“I
disagree with almost everything”
-Arnold Schoenberg
“Mosaic”
is John Cage’s major essay on Schoenberg, although Schoenberg’s name pervades
virtually all of his writings. Cage insistently posited a modernist lineage
stemming from Schoenberg’s compositional approach to serialism, and as Cage’s
story goes, noise and indeterminacy were the next logical step in the “evolution”
of Western art music. You can tell this tale by starting as far back as you
like, from modal/tonal relationships in Monteverdi, to the “long-line” of
Beethoven, the chromaticism of Wagner, “developing variation” in Brahms, “emancipation
of the dissonance” in Schoenberg, etc., but few besides Cage himself were willing
to connect the next modernist dot to Cage’s compositional approach, even half a
century later.
In
my mind, the problem here is that musicologists are simply talking over each
other. When we are speaking of Western tonal art music, Cage’s program, and
particularly his aesthetic of silence, comes across as something altogether
different. To be sure, Cage still utilized the resources of Western concert
music to launch his campaign (I am thinking in particular of 4’33”, which is a specific critique of
the concert music setting), but in the end he was equally concerned with the
relationships between listening, object, and alterity.
Nevertheless,
Cage still clung to certain conventions of tonally-structured music, especially
later in life when he returned to composing for acoustic instruments, and his
relationship to Schoenberg’s thinking consistently returned to the
fundamentals. It is notable that, as many scholars have proven, all that Cage likely
gleaned from his early studies with Schoenberg were nothing more than this,
fundamentals of counterpoint and analysis. I imagine the courses were insightful,
and judging from Cage’s recollections, rather curious, but in the end they were
really just elementary counterpoint classes that most undergraduates in a music
school are obliged to take.
Cage’s
favorite anecdote about having “no ear for music” was both a provocation and a
veil. Did he literally not know anything about music, and thus resorted to
esoteric compositional methods to hide his inadequacies? Most certainly not. To
put it the other way, however, that Cage understood counterpoint and harmony
well enough to construct a system of an even higher order of complexity than
serialism is, in my mind, a bit of a stretch. To be sure, Cage conceived of
elaborate mathematical puzzles and systems for ordering events temporally, but
none of his systems maintained a constant variable point to base further
elaborations on. Schoenberg’s system of serial composition was, in most cases, nested in a late-romantic style relating to form and content, and it was not until the
hard-edge serialism of the postwar schools emerged that the system began to look a lot
like chance and indeterminacy.
As
I have mentioned before, however, these two extreme oppositional poles were the
logical extension of one idea: namely the removal of romantic expressionism
from the ordering of musical notes, and once this extreme was reached, there
was really nowhere else to go. Academic composers still occasionally apply
serial techniques in their works, and many downtown composers still look to
Cage as a model or a mirror for their own work, but neither camps have
resonated deeply enough in modern culture to be appropriately called a living “school”
of composition.
That
is not a critique of either approaches relative merit or value, it’s rather a
historical evaluation. Most of Cage’s works are viewed as fascinating
historical artifacts, no different from the eclectic methods of ars subtilior in the fourteenth century.
What has lasted and remains a strong
cultural force, in my mind, are the profound notions Cage advocated for
listening in general, and thus while it is appropriate to trace historical comparisons
between Cage and Schoenberg regarding method, I hesitate to advocate for a
sweeping generalization of the historical effect of this particular connection.
The
second notion that creeps up still today in Cagean lore is the supposed
anecdote from Schoenberg that Cage as an “inventor of genius,” and I think it
is appropriate to once again set the record straight here. The anecdote arose
after Los Angeles impresario Peter Yates sent a note to Cage in 1953. I’ll
transcribe the section verbatim:
I have planned
several times to tell you—and always forget to—that during my last conversation
with Schoenberg I made an effort to find out how much he knew about the work of
his self-appointed disciples, especially those in NY. He knew nothing of them,
their work or their names, except his few elder friends, not even about his
pupils. Until he thought of you, and at once he brightened and explained, to
this effect “An inventor! An inventor of genius. Not a composer, no, not a
composer, but an inventor. A great mind.” Recognizing that the qualification
balances your own estimate of the old man, I think you should be honored and
happy that both his esteem and his affection for you remained so vocal and so
visible.
-Peter Yates to John Cage, 8 August, 1953. John Cage Collection,
Northwestern University, Series I, Box 3, Folder 8, Item 1, p. 2.
The
question remains just what Yates meant by “to this effect,” but nevertheless
Cage was fond of quoting the anecdote, and scholars continue to cite the
anecdote as fact, despite the minimal evidence. Not that it matters one way or
the other for most, but it is evidence of the complex notions of lineage that
pervade academic, artistic, and social constructions of history.
In
many ways this notion of memory and history is reflected in the structure and
title of the essay, and it is here that I think Cage is most adept at approaching the act of remembering. As the essay implies, it is a mosaic of
ideas surrounding Schoenberg, constructed from snippets of his
recently-published correspondence, subjected to I-Ching calculations, and then
filled in with Cage’s own memories of his early counterpoint classes. Most of
the anecdotes pop up elsewhere in Cage’s writings, and he persistently returns
to the relationship between Schoenberg, Berg, Webern and Hauer. I’ll end with a
note on the various anecdotes that pervade the Schoenberg legacy, particularly
those in Los Angeles surrounding his eclectic demeanor and his fondness for
tennis. Here, it seems, we have a character as odd and curious as Cage, and
here I see a fine parallel to be made.
 |
Charlie Chaplin, Gertrud and Arnold Schoenberg, David Raskin. Photograph by Max Munn Autrey
|
 |
| Arnold Schoenberg and Lucca Lehner shaking hands with Gertrud Schoenberg and Felix Khuner at the net, at the conclusion of a tennis doubles game in Los Angeles, in the summer of 1937. |
No comments:
Post a Comment