“Where are We Eating? and What Are We Eating?” (1975)

[17. Sui / Following, Nine at the Top. Changing To:  51. Chên / The Arousing (Shock, Thunder)]

After Merce got the Guggenheim Fellowship, someone asked him what he was going to do with all that money. Answer was monosyllabic: eat!

Now that I’m getting older, I think I understand what Wittgenstein had in mind. He said if he found anything he could eat he would stick to it and not eat anything else.

“Where Are We Eating…” was originally written for James Klosty’s 1975 book, Merce Cunningham, and is a play on the theme of his 1961 essay published in Silence, “Where Are We Going? and What Are We Doing?” The latter essay, as I mentioned in an earlier post, consisted of four simultaneous conversations that formed a sort of analytic joke built around Cage’s encounter with Wittgenstein, and the former essay contains the same ethos and tone, in contrast to the other nonsyntacitcal investigations Cage was undergoing in his later text-based works.

As the essay title alludes, the topic here is simple: food. Cage and company, whether it was the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, David Tudor, or any other group of traveling artists surrounding his life and work, always integrated food and dining into the overall aesthetic of art and life, interpenetration, and silence. Food for Cage was an important ritual bonding experience, a site of social activity and interaction, curiosity, exploration, and daring; nothing was beyond Cage’s palate, and as the MCDC tours increased in their regional and international scope, so too did their culinary forays into multicultural and ethnic delicacies.

I find the tone of this essay very down to earth; Cage is not afraid to expose colloquialisms, (Merce “got” a fellowship, *gasp* - how provincial!), and the essay, like many of the anecdotes peppering earlier books, is reassuringly homely, like discussing the weather with an old uncle.

Cage opens the essay discussing his recent conversion to a macrobiotic diet, a regimen that avoids refined or process foods that was very much in favor in the 1970s social circles in New York. It was Yoko Ono and John Lennon that famously introduced Cage to the diet, as the star-studded anecdote famously goes, and by all measures Cage added a decade or more onto his life by moving away from the artery clogging Midwestern diet of butter, cream, hard liquor and cheap starches.

The essay itself reads like an excellent cookbook peppered with food reviews, and moves along in a decidedly relaxed pace; I found myself easily skimming through it, in contrast to other more difficult essays, such as “The Future of Music” from last week, where Cage tends to fall prey to the academicization of text through heady clauses buried beneath commas, dashes, and semicolons.

This is as much a diary of the comings and goings of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as it is about food or anything else in particular, and it alludes to the carefree early years, when Cage and company hopped in the VW microbus and toured the country, pulling over at roadhouses for the best hamburger or fried chicken in the tri-state area, or cozying up to the fire while grilling streaks in a national park. Carolyn Brown described these idyllic pastoral years, when, to assuage the internal tensions between dancers and Merce, Cage maintained a carefree and adventurous atmosphere as company cook, driver, accountant, and, oftentimes, company therapist. Consider this paragraph, which quickly moves through a collage of scenes, imagery, tastes, and emotions:

In order to crossover backstage you had

to go outdoors and around the

back. No matter how much authority

and energy the dancers displayed to the

audiences at Wheeler Hall, offstage

they were immediately forced to be

timid and cautious: it was dark; stage

wings were dangerous stairways.

Dancers’ requirement: swimming pool and

color TV. At home over chicken dinner,

Victor Hamburger described his work with

chickens. He alters their embryos so

when they hatch they have more or

less eyes or legs, for instance, and

in different places than chickens

normally have and do. I was

hungry. Jean gave me a bag of peanuts

in their shells. Barbara said I

sounded like a squirrel. We stopped and I

had a bowl of chili. Returned to

the bus and began shelling peanuts

again.

Equal parts wit, humor, and caricature, and altogether odd; if ever there were a way to describe Cage’s own personal natural voice (an intentions mind you…), this essay is it. But at the same time, this is not an artistic manifesto, nor is it a statement on the aesthetic of silence or any other ideological dogma - it is Cage recounting a lifetime of touring, food, good company, and pleasure, an essay penned for a book on his life partner, and it isn’t until the final paragraph that the subject of not just this, but likely many other essays in some shape or form, emerges:

There’s a

rumor Merce’ll stop. Ten years ago, London

critic said he was too old. He himself

says he’s just getting a running start.

Annalie Newman says he’s like wine:

He improves with age. 

“The Future of Music” (1974)

[26. Ta Ch'u / The Taming Power of the Great, Unchanging.]

Silence isn’t as generally upsetting as it used to be.

Today I am reading through Cage’s summit statement on “The Future of Music,” a rhetorical trope begun with his influential and often misdated ca. 1940 essay, “The Future of Music: Credo.” Noticeably, this is the last essay from Cage’s published collections that is entirely in essay format, devoid of any precompositional limiting or randomization procedures. It is a direct statement on the state of contemporary music, similar in effect to “History of Experimental Music in The United States” (1958), but written in a less emphatic tone of ethical necessity.

Cage was 62 years old when he wrote this essay, and in many ways I consider it a summit statement on the range and influence of his life and work, at least in the traditional sense. Certainly there are later essays that, through many levels of coding, assert some form of ideological Cagean discourse, but this essay in particular comes at a critical juncture in which the Cage aesthetic had, as Cage himself notes, more or less been adopted by a new cadre of artists—the first of many “post-Cage” generations. And, once again, it is his last published essay in the Wesleyan series that follows a linear narrative structure.

Thus the initial shock of experimental music, as Cage notes in the first few paragraphs, has waned as more and more people adopt and absorb the new intellectual and creative license granted by the neo-avant-garde generation and beyond.  “Almost anyone who listens to sound now listens easily no matter what overtone structures the sounds have,” Cage observes, and thus, “we no longer discriminate against noises.”

Cage makes many allusions to racial and social justice in conjunction with this newfound musical and artistic plurality: the ultimate goal of liberal politics, and the summit achievement of Cagean discourse. Out of tune sounds are now identified as microtones, and the notion of “world” music in the early post-colonialist stance has lead to a homogenization of international styles and tastes. Silence, rhythm, harmony and the general notion of process have been absorbed by a diverse range of artists, including La Monte Young, Ben Johnston, Elliot Carter and Conlon Nancarrow (although these two are admittedly from Cage’s generation, yet he seems to want to categorize them in the new expansionism of post-Cagean discourse).

Everywhere Cage seems to situate artists and performers in and around his own social and artistic milieu, as he had done in many past essays. This is certainly not a fault, the essay is meant to summarize the state of contemporary music and possible future directions, and Cage was particularly adept at formulating a specific historical narrative that outlines methods, attitudes, and philosophies within the general trajectory of the neo-avant-garde in America.

On the third page of the essay Cage demurely describes the current state of acceptance as a general attitude of conviviality; minimalist composers in particular, such as Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich, are lumped into a category that Cage seems to want to push away from, although his formulation for a stance in opposition to the minimalist aesthetic is somewhat convoluted:

The difference between closed-mindedness and open-mindedness resembles the difference between the critical and creative faculties, or the difference between information about something (or knowledge even) and that something itself.

This seems to be a formulation similar to the minimalist goal of eradicating illusionism and a priori systems by creating an anti-gestalt object. This, however, overlooks the difference between minimalist aesthetics in sculpture and those in music, particularly Reich’s thesis of music as a “gradual process,” and it seems that  Cage was attempting to equate his own notion of “sounds as sounds” with minimalism. This is something that is worth looking into, as several scholars are now realizing, but in the context of this project such an essay would be beyond the project of reading through.

Instead of following through with this inquiry, Cage, as usual, jumps to something entirely different, equating the minimalist aesthetic and open-mindedness with a new cultural plurality that would have many post-colonialists shudder. But, as I have mentioned before, this continues to be a difficult aspect of Cage’s high modernist liberalism for cultural theorists and critical musicologists to parse. Noticeably, on the following page Cage equates cultural plurality with technocratic idealism; it is through advancements in communication and recording technologies that we are given a global sense of musical identity. This again is an academic notion that quickly fell out of favor, although there is a resurgence of global cultural identity in the post web 2.0 millennial age, but it’s too soon to really give this any theoretical grounds.  

By the fifth page Cage returns to a familiar notion of what Benjamin Piekut has described as his “hegemonic liberalism,” which I have discussed in the past. Cage’s “freedom of choice” ideology was brought about by advancements in communications, recording, and synthesis technologies, and yet this expansion of opportunity in many circles resulted in a formulation of a new discourse meant to promote a singular version of liberalism, one endorsed by those sympathetic to the fundamental tenants of liberalism in America, and one that continued to exclude many racial and ethnic minorities. Again, it would be difficult and perhaps irrelevant to directly implicate Cage in this complex web of societal change that America went through during the depression of the 1970s, especially when considering the ideological backlash of 1980s conservatism that was soon to come forth after the publication of Cage’s final Wesleyan monograph in the early 80s.

Overall I would consider this one of the most intriguing essays of the “late-Cage” period, primarily for its many contradictions and overt political references. As a cultural artifact it represents the state of Cagean discourse in the 1970s and the gradual adoption of Cagean notions of liberalism in the academy and beyond, creating a platform for subsequent generations to forge their own notions of just what it means to be “post-Cage.” Cage was always elusive and often contradictory, as this essay proves, and it would take more than a blog post like this to truly give the essay justice. To date I have yet to see an in-depth investigation of the post-Cage influence, or of the concept of “late Cage” in general, and in my mind this essay would be an excellent starting point.

In the conclusion Cage cites the infamous anecdote when Henry David Thoreau accidentally set fire to the woods near Walden pond. The fire soon spread to nearby Concord, causing $2,000 in damage ($50,000 in 2010 dollars). Thoreau was for years known as the “woods burner,” an early fumble that could have permanently set his place in history as an eccentric lost in the woods. But as Cage notes, Thoreau embraced the accident, citing the wealth it brought to the forest through rejuvenation of the natural effect of “nature’s broom” on the natural cycles of the forest. In the penultimate paragraph, Cage places a rather stark observation that he very well could have considered similar to his own legacy.

Emerson said that Thoreau could have been a great leader of men, but that he ended up simply as the captain of huckleberry-picking-parties for children. But Thoreau’s writing determined the actions of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Gandhi, and the Danes in their light-hearted resistance to Hitler’s invasion. India. Nonviolence…The change is not disruptive. It Is cheerful.  

“Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake” (1977)

[20. Kuan / Contemplation (View), Six in the Fourth Place, Nine in the Fifth Place, Nine on Top. Changing To:  16. Yü / Enthusiasm.]

Another post from the dog days of summer as the heat wave finally made its way to Los Angeles. Today I’m reading through Cage’s monumental “writing through” project on the ever complex Joyce text, Finnegans Wake. As I mentioned last week, much like “Empty Words,” this is a performative text, and Cage’s most famous performance of the piece was in conjunction with the 1979 Merce Cunningham Dance Company collaboration collectively known as Roaratorio. This work combined dance with a collection of sounds Cage recorded in the Irish countryside of sounds mentioned in Joyce’s text, Irish ballads, jigs and other instrumental music and, finally, Cage himself reading through the second writing through.

The piece was revived last year for the MCDC legacy tour, and I had happened to be in New York during the final rehearsals, and managed to pop in at Westbeth to see a run-through, sans music. The effect was just as wonderful as the multimedia event, the hot summer sun of New York blazing in the background while the dancers rehearsed the steps in the crowded top floor studio. Mark Swed, who was with me at the rehearsal, felt that the legacy revival was not as strong musically because they chose to project the sounds with eight loudspeakers rather than hire live musicians for the performance, as they had done for earlier productions. But alas, I was unable to see the final live show, and thus I cannot say one way or another.

Cage’s preface for “Writing through…” is extensive, and he explains the process involved with choosing a full acrostic technique for the second writing, which limited the page length to a manageable amount of material, and overall his comments on Joyce are in my mind rather vague when compared to those on Thoreau. Nevertheless, there are plenty of literary parallels to be made between the two artists, as Marjorie Perloff and others have done.

 I’ll keep this post short, but suffice to say I find the recorded performance of Roaratorio just as much if not more interesting than the printed text; combined with music and outdoor sounds, the collage is far more lush and interesting than the printed words on the page, or the solo voice performance on its own. But I’ll take it in any form, especially in this heat.

“Empty Words” (1973-4)

 [22. Pi / Grace, Nine in the First Place, Nine in the Third Place, Six in the Fourth Place. Changing To:  35. Chin / Progress.]

Today I’ve moved on to Cage’s penultimate collection of essays from Wesleyan University Press, Empty Words, and I am reading through the essay of the same name. This just happened to coincide with two wonderful recent performances of the lecture (which lasts approximately 11 hours and 30 minutes); the first organized by Laura Kuhn and the John Cage Trust at Bard College, and the second this last weekend in Brooklyn by the Varispeed Collective. Information can be found HERE and HERE.

Both performances followed Cage’s instructional format, which, much like his influential staging of Satie’s Vexations in 1963, spans an entire evening, ending at sunrise with the final movement. “Empty Words” is a continuation of the ideas Cage explored in “Mureau,” where he subjected portions of the collected journals of Henry David Thoreau to chance procedures, creating a constant flow of unrelated observations on sound and silence in the pastoral setting of Concord, Massachusetts. However, as Chris Shultis mentions, “Empty Words” does away with complete sentences, eliminating some of the flowing sentence structure. I mentioned in my reading of “Mureau” how pleasant I felt the text read, like a gentle perusal of favorite passages from Thoreau’s Journal, and I agree that “Empty Words” is much more disjunctive, but I don’t think that necessarily matters.

“Empty Words” represents the next step in Cage’s effort to slowly dissolve grammar and syntax through chance operations, focusing instead on the sounds of syllabic structures and combinations themselves, thus making music out of poetic recitation. He does so in phases with “Empty Words.” The first movement uses phrases, syllables, words and letters, the second only words, letters, and syllables, the third syllables and letters, and the fourth only uses letters drawn randomly from the journal. The idea Cage was stressing here was a progression from familiar to unknown through an evening of meditative immersion. Audience members sat through these long recitations, slowly ignoring sentence structure in favor of the actual sounds of the words, and then, as words dissolved away, focusing only on the sounds themselves: Cage’s ultimate reductionist goal of the thing-in-itself, or "sounds as sounds."

Mode records has a wonderful new release from their vaults of Cage performing “Empty Words” in conjunction with “Music for Piano,” recorded in 1991, and the juxtaposition of the two pieces exemplifies the musicality of written text Cage was exploring:

The title “Empty Words” was inspired by a conversation Cage had with Oriental scholar William McNaughton, who described the classification of classical Chinese language according to two categories. The first, a “full” word has a specific referential meaning, while the second category of “empty” words included conjunctions and pronouns; items that refer only to other terms. Thus Cage culled two meanings from this concept; words can have no “meaning” simply because they are reduced to a form beyond syntax, and instead of having a meaning they are merely a sound, a phoneme uttered by the human voice.

The next question then is how these performative texts relate to any sense of musicality in general. As with several other texts in this project, this “reading through” was more a reading aloud through, (although not all of it according to the original time span, I do have other work to do on Mondays…) and thus I set out, on a hot Monday in my cramped apartment in Echo Park, fans ablaze, with the remnants of a summer cold (which helped to reverberate the sounds of the words no less) and read aloud some portions of “Empty Words” to an audience of the landlord’s dog and myself.

Out of all the performative texts I’ve read through so far, this one feels, perhaps next to the “Song Books” excerpt in M, the most musical in an abstract sense. The first section has remnants of “Mureau,” in that I occasionally caught moments of introspective reminiscences of Thoreau’s landscapes, but as I progressed, it took all of my effort just to follow the syllables and consonants of the text rather than think about any specific associations these words and syllables might engender. The experience was identical to sight reading music, a skill that requires one to let go to a certain extent and let muscle memory and intuition guide you through.  

Granted, recitation is one step removed from intoning or incanting, which, stemming back to the earliest meditative practices and on to the liturgical recitations of the modern Catholic liturgy, create a natural rhythmic rise and fall. I have found that most recordings of Cage’s poetry follow a sort of performance practice that generally aligns with the high recitation style of classical American literature, rising and following at punctuation marks when possible, but often thwarted by the dissolved grammar as the piece progresses.

The final movement, meant to be recited at sunrise, completes the transition from language to music, as Cage describes it, creating a landscape of empty words, syllables, and ideas. The thought behind this structure was, once one has remained within the immersive environment long enough, the sounds of the sunrise would naturally envelop the piece itself, and the end would climax by dissolving into nature itself, leaving off where Cage started, toward something else.

Languages becoming musics, musics becoming theatres; performances; metamorphoses (stills from what are actually movies). At first face to face; finally sitting with one’s back to the audience (sitting with the audience), everyone facing the same vision. Sideways, sideways.