“Composition as Process” II. Indeterminacy (1958)

[10. Lü / Treading [conduct], Nine in the Fifth Place. Changing to: 60. Chieh / Limitation.]

“No matter what eventuality.”

Interesting I-Ching reading today (oh, and happy holidays to whoever out there is actually reading this). I’m in the thick of Cage’s Darmstadt lectures as I mentioned last week, and “Indeterminacy” was the second address given on a cold fall Monday evening in Germany to a crowd of largely bewildered composers and artists. The image of the primary reading “Lü/Treading [Conduct] is of “Treading upon the tail of the tiger. It does not bite the man. Success.” The interpretation states, “in terms of a human situation, one is handling wild, intractable people. In such a case one’s purpose will be achieved if one behaves with decorum. Pleasant manners succeed even with irritable people.” The secondary hexagram is 60. Chieh/Limitation, and the interpretation states that “In relation to the moral sphere it means the fixed limits that the superior man sets upon his actions—the limits of loyalty and disinterestedness.”

….

“This is a lecture on composition which is indeterminate with respect to its performance,” notes Cage in the opening line to “Indeterminacy,” which was written in excessively small type to “emphasize the intentionally pontifical nature of this lecture.” “Indeterminacy” is a detailed analysis of the necessary parameters for a work to be considered indeterminate according to Cage’s definition, and I think it is revealing as much for what it leaves out as what it leaves in.

Rebecca Kim recently embarked on an extensive archival investigation on the origins of indeterminacy as a concept and as a practice, and she notes that the origins of this essay are likely from Cage’s New School lectures the prior summer in New York. Cage’s invitation to Darmstadt was last minute—as I mentioned he was filling in for Boulez—and he prepared these lectures in a very short amount of time, which is quite amazing considering the breadth they cover. Kim argues that one of the students, future Fluxus artist George Brecht, had a particular influence on Cage’s taxonomy of the conditions for the possibility of indeterminate music.  

Here is an example from the first page (24 June, 1958) of Brecht’s personal notebook (which is available in publication, but very expensive):

Dieter Daniels, (ed.), George Brecht, Notebook I (June 1958-September 1958), (Cologne: Walther König, 1991).

Here we have what by now is getting a little redundant: the four characteristics of sound Cage repeated ad nauseum of pitch, duration, amplitude and timbre, followed by a fifth, “morphology,” with simply the note “attack-body-decay” followed by a course note that explained the obvious:

“At one time Cage conceived of a sound-silence opposition, but after the anechoic chamber experience (hi [sic] note nervous system noise, low note blood circulation, concluded silence was non-existent.”

This last addition to the Cagean empirical taxonomy is most interesting, because it becomes a recurrent trope in “Indeterminacy” as an evaluative means for determining if a work adheres to the parameters of indeterminacy. Cage calls it the “morphology of the continuity,” which has several connotations, especially if one is familiar with linguistics. I have never been entirely sure what to make of this term, but it seems that Cage was looking for a different way to characterize syntax or grammar according to the general concept of similarity in morphological analyses of basic sound types—morphemes in linguistics—that build up the basic cognitive structure of language according to generative grammar theories, but again it’s always tricky to read into this too far, he could just have easily lifted the term from someone else.

What Cage did lift in this essay, as Kim has noted, was Brecht’s analysis of these parameters in several of the works discussed in the essay. With limited time and many engagements in the fall of 1958, Cage took a note from academics by doing what every professor does: assign it as homework for the class, collate the observations, and put them into a paper. Later on in Brecht’s notebooks are several pages of a loosely written essay that contain many observations similar to “Indeterminacy.” One that is interesting here is the opening paragraph, where Cage equates Bach’s Art of the Fugue with Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI. Here is a little comparison between the two sections:

Cage:

This is a lecture on composition which is indeterminate with respect to its performance. The Klavierstück XI by Karlheinz Stockhausen is an example. The Art of the Fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach is an example. In The Art of the Fugue, structure, which is the division of the whole into parts; method, which is the note-to-note procedure; and form, which is the expressive content, the morphology of the continuity, are all determined. Frequency and duration characteristics of the material are also determined. Timbre and amplitude characteristics of the material, by not being given, are indeterminate. This indeterminacy brings about the possibility of a unique overtone structure and decibel range for each performance of The Art of the Fugue. In the case of the Klavierstück XI, all the characteristics of the material are determined, and so too is the note-to-note procedure, the method. The division of the whole into parts, the structure, is determinate. The sequence of these parts, however, is indeterminate, bringing about the possibility of a unique form, which is to say a unique morphology of the continuity, a unique expressive content for each performance.

Brecht:

Another aspect of these works, it seems to me, is that of the extent to which the sound structure (of the piece as a whole) partakes of the situation in which it occurs, as opposed to its arising from some pre-existent structure (score notation, symbolism, i.e. form arrangement), which determines (to a greater or lesser extent), a scale of situation participation. Situation non-participation might comprise a magnetic tape sound reproduction system at one end of the scale (relative non-participation), through most conventional 19^th and 20^th century scores, toward certain “abstract” scores (such as the “Kunst der Fuge,” determining structure but not substance), contemporary music given the performer choices, to (say) the harmonic structure of Cherokee in its 10^th variation by Charlie Parker (smoky club context), real blues, inspired folk music, etc.

Noticeably, Cage avoided—here and just about everywhere else—any comparison with Cagean indeterminacy and jazz improvisation, despite their many common grounds. I think the comparison between all three is apt:

Cage later speaks at length about Christian Wolff’s Duo II for Pianists, where the “morphology of the continuity” is unpredictable because “each performer, when he performs in a way consistent with the composition as written, will let go of his feelings, his taste, his automatism, his sense of the universal, not attaching himself to this or to that, leaving by his performances no traces, providing by his actions no interruption to the fluency of nature. The performer therefore simply does what is to be done, not splitting his mind in two, not separating it from his body, which is kept ready for direct and instantaneous contact with his instrument.”

I think that improvisatory structures are more along the line of a close neighbor to Cagean indeterminacy, and the problem historically is that Cage was determined to maintain a division between indeterminacy in its “purest” sense—i.e. according to the parameters of notation—and the visceral (and popular) forms of jazz improvisation. Taken in one sense, early jazz improvisation adhered to a similar indeterminacy as Cage’s earlier works. A “standard,” for which an improviser bases his performance on, contains a tonal-schematic shell for which the player has a limited number of harmonic/melodic relationships in which she can improvise within. There are standard licks and passages from past traditions that a performer may choose from in order to refer to another work or a genre or style, and this dialogue constituted much of the “classical” jazz repertoire that has now become perfected and canonized in American culture.

However, in the late 1950s and early 60s, a number of New York performers were already beginning to combine elements of Cagean indeterminacy with the classic model of jazz improvisation. This is a complex web of interaction and influence far beyond a blog post, but I will ask this question: at what point does Cage’s conception of “direct and instantaneous contact with his instrument” run up against this? 

“Composition as Process" I. Changes (1958)

[36. Ming I / Darkening of the light, Nine in the first place. Changing to:  15. Ch'ien / Modesty]

“This end of the pencil is just as important as the other end.” – Arnold Schoenberg

It’s the holidays and like everyone else I’m naturally busy traveling, so the next two posts will be short. The last few weeks have begun to stray from the concept of “reading through,” mainly because so much has been written on the primary essays in Silence, and I am going to try and adhere to the concept a little more with these two postings, although naturally some context makes the process easier.

To summarize, the “Composition as Process” lectures, or, as they are often referred to – the “Darmstadt Lectures," mark a significant historical juncture in Cage’s career. There is a clear reason that they are situated early in Silence, as I have mentioned. The opening pages present a dichotomy between American experimentalism and European serialism, making this portion of Silence a sort of manifesto on American cultural significance in response to increasing solidarity within the European postwar avant-garde.  Cage’s brief visit in 1958 created one of the largest rifts in postwar Western music, and it is significant that he was not invited again to Darmstadt for over 30 years, in 1990, when he was 78.

Amy Beal, Rebecca Kim, and others have argued that these lectures were really a result of hurried circumstances rather than a planned attack on Darmstadt, and it was the response to the audience response, rather than the content itself, that was of real significance. The real figure central to American-European dialogue during the postwar period was undoubtedly David Tudor, who continued with a regular series of engagements at Darmstadt and other venues well into the 1960s, and it was largely due to his skills as a performer and interpreter of all of the vastly diverse music composers were throwing on the piano stand. Then there is the question of performativity, especially with the Tudor/Cage travelling show, as one could call it. Often accompanied by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the lecture/recital format of Cage/Tudor collaborative talks was an all-encompassing package (and was later sold explicitly as a package, with different rates depending on the number of talks), consisting of lectures, lessons, and performances. The highlight was often the evening lecture recital, where Cage characteristically performed a variety of theatrical acts alongside Tudor, either at the piano or on a stage with various sound producing objects. It was this collaborative-theatrical environment that would begin to characterize the general evening entertainment of Cage/Tudor/MCDC in the late 1950s and 60s.

The earlier Something/Nothing/Julliard lectures set the template for these performance events, and the general idea was to coordinate through temporal notation simultaneous actions between performers. This was the same format for all Cunningham collaborations, where, rather than “choreograph” events in the traditional sense, actions were structured according to temporal synchronization; performers were given “space” to complete acts, either improvised or from a gamut of possibilities, and the accompanying audio/visual simultaneities were strictly coincidental, hence “by chance.”

Finally, the Darmstadt lectures represent a culmination of Cage’s rhetoric surrounding the general concept of indeterminacy, shifting from the selective application of various randomization procedures on a particular gamut of precompositional choices, and toward a structural template that more represented a “field situation” as Cage explained, where all categories of actions and events were open to realization in the broadest sense. Much of this was culled from Cage’s courses at the New School for Social Research courses he taught between 1956-1960, and there is a direct link between Cage’s ideas and those found in the notebooks of George Brecht. In addition, despite all the claims for a moment of “total” indeterminacy in Cage’s work, a specific school of “performance practice” if you will, emerged from David Tudor’s realizations of Cage’s graphic scores, whereby certain select individuals committed to the application of Cage’s specific ideological goals were granted authority in recreating the specific Cagean “sound” of indeterminacy, which, in the end, maintained a limited—yet unique—characteristic tone in execution.

Okay, so in other words: that is why these lectures are important. You have some crazy new music, competing ideological goals, and some radically disruptive ideas for indeterminacy that threatened to throw the baby out with the bathwater—and the Europeans were not having it. Up until this point, most of the Darmstadters viewed Cage’s use of chance through the interpretive lens of Boulez, who, as most know, for a period was very interested in its strict application as a process similar to total serialism. However, the famous rift between Cage and Boulez is characteristic of virtually every attack on Cage: That total indeterminacy was simply a lazy way out of the “hard work” of composing music, and that the Americans were—as usual—full of a lot of hot air.

Cage was originally asked merely to present a few lectures to fill in for Boulez, where he would explain his Music of Changes (1952). Only the first lecture does so. It is arranged to coordinate with Tudor’s performance of the work, where each line of text represents one second, alternating between moments where Cage spoke, and moments of speaking silence, where Tudor played passages from the work. One point is often missed here, but it is of fundamental importance to the strange divide that occurred between Cage and the Darmstadters. Most of the audience noticed an affinity between Cage’s piano piece and the “total” serialism in certain piano works by Boulez, most famously Structures of the same year as Changes, but they also noticed another important fact: to all but the most discerning ear (and even this is arguable), it is quite difficult if not impossible to distinguish between a piece controlled in strictest sense through serialist technique from a work in which all questions of temporal succession or overlay were determined randomly.

Try it yourself:

One of these things is like the other?

The overall argument Cage presents in “Changes” is a move within his compositional approach from method and structure to process. Much like “grace” and “clarity,” Cage ascribes weight to the poles of duration and procedure, or “structure” versus “content,” or, to use the easiest and clearest dichotomy, form and content. He earlier sought to unify or integrate both poles, bringing about a “freely moving continuity within a strict division of parts,” and this is what generally constitutes the chance or gamut procedure in earlier works. Here, precompositional choices are made regarding material—in the case of Music of Changes the smaller musical segments—that were then randomized according to a temporal grid, the duration and subdivision of which itself was organized by additional randomization procedures. This created levels of surface indeterminacy, but the work as a whole still required a number of decisions in the compositional process.

Because chance procedures usurped the necessity for a precompositional “grid,” Cage notes, “structure is no longer a part of the composition means. The view taken is not of an activity the purpose of which is to integrate the opposites, but rather of an activity characterized by process and essentially purposeless.” He then goes on with a brief introduction to the concept of silence, which I’ve discussed at length in the past, the anechoic chamber anecdote, and an attempt to historicize his own compositional development. It is only when Cage discusses his newest work, Variations I (from January of the same year), do we get somewhere new. Perhaps the most important point here is this:

“In this situation, the universe within which the action is to take place is not preconceived. Furthermore, as we know, sounds are events in a field of possibilities, not only at the discrete points conventions have favored.”

This is just one of many points that scholars want to take further, but Cage himself does not. There are countless implications for Cagean aesthetics in regards to information theory, cybernetics etc., that indeterminacy alludes to, but in the end we are faced with a dilemma: Cagean indeterminacy, as many have discovered, was not necessarily indeterminate, it was in many senses improvisatory, which would negate all of the distancing rhetoric essential to the ideal of nonintentionality. I think in the end that the idea, or to be more precise, the ideal of nonintentionality, is what Cage was briefly aspiring toward. But then there were all those pesky details of execution in performance……

“History of Experimental Music in the United States” (1959)

[55. Fêng / Abundance [Fullness] nine in the third place, nine in the fourth place. changing to:  24. Fu / Return (The Turning Point)]

“The past does not influence me; I influence it” – Willem de Kooning

This is the third essay on experimental music in Silence, and as I mentioned two weeks ago, Cage tucked it away in the middle of the book even though it was written shortly after the other two essays, “Experimental Music” (1957), and “Experimental Music: Doctrine” (1955). Cage is less elusive here and decidedly polemic, both in his historicism and in his attack on the European avant-garde. The essay was commissioned by Dr. Wolfgang Steinecke, director of the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (International Summer Courses for New Music) at Darmstadt. Heinz Klaus Metzger famously provided a rather mannered German translation in the Darmstädter Beiträge the following year. As Amy Beal has noted, one phrase in particular stood out in the translation. In the English, Cage wrote “The silences of American experimental music and even its technical involvements with chance operations are being introduced into new European music,” and Metzger chose to use the active verb eindringen—to invade or intrude—for Cage’s passive are being introduced to, thus giving the reverse translation of “chance operations are invading European music.”

This hints at the high-minded competitiveness within new music circles in Europe and America, where, following Sayre’s law in academics, politics were most vicious because the stakes were so low. To be fair, there was a considerable amount of political wrangling involved in the Darmstadt summer courses, as Beal has noted in detail in New Music, New Allies, but it is important to note that agency was in many ways removed from the actual actors in “America Houses” and held tightly by the politicians and corporate interests that planted the seeds in the first place. This may be a bit of an extreme statement, and there are certainly contrary examples, but I do believe that political action—actual real political action like a call to arms such as Wagner’s famous tossing of grenades during the 1848 revolution—is a rarity among musicians. However, the ideas are often powerful political motivators, and such political zeal quickly fuels the individual ego of high-minded musical polemicists. At the same time, there has been and always will be a close relationship between political forces of control and the ability or extent of an artwork to incite or provoke. At its worse, a society openly oppresses artists, but oftentimes, especially with modern liberalism, society assimilates or appropriates, thus taking away the inherent power of a work or a statement.

I’ve thought a lot about the recent Occupy protests in conjunction with this project, and it will come up more in the later essays when Cage became more politically active. I am not really an activist, and my general political viewpoints are largely in line with the institutions that support academics. There is (and probably always will be) a general misconception that academics are consistently “liberal” according to the contemporary definition of the word. But it is obvious that this definition of “the left” is far removed from the fundamental tenants of liberalism, which, when taken apart are really more like the centrist position that most successful politicians eventually embrace. In my mind, what really is at issue in contemporary political discourse is a general struggle over the communicative avenues of public discourse, a sort of wrangling over the avenues of contact between individuals in the face of cultural pluralism. The stratification of discourse along a seemingly endless and disparate network of individual platforms (this blog being but one of many), has ignited a desire to solidify and control. Whether we are speaking of political discourse, net neutrality, copyright infringement, or individual privacy, it is clear that there are many social forces at work in contemporary culture that are seeking ways to organize this new system of communication and social interaction in general. I am not a fatalist, and I have enough faith to believe that the end result will be, like most social structures that have emerged from liberalism, pragmatic and centrist—a compromise in the positive sense.

I’ve recently read (or re-read its newest incarnation, since it has been available in dissertation form for a few years), Benjamin Piekut’s new book, Experimentalism Otherwise, which is one of the first of (hopefully) many studies on experimentalism in the United States. The history of American experimental music has largely been dictated by traditional musicological methodology: contextualization of oral histories authenticated through the indexing of archival documentation and justified through musical analysis. In the case of experimentalism, however, we are not dealing with music in the familiar sense, and Ben asks a pointed question: “What was experimentalism?” From its essential formulation articulated by Cage to the proliferation of practices in the 1960s, experimentalism is fundamentally performative, giving it, one would hope, the unique ability to subvert the traditional canonization and cultural assimilation of say, jazz. However, the discourse surrounding the history of experimentalism has relied heavily on Cage’s own historicism. Cage’s proclivity, as Piekut notes, for equating experimentalism with high-art obfuscates many of the concurrent practices and discourse surrounding the “core” group of Cage’s generation, and Piekut’s study focuses in particular on the practice of improvisation, which is wholly ignored within Cagean discourse (although, as he reveals, it was often incorporated in Cage’s “band” of artists and musicians for practical reasons).

This is what makes experimental music studies so interesting. Much like conceptual art, discourse is as much a part of its history as practice. Discourse defines the parameters of discussion, the ground to which we formulate arguments. Piekut examines experimentalism as a network (“a grouping, not a group”) proliferated through discourse (“a series of citations”) that has largely been dominated by conventional studies of canonic definition and style history. Cage’s “scores” for his more indeterminate works such as the transparencies used in the Variations series have been analyzed, documented, and performed with the purity of any traditional score in Western Art Music, despite the implied liberation that they purportedly claimed.

 Print it, archive it, and put it in the canon: it’s a piece of Western Art Music?

This is a rather contentious area of Cage scholarship, one that pits a generation of scholars who have tirelessly defended the work of Cage against cultural institutions that once vehemently dismissed his artistic program as, in the words of Adorno, “abstract negation in séances with overtones of [Rudolph] Steiner, eurhythmics, and healthy-living sects,” only to find Cage studies welcomed with open arms under the banner of New Musicology—with the understanding that the various aspects of Cage’s career that were brushed under the table are now open targets. During his life Cage navigated through discourse brilliantly, weaving between institutional support and the energy of the antiestablishment 60s generation. Cage is both Cage and “Cage” in this respect, as I have noted before; we want him to be one thing when in fact he is another.

Piekut reads Cage’s artistic program less as liberatory politics under the general veil of anarchism and more as conventional postwar American liberalism. Having spent considerable time reading through Cage’s personal correspondence and various other archival documents, I have to say I am in agreement. I would add however that, again, there is the difficult issue of reading Cage as he is and Cage as we want him to be. To add to the confusion, Cage certainly wanted us to read him in one way, but that specific way changed over the years. As I said, I am more of a centrist, and am happy to find a common ground between the excellent work of the last generation and the concomitant critical investigations that the nature of the materials warrant. Piekut concludes that Cagean liberalism has one concerning element inherent within the larger discourse surrounding American liberalism:  

the “freedom of choice” ideology of liberalism in fact masks a meta-operation of power that defines the terms through which those choices can be made…from this perspective, Cage’s work evidences a peculiar status as both a model and a mirror—a mock-up of utopian anarchism and register of hegemonic liberalism.

This brings me back, in a way, to the occupy movement and Cagean politics surrounding experimentalism. I recently came across, on Melrose and Gower at the very corner of the last surviving RKO pictures building, a wonderful piece of graffiti art that simply read “occupy everywhere, all the time,” which struck me as very Cagean in a way—or, perhaps in the context of this post, what I would like to imagine Cage would ideally have believed. Jason Adams’ recent post on the Critical Inquiry blog perhaps articulated what I am thinking the best, when he noted, “what is most interesting about Occupy now is that it is increasingly complicating static images of space: it is, in short, occupying time.” This approach to the “temporal and tactile rather than the spatial and strategic” is very much in line with a Cagean discourse that is not necessarily liberatory, but is rather along the lines of method or process. Activism in the traditional sense was in a way antithetical to the passive politics of Cage (at least in the 1950s and early 60s), but activism in the sense of experimentalism was in line with many strains of Cagean indeterminacy rhetoric.

Jonas Mekas at Zuccotti Park

Adams argues that the “counter-temporality” of Occupy is primarily concerned with the creation of, rather than a response to, situations. The media’s frustration with the Occupy movement's persistent plurality hints at the fundamental idea that such a temporal situation incurs: an awareness of the effect of discursive networks of individual strategies of control and the current (or perhaps ongoing) crisis of individualism. Occupy’s focus on situational awareness in the end likely implies another variance of liberalism, or perhaps even libertarianism, but what is unique is the embrace of disunity and dissensus in the process of engendering debate. I read this dynamic somewhere within Cagean discourse, and I’ll try to articulate it better in the future.

It has become somewhat of a cliché to note that we live in an era of information overload. But it is notable just how quickly information, or content in general, has transformed contemporary culture, and how it has affected our lives in every way. Whether it is the debilitating effect of an incessantly pervasive media culture on traditional negotiations in governmental politics, the rapid acceleration of electronic financial transactions and the inevitable greed that accompanied this newfound productivity, or the basic issues of control and regulation of information corridors and pipelines, information has changed in a fundamental way.

This is one area where I believe Cage studies and experimentalism discourse resonates, and has always resonated, deeply with culture in general. I’ve managed to ramble on with this entire post without spending a minute talking about the content of the essay itself, and to me that is okay. I am not sure where the Occupy movement will go next; I imagine it will eventually follow the path of most movements through assimilation into the conventional strategies of participatory politics, likely by the left in the upcoming election cycle. But I will say that, for a moment at least, it seemed like something very different was happening. The sense in the air was not of revolution, but something else. I’m just not quite sure exactly what that is, but I hope it comes back again.

I am apprehensive to end this post with the quote that really does solidify Piekut’s argument, but I think it is appropriate, and probably necessary:

From “Seriously Comma” (1966):

Privilege of connecting two things remains privilege of each individual (e.g. I: thirsty: drink a glass of water); but privilege isn’t to be exercised publicly except in emergencies (there are no aesthetic emergencies)

PERMISSION GRANTED. BUT NOT TO DO WHATEVER YOU WANT.

“Experimental Music” (1957)

[60. Chieh / Limitation, Nine in the second Place, Six in the Third place, Nine in the Fifth Place. Changing to: 36. Ming I / Darkening of the light.]

This is the second of a three-part examination of what I would call the “experimental music” triptych in Silence, beginning with the post last week on “Experimental Music: Doctrine” (1955), and culminating next week with “History of Experimental Music in the United States” (1958). As I mentioned before, I think it is helpful to loosely group some of Cage’s earlier essays in this fashion rather than look at them in isolation, because Cage is notoriously sly with his presentation of ideas and concepts.

I inserted Cage’s famous anechoic chamber essay last week to jumpstart the “nothing” or “no-thing” thesis, and “Experimental Music” explores the idea from a scientific perspective. To recap, one of the fundamental ideas behind the “no such thing as silence” thesis involves the anechoic chamber, where Cage famously discovered that, even in a room in which all physical sound has been removed, the human body still perceives sound – sound emanating from the very perceiving body. Thus, there is no situation in which a sentient human being is completely devoid of the perception of sound, and thus, “there is no such thing as silence.” Now, this is an important point to mull over, because there are many qualifications to the thesis that Cage vacillates with throughout his life. We can begin with the simplified anecdote of a “tree falls in the forest” idea that anybody can easily posit. Let’s word it a little more carefully:

“If a situation occurs in which objects interact emitting soundwaves commonly audible to an able human being in absence of any such sentient object that is able to perceive any such frequencies, did the sounds actually occur?” The empirical answer is, undoubtedly, yes. Sounds occur in nature, in the deepest recesses of space far removed from organically-based material capable of perceiving the limited range of frequencies audible to a sentient human being. In fact, one could argue that the entire universe is constantly emitting the basic frequencies of life itself in the constant expansion of the universe.

The Universe is Full of Noise

 Now, let’s go back to the “no such thing as silence” thesis in an anechoic chamber, and sharpen the same statement:

“Given a situation (likely a vacuum) in which the soundwave frequencies audible to a sentient human being are unable to resonate within the given space (through the absence of molecules to transmit the  energy through space), is it possible for sounds to still occur?”

Here the answer, empirically, is no. There is such a thing as silence, it’s just that it cannot occur in any situation where a human being is present (man cannot breathe, much less maintain his molecular structure, in a vacuum). However, we can insert instruments into such a space to confirm empirically that no sounds exist. Thus, there is the possibility of silence, but that possibility is only confirmed through the mediation of a testing apparatus. Science can prove many theorems beyond the capacity of an individual human being, but humans beings themselves cannot perceive such situations, they can only posit them theoretically and confirm them through recording instruments.

I find these questions fascinating, not because I have a distrust of science, but because I appreciate the poetics involved in higher scientific thinking. To ask any theoretical physicist to definitively answer any of these questions would inevitably entail an evening discussion, because higher-level science is in itself a process, a process of hypothesis, experimentation, conclusions, refutations, etc. – it is an organically changing part of the human psyche that ebbs and flows with mankind through each intellectual epoch. The recent experiments surrounding neutrinos possibly traveling faster than the speed of light are to me a fascinating glimpse not only into scientific development, but also into the collective psyche of mankind. In order to even test this hypothesis (which only partially would refute Einsteinian theories and the implications of relativity), scientists constructed elaborate timing mechanisms at distant sites that measure the speed of neutrinos traveling through the earth’s crust, and the crux of the debate is not whether it is theoretically possible (it is, otherwise there would have been no reason for the experiments), but whether the testing equipment was precise enough to confirm the hypothesis.

In this sense, I think it is helpful to read Cage’s definition of “Experimental Music” along the idea of scientific experimentation. Cage’s artistic program, it could be argued, was forever testing the hypothesis “Is there no such thing as silence?” In that sense, it is inevitably intertwined with issues surrounding the human perceiving object and scientific recording apparatuses. From a scientific standpoint, the human ear and human mind is unbelievably imprecise. Human beings are psychological entities: as I said last week, we think, we perceive, we have emotions, we have biases, we have tastes, etc., and all of these get in the way of scientific precision. Thus, to use the human ear as a testing apparatus for the “no such thing as silence” thesis is from the outset a failed endeavor. Cage would like, in a sense, to refine the listening subject to a level of “natural” precision—unmediated, unbiased, purely objective, mechanical.

If Cage were a scientist he would have stuck to this methodology. But he wasn’t, and he didn’t. Consider the second paragraph of “Experimental Music”

I no longer object to the word “experimental.” I use it in fact to describe all the music that especially interests me and to which I am devoted, whether someone else wrote it or I myself did.

Now, we have to be careful hear to not dismiss Cage, because at all times, he vacillates between pragmaticism and idealism. Practically speaking, the only way he can describe experimental music is through intuition: “I know it when I see it,” is an easy way out, but Cage is, as always, open to other ideas. As we mentioned, the anechoic chamber confirmed the falsity of “no such thing as silence” for the human perceiving subject, and this is an inherent fault of the human sentient subjective being:

…if, at the parting of the ways, where it is realized that sounds occur whether intended or not, one turns in the direction of those he does not intend. This turning is psychological and seems at first to be a giving up of everything that belongs to humanity—for a musician, the giving up of music. This psychological turning leads to the world of nature, where, gradually or suddenly, one sees that humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world together.

Thus it is not really a fault of the sentient human being, it is an attribute, and its implications for perception are revealing. Following this statement Cage turns to magnetic tape, which, at the time, was a highly precise technological mechanism for the recording of sound: is it possible to insert a recording apparatus for testing purposes into an anechoic chamber to prove the “no such thing as silence” hypothesis?

Cage loves to make categorical definitions, and with magnetic tape he presents another ordering of possible uses of magnetic tape for experimental purposes (he was at the same time still trying to establish a center for experimental music, so these categorical definitions are in a way simply just descriptive, and meant to exemplify the implications of the medium). Following this categorization, Cage presents something similar to the ideas in “The Future of Music: Credo,” but with a greater precision:

The situation made available by these means is essentially a total sound-space, the limits of which are ear-determined only, the position of a particular sound in this space being the result of five determinants: frequency or pitch, amplitude or loudness, overtone structure or timbre, duration, and morphology (how the sound begins, goes on, and dies away). by the alteration of any one of these determinants, the position of the sound in sound-space changes. Any sound at any point in this total sound-space can move to become a sound at any other point.

Here we have the familiar Cagean descriptions of the scientific structure of soundwaves, but suddenly we have a new precise scientific tool to record and manipulate sound without the mediation of the individual construction of written and performed musical sounds. Sounds are recorded as sounds, without any human intervention, and manipulated directly: sounds are able to be sounds, period, right? All problems aside, the “sound-space” metaphor is the most important here for the formulation, as Cage goes on to say:

This cautious stepping is not characteristic of the possibilities of magnetic tape, which is revealing to us that musical action or existence can occur at any point or along any line or curve or what have you in total sound-space; that we are, in fact, technically equipped to transform our contemporary awareness of nature’s manner of operation into art.

So there you have it: magnetic tape can capture “nature in her manner,” but only if it is unmediated or manipulated in any way. This the problem: do we mess with these “pure” recordings of sound, “field recordings” if you will, and if we do, does it just become another way of creating an artistic object no different from the traditional methodology of composer/score/performance/audition?  Cage goes on:

Again there is a parting of ways. One has a choice. If he does not wish to give up his attempts to control sound, he may complicate his musical technique towards an approximation of the new possibilities and awareness. (I use the word “approximation” because a measuring mind can never finally measure nature.) Or, as before, one may give up the desire to control sound, clear his mind of music, and set about discovering means to let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expressions of human sentiments.

Cage acknowledges that the biggest problem here again is the human mind:

Hearing sounds which are just sounds immediately sets the theorizing mind to theorizing, and the emotions of human beings are continually aroused by encounters with nature….emotion takes place in the person who has it. And sounds, when allowed to be themselves, do not require that those who hear them do so unfeelingly. The opposite is what is meant by response ability.

Here is another wonderful Cagean play on words: “response ability” versus “responsibility.” A truly ethical stance according to Cage’s terms seems to be that the sentient human being is able to hone the ability to respond to stimulus in the same manner as the automatic inscription of soundwaves on to electromagnetic tape.

New music: new listening. Not an attempt to understand something that is being said, for, if something were being said, the sounds would be given the shapes of words. Just an attention to the activity of sounds.

Then we are (finally), introduced to Cage’s methodology: ways to remove subjectivity from the human receptive process in a way akin to mechanical inscription. For Cage, it is through chance operations, or the interpretation of imperfections in the paper, spatial superimpositions (transparencies, such as those used in the Variations series), etc. What I think is important to note here, in the context of these three essays, and in Cage’s ordering of introductory essays, is the effect of recording and magnetic tape on the overall perception and articulation of the sound object. This is one of the few constants in Cage’s writings: we have scientific definitions of sound and sound objects, methodologies for determining their existence within or outside the human perceiving object, and strategies for negotiating the (impossible) project of separating the individual perception from the presentation of sounds in succession.

The “sound field” thesis is an interesting one that many theorists have explored recently, particularly Branden Joseph, and I’ll save that discussion for another day. In the meantime, I think it is important to reiterate Cage’s words:

Whether one uses tape or writes for conventional instruments, the present musical situation has changed from what it was before tape came into being. This also need not arouse alarm, for the coming into being of something new does not by that fact deprive what was of its proper place. Each new things has its own place, never takes the place of something else; and the more things there are, as it is said, the merrier.