Category: Articles

Frank J. Oteri Photo by Melissa Richard

I was lucky to have had two brief encounters with John Cage that were both defining moments though in very different ways.

The first time I met John Cage was at a bookstore in Greenwich Village where he was autographing copies of his new book For The Birds. I was in high school and had just discovered his music while my peers were telling me that the greatest musical revolutionaries were The Clash and Blondie. On line in front of me was a standard uniform punk rocker—Mohawk, slashed leather jacket with requisite safety pins—who proceeded to kneel in front of Cage exclaiming that he was the inspiration for all of punk rock. Cage, in characteristic Zen fashion, sat motionless with a sanguine smile.

The second time was somewhat less valedictory. A few years later, I was up at SUNY Purchase for the premiere of one of Cage’s Europeras, a production I was finding only slightly less irritating than the accompanying program notes which definitively proclaimed that this masterpiece was the last opera anyone ever needed to write. During intermission I leaned over to the friend with whom I was attending the performance and launched into one of my typical over-the-top blathering tirades only to discover a few minutes later that John Cage was sitting directly behind us. Cage, still completely in character, he said absolutely nothing, but neither did I for the remainder of the day.

The greatest lesson in the music and writings of John Cage is to be open to possibility: any possibility, all possibility. And while Cage espoused a music created by leaving elements open to chance (in many ways the only real fulfillment of his teacher Schoenberg’s goal to emancipate dissonance), Cage’s real marching orders to both composers and listeners is to get past the preconceptions that frequently distract us from appreciating the breadth and depth of musical experience. Strangely, I believe that the composers, musicians, and listeners of today’s musical environment where all styles co-exist and none is dominant are all somehow Cage’s disciples and his legacy.

The Pandora’s Box of chance music was opened by a variety of confluences in the early 1950s, but the most dramatic was probably Cage’s reading of the ancient Chinese classic divination text I Ching (Book of Changes). Cage was given his copy of that book by a precocious teenager named Christian Wolff who, along with Earle Brown and Morton Feldman, became the youngest member of the so-called “New York School” of Composers led by Cage. We spent an afternoon with Wolff during which he recounted his initial encounters with Cage more than a half-century ago and explained how his own music has evolved since then. Sabine Feisst provided us with an overview of music in which chance is a structural component.

At a lecture about chance music given by John Cage in the 1950s, he asked, “Is music just sounds? And what does it communicate?” We rolled some dice to determine whom we should ask to provide us with a contemporary series of answers. And we ask for your own random thoughts in our interactive forum!

In keeping with the spirit of this month’s issue, Amanda MacBlane also took some chances with our compendium of new recordings which, through pure serendipity, contains a great deal of indeterminate and free-improvised music. So, take some chances and overcome your preconceptions!

Daniel Dorff, Photo by Eiko Fan

Some instrumental music is “just sounds” to communicate musical patterns, ranging in style from Haydn to Brahms to Persichetti to Shapey.  Other instrumental music communicates tangible meaning, generally with extra-musical clues, as in Berlioz, Strauss, many recent composers, and Vivaldi‘s Four Seasons. (Vocal music is a different story, since there are words with immediate meaning.)

Abstract music about musical patterns is magical in its ability to move our emotions despite not meaning anything.  Program music is magical in its ability to mean something despite being “just notes.”

Donald Harris, photo by OSU Photo Services

Professor of Composition & Theory
School of Music, The Ohio State University

John Cage Introduction

These are questions that might seem appropriate for John Cage to ask, particularly if one is already acquainted with his music and his musical thought. Cage was eager to challenge common understandings. Whether or not they are useful questions today, however, depends on one’s perspective on several if not many issues arising out of what each question conjures up. For example, “is music just sounds” could easily be answered yes or no, depending upon a larger definition of what is meant by the question in the first place. Similarly, “what does music communicate?” could be answered by nothing or everything, leaving open the larger question of what is meant by music communicating. Each question poses philosophical or aesthetic problems whose various resolutions go way beyond what this writer is willing to engage in. I would prefer that the reader find my response in an introduction of John Cage that I presented prior to a lecture he gave at The Ohio State University in January, 1990. My introduction doesn’t really answer the two questions, but it is, in my view, an honest appraisal of their author, who remains one of the most enigmatic, imaginative, and forceful musical personalities of the last half of the twentieth century…

I first met John Cage in a small country tavern or gasthaus, near Darmstadt, West Germany. It was a chance or random encounter, to use familiar words in John Cage’s vocabulary. I recognized him from his photographs. Inquisitive student that I was, I struck up a conversation.

I recall that he had been out and about looking for mushrooms in a neighboring wood. I didn’t know at the time that he was an expert mycologist. But I also recall that he ate an omelet for lunch, which may or may not have contained mushrooms, and that the conversation lasted for the better part of the afternoon. We were both in unfamiliar surroundings. I think that he enjoyed some casual conversation, a departure indeed from the serious, humorless debate that normally occurred at Darmstadt.

It was the summer of 1956 or 1957, the early years of the Darmstadt new music festival, and neither of us was conversant in the German language. I came away with the feeling that my encounter with John Cage was the most important of that week. How could it have been otherwise with a man at once so enigmatic, charming, and forthcoming, and with so much to offer?

Since that time I came in contact with John Cage at infrequent intervals, but nonetheless with some random irregularity, to continue with words not uncommon to his vocabulary. Only a few short years ago, when associated with another school, the Hartt School of Music, I had the good fortune to co-sponsor a concert of his complete works for violin, both with and without piano accompaniment, performed by the violinist, Paul Zukofsky, with the composer, Charles Wuorinen, at the piano. Each work was vintage Cage, but the event clearly demonstrated how important quality performers are to the execution of his music. These are not pieces that shine in the hands of amateurs or the uninitiated.

Nonetheless, one hardly has to see or be with John Cage to be in contact with him. His artistic presence is continually with us, whether we accept it or not. John Cage has successfully challenged the way we view and perceive art. In music, he has single-handedly brought forth a new concept of notation. He was the first to tell us that the European way of making art was not the only path. His example showed us that there were extra-European philosophies and aesthetics which were equally as compelling models.

As many American artists persisted to emulate their European predecessors, John Cage was, I think, amused. He was laughing, not at us for he is far too generous and compassionate for that, but laughing with us, if only we would have had the courage to see his ideas as non-threatening, as simply adding dimensions which were out of our habitual orbit.

John Cage has taught us to question everything we thought we knew about art. At the same time he has relentlessly pursued his own vision with courage, tenacity, and wit. His lectures and writings are as much a part of that vision as his music. As a matter of fact, his life and actions are inseparably linked to his oeuvre. One or the other does not begin where the one leaves off. True to the finest of oriental philosophers, the man and his art are an insoluble whole.

John Cage has certainly influenced the entire artistic world, as much if not more than the purely musical one. Painters, poets, dancers have all succumbed to the power of his ideas.

Andrew Frank, photo courtesy University of California, Davis

Professor
Department of Music
University of California, Davis

Music is more than “just sounds.” It is a system of sound images and patterns, often very complex, made up of elements which coalesce to make a coherent work of art.

Music communicates itself. Listeners’ emotional and intellectual responses to a particular piece may be highly variable, pointing up the subjective nature of all artistic communication.

Alfred V. Fedak, photo courtesy Selah

Composer, Organist and Minister of Music and the Arts,
Westminster Presbyterian Church in Albany, New York

Music is not just sound, it is organized sound. And composing is nothing more than the act of selecting sounds and organizing them. Even the most aleatoric compositions involve some degree of organization: decisions must be made (either by the composer or the performer) about when to begin, when to end, and what to do in between.

I think music communicates in at least three ways:

1. A piece of music communicates itself. That is, it reveals itself as a unique organization of sounds with a particular set of characteristics.
2. A piece of music also communicates something about its composer. At the very least, it discloses some of the decisions he or she made in working out the piece.
3. Finally, a piece of music communicates emotion or feeling, although it’s not always easy to put into words exactly what the emotional content of a given work might be. Feelings are subjective, so that two individuals could very well experience different emotions while hearing the same piece. Moreover, the association of specific emotional states with particular types of music is to some degree a learned phenomenon, and one which varies from culture to culture. Nevertheless, the power of music to convey emotion is and has always been universally recognized.

MSgt. Aldo Rafael Forte

Composer/Arranger for the USAF Heritage of America Band
Langley Air Force Base, Virginia

To me music is not “just sounds”. Certainly there is a “magic” to the sounds conjured up by composers in their harmonies and tone colors which can be most aurally satisfying on its own. As a composer, communicating with the audience is very important to me. Music is capable of portraying a wide range of emotions as well as depicting things about the world around us. Consider for instance Mahler’s works for the former and Debussy’s “Nuages” from the “Trois Nocturnes” for the latter. Also, different members of the same audience will “interpret” the same work in different ways. Their interpretations may be different from what the composer had in mind in the first place.

“No matter what we do, sooner or later it all sounds melodic.”
—Christian Wolff

Despite the best laid plans of composers and performers, music happens.

Like life itself, music always involves some degree of indeterminacy. Improvisation, wrong notes, reluctant instruments, failing technology and other messy realities are integral elements of all music.

But it wasn’ t until about 1950 that Western “art” music began to fully embrace its own indeterminate nature. John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and Christian Wolff began making a new music in which notation, the sequence of sounds, and the sounds themselves were left open to an unprecedented extent.

This was a uniquely American phenomenon. It evolved directly out of the music for percussion ensemble composed by Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, William Russell, Cage and others in the late ’30s and ’40s. Since the sounds of individual brake drums, pod rattles, temple gongs and tom-toms vary much more than the sounds of pianos, strings, brass and woodwinds, a high degree of indeterminacy was already inherent in the percussive medium.

Taking his lead from Cowell, Cage “invented” the prepared piano to place an entire percussion ensemble at the fingertips of a single performer. He got more than he bargained for.

With traditional composer’s precision, Cage’s early scores for prepared piano contained exacting specifications for the size, location and materials of the objects to be placed on or between the strings of the piano. But when he heard his music played on a piano different from his own, the sound was shockingly different. Cage had to decide whether this was or wasnÕt the piece he had composed. He decided it was.

From this epiphany, Cage and his circle went on to incorporate the I Ching and other indeterminant processes into composition and performance. By the end of his life, Cage had come to the radically elegant definition of music as “Sounds heard”.

This shifts our center of musical gravity from “saying something” to simply listening. As composers, performers and audience members, our primary participation in music is to listen. Music becomes less of an artifice and more a part of the ecology of our lives. We step off the grid of regularly measured time and into the more open and immeasurable flow of time that we experience in nature.

The first work in my catalog is songbirdsongs Ð a cycle of pieces for piccolos and percussion. In this music, I set fragments of bird songs in a way that I hoped would ring true with the experience of listening in the soundscape. All the notes are written out. But the printed music is what Harrison called a “performance kit”, with the specific order of events left to the performers to decide in the moment of playing and listening.

Since these early pieces, my music has ranged from one end of the determinate/indeterminate spectrum to the other Ð from rigorously detailed scores to more open forms of notation and performance. Some of my music explicitly celebrates nature. Much of it is more sonically “abstract”. But to this day all of my music is still informed by the lessons of indeterminacy, and by Cage’s aspiration “to imitate nature in her manner of operation”.

What about you?

How do chance, indeterminacy and “the music that happens” influence your listening, composing, performing?