“45’ For A Speaker” (1954)

[24. Fu / Return (The Turning Point), six in the third place. Changing to:  7. Shih / The Army.]

“There is too much there there.”

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.

(Yawn)

“45’ For a Speaker” returns to the performative genre, and I think I’ll spend some time working through the idea of “reading through” that I initially proposed as one of the goals of this blog. It is fairly easy to approach John Cage’s technical or biographical essays from an analytic standpoint, but essays like “45’” present a very “musical” challenge. This is a performative and temporal piece, and its real ontology lies in hearing and seeing it performed rather than studying the “score” or written text. The greatest challenge of musical discourse lies in the relationship to written text and aural experience. We use words to describe a temporal aural experience, but there is really no direct relationship between the two. Metaphor serves to bridge the link between experiences, and oftentimes we resort to discussions of structure and form when describing a piece, leaving the “interpretation” up to the listener. Historical background, likewise, is an easy realm for musical discussion; these are facts about the piece, but not necessarily about the music “itself.”

At the same time, “45’” does contains a fair amount of “facts” in the sense that it describes compositional techniques Cage was interested in at various points, as well as a considerable amount of metaphor via Zen or East Asian heuristics and anecdotes. Equally, “45’” is densely structured; every element of succession and duration was devised according to a complex precompositional rhythmic structure coupled with a strict gamut technique for content.

So here we are left with a question: What “is” “45’ For A Speaker”? What boundaries, if any, can we ascribe for a performative piece? It is both a lecture and a musical composition, in my mind. It exists in a “score” form, and like a musical recording, it has another boundary of its original performance (The Composers’ Concourse in London and later at Donaueschingen in 1954), and in another sense, it exists in every subsequent reading, but that still doesn’t really tells us what it is.

This is a difficult but important question that I feel scholars need to address, particularly when discussing performative texts such as “45’.” It is admittedly a slippery slope of analytical investigation, but it gets quite close to the heart of Cage’s own ontological investigation on the nature of sound, listening, and experience, and it seems fitting that we apply the same methodology to his written words. This is especially important in later works that dissolve basic syntax and grammar, leaving us only with fleeting connections between sounds and specific ideas, symbols, or objects.

So let’s start with the easy descriptive work. “45’ For a Speaker” was delivered as a lecture in 1954 in conjunction with 34’ 46.776 for Two Pianists. 34’ 46.776 and was (and is) a part of what James Pritchett describes as the “Ten Thousand things” series in the mid 1950s. After completing Williams Mix in 1952, Cage began a new project, which he described:

From time to time ideas come for my next work which as I see it will be a large work which will always be in progress and will never be finished; at the same time any part of it will be able to be performed once I have begun. It will include tape and any other time actions, not excluding violins and whatever else I put my attention to. I will of course write other music than this, but only if required by some outside situation.

The collection of works that resulted from this project include two pieces for piano, two for strings, one unfinished work for voice, one for percussion, an unfinished project for magnetic tape, and “45’ For A Speaker.” The most famous work from this series was 26’ 1.1499” for a string player (1955), made famous largely due to the controversial performances by Charlotte Moorman in the 1960s (performances which Cage famously decried as “murderous”). The unifying element of these works is a similar strategy to Cage’s micro-macrocosmic form from his early percussion works. I’ll spare the minute details, but suffice to say there is a unifying element here of rhythmic structure related to the number “10,000,” which represents infinity in many Taoist and Buddhist writings. If you are interested in the details, I will defer to James Pritchett’s detailed discussion of the works.

Cage explicitly outlines the method involved in constructing “45’” in the introduction, so let’s get that out of the way now too. The performer reads the text in strict clock time following the timing marks on the left margin (although I am confused as to why Cage explained that each line should take two seconds, yet there are six lines in each ten-second margin grouping), loudness is indicated by typographical means, and noises and gestures that are to be performed are indicated in the right margin. Finally, the content of the lecture was decided via a gamut technique. After tossing the coins or using other star chart or constellation chance procedures, Cage went through the following procedure: 1.) speech or silence, 2.) duration, 3.) new material or old, which led to the following two choices, 4.) if old material, from which lecture and from which part, or 6.) if new material, he chose from 32 different subjects.

This gave Cage an consistent way to “write through” that he would refine in the coming decades. Once the process is set up, he could return to the writing or composing project with no concern for previous or future content; the act of writing could be set in motion at any given time. This is why Cage explicitly noted in this and many subsequent written works that they may be performed alone or together in any combination, and that segments can be taken separately and performed in any order. This was not an effort to get away from any sense of continuity or provide an example of “pure” indeterminacy, it was merely a mirror of the compositional process employed in creating the pieces themselves. They never really existed in any final form since they were composed with an automated means, and thus their ontological status need not be defined with any sense of totality.

Thus “reading through” this work presents another level of circularity central to the Cagean aesthetic. This is in essence a mosaic of ideas and aphorisms related to Cage’s compositional style and various philosophical statements, and the thinking mind inevitably goes about making analytical connections between statements, history, individual pieces, literary theory, art history, musicology, etc. etc.; we cannot stop the thinking mind from thinking, especially when there are hints of ideas that evoke our own personal understanding of Cage’s life and history, our own aesthetic and creative dilemmas, or any other host of ideas that float in and out of the mind in any given setting. To make matters worse, the content of many of these small gamuts of ideas are explicitly involved in describing that very intellectual circularity: we are thinking about what we are thinking about while it happens over time. In my mind this is something akin to the phenomenological reduction that attempts to get at the “thing itself,” which, itself, is a central concern of modern philosophy. Phenomenology is more concerned with “essences,” or the fleeting sense of something rather than the concrete, since it is impossible to perceive just what that is in time; it’s sort of like glancing over your shoulder, or the cold feeling of déjà vu.

So how do I “read though” this piece? Do I start from the beginning with a stopwatch and read it aloud according to the instructions? Do I read it in the normal succession of page after page, or do I skip around and read sections at random? (which is admittedly what I end up doing after having already read the essay all the way through and filling the text up with notes)  When ideas come to my head while reading, do I ignore them, or do I make connections between different sections of the work; its structure or its relationship to the gamut? Have I heard this idea before; is it part of a previous essay? If not, what does it mean? In my mind, these are the same questions that inevitably occur when listening to Cage’s music; it’s just that here, “content” is more explicit. They are ideas or anecdotes, while small musical figures are just that, musical figures. They have, as Cage would say, no “content” other than their actual existence.  

These are important questions to address, especially with “45’ For a Speaker,” and the other purely performative lecture, “Where are We Going? And What Are We Doing?” (1961 – which I’ll discuss next week), which together constitute almost half of the “content” of Silence. What do we “do” with these essays, if anything? I am amazed how often analytical arguments quote from the small sections of these essays, as if they were quoting from a segment of a logical argument presented in the normal succession of written texts. The individual ideas gradually functioned as part of the greater “Cagean” discourse on many levels. Cage repeated many ideas in interviews or lectures, and thus the ideas gradually developed a life of their own, which in turn problematized essays such as this as time went by and a larger network of indeterminate discourse developed.

With essays like this it is tempting to “put the pieces back together” by categorizing the individual segments according to the original gamut of subjects. Thus we could tear apart the essay and collect all of the old ideas in one group alongside the new ideas divided according to the 32 subjects. We would then have a linear discourse that would accurately describe many of Cage’s ideas in a coherent way. Even without literally doing this on paper, I tend to construct such a grouping as I “read through” the lecture. But who is to blame me for doing so? Cage tempted us in the beginning by explaining the gamut process quite clearly. If he would have just printed the essay with no explanation, it would be perhaps easier to just read the essay and not think about structure and division. In a way the essay is like an interview; the discussion wanders between many different disparate topics, Cage chiming in with familiar aphorisms, occasional jokes, and circular arguments that evade moments of intellectual clarity.

I think I’ll end today by doing what many people do: open to a random page of the lecture and find a quote that seems to summarize my ideas at this very moment. If I were to do it tomorrow, it would be a completely different page, a different idea, and this essay would have a different structure. But it is not tomorrow, nor is it yesterday; it is this moment right now, and this particular anything whatsoever.

This work has no score. It should be abolished. “A statement concerning the arts is no statement concerning the arts.” It consists of single parts. Any of them may be played together or eliminated and at any time. “To me teaching is an expedient, but I do not teach external signs.” Like a long book if a long book is like a mobile. “The ignorant because of their attachment to existence seize on signified or signifying.” No beginning no ending. Harmony, so called, is a forced abstract vertical relation which blots out the spontaneous transmitting nature of each of the sounds forced into it. Form, then, is not something off in the distance in solitary confinement: It is right here right now. Since it is something we say about past actions, it is wise to drop it. 

“Edgard Varèse” (1958)

[47. K'un / Oppression (Exhaustion); Nine in the third place, nine in the fifth place. Changing to 16. Yü / Enthusiasm.]

Varèse is an artist of the past. Rather than dealing with sounds as sounds, he deals with them as Varèse.

This is John Cage’s main statement on Edgard Varèse, the French composer who is viewed by many as the father of modern electronic music. I think this point in itself is notable, because Cage was aware of the pervasive influence of Varèse, both as director of the International Composer’s Guild and for his role in American music in the inter- and post-war periods. Cage’s relationship to Varèse was best described as tenuous, alternating between periods of friendship and hostility. The best example of this conflict is the early use of the term “Organized Sound,” which, as I mentioned last week, has become ubiquitous in the field of sound art.

Sound art theorists generally delineate the generational divide between Cage and Varèse as the foundation for modern sound art, or sound-as-object theory. The narrative generally reads that Varèse treated new musical resources with traditional “composerly” approaches to form and structure, while Cage inaugurated the “sound-as-sounds” aesthetic that utilized new technology to examine the empirical foundation of sound objects, and to remove subjectivity from the phenomenological experience of listening.

In a sense this narrative is Cage’s, and most have tended to, as in many other cases, take Cage’s word as historical truth. This essay is a prime example. Cage was conscientious of historical lineage, and he explicitly outlined his preferred narrative. This trajectory places Cage within the modernist tradition, beginning with his famous "break" with Schoenberg and a transition to new musical resources such as percussion (which, in this narrative, minimizes the influence of Henry Cowell), followed by the discovery of temporal durational structure via Eric Satie, and finally splitting with the historical avant-garde of Varèse and his contemporaries ( I know this is a little reductive, but you get the idea). 

That is not to say that Cage dismissed Varèse; on the contrary, I think he realized just how essential he was to this historical lineage. As Cage notes, “he fathered forth noise,” which “makes him more relative to the present musical necessity than even the Viennese masters.” Varèse provided a backdrop for Cage’s artistic program more than any other composer. There was a clear correlation between their interests, but Cage moved forward into the unknown sound hidden beneath magnetic tape, while Varèse adhered to structural principles to the end.

This is an interesting point surrounding Varèse’s own biography, which, in a way like Duchamp, has some glaring holes. Varèse famously destroyed many of his early works, and his surviving output is rather small – you can soak it all up in a double CD set in just one evening. Varèse’s surviving works, however, are incredibly dense, both in their structure and their approach to the general sound field. Varèse is a popular topic for analysts, and analyses such as Jonathan Bernard’s clearly demonstrate the dense complexity of sound structure in his acoustic and electroacoustic works. In general terms, what Bernard observed was a strict correlation in Varèse’s works between orchestration and acoustics. Individual notes and articulations are arranged according to their sonic characteristics, creation projections across the audible spectrum that have less to do with note-to-note correspondences in tonal or serial music, and more to do with the sound-to-sound correspondences.  

Cage understood this on a certain level, I think. He noted that Varèse’s music always contained a “characteristic flourish” of a “tone sustained through a crescendo to the maximum amplitude,” which, as Bernard has observed, is articulated through motivic expansion and contraction. Unlike twelve tone treatment of the equal tempered scale, Varèse clearly articulates the acoustic and timbral differences between octave equivalencies, emphasizing symmetrical structures of the complete spectrum of acoustic space available for compositional play. A work such as Density 21.5 focuses of the symmetrical expansion and contraction of interval structures, creating musical form through the articulation of these hierarchical symmetries. The focus on registral expansion and contraction is reflective of the scientific nature of Varese’s interest in acoustic space and organizational structures, as he probes the ramifications of the technological apparatus of the newly constructed platinum flute.

Density 21.5 is a popular example for music analysis due to its literal density of motivic and symmetrical equivalencies. Consider Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s famous semiological analysis:

I'll spare everyone any more of this. I find it interesting, but for most this is a bit much. There is little doubt among theorists that Varèse’s work has a certain compositional profundity, which is a favorite topic for theorists and historians to justify a musical artwork as “good” in an intellectual sense. Cage’s early percussion works displayed a similar level of compositional complexity, culminating in Music of Changes and Williams Mix in the 1950s. Where the real difference arises, I think, is how Cage and Varèse each approach magnetic tape.

Cage notes, Varèse’s famous work Deserts (1950-54), which alternated between orchestral sections and “organized sound” moments of amplified sounds, “attempts to make tape sound like the orchestra and vice versa, showing again a lack of interest in the natural differences of sounds, preferring to give them all his unifying signature.”

Cage is clearly considering this work in opposition to Williams Mix, which as I have mentioned, contains an assault of randomized sounds culled from six categories and spliced on eight tracks of magnetic tape. The difference between the two approaches to magnetic tape composition is clearest in the scores, I think. Both are detailed templates for the editing of sounds, “dressmaker patterns,” as Cage noted, but the difference lies in what those sounds actually are. In Varèse’s score for Deserts, along with Poème électronique (1958), the score outlines the sound characteristics in detail. This is an approach quite similar to Stockhausen’s Kontakte (1958-60), which alongside the notated percussion instruments, outlines the general sonic characteristics of individual sounds on the accompanying soundtrack.

Score for Williams Mix

Detail from score to Poème électronique (1958)

Detail from Kontakte  

Cage considers magnetic tape a tabula rasa for sounds to be inscribed and projected, while most composers were interested in crafting specific sonic continuities between moments. This leads to a fairly traditional concept of “organized sound,” which in effect could encompass tonal music as well, which is a reductive form of organized sound that favors specific divisions of audible frequencies and their arrangement within harmonic/melodic structures. Cage’s leap was a big leap, Varèse’s leap was a small one. However, Varèse was cognizant of the listener; he understood that the leap Cage wished to make would be more or less incomprehensible to contemporary listeners. I think the situation today, however, is quite different. The contemporary sonic landscape has expanded exponentially, and sound art discourse has built a listening audience prepared to take the leaps Cage advocated fifty years ago almost with a sense of nonchalance. Listeners may laugh a bit at Williams Mix, but after a lifetime of sonic assaults from every style and genre of contemporary electronic, dance, rock etc., the overall sonic texture is hardly shocking. No one boos a sound art work today the way they did for Williams Mix.

I’ll leave the Varèse discussion there; the essay is not terribly long, and it really only outlines those three main points: artistic lineage, sounds-as-sounds, and magnetic tape. I think it is interesting that Cage followed this essay with a page and a half of anecdotes, and I believe there is a bit of a connection to the essay. There are seven anecdotes, the first a story of John and Merce and a group of schoolchildren at the zoo, the second on Schoenberg, the third on Williams Mix and tape splicing, the forth on Buddhism, the fifth and six on Cage’s childhood, and the final on enlightenment.

All of Cage’s anecdotes are structured like a Zen kōan; some of them are actually kōans lifted from other texts. A kōan is a type of anecdote in that it tells a story, but the primary focus is the turning point, usually toward the end, that presents a strange and unanswerable question or situation. A famous kōan: “Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?” Kōans are circular and often unanswerable, in contrast to many anecdotes, which are funny and informative. Cage is pretty good at structuring his kōans with a familiar twist, and each kōan leaves one with a dilemma: what was that supposed to mean, if anything? The Zen answer, of course, is that it doesn’t mean anything in the logical sense; it is meant to enlighten one to a situation. I don’t know if this always gets across with Cage’s statements; some are very autobiographical and disconcerting, especially those that deal with his childhood. Here are the two after the Varèse essay:

Once I was visiting my Aunt Marge. She was doing her laundry. She turned to me and said, ‘You know? I love this machine much more than I do your Uncle Walter.”

One Sunday morning, Mother said to Dad, “Let’s go to church.” Dad said, “O.K.” When they drove up in front, Dad showed no sign of getting out of the car. Mother said, “Aren’t you coming in?” Dad said, “No, I’ll wait for you here.”

A large majority of Cage’s anecdotes recount discussions with friends and colleagues on Zen Buddhism, and they end with a characteristic turn from one of the main characters. In this section, Cage brought up the death of the Buddha, which is a central idea in Zen Buddhism where, if one encounters the Buddha, he must kill him on the spot (because thinking about the Buddha is antithetical to enlightenment). The final anecdote is a common story of someone attaining enlightenment accidentally; a man comes to a teacher to study, but upon arriving received to answer: the man continued to rake the leaves in front of his house. The student left, built his own house, and many years later while raking the leaves, was enlightened.

I dwell on this here because this section contains perhaps my favorite Cage anecdote. It is a rather detailed story that ends with a “twist” or a turn at the end. In keeping with the kōan tradition, the final sentence is somewhat indecipherable, but it characterizes Cage better than any of the other anecdotes:

One summer day, Merce Cunningham and I took eight children to Bear Mountain Park. The paths through the zoo were crowded. Some of the children ran ahead, while others fell behind. Every now and then we stopped, gathered all the children together, and counted them to make sure none had been lost. Since it was very hot and the children were getting difficult, we decided to buy them ice cream cones. This was done in shifts. While I stayed with some, Merce Cunningham took others, got them cones, and brought them back. I took the ones with cones. He took those without. Eventually all the children were supplied with ice cream. However, they got it all over their faces. So we went to a water foundation where people were lined up to get a drink, put the children in line, tried to keep them there and waited our turn. Finally, I knelt beside the fountain. Merce Cunningham turned it on. Then I proceeded one by one to wash the children’s faces. While I was doing this, a man behind us in line said rather loudly, “There’s a washroom over there.” I looked up at him quickly and said, “Where? And how did you know I was interested in mushrooms?”

“A Few Ideas About Music and Film” (1951); “On Film” (1956)

[19. Lin / Approach, nine in the first place, six in the fifth. Changing to   29. K'an / The Abysmal (Water)]

I am interested in any art not as a closed-in thing by itself but as a going-out one to interpenetrate with all other things, even if they are arts too.

Today’s post is related to some of my own research on John Cage and multimedia. Cage only composed a few works for film in the traditional sense, but his relationship to avant-garde and experimental cinema in American was notable. I have had the pleasure of taking some wonderfully obscure courses from a few of the cinema scholars out there that are actually invested politically and creatively in alternative film and video. In Los Angeles this is a lively and active subculture, despite the overwhelming cultural dominance of the Hollywood industry.

Anyway, Cage’s work in film consisted of a few commissions to score projects that were closely related to the visual arts; the two most notable were prepared piano compositions, the first for the 1947 feature-length film, Dreams that Money Can Buy, by Hans Richter, the second for the Herbert Matter documentary short on sculpture Alexander Calder, Works of Calder (1951). Notably, both projects were initially offered to Edgard Varèse, who passed them along to Cage.  Cage was also offered to score the Hans Namuth documentary on Jackson Pollock the same year as  Works of Calder, but his strong distaste for Pollock and the conceptual divide between Abstract Expressionism and the neo-avant-garde made his rejection inevitable; he handed the project off to Morton Feldman, who scored the film in exchange for a small Pollock painting.

The first essay, “A Few Ideas About Music and Film,” (1951), primarily addresses a few technical points surrounding these two projects. The original journal, Film Music Notes, was edited by Louis Appelbaum, a composer who was also the music supervisor for the Richter film. It was essentially a technical trade journal for composers working in Hollywood. “A Few Ideas” is not a terribly interesting or revelatory essay, but it does make some interesting comparisons between editing techniques and rhythmic structure. Cage mainly compares his approach to film music to his method of composing for the dance, where a temporal grid is set out ahead of time and the composer goes off and writes something—anything, when it came to Cunningham commissions—and then the two were put together in performance.

There are hints here of the big transition point in Cage’s career (his first chance compositions came about the same year), and he has several amusing comments on “anonymous polyphony” where “several composers work independently of one another on the same music” (similar to the “Exquisite Corpse” piece a decade earlier, “Double Music” (1941) with Lou Harrison, and ironically, a common industrial practice in Hollywood studios, perpetuated today in the strict division of labor at such behemoths as Hans Zimmer’s production company, Remote Control Productions).

Cage was not particularly fond of the Hans Richter project, mainly because there were numerous problems with sound synchronization in post production, and his score, Music for Marcel Duchamp, did not align with the images as he had originally intended. The project was underwritten by Peggy Guggenheim and, typical of independent film, was grossly over budget by the time the music was edited in. Early sound editing procedures were incredibly complicated, and smaller budget films were laden with these types of problems. Richter himself had a rather in-between status within the war refugee community in New York; he later went on to work at New York University in the recently-founded film production department (notably, a similar job was offered to avant-garde filmmaker Slavko Vorkapich at the other film school giant in America (and my alma mater), the University of Southern California).

“Dreams That Money Can Buy” was a collaboration between Richter and some of his friends in the exile community, and consisted of five shorts elaborating on themes in each artist’s respective mediums, intercut with a loosely scripted film noir character, “Joe” who founds a company to sell dreams, the dreams being the dreams of each artist. The lineup was notable: Max Ernst, Ferdinand Leger, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, and Richter himself for the final sequence. Original music accompanied each film segment by, respectively, Paul Bowles, John Latouche and Libby Holman, Darius Milhaud, John Cage for the Duchamp sequence, Paul Bowles and David Diamond, and Louis Appelbaum. It’s a fairly amusing film that you can watch online here.  

Cage’s music for the Marcel Duchamp sequence is among the quietest prepared piano works in the repertoire. James Pritchett called it the “summit of the prepared piano style,” and there are noticeably long segments of silence. Duchamp’s segment was an amusing interplay between two prior works, the first, Anémic Cinéma (1926), was an early experimental film project that played with the concept behind his “rotoreliefs,” and the second idea was a literal interpretation of his famous early cubist abstraction piece, Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912) – here, a collage of nude women descend across the screen while superimposed images of coal drape the image (and conceal some of the nudity for the censors…). It’s a notable yet fairly literal section of the film; the Man Ray sequence is in my mind the most interesting.

Duchamp Rotoreliefs

Anémic Cinéma (1926),

Duchamp filming his rotoreliefs for Dreams

Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) 

Duchamp/Cage, "Circles," from Dreams that Money Can Buy

The second film Cage discusses is the Herbert Matter film on American sculptor Alexander Calder. This film is typical of art documentary films from the period; it’s really a beautiful film that superimposes Calder sculptures against images in nature and various other backdrops, with a central section in which Matter’s son, the protagonist in the film, wanders into Calder’s Roxbury, CT studio and becomes enthralled with all of the playful toys and machinery. There are only a few copies left of this film and it is not widely available for viewing. Margaret Leng Tan often performs the piece live against the film; it’s among her favorite works in the prepared piano repertoire. This is one of Cage’s most complex scores and, despite his proclamations in “A Few Ideas” on the independence between music and image, the score has plenty of “Mickey Mousing” moments.

Works of Calder is also one of Cage’s first experiments with magnetic tape. As he outlines in “A Few Ideas,” “another idea I have is that if there is a story or pictures, the sounds should be the noises and sounds characteristic of or relevant to what one is following or seeing…not as sound effects but as organized sound (to quote Varèse).” This is an interesting section; the sounds of hammering at first are diegetic, but quickly they move in different rhythms, and it is only after some time that one realizes that it is actually a percussive composition. This is essentially what Varèse was talking about in his original 1940 essay, “Organized Sound for the Sound Film,” where he compared sound editing to Eisenstein montage techniques in narrative film. The origins of this term really have nothing to do with the ideas expressed in sound art and contemporary journals such as Organised Sound in the UK; but these type of historical misnomers are pretty commonplace, and there is nothing wrong with taking an old term and finding some new uses for it, even if it gets a little confusing.

Music for Works of Calder (1951)

One last note that is interesting in the essay are the comments on “synthetic” sound. As I mentioned in past posts, magnetic tape was really the driving force behind Cage’s empirical conception of “sounds-as-sounds,” and there were several parallel experimental uses of the audio portion of sound film by artists such as Oskar Fischinger and Norman McLaren, the latter who he mentions directly in the essay (Fischinger was noticeably left out).

One interesting connection Cage does not bring up in either essay is his interaction with Maya Deren, who is considered by many represent the critical juncture between European and American experimental film in the 1940s and 50s. Cage met Deren through Joseph Campbell, and his wife at the time, Xenia, famously clashed with her eccentric demeanor at many of the infamous Greenwich Village parties in the 40s. Both John and Xenia had cameos in Deren's 1944 film, At Land, which, along with Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), inaugurated the "trance" genre in American experimental film, where an individual psychological journey is outlined through a non-narrative juxtaposition of scenes and images, redefining the boundaries of cinematographic space while challenging conventional montage techniques. 

Maya Deren and John Cage in At Land (1944)

At Land (1944)

The second short essay, "On Film,” (1956) is more interesting. This was written after the transition period in the fifties, and is more in line with the Cagean notions of theatre most are familiar with. Thus it is natural that in the opening lines quoted above that Cage is not interested in “Film as Film” necessarily, but more with what film as a medium can be. The address was given to the Creative Film Foundation in 1956, an organization spearheaded by Deren and Joseph Campbell that provided much of the theoretical discourse that would eventually transfer to the influential journal, Film Culture in the 1960s. Experimental filmmakers in America gradually moved away from the trance genre around the same time. Structural film, Expanded Cinema, Underground film, and the mythopoetic were just a few of these directions. Much like the visual art world, filmmakers were concerned as much with ideas as content or medium. Many of these ideas arguably stemmed from Cage's notions of indeterminacy, particularly his influence on Fluxus artists enrolled in his courses at the New School mentioned in previous posts. Discussing the boundaries of these new art works within the traditional parameters of musicological studies is quite difficult, particularly when one is considering questions of influence alongside of the traditional associations between sound and image in narrative film. 

One enduring problem in film music studies is the slippery slope where narrative diegesis discussions wandering into purely conceptual audiovisual interactions within the boundaries of the filmic apparatus. The former category is fairly straightforward, because the question is fairly straightforward: what effect, if any, does the soundtrack have within the narrative? Narrative is generally considered as everything that functions to create an actually reality on screen, and thus there are a few things to discuss, including more conceptual ideas such as montage, flashback, twist, etc. However the second category is more difficult to define, especially when dealing with film that is decidedly anti-narrative, or simply deals with a succession of abstract images.


Cage's essay problematizes all of the "traditional" boundaries of narrative, diegesis, and the cinematographic experience itself, which encompasses the entire experience of sitting in a darkened theater, engaging in the fictional narrative presented in front of you, and ignoring the reality of your outward bodily existence while doing so. As I have been slowly unraveling in my own circular academic way, all of Cage's essays around this period explore the relationship between object and perception, and cinema is of particular significance in this respect, since it deals entirely with a fictional "place" on or in the screen that simultaneously creates a "world" that is transparent in one sense, in that it directly represents an image of a reality, but at all times and in all circumstances, is inherently fictional when compared to actual human experience. Cinema can be considered a "Transparent Eye" in the sense of Whitman, as I discussed before, but any instance of cinema occurring is, much like any artwork, still respectful to the medium itself. Cage mentions this, along with the subservience of the auditory to the optical in the cinematic experience. Cage quote's Antonin Artaud, whose famous treatise The Theater and Its Double was an important instigator of Cage's conception of theater (it was translated for the first time in English by his close friend Mary Caroline Richards in the early fifties). 


Here he notes, "in theater, as Artaud points out, it is death to place literature in the only central position; and so I do not agree that 'film is a visual form.' The images don't interest me any more than the sound." Later he provides a good example of the cinematographic experience, where a viewer is suddenly lurched out of the diegesis when he notes, "he [an "average person"] is therefore not entirely alive under film bombardment, but if the building he is in begins to burn down, he will wake up and use his liveliness to save himself." "In other words," he explains, "I am not interested in emotional response, but rather in bringing about a situation in which life on the part of everyone concerned is an obvious necessity." He then provided two poignant examples of just what he was thinking film may be:


In Seville around 1929 or 1930, I stayed on longer than I had planned in order to see a film, Homer's Illiad, a performance having been announced a week off. Loitering around, I was one day on  a street corner and found myself surrounded by three radio loud-speakers, each playing a different program, and the traffic and pedestrians visible and audible all at the same time. When the day for Homer came along, I went to the "theatre," which was an outdoor cafe. The picture screen was placed in the center of two such cafes, and I suppose that the image was seen straight from one side, reverse from the other, though the arrangement was marvelously suggestive of new possibilities. The program had been changed. Homer was never performed. The manager was surprised that I was concerned to see it.
      Just a few years ago, I was on my way to Boston with friends. We stopped to get some lunch. The situation was a bar and glass-walled dining room, overlooking a small lake with diving apparatus in its center. There were people swimming (I could see them); there was a juke box playing (I could hear it). I was eating lunch and conversing. It all went together.


This gets to the heart of the "art and life" dichotomy that Cage expressed to varying degrees, where any situation that has in essence been aestheticized is considered a work of art, a theatrical performance of the very act of living. This is a hard divide to make, and Cage's writings vacillated with the notion of just how to create such a situation, much less realize that such a situation has occurred. He notes the relationship between reality and an experience, but I think it is important to note that the event itself has already been aestheticized in the same way that any found object or other conceptual object has been placed in an "art-world" category, meaning we have identified its uniqueness and its place as "art," even when the goal of the artists was to create something that fundamentally was not art. This is what Duchamp took very seriously in his most humorous readymades. This is one aspect of cinema that has fascinated artists and viewers since its inception; we, in essence, have many aesthetic moments in life where we contemplate a situation in its entirety - existential moments of clarity if you will - and cinema captures certain instances in the same way, replaying them and all their ocular fantasy for all eternity. Like most boundaries of intentionality, cinema had the added aspect of literal representation that photography had to deal with when constructing moments of ocular experience. This is what primarily concerned filmmaker Stan Brakhage, whose ideas were at times in stark opposition to Cage, and at others purely in line (much like Pollock). 


I have a lot more to say on this topic, but I'll leave it for another day. In the meantime, there is one great example from cinema to compare to last week's discussion of Rauschenberg: Nam June Paik's Zen for Film (1964), which consists of nothing but blank leader projected on the screen, where particles of dust from the environment are reflected on the film. 

“On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work” (1961)

[1. Ch'ien / The Creative, Unchanging.]

To Whom It May Concern:

The white paintings came

first; my silent piece

came later.

                                —J. C.

Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting, 1951. 

                                                                To Whom

                                                                     No Subject

                                                                     No image

                                                                     No taste

                                                                     No object

                                                                     No beauty

                                                                     No message

                                                                     No talent

                                                                     No technique (no why)

                                                                     No idea

                                                                     No intention

                                                                     No art

                                                                     No feeling

                                                                     No black

                                                                     No white (no and)

                Hallelujah! the blind can see again; the water’s fine.

Rauschenberg, Untitled (Red Painting), 1953 

Untitled (Glossy Black Painting), ca. 1951

Today’s I-Ching reading could not have been more apt. This is the second time Ch’ien/The Creative came up, the first was for the initial post to this blog. This is the first of the 64 hexagrams, and it is one controlling force of the philosophical tenants of The Book of Changes. In addition, this is an unchanging hexagram, meaning that none of the lines are moving, and that it is entirely controlled by the primary image. The first two hexagrams represent the dual forces within the philosophy of yin and yang. Ch’ien consists of all solid lines, and represents primal power, “light giving, active, strong, and of the spirit,” commonly referred to as yang, while the second hexagram consists of its opposite of broken lines only, representing the “dark, yielding, receptive primal power of yin.” This is fundamentally not a dialectic—it does not mean that these are opposing forces, which would make sense to a Western mind that is comfortable thinking in binaries. Rather, as the book explains, these two hexagrams are perfect complements; they do not combat, rather they complete.

Here are some of the dualisms mentioned in the book:

Ch’ien                                                   K’un

                                Spirit                                                     Nature

                                Heaven                                                 Earth

                                Time                                                      Space

                                Male-paternal                                    Female-maternal

I mention this because I believe there is a correlate between these ideas and those of the Neo-Avant-Garde aesthetic, but because it has a lot of “spiritual” connotations it is generally relegated to footnotes in most academic discussions. However, the Book of Changes does not portray a spiritual “religion” in the sense of Western adherence to some sort of deity, it’s in fact quite the opposite. It should be considered as a guidebook that reveals the many dualities of existence by stretching comparisons to their extremes, which seems dialectical, but in the end it focuses on revealing the fundamental coexistence of opposites in any given situation. This is not a resolving of dialectics through a grand synthesis, because the resolution is there from the beginning—there is no need to work through the problem through “hard thinking.”

This is everywhere in Cage’s writings, and it is an idea that is both beautifully acute and frustratingly obtuse to any thinker who has battled through logic all their lives. It is hard to “get out of thinking” in any given situation, especially one that seeks out a thread of inquiry. To be fair, even Cage rarely reached a true “Zen-like" synthesis; his life was full of all the problems and inconsistencies of an American working and living in a society built upon ideas of rationalism, liberalism, and enlightenment idealism. Oftentimes I wonder if the two could ever coexist in this society in any meaningful sense. This is also why people are frustrated with Cage’s ideas and works; they simply don’t mesh with any traditional thinking in the logical sense—they are really trying to get outside of thinking, to that realm “in-between” thinking and existing. Or as Rauschenberg liked to quip, "Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in the gap between the two.)"

The example of Rauschenberg’s White Paintings (1951) is perhaps one of the most direct visual metaphors for this idea, and Cage regularly returned to it to explain the relationship between nature and environment, thinking and existing, space and time, and any of the other binaries we can extrapolate from the coexistence of opposites ideal set forth in the opening pages of the Book of Changes. Cage’s essay on Rauschenberg in Silence is a little tricky to work through, because there are many references to works that many may not be familiar with, and he is very elusive in his prose. This speaks to the intimacy between Cage and his “inner circle” of artists, all of whom had different types of personal and professional relationships that are likely forever to be held behind closed doors. 

Postwar American art history criticism and theory is incredibly dense, and in the case of the Neo-Avant-Garde it is challenged with bringing in discussions from musicology that few are really versed in. The same problem exists on the other pole; musicologists may be “armchair” art historians, but most have spent their lives thoroughly enveloped in the world of sounds, not images, and their modes of inquiry are always going to be biased in this sense. Thus one treads softly, as it were, over neighboring territories. To me this is what has always made Cage studies so appealing.  

There are a few general tropes worth noting in Cage’s commentary on Rauschenberg. I think it is best to think of two opposing ideas regarding information, iconography, or visual perception. This follows the something/nothing dualism in Cage’s aesthetic. The first is an absence of material, such as the monochrome works, where the absence or void is a space or arena for material, or ideas, or, in the case of 4’33”, sounds, to enter or simply exist (if they are already there). The second is an overabundance of information, a cacophony if you will, that is dense enough so as to not direct attention to any single idea or situation; rather one is enveloped in a multitude of perspectives and viewing planes. This is more applicable to Rauschenberg’s combines. Both, according to Cage, achieve the same effect. Objects and materials are not there for their literal iconography, they are just there, and no particular object is of more significance than any other. Again, a troubling aesthetic for anyone who looks at something like a combine and is tempted to read into an assemblage of objects according to some sort of narrative or set of concepts underlying their particular arrangement.

I think I’ll begin with some of the general references to Rauschenberg’s works in the text, since few if any are directly cited; I doubt I can point out all of them, but some are pretty clear. Plus it is just as helpful to simply look at the works rather than spill more ink (or ones and zeros) over them. 

The goat. No weeds. Virtuosity with ease.

Monogram, 1955-1959

 Does his head have a bed in it?

Bed, 1955

The paintings were thrown into the river after the exhibition. What is the nature of Art when it reaches the Sea?

This is a particularly amusing anecdote. In 1953, a critic suggested that Rauschenberg throw his recent sculptures, which consisted of boxes filled with dirt (in reference to Joseph Cornell) into the Arno river. He noted: “I thought to myself, what a wonderful idea.” And he did. I cannot find any images from this series.

I know he put the paint on the tires. And he unrolled the paper on the city street. But which one of us drove the car?

Automobile Tire Print, 1953.

(BTW - Cage drove the car....) 

Dante is an incentive, providing multiplicity, as useful as a chicken or an old shirt. The atmosphere is such that everything is seen clearly, even in the dark night or when thumbing through an out-of-date newspaper or poem.

(This was a series based on the 34 cantos of Dante's Inferno - I'll post just a few)

Is Gloria V. a subject or an idea? Then, tell us: How many times was she married and what do you do when she divorces you?

Gloria, 1956

In preparation he erases the De Kooning.

Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953.

Now Rauschenberg has made a painting with radios in it, does that mean that even without radios, I must go on listening even while I’m looking, everything at once, in order not to be run over?

Broadcast (1959) (with radios embedded behind the paint and plaster)

  

Hallelujah! The blind can see again. Blind to what he has seen so that seeing this time is as though first seeing. how is it that one experiences this, for example, with the two Eisenhower pictures which for all intents and purposes are the same? (A duplication containing duplications.) Everything is so much the same, one becomes acutely aware of the differences, and quickly. And where, as here, the intention is unchanging, it is clear that the differences are unintentional, as unintended as they were when the white paintings where nothing was done.

Factum I and II (1957)

The white paintings were airports for the lights, shadows, and particles. Now in a metal box attached by a rope, the history kept by means of drawings what has taken away and put in its place, of a painting constantly changing.

Black Market (1961)

(This is a really good section to quote in its entirety, from the end of the essay) 

If I were teaching, would I say Caution Watch Your Step or Throw yourself in where the fish are the thickest?

Trophy I (1959)

Of course, there are objects. Who said there weren’t? The thing is, we get to the point more quickly when we realize it is we looking rather than that we may not be seeing it. (Why do all the people who are not artists seem to be more intelligent?) And object is fact, not symbol. If any thinking is going to take place, it has to come out from inside the mason jar which is suspended in Talisman, or from the center of the rose (is it red?) or the eyes of the pitcher (looks like something out of a movie) or—the farther one goes in this direction the more one sees nothing is in the foreground: each minute point is at the center. Did this happen by means of rectangles (the picture is “cut” through the middle)? Or would it happen given this point of view? Not ideas but facts

Talisman (1958)

I’m sure I missed many references, but I’m a musicologist, not an art historian. I think I’ll finish this post with some comments on the last statement. Cage reads into Rauschenberg according to the sense of perspective; perspective of the viewing plane from close up and far away, perspectives regarding the relationship between viewer and object, perspective and environment, and many other variations. This is a point Branden Joseph emphasizes:

This impulse to create works that underline such a differential reception, that make each beholder aware of the role played by his or her individual history and subject position, is what forms the crux of the neo-avant-garde project initiated by Rauschenberg and Cage. …their work does not presuppose any common denominator of subjectivity, as in the subject who comes to consciousness of his or her perceptual processes through the phenomenological interaction with the minimalist object.

One of Cage's favorite metaphors for Rauschenberg and Duchamp was the “airports for particles of dust,” which Joseph argues is taken from a caption written by Man Ray in the magazine Littérature of his photograph Élevage de Poussière [Dust Breeding] (1920), a close-up of photograph of Duchamp’s famous Large Glass (1915-1923) after it had been covered with dust, resembling a topographical landscape. The caption read “view taken from an airplane by Man Ray,” reflecting on the relationship between landscape on the large and small scale.

Man Ray,  Élevage de Poussière [Dust Breeding] (1920)   

Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même), most often called The Large Glass (Le Grand Verre) (1952-1923)

That a Rauschenberg or Cage work could be an arena for experience, a “no matter what eventuality,” rather than an object instigating a specific phenomenological interaction is a fine line to draw, but it is an important one. Cage in effect spent much of his career delineating this line whenever he discussed another artist’s work. Much like the conditions of possibility for an indeterminate work, the conditions for the possibility of a specifically Cagean artwork were consistently set out along these parameters. In effect, all of Cage’s criticism  followed this pattern (he generally phrased it nicely, as in “what I like about the artist is….” or “what interests me about composer x or artist y”).

I’ll close with the I-Ching reading again, because this really does point to the center of the something/nothing, anything/everything, or “no matter what eventuality” dualism inherent in the notion of changes.    Here are some more passages from the opening hexagram reading:

The beginning of all things lies still in the beyond in the form of ideas that have yet to become real. But the Creative furthermore has power to lend form to these archetypes of ideas…this act of creation having found expression in the two attributes sublimity and success, the work of conservation shown to be a continuous actualization and differentiation of form. This is expressed in the two terms “furthering” (literally, “creating that which accords with the nature of a given being”) and “persevering” (literally, “correct and firm”). “The course of the Creative alters and shapes beings until each attains its true, specific nature, then it keeps them in conformity with the Great Harmony.

I don’t know if that completely makes sense here, but they are nice words…..