“How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run” (1965)

 [61. Chung Fu / Inner Truth, Nine in the Second Place, Six in the Fourth Place, Nine in the Fifth Place. Changing To:  3. Chun / Difficulty at the Beginning.]

I’m busy traveling these next two Mondays, hopping on the LAX-JFK thoroughfare, so these posts will be brief. Luckily, both readings are brief: this week’s is another installment of the “Indeterminacy” series of anecdotes I’ve discussed in the past (HERE). I was struck by today’s I-Ching reading, two hexagrams I had yet to encounter; the reading of the changing line in the second place for Chung Fu was particularly interesting:

Confucius says about this line:

The superior man abides in his room. If his words are well spoken, he meets with assent at a distance of more than a thousand miles. How much more then from near by? If the superior man abides in his room and his words are not well spoken, he meets with contradiction at a distance of more than a thousand miles. How much more then from near by! Words go forth from one’s own person and exert their influence on men. Deeds are born close at hand and become visible far away. Words and deeds are the hinge and bowspring of the superior man. As hinge and bowspring move, they bring honor or disgrace. Through words and deeds the superior man moves heaven and earth. Must one not, then, be cautious?  

Following Confucius, and perhaps Strunk and White, I hope that every word here tells, and nothing more. As Xenia Cage once said, “only one rule: no silliness.”

“How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run,” followed the strategy of “Indeterminacy,” where Cage read each anecdote evenly over the course of one minute alongside David Tudor. This time, however, the reading was the “accompaniment” (in the Cage/Cunningham sense) to Merce Cunningham’s dance of the same name.

John Cage and Merce Cunningham performing "How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run"

Carolyn Brown wrote an excellent summary of the dance in her recent memoir.”How To…” followed on the heels of Variations V (1965), the Cage/Cunningham immersive multimedia extravaganza, and was a simple, improvisatory (dare I say) work with no set design, “wild, fast for the most part—with intricate space, and in-and-out continuity—I love it,” recalls Brown. She later recalled the basic structure of the dance:

As the title implies, it has the high-energy leaps and jumps, runs and falls one sees in sports activities, but without any literal reference to a particular sport. It was “dance-y,” with interesting groupings, changes in dynamics, rhythmic variety. Chance procedures were used to chart entrances and exits, paths in space, speed, levels, numbers of dancers—the usual gamut of possibilities Merce tended to employ for group dancers, but the phrasing, the inner rhythms, were not dictated. Much of the time, we could discover these for ourselves. What felt so different from precious dances constructed with chance procedures was the sense of liberation, which allowed exuberance, joyfulness, and pure fun. Even tenderness!

                Carolyn Brown, ChanceAnd Circumstance: Twenty Years With Cage and Cunningham, p. 461.

As Brown notes, the dance was also accompanied by David Tudor’s electronic manipulations of the earlier recording of the “Indeterminacy” lecture, thus adding another layer of anecdotes to the electronic palette of sounds. The first thirty anecdotes Cage reproduced in A Year From Monday were used for a 1958 performance in Brussels, and the remaining seven, all of which are quite long, were new. I’ve already discussed the meaning and import of anecdotes in Cage’s career, as well as the Indeterminacy series in general, and I’ll point anyone interested in the entire collection to the Indeterminacy Project at the John Cage Trust HERE. Laura Kuhn has assembled 190 of these stories on a website that randomly generates the next story. They are reproduced in the same temporal format on a single note card that enabled Cage to time out his reading over one minute.

Since I’ve already spent considerable time recounting these anecdotes, and I’ll end here with a focus on the final one, which I feel is an important point to stress in the Cage biography regarding mushrooms, particularly Amanita muscariai, the mushroom species known to have hallucinatory effects popularized in the 1960s drug counterculture. Naturally, one with only a passing interest in Cage’s eclectic and curious personality and career would, upon hearing about his interest in mushrooms, tend to make some assumptions here. But as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Cage had no interest in hallucinatory drugs of any kind, and was far removed from the 60s countercultural belief that hallucinations bred meaningful artistic creations. This he states clearly in the final anecdote:

When I mention my interest in mushrooms, most people immediately asks whether I’ve had any visions. I have to tell them that I’m very old-fashioned, practically puritanical, that all I do is smoke like a furnace—now with two filters and a coupon in every pack—and that I drink coffee morning, noon, and night. I would also drink alcohol but I made the mistake of going to a doctor who doesn’t permit it. The visions I hear about don’t interest me. Dick Higgins said he ate a little muscaria and it made him see some rabbits. Valentina Wasson ate the divine mushrooms in Mexico and imagined she was in eighteenth-century Versailles hearing some Mozart. Without any dope at all other than caffeine and nicotine, I’ll be in San Francisco tomorrow hearing some of my own music and on Sunday, God willing, I’ll awake in Hawaii with papayas and pineapples for breakfast. There’ll be sweet-smelling flowers, brightly colored birds, people swimming in the surf, and (I’ll bet you a nickel) a rainbow at some point during the day sky.

“Rhythm Etc.” (1962)

[32. Hêng / Duration, Nine in the Third Place, Six at the Top. Changing to:  64. Wei Chi / Before Completion.]

There’s virtually nothing to say about rhythm for there’s no time.

“Rhythm Etc.” was written in 1961-2 for a publication by Gyorgy Kepes, Professor of Visual Design at M.I.T., Module, Proportion, Symmetry, Rhythm (1966), as part of a series of books analyzing problems of form in architecture. In Cage’s extensive preface to the article, he notes the curious background to this commission. Immediately he recognized that the premise of this edition in the series was based off the theoretical implications of famed architect and social planner Le Corbusier’s 1954 English-language publication, The Modulor, which promoted a model for design architecture based on the proportions of the human body, creating a plastic series of design variables for architectural forms. Kepes invited Cage to contribute an opinion based on his musical background, as Le Corbusier noted many parallels between his Modulor forms and the architectural features of Western tonal music.

Needless to say, Cage scoffed at the hierarchical model of social engineering purported by Le Corbusier, and his article dismantles the Modulor theory, accusing Le Corbusier of creating a form of social engineering that limits any sense of relative autonomy of the individual in the face of corporate and commercial pressures. It was only at this point in Cage’s own career that he began to clearly articulate the relationship between his work and the larger sociological debates on the implications of art within a capitalistic society, and in this sense the article stands apart in A Year From Monday, and is more in line with the core theoretical texts in Silence.

What Cage discovered upon reading Le Corbusier’s book was a similar problem he had encountered in his own investigation of musical materials and form over the past thirty years, a story I’ve rehashed in a number of ways on this blog. Cage had applied increasingly abstract strategies for arranging musical events over time; beginning with proportional strategies such as micro-macrocosmic form in early percussion and electroacoustic works, Cage sought out different methods for determining which materials would emerge from within a gamut of possibilities in any given setting, eventually introducing chance operations to control certain variables in his works from the early 1950s, and finally settling on constellation arrays and transparency overlays as a means of generating content. However, the notion of a discrete set of predetermined variables with which one may supply a limited series of variations in form perpetually troubled Cage, even with his own compositions, and as I’ve mentioned many times, the story of Cage’s compositional career is centered around his frustration with notions of logical form, continuity, and variation, as well as the limitations of any specific system as a strategy to usurp these variables.

Variations within the Modulor example

Micromacrocosmic form analysis, from James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage 

Branden Joseph, in his 1997 article, “John Cage and The Architecture of Silence,” (which can be found HERE, also recently reprinted by MIT press and available for purchase HERE) presents one of the most astute criticisms and interpretations of Cagean aesthetics to date, using “Rhythm Etc.” as a starting point for examining notions of transparency and space in relationship to architectural theory and postwar neo-avant-garde aesthetics. It is a bit dense to summarize here, but outlining some key points might help clarify the problems Cage’s encountered and tackled in today’s article.

Joseph first notes that the inspiration for Cage’s vehement attack was undoubtedly architect Paul Williams, a close friend of Cage beginning with his early visits to Black Mountain College. Williams supported many of Cage’s endeavors (including a grant to fund several experiments in magnetic tape, for which the title of perhaps Cage’s most famous piece in the genre, Williams Mix (1952), was given its name), and in 1954 Cage moved to Stony Point, NY to join the Stony Point Artist’s Collective, where he shared a duplex with Williams and his family. Joseph notes that the rhetoric in Cage’s essay (and elsewhere) highlighted notions of transparency that were literally a part of Cage’s own environment. Cage’s home, designed and constructed by Williams, consisted of a long prefabricated building with floor-to-ceiling glass panels on two sides of the structure; on the west-facing exterior, the large glass door slid along runners to open up to the outdoors, and many of Cage’s observations on architectural space were based on his experience living and writing within this unique domestic setting.

Naturally, the notion of transparency in architecture provides a fitting metaphor for Cage’s notions of pure unmediated perception; 4’33” asks us to listen to the sounds of an environment unencumbered by the traditional restraints of a predetermined musical backdrop, while a space that is literally transparent ask us to consider it in harmony with the literal surroundings it encapsulates, making no distinction between what is part of the architecture and what is part of nature. Joseph notes, however, that the standard interpretation of glass architecture, such as that directed Mies van der Rohe, views glass not as a literal purveyor of environmental immersion, but rather as something that provides a literal reflectivity, offsetting the environment against the autonomous object of architecture that it itself is.

It was this point that most bothered Cage when he discussed the ontology of the musical artwork, for as I’ve mentioned many times, Cage sought out an ontology of music that centered on perception rather than idea, something akin to the unmediated perception of the recording apparatus, and his notion of indeterminacy was more in line with the anarchic nature of the thoughtless listening experience rather than the directed listening of a musical form based upon predetermined theoretical principles that, in turn, set the musical artwork itself off from its literal environment, creating yet another autonomous artwork.

Here is where the big names in postwar musical aesthetics come in, such as Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School of social criticism, and I’ll keep the dense language portion of this blog post short, and focus on the text and the “reading through” concept rather than “preaching to,” the latter of which constitutes the entirety of Adorno’s life and career. More dialectics, anyone?

From the outset of the article it is clear that Cage is engaging a larger sense of rhythm commonly examined by phenomenologists. Rhythm in the musical sense is, in essence, a proportion; an eighth note can only be considered an eighth note when compared to any other discrete object, otherwise it is just a blank concept. Likewise, rhythm implies a sense of repetition in that it must be reiterated one or more times in order for it to be identified as a pattern. In my mind the history of Western music is as much about notational strategies concerning the concept of rhythm rather than harmony, something much more fascinating and revealing that the usual evolutionary tale of tonal form, and I feel Cage was of the same opinion.

What Cage repeatedly alludes to in his essay is less the concept of a “pure” rhythm outside of the body, but more of the perceived rhythms that forms and structures (such as the Modulor) impose on the mind. A rhythm is the relationship between two or more discrete events, and one can measure that duration with scientific precision, thus making it easier to justify that the human mind perceived the duration between two discrete events in the same way. However, as Cage notes, and as Husserl famously declared, even our short-term memory of duration is inherently faulty; we may be able to train ourselves to a degree of proficiency in detecting rhythm, but even that is anathema to what Cage considers a naturalistic form of perception that embraces the indeterminate nature of both the environment and our ability to accurately perceive it.

Speaking here of Pauline Schindler, wife of architect Rudolf Schindler, and the famous “Schindler house” in Los Angeles, Cage notes the core problem with the phenomenological model (adumbrational theory, in a sense):

The house in Los Angeles the others visited. They told about it: how the people tried to get it destroyed (“an eyesore”) but that it proved to be too great a source of income. She spoke of change in her perception of light. As I pick up my thought I already know that it is going to slip through my fingers. Its very nature is to evade being caught. That is what thought does (not just this one: that things are in the fluent relationship of life and death, death only coming to him who wins, nothing stops).

Later on he reiterates the same concept:

And when that comes about that has not yet been heard, will we be able to say more or less than we can now about the unit and its relationship to the whole? In the interior of that space, open yet filled like a dish to the brim with sounds both gentle and terrifying, occurring at unpredictable points not only in time but throughout the space, too, will it not be as it is today, spring definitely here (or is it summer?), finally outdoors, deliciously plagued by insects, something to hear on all sides (even back of me), that anything we may think we will have had to say will as now have somehow slipped our minds?

This concept is intertwined with the criticisms of Le Corbusier’s general model of universal form outlined above, alongside several highlights of Cage’s own notational and performative strategies, of course. There is a mention of Schaeffer and Musique concrete, yet very little mention of magnetic tape (which by this point Cage had moved beyond in a sense, precisely because of its scientific exactitude in measuring proportion and duration), Russian chickens once again return, and Cage ends the essay with a brief consideration of the space-time sound field model of listening, something that he seems to allude to in a number of places yet never fully articulates. This is the fascinating leaping point at the tail end of Cage’s aesthetic, and in my mind, something that is very relevant to contemporary discourse on the sonic arts. Josephs’ critique of transparency and space links this train of thought directly to earlier artists such as Moholy-Nagy, which I’ve discussed in the past, and I would equally add choreomusical dance, cinematic realism aesthetics, and relativity theory espoused by Cage’s father, John Cage Sr., to this unique blend (or perhaps better, pastiche) of phenomenological questions Cage tossed into the mix.

This is not an easy post to finish, because “Rhythm Etc.” is a text with the usual depth and discursiveness found in all of Cage’s major essays. Oftentimes contradictory, deeply anecdotal, and always elusive, Cage taunts and teases out ideas, leaving the listener in a tailspin, and, hopefully, shaking up their own individual sense of perception along the way.

Whenever anyone speaks informatively with precision about how something should be done, listen, if you can, with great interest, knowing his talk is descriptive of a single line in a sphere of illuminating potential activity, that each one of his measurements exists in a field that is wide open for exploration. 

“Lecture on Commitment” (1961)

[43. Kuai / Break-through (Resoluteness), Six in the Third Place, Six in the Fifth Place. Changing to:  9. Hsiao Ch'u / The Taming Power of the Small.]

The question is not: How much are you going to get out of it? Nor is it How much are you going to put into it? But rather: How immediately are you going to say Yes to no matter what unpredictability, even when what happens seems to have no relation to what one thought was one’s commitment?

I’m venturing on to the final essays in A Year From Monday, away from the statements on other artists and toward several essays commissioned for various journals or presentations in the 1960s. “Lecture on Commitment” was prepared for a symposium at Wesleyan University on the subject of commitment, during Cage’s first residency in 1961, when he arranged his first publication, Silence.

Commitment is an interesting topic for this project, and for Cage’s artistic platform in general. I doubt anyone would deny that Cage was, at the very least, deeply committed to all of his artistic endeavors, regardless of however successful they were in any normal sense of the word. Cage’s artistic platform required a sort of commitment that many have criticized as subtly hegemonic, pushing one to accept wholeheartedly the platform of the aesthetic of silence and indeterminacy according to Cage, and performance practice according to David Tudor, which implied that it was only those “sympathetic” to this artistic program that were truly part of Cage’s inner circle. In this sense, commitment implies much more, and Cage explores several greater meanings and implications of commitment in this essay.  

The word “commit” itself is an interesting concept, with a long history and etymology. The Latin origins stem from two concepts, the first, com-, “together”, and the second, mittere “to put, send,” meaning literally to put or send things together, to unite, to build, or to bond. Adding the suffix forming noun of -ment represents the result or product of the action, thus commitment is the product or result of putting things together or uniting under one cause. The concept of committing to something, or to oneself, evolved in the 20^th century, influenced by the existentialism movement, particularly moral and emotional engagement: to commit to a project is one thing, to commit to an ideology is quite another. Equally, a commitment connotes a sense of obligation: we may be loosely committed to a cause, but our commitments are often relegated to minor details of everyday life. I have a commitment to finish this blog every week, yet in a deeper sense I am committed to the concept of reading through John Cage’s writings in one year. The final extreme of this concept is that one can be so committed that they are deemed insane, and are thus subjected to involuntary commitment, but let’s hope we don’t go down that road, at least not today.

These are the primary concepts that Cage engages in the essay, written in a temporal aleatoric format, whereby short statements are written on index cards, shuffled and then read aloud according to predetermined time lengths for each essay in a manner similar to the “Indeterminacy” series. There are several references to early moments in Cage’s own career, such as when he abandoned his study of architecture and committed himself to music, along with his famous anecdote where he committed his life to “banging his head against the wall” after Schoenberg criticized his musical proficiency. Commitment is also deeply tied with the concept of devotion: one is devoted in a similar way as they are committed, yet commitment does not seem to have the same spiritual connotations as devotion, which connotes a loftier sense of a vow or a sacrifice.

This makes commitment a somewhat of a twentieth century secular phenomenon. We can commit to something, and then break a commitment, marry and then divorce, break bonds and move along, change and renew ourselves, but to lose one’s devotion is a far more serious matter. Cage highlights this notion, adding that, “there is always Madison Avenue” for those who accept the weaker notion of commitment, but Cage himself is far more committed to the devotional idea commitment:

Let me say it schematically. This point is it. That point is you. We draw an arrow between the two points, indicating that you have dedicated yourself to it, unquestionably. That is commitment. Where does it get you? Well, there are lines from that point that is it that are arrows to every other point in space and time. Any “it” is like a Grand Central Station, or rather a space platform in orbit. Once there, you can move out in any direction.

Here Cage ties the concept of commitment to dedication: if you are dedicated to something, you accept the results and any other results, whatever they may be, whereas a commitment in the conventional sense is only to a specific result. One is committed to passing a test, whereas one is dedicated to getting an education.

Cage also frames the concept of commitment around the aesthetic of silence and indeterminacy. He is committed to the “anything whatsoever” that might occur in any given artistic situation. Once materials are determined, he is committed to the results of the operations that are set on them. This ties in with the concept of acceptance, which is central to his notion of indeterminacy. He not only accepts any results of a process, he is fully committed (or devoted) to the idea of accepting these results. This commitment has to do more with the process rather than the direct results, and in the middle of the essay he brings up a concept I will discuss more sometime soon: “Neti Neti (Not this Not that):

We are not committed to this or that. As the Indians put it: Neti Neti (Not this Not that). We are committed to the Nothing-in-between—whether we know it or not.

I’ve discussed the concept of nothing-in-between before, in the context of the core essays in Silence, and here Cage is framing the concept of commitment around the negative aesthetic: since we cannot know anything for certain, we must remain committed to the concept of not-knowing. This is central to the general concept of Cage’s indeterminacy: we are committed to the results before we know them, and the only thing we know for certain is that we do not know what the results will be.

Thus, it seems, commitment according to Cage implies devotion, requires dedication, and in the end, leads to acceptance.

Seriously, shall we get with it? 

“In This Day…” (1957); “2 Pages, 122 Words on Music and Dance,” (1957); “Where Do We Go From Here?” (1963)

[43. Kuai / Break-through (Resoluteness), Nine in the Second Place, Nine in the Third Place. Changing To:  17. Sui / Following]

Does dance depend? Or is it independent?

Today I am reading through three essays on the (anti)choreomusical aesthetic of John Cage and Merce Cunningham. The first two essays are from the “4 Statements on the Dance” collection in Silence, and as I mentioned in an earlier post, I waited to finish the second two essays until I reached this point in the project, when I got to “Where do We Go From Here?” This third essay marks a transition in A Year From Monday from statements on individual artists to the final large theoretical essays at the end of the volume, which I’ll be tackling over the next few weeks (skipping “Julliard Lecture,” which I covered in conjunction with its period-specific texts here). As I mentioned before, Cage did not compose a statement on Cunningham in the same fashion as those of other artists in the inner sanctum of the neo-avant-garde. True, he did write a series of mesostics on Cunningham in M, which hopefully I’ll get to in this project, but these statements are in many ways, literally and figuratively, deeply coded—for obvious reasons.  

These three statements outline the core tenants of the Cage/Cunningham (anti)choreomusical aesthetic. In the earlier texts on the dance, we saw Cage move in a direction similar to his compositional approach. Beginning with a temporal-mathematical structure, Cage outlined duration for musical events to occur. In his earlier works, the succession of musical noises or events were determined at times by choice and others, such as First Construction in Metal (1939), by a limiting procedure whereby a gamut of ideas, motives, etc. occur; upon “discovering” the I-Ching, Cage then applied various randomization procedures to the selection and succession of musical ideas, and the rest is history.

From this analytical perspective, one can note that duration, or large scale ordering, remained paramount to the ontology of the musical artwork according to Cage, and this structure formed the basis of Cage’s earlier approaches to dance accompaniment, which I discussed in the earlier post. Blocks of time were prearranged with the choreographer, whereby the music—anything that Cage felt like composing—would fit within the pre-structured time lengths of the dance. At this point, the notion of “accompaniment” became obscured, because the choreomusical relationships were in general quite random. Following this, the whole point of musical accompaniment started to fall apart, and Cage being Cage, he and Cunningham embraced the idea that anything whatsoever could simultaneously happen concerning the sounds and the dance within the timeframe of the work. Here we arrive at the Cage/Cunningham aesthetic: dance and music simply occur at the same time in the same space, nothing more, nothing less. The choreography is self-referential, intrinsic rather than extrinsic, and the same for the sounds that occur in the space.

Dance scholars and musicologists, such as two colleagues of mine, Daniel Callahan and Paul Cox, have challenged this biographical narrative, citing archival evidence that, in several cases, such as Credo in US (1942) and Cheap Imitation (1969, alongside Cunningham’s Second Hand), Cage and Cunningham derived an explicit narrative internal and essential to the work. In the latter case of Cheap Imitation, this would seem to contradict the entire Cage/Cunningham aesthetic; however, the volume of works that do adhere to the anti-choreomusical aesthetic far outweigh these examples, and to dismiss their entire program because of a few contradictions is something neither scholars have done. I am always reminded of this wonderful short excerpt from the Cunningham repertoire, accompanied by Satie, Septet, from 1953, a work as poignant and expressive as any choreography can be:

Thus we have another very simple formulation that, like the negative aesthetic of silence, is very tricky to parse. Dance and music occur at the same time, nothing more, nothing less. “People and sounds interpenetrate.” Easy to explain, much harder to understand. In contrast to Cage’s sounds-as-sounds thesis, this one has a number of associative problems that the human mind rarely gets over, and I believe this was built in to the anti-choreomusical aesthetic. The term I’ve mentioned before, synchresis, coined by Michel Chion in his writings on film sound, is relevant here. Synchresis is the “indelible weld” that occurs between sound and image on the screen, and the associative mind immediately, and perhaps instinctually, associates an action with its concurrent sound, even if the sound has little to do with a sound that would occur in reality. Sound designers take advantage of this phenomena by utilizing a wide variety of objects to create sound effects on a Foley stage—think of pumpkins and wood being smashed to mimic someone being punched, when in real life a punch is usually accompanied by an anticlimactic and generally inaudible soft thud.  

In terms of choreomusical relationships, especially when the music is music as defined by Cage, the happenstance moments when sound and action correspond immediately set the mind to making associations. Cage, and Cunningham, would kindly ask that we ignore these moments, but in the end, this is an instinctual response, one closely related to the fight or flight instinct deep in the oldest recesses of our troublesome craniums, and it simply will not go away. This is where the Cage/Cunningham aesthetic really shines: if we really do celebrate these instinctual responses, rather than think about them, we can truly appreciate the multimedia audiovisual haptic and kinesthetic artwork that is the Cage/Cunningham dance experience.  In this case it is all about instinct, not intellect, that we are reveling in. The mind jumps to make associations, and we let it, we just don’t think about it or assume it means anything.

This is the idea that is gradually developed in these three essays, I believe. In the first, written in 1956, Cage begins by taking the easy way out, by defining the “meaning” of the Cage/Cunningham experience in absolute terms:

We are not, in these dances and music, saying something. We are simple-minded enough to think that if we were saying something we would use words. We are rather doing something…there are no stories and no psychological problems. There is simply an activity of movement, sound, and light…the activity of movement, sound, and light, we believe, is expressive, but what it expresses is determined by each one of you—who is right, as Pirandello’s title has it, if he thinks he is.

Here Cage is referring to Pirandello’s 1917 play, Right You Are! (If You Think So), which aptly summarizes the solipsistic or skeptical argument in philosophy: We cannot know what is going on in anyone else’s mind, ever, and thus the problems of philosophy, of the mind, meaning, or interpretation are all internal, a battle within ourselves, played out in jumbled words, jumbled blog posts, polemics, aesthetics, idealism, politics, etc.

Cage realized quickly that he should probably avoid the term “expressive,” and thus the latter two essays speak in even more vague terms about the ontology of the Cage/Cunningham artwork, and the other fun problem of philosophy: how do we define the indefinable? The answer according to Cage, as I have discussed, is through negation: we define it according to its opposite. In the interim essay, “2 Pages, 122 Words on Music and Dance,” Cage takes recourse to a version of the sounds-as-sounds thesis: we look directly to the object, whether it is a sound or an action, and define it according to itself, and nothing else:

[this is an approximation of the beautiful layout of the text]

To obtain the value

of a sound, a movement,

measure from zero. (Pay                                                                      A bird flies.

attention to what it is,

just as it is.)

……

                                                                                                movement

                                                sound

Points in                                                                Activities which are different

time, in                   love                                         happen in a time which is a space:

space                       mirth                                      are each central, original.

                                the heroic

                                wonder

The emotions         tranquility             are in the audience

                                fear

                                anger                                                      The telephone rings.

                                sorrow

                                disgust                                   Each person is in the best seat.

So at this point the recourse is to the intrinsic, to the associations within the mind, whatever they may be, that keeps the thinking mind thinking. If we follow Cage, and accept the actions just for what they are—moments in time, unique to the occasion and irreproducible—then we have come that much closer to the great ideal of philosophy, the thing-in-itself, or in Cage’s terms “nature in her manner of operation,” that prickly elusive thing we just never seem to be able to grasp with our feeble minds. This is not necessarily the best way to go, because as I mentioned before, time and again philosophy has argued for and against such an ideal, and in the end it is nearly always concluded that this ideal is just that, an impossibility; at some point we are going to fall back on our habits and start thinking of relationships between things, ideas, objects, sounds, movement, etc.

So, Cage asks us in the third essay, “Where Do We Go From Here?” More than any other writer on music in the twentieth century, Cage phrases his ideas in the form of a question, opening up the debate and sending the mind spinning, and at this point, my mind is spinning. Where do we go from here? Where are we going? Are sounds just sounds, or are they Beethoven?

Cage opens the essay with the quote at the beginning of this post: “Does dance depend? Or is it independent?” He follows with another formulation of the “sound field” thesis, which is integral to the sounds-as-sounds ideal, and quickly rushes through a host of ideas relating the Cage/Cunningham aesthetic to, suddenly, politics. This is a strong undercurrent in the latter half of A Year From Monday, and it really peaks in M, when Cage seemingly moves to leftist extremes. This is really not a surprising turn, for Cage’s negative aesthetics ultimately led to the one real political confrontation that the arts have been dealing with in the latter half of the 20^th century and beyond: now that we opened the door for the “what is art” question, the step many people began to take was: “what do we pay for, or support, and what is its value?” Naturally any artist scoffs at this question, but it was and is a very real question, one that highlights the dirty connection between arts, commerce, and politics. And it’s not going away any time soon.

In between these political wranglings (which are footnoted, yet the footnoted material is placed in line with the text rather than at the bottom of the page) is an interesting elaboration on the sound-as-sounds thesis, emerging from the sound field idea, toward what Cage calls a “space-time arts.” Sound is ostensibly just a vibration within a space, audible to the human ear, and thus space, environment, and architecture are included in this conception of a new kind of art, one more in line with multimedia, or, in the popular sixties term “Intermedia.” On the last page of the essay, after recounting his famous anecdote of the first time he met Morton Feldman (which seems a bit out of place considering the context), Cage highlights an important new direction for the Cage/Cunningham anti-choreomusical aesthetic, one he would discover in about a year:

We’re no longer satisfied with flooding the air with sound from a public-address system. We insist upon something more luminous and transparent so that sounds will arise at any point in the space bringing about the surprises we encounter when we walk in the woods or down the city streets. Thus music is becoming a dance in its own right and has, of course, new notations.

Cage is referring here to a project that he started in 1962 with the sculptor Richard Lippold, who was commissioned by Pan American Airlines to construct several sculptures in its new high-tech, glossy behemoth corporate headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, the infamous Pan Am Building (later bought out and renamed the MetLife Building). Lippold, a close friend of Cage for many years (and about whom I have written extensively in other contexts), tossed out an idea to the architects to commission Cage for lobby music rather than utilizing the dreaded Muzak that Cage famously scorned (as I discussed HERE). To his surprise they accepted the proposal, and Cage began work on perhaps one of the first commercial sound installation sculptures. He proposed that the floor be embedded with contact sensors that would cue a large sound system of prerecorded sounds from the environment—a far cry from Muzak and a wonderful idea far ahead of its time. However, once he started discussing the idea with engineers and architects, they realized the project would be far too costly, and far too avant-garde for the guys upstairs, and they went for the Muzak. Corporate America: 1 Cage: 0 (but who’s counting at this point, really).

However, the project did spark something in Cage. He was in the midst of his infamous “Variations” series at the time, and many point to Variations IV, which premiered the following year, as a major turning point. In addition, the idea of using contact microphones and sensors to cue electronic equipment opened up a new direction for the Cage/Cunningham choreomusical aesthetic. So, in a sense Cage was on the cusp of answering his own question. Where do we go from here? Here: