the publication and reception of Silence, and You Nakai gave a fascinating critical interpretation of Cage’s many technological metaphors in the 1950s and 60s.

Today’s essay is a follow-up to “Lecture on Nothing,” appropriately titled “Lecture on Something,” delivered to the Artist’s Club sometime in 1950. As Cage explains in the essay, the topic—something—is ostensibly Morton Feldman, but as he admits, by the end it is about “something” else, namely Cage’s most recent ideas on the Aesthetic of Silence. Feldman scholar Brett Boutwell gave an excellent paper during the Cage session at AMS, “Morton Feldman’s Projections: Origins, Development, and Spin,” that brought up some of the tensions between Cage and Feldman surrounding the Aesthetic of Silence and Cage’s interpretation of Feldman’s early graphic scores such as Projections, and I could not help but think of it as I re-read the essay.

Cage and Feldman were very close during the early 1950s. They spent nearly every day together, visiting museums, talking music, and popping in the Cedar Bar. I was a bit overdramatic in the posting last week when I highlighted the later tensions between New York artists and composers, and I think Feldman summed up the actual atmosphere best when he observed, “for a brief moment–say perhaps six weeks—nobody understood art.” It was a period of excitement and freedom, before the art commodity market rushed in and capitalized on everything, and the dialogue between Cage and Feldman was likely very pleasant. Both artists were on a precipice. For the past five years, Cage had undergone a period of intense introspection on the nature of artistic expression, yet he continued to write music for the decidedly expressive prepared piano. Despite his intense reading of Antonin Artaud and repeated proclamations deriding the difficult paradigm of expression in music, Cage continued work on a concerto for prepared piano, a genre of western art music that is generally considered the pinnacle of individual expression. For Feldman, his studies with Varèse stressed the engagement of sonic texture in the organization of sound, but he still held Varèse’s primacy of the notated score in structuring sound of western acoustic instruments. Of the two, Feldman was the most engaged with Abstract Expressionist artists and their work, and thus it came as no surprise when he provided one of the first musical notation solutions that borrowed directly from the visual techniques he observed. He visited Cage’s studio one day with a simple yet provocative idea for notation.

With this approach, Feldman adapted a statistical method that utilized a graphic notation to depict broad compositional gestures over time. In Projection I for solo cello (1950), sonic structure is given an overall arc and motion, but the precise aural results are left to the act of performance. Register is indicated through the horizontal placement of specific blocks, while duration of specific sonic events is indicated through the length of blocks along the horizontal axis. Density of gesture is observed through the accumulation of events along the vertical axis as specific moments in time. Time itself is the only remaining absolute in the final score. Feldman provided varying degrees of instruction for specific musical techniques through the projection series, such as the P and A shown here, standing for pizzicato and arco techniques for the cellist, and the diamond indicating harmonics. As a notational technique, graphic organization of sound structure in a two dimensional field provided one of the clearest analogs between visual and acoustic.

A Brett Boutwell skillfully argued, Feldman’s graphic notational technique emerged from a host of influences, including Varèse and Stephan Wolpe, and later in his career he distanced himself from Cagean theories of acoustic self awareness in favor of a painterly interpretation of gesture mapped over space and time. Cage read the graphic notations as an outgrowth of his own paradigm of temporal notation and micro-macrocosmic structure, and in “Lecture on Something” he appropriated Feldman in the general discourse on space and silence emanating from “Lecture on Nothing.” In the end, I think it is helpful to consider Feldman when reading this essay, but to recognize that the essay was really meant to introduce and explore several recent texts Cage had been reading to The Club, and to work through some of the intellectual conundrums that this new discourse presented. As he noted in the introduction:

In the general moving around and talking that followed my Lecture on Something (ten years ago at the Club), somebody asked Morton Feldman whether he agreed with what I had said about him. He replied, “That’s not me; that’s John.”

So what does John have to say? Last time he said nothing, this time something, but both times he stressed that saying something and not saying something are essentially the same. This is a difficult conceptual circle to get around, but in a way this circularity is central to the Aesthetic of Silence. What is really driving this essay is Cage’s recent discovery of the I-Ching, or Book of Changes. Cage discovered the English translation by the Bollingen Foundation, translated to German by Richard Wilhelm and then to English by Cary F. Baynes, and released in 1950. The Bollingen Foundation and the Pantheon Press were integral to Joseph Campbell’s publishing career, and Cage was given a copy by Christian Wolff. Wolff’s parents, Helen and Kurt, who founded the Pantheon Press that same year, and the translation was one of their first publications. This discovery was a famous turning point in Cage’s career, when he first used the coin tossing technique described in the book to structure the third movement of the Concerto for Prepared Piano, but hardly anyone has paid much attention to the actual content of the book itself, which Cage read voraciously.

Although “Lecture on Something” does adhere to a rhythmic structure and page layout similar to “Lecture on Nothing,” Cage presents a very specific argument that is essentially grafted onto the “nothing” format. There are a few reflexive references to the structure of the essay, but nothing compared to the extended sections of pure reflexivity in “Nothing.” The opening page presents a rough formulation of the circularity between ideas of “something” versus “nothing.” This more or less sums up the idea of interpenetration in the I-Ching, and the necessity for balance and harmony of opposites. It is “a talk about something and naturally about nothing,” Cage observes, but they are not opposed, they “need each other to keep on going.” The next sentence is a very close approximation of the problem with phenomenology: how to perceive the actual present.

It is difficult to talk when you have something to say precisely because of the words which keep making us say in the way which the words need to stick to and not in the way which we need for living.

Here I would venture to insert one of the fundamental dictums of the founder of modern phenomenology, Edmund Husserl:

“No conceivable theory can make us err with respect to the principle of all principles: that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily (so to speak, in its “personal” actuality) offered to us in “intuition” is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there.”

                -The Idea of Phenomenology, Vol. 1: §24

I’ll come back to this later (it’s a bit much to unpack today; I did just return from a long academic conference), but I will say that the overarching concept focuses on isolating the actual act of perception in an effort to seek out truths of existence, being, etc., and that, in many ways, this process was revealed to be possible in theory only, which in a sense negated the whole premise of phenomenology (but that in itself was later revealed as just as important).

Cage is concerned with this problem, but he is also concerned with the definition of art, as he goes on to explain:

For instance, someone said, “Art should come from within; then it is profound.” But it seems to me Art goes within, and I don’t see the need for “should” or “then” or “it” or “pro-found.” When Art comes from within, which is what it was for so long doing, it be-came a thing which seemed to elevate the man who made it a-bove those who ob-served it or heard it and the artist was considered a genius or given a rating: First, Second, No Good, until finally riding in a bus or a subway: so proudly he signs his work like a manufacturer.

I think it is important to notice the idea of direction here, as well as normative prescriptions. Cage has many “oughts” in his own program, and we would be naïve to assume that his new direction was not without its own modernist imperative. But he does have a good point on direction: rather than coming from within, art goes within. It is an action, an event occurring in time, rather than an autonomous object. Focusing on outward projection rather than inward intention, Cage is characterizing art as something very different, and his comment on signing a work is a direct reference to the famous “signatures” in Marcel Duchamp’s readymades.

Duchamp made a famous gesture that called out the ideal of autonomous art and the appropriated value of objects. It was a profound statement in its own right, and Cage recognized the implications of this critique, but—and this is a very important point—Cage was not proposing the same actions as Duchamp for contemporary music. He was not going to “throw the baby out with the bathwater” again;  that already happened. Instead, he focused on the metaphor of directionality. As he continues:

But since everything’s changing, art’s now going in and it is of the utmost importance not to make a thing but rather to make nothing. And how is this done? Done by making something which then goes in and reminds us of nothing. It is im-portant that this something be just something, finitely something; then very simply it goes in and becomes infinitely nothing.

Now things get complicated: “Anything goes” in a sense, in the Duchamp critique of the art object. This toilet is as aesthetically valuable as da Vinci, etc., but again Cage is focusing less on the implications—the ideas per se—of Dada, and focuses more on the process of acknowledging futility, which in turns leads to affirmation. (This is a rough formulation, so bear with me, I’ll work on it more in the next few weeks.) The next idea Cage focuses on is changing, which of course comes from the concept of change in the I-Ching, but ultimately will lead to a nuanced idea of process:

It seems we are living. Understanding of what is nourishing is changing. Of course, it is always changing, but now it is very clearly changing, so that the people either agree or they don’t and the differences of opinion are clearer. Just a year or so ago everything seemed to be an individual matter. But now there are two sides. On one side it is that individual matter going on, and on the other side it is more not an individual but everyone which is not to say it’s all the same, —on the contrary there are more differences. That is: starting finitely everything’s different but going in it all becomes the same. H.C.E.

“Here Comes Everybody,” one of the great Cagean mottos, and an integral part of his later ideas on theater. Here, however, Cage goes on to attempt to equate Feldman’s graphic scores to the idea of space, transparency, and directionality, which as we noted, was a bit of a misreading of Feldman’s ideas. There is a lot more to unpack here, but I will say that the opening page is in my opinion the most important moment in the essay. The remainder of the essay fleshes out these premises, with lots of quotes from the I-Ching, Meister Eckhart, Blythe and others. This is the first of several essays that read less like proclamations and more like philosophical interrogations. Cage is not entirely sure what implications chance procedures and Zen might have for his artistic program. As Feldman explained, “for a brief moment, nobody understood art.” I’ll return to this in the next few weeks with “Julliard Lecture” and the Darmstadt addresses, but for now let’s let Feldman have the final word, as he often did.  

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

“Lecture on Nothing” (ca. 1949-50)

[59. Huan / Dispersion [Dissolution], Nine at the Top, Changing to:  31. Hsien / Influence (Wooing).]

One’s-self I sing, a Simple separate person,

Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.

Of physiology from top to toe I sing,

Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say

the Form complete is worthier far,

The Female equally with the Male I sing.

Of life immense in passion, pulse, and power,

Cheerful, for freest action form’d under the laws divine,

The Modern Man I sing.

1867

-“One’s-self I Sing,” Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass

Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. Almost I fear I think how glad I am. In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and a sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed,, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befal me in life, -- no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God

Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1836)

I have nothing to say

and I am saying it                                                and that is

 poetry                                                    as I need it            .

---------------------------------------------

beware of

that which is         breathtakingly                     beautiful,                               for at any moment

       the telephone                           may ring                                       or the airplane

come down in a     vacant lot                                  .                                           A piece of string

or a sunset             ,                                                  possessing neither             ,

each acts                                                       and the continuity happens                                                                         

.

                                                                   -“Lecture on Nothing,” John Cage

“Lecture on Nothing” is perhaps, next to “The Future of Music: Credo,” one of Cage’s most famous essays. The line quoted above, “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it,” summarily defines the fundamental tenants—and contradictions—of Cage’s aesthetic principle of individuation and silence.

There are many things to comment on here, but I want to focus more than anything else on the effect of reading and experiencing this work, or piece, if you will, because it is very much an experiential work of poetry—meaning that one must be actively reading it rather than comprehending it in order to really get anything out of it. I say this because the fundamental idea foregrounded here is duration, or the experience of time. The words themselves are at times irrelevant, many sections just explain literally what point we are at in time in the overall duration of the work (i.e.: “here we are now at the beginning of the third unit of the fourth large part of this talk”…etc.), and others seem to repeat or reiterate the same scattered ideas. Kansas, for example, returns repeatedly as a geographic location and a metaphysical principle of location and duration.

Just a bit of background: Cage famously delivered the lecture to the 8^th Street Artist’s Club, or “The Club,” as I mentioned briefly last week. Established in 1948, “The Club” was really nothing much, just a rented space where artists living in Greenwich Village met once a week for a discussion on art. The meetings had various formats; sometimes a panel was set up, other times artists or critics prepared a lecture followed by a respondent, and almost always the night ended with a lot of alcohol—most continued the conversation well into the night next door at the infamous “Cedar Tavern” bar, mainly home to longshoreman and night laborers. (Absolutely nothing even remotely resembles the original vibe of this slum industrial district today- the area is more or less overrun by wealthy NYU undergrads, tourists, and franchise stores—there is even a “Abstract Expressionist Walking Tour” available if you are so inclined).

But be assured, this was never a complacent academic setting of genial back-patting, everyone involved in “The Club” was passionate about something—anything—that related to their work to the past, present, and future, and it was in this tiny room that the core group of Abstract Expressionist artists essentially cut their teeth, creating a language and discourse on expression, the artistic ground, the canvas plane, geometric abstraction, color, space, identity, politics, and just about anything else relevant to their artistic program. It was here that the beginnings of a kind of manifesto were formed, where each artists “stood” for something. Pollock was famously “In” the painting, his rhythmic swirls eked out some sense of unconscious automatism; Rothko’s amorphous “multiforms” represented mythic themes, De Kooning explored the sexuality of the carnal female figure, Barnett Newman divided the conceptual plane with an effortless line, etc., etc., - in other words, each individual within the loosely-defined school had a way of explaining their work. Each artist explored specific aspects of abstraction, and each presented individual artistic solutions or explorations of the general concept.

He had something to say

He had something to say

He had something to say

He had something to say

Cage naturally had a tough time with this approach, and his lecture was a clear provocation. The opening lines essentially attacked everything that The Club stood for:

I am here                ,               and there is nothing to say                 .

                                                                                                                If among you are

those who wish to get           somewhere             ,               let them leave at   

and moment                          .

The essay culminates in the concept of nothing, or no-thing in particular, but rather of experience itself in the most general sense. There were many reasons for this turn, and this attack. I’ll outline a few here. By this point, Cage had more or less abandoned the idea that music could describe any specific emotion, especially after he struggled with reviews and interpretations of works such as The Seasons (1948), and the individual Rasas, or permanent emotions he meant to associate with individual movements of Sonatas and Interludes (1948). Naturally, it is easier for a musician or composer to abandon the idea of concrete associative meaning between musical sounds and ideas, but in the visual world the problems are different. Sight is a very different cognitive function. From an evolutionary standpoint, sight has very different functions when compared to audition, and our ability to associate shapes, geometric forms, color and plane is much easier then with sound. Sound can evoke a host of associative ideas, but they are easily transposed to different planes. A sequence can be altered dramatically and still heard in a similar way, with a figure or an icon the situation is much different. Thus, to develop a language of visuality was always natural for artists, and abstract expressionism was no different than other historical periods.

When Cage visited and discussed aesthetics with the Abstract Expressionist School, he came to the table with ideas that were not necessarily oppositional—they were essentially something completely different. James Pritchett points out that “Lecture on Nothing” is an extension of the idea of micro-macrocosmic structure, especially the idea of creating an “open” space of temporal structure, where any and everything can happen within a structured duration. This was hinted at in “Forerunners” discussed last week, and here it is clearly exemplified. In a way, “Lecture on Nothing” functions like Imaginary Landscape No 4 for twelve radios, primarily because there is a lot of spoken text in each (assuming one finds talk radio stations in performance).

Text, as long as it is written and arranged in a decipherable language, is immediately associative. We cannot avoid the meaning of words once they are spoken. If I say the word “Kansas,” you cannot help but think of the great plains, red barns, wheat fields, etc., unless you are from a culture that has never heard of Kansas. But who in Cage’s original circle did not know of Kansas? (the question is thus then irrelevant to the current context). This is an important point, because Cage’s later works tear apart this associative element of text, but in “Lecture on Nothing,” every sentence is complete, every thought articulate; the only real revelation is in the presentation. Here is just the first page from the original text:

Cage divided the text into “measures” spread proportionally on each page, with the idea that the reader will recite the text according to a general tempo, giving pause in the spaces between words accordingly. The result is a lot of silence. Awkward silence. Needless to say, many of the audience members, Joseph Campbell in particular, were quite bothered by the exhortation early on. Cage was well-aware of the effect of this provocation, and in a way relished it. It is one of the first things he mentions at the beginning of the Forward to Silence:

…One of the structural divisions was the repetition, some fourteen times, of a single page in which occurred the refrain “If anyone is sleepy let him go to sleep.” Jeanne Reynal, I remember, stood up part way through, screamed, and then said, while I continued speaking, “John, I dearly love you, but I can’t bear another minute.” She then walked out. Later, during the question period, I gave one of six previously prepared answers regardless of the question asked. This was a reflection of my engagement in Zen.

The last connection to Zen is a point of contention with many scholars (another dating issue of little interest to most), but I’ll set that aside today. The structure of the work was nothing but explicit. It was divided into five large parts, each focusing on different aspects of musical form—our familiar Cagean tropes—form, structure, material, and method, while the fourth section exemplifies the rhythmic structure, and nothing else. This is the height of tediousness; here is a brief excerpt:

Here we are now                                                                                        at the beginning                    of the

third unit                 of the fourth large part                                         of this talk.

More and more                                                          I have the feeling          that we are getting

nowhere.                           Slowly                             ,                                      as the talk goes on

,                                          we are getting                  nowhere                       and that is a pleasure

.                               It is not irritating                 to be where one is  .                                   It is

only irritating       to think one would like            to be somewhere else.

and a few minutes later

Here we are now                                                   at the beginning                   of the

ninth unit              of the fourth large part                                        of this talk.

More and more                                     I have the feeling  that we are getting

nowhere.                                Slowly                    ,                                               as the talk foes on

,                                               we are getting nowhere                                        and that is a pleaure

.                                               It is not irritating                 to be where one is                  .                               It is

only irritating                      to think one would like to be somewhere else.

You get the point. Naturally, this was meant to irritate, if just a little bit, to wake everyone up to a point. And this point is clear: ”It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.”

This is the dichotomy presented in the lecture: the tension of exploring duration and content. Ideas float in and out of the mind over time, always. We cannot have a thought that is “locked” in time, it is always passing through. Once we think of it, it has already passed. This is a fundamental point to a field of philosophy known as phenomenology, which explores perception as it relates to knowledge and ontology (among many other ideas) and this work is in a certain sense an exercise of awareness: a trance meditation if you like, meant to evoke one’s awareness of the present, and the fundamental inability of the cognitive mind to ever actually grasp that specific moment, for it immediately passes.

I included two quotes at the beginning from Emerson and Whitman, because many literary theorists have pointed to “Lecture on Nothing” in relationship to American Transcendentalism, a philosophy that has many affinities with Cage’s Aesthetic of Silence. I’ll come back to this again and again, but I want to finish with just one point that I find directly relevant. Film historian P. Adams Sitney recently presented a comparison between Cage’s lecture and the homiletic tradition of American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. Many, including Cage himself (which I’ll cover later), have pointed to the affinities between Cage and the other famous transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau, but Sitney instead focuses on the founding poet of American literature and his compatriot, Walt Whitman.

As Sitney argues, one dominant features of American aesthetic theory is the transformation of Necessity (the “ought” in so many of Cage’s writings) into a category of poetics, where artists sublimate and perhaps obfuscate religious undertones in a secular rhetoric of necessity for change. Sitney highlights two features of this poetic rhetoric: the primacy of the visible and the “transformative value of vehicular motion.” This was exemplified in the famous passage from Emerson’s Nature quoted above, made famous by the caricature of the “transparent Eye” sketched by Christopher Cranch.

I can imagine something similar in a caricature of Cage: a man walking around with giant ears, perhaps? I can’t find an appropriate caricature online, but perhaps this famous photo will suffice (Cage did have very big ears, mind you):

Anyways, Sitney presents another parallel passage in Nature that highlights what he describes as the cinematic acceleration of vision in modern industrial America, and the following passage reads much like the often-quoted Walden section on sound, which I’ll certainly return to later:

The least change in our point of view, gives the whole world a pictorial air. A man who seldom rides, needs only to get into a coach and traverse his own town, to turn the street into a puppet-show. The men, the women,—talking, running, bartering, fighting,—the earnest mechanic, the lounger, the beggar, the boys, the dogs, are unrealized at once, or, at least, wholly detached from all relation to the observer, and seen as apparent, not substantial beings. What new thoughts are suggested by seeing a face of a country quite familiar, in the rapid movement of the railroad car! Nay, the most wonted objects (make a very slight change in the point of vision,) please us most. In a camera obscura, the butcher’s cart, and the figure of one of our own family amuse us. So the portrait of a well-known face gratifies us. Turn the eyes upside down, by looking at the landscape through your legs, and how agreeable is the picture, though you have seen it any time these twenty years!

Now picture the recitation of Cage’s lecture, slowly clunking along, and imagine it from a cinematographic perspective, as Deleuze or Bergson would ask of us. The rapid succession of time is captured uniquely in the cinema image, animating the life of reality in an act not dissimilar to that of the poetic recitation, or perhaps even the Cagean sonic temporal event. We are constantly capturing brief moments of imagery, whether through the optical or the visual, encompassing a larger perspective on individual self-awareness and corporeal reality. This has extra meaning to me when I return to Whitman: “Of physiology from top to toe I sing, Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far.”

I’ll conclude with one of my favorite cinematic examples that is not Stan Brakhage as an example of what I feel Sitney was hinting at: Bruce Baillie’s famous Castro Street (1966). Here images of industrial development—Thoreau’s acrimonious train and Emerson’s clatter of the street market—are juxtaposed in a spattering of poetic imagery unsurpassed in any cinematographic image I can think of (at least right now, it is daylight savings time, and I am a bit behind today):