Experimentations: John Cage in Music, Art, and Architecture 9781501306402, 9781501306396, 9781501306433, 9781501306419

Citation preview

Experimentations

Figure 1  John Cage, 4'33", 1952. Score in proportional notation, 1953. Key and first page.

Experimentations John Cage in Music, Art, and Architecture

Branden W. Joseph

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

N E W YO R K • LO N D O N • OX F O R D • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © Branden W. Joseph, 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Joseph, Branden Wayne, author. Title: Experimentations : John Cage in music, art, and architecture / Branden W. Joseph. Description: First edition. | New York ; London : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016001838 (print) | LCCN 2016003020 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501306402 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501306419 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501306426 (ePub) Subjects: LCSH: Cage, John–Criticism and interpretation. | Cage, John–Influence. | Avant-garde (Music)–History–20th century. | Avant-garde (Aesthetics)– United States–History–20th century. | Music–20th century–Philosophy and aesthetics. | Art and music. | Music and architecture. | Fuller, R. Buckminster (Richard Buckminster), 1895-1983. | Cage, John. HPSCHD. | Aleatory music–History and criticism. Classification: LCC ML410.C24 J67 2016 (print) | LCC ML410.C24 (ebook) | DDC 780.92–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016001838 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-0640-2   PB: 978-1-5013-0639-6 ePDF: 978-1-5013-0641-9 ePub: 978-1-5013-0642-6 Cover design: Sutchinda Rangsi Thompson Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

Contents Acknowledgments viii List of Illustrationsx Introduction: Interpenetrations and Displacements1 1 2 3 4 5

A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers: John Cage’s Early Avant-Garde Aesthetic35 Hitchhiker in an Omni-Directional Transport: The Spatial Politics of John Cage and Buckminster Fuller 81 The Architecture of Silence 101 Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity 133 HPSCHD—Ghost or Monster? 173

Index205

Acknowledgments In many ways, this book could be considered my first, since working through the legacies of John Cage’s music, thought, and writing was a prerequisite for the investigations I have made into “neo-dada” art and minimal tendencies in art, music, and experimental film over the course of nearly two decades. During this time, my research has benefited from a great many individuals and institutions. Particular thanks are due to all those who generously read and commented on earlier versions of these chapters: Danielle Fosler-Lussier, David Grubbs, Hannah Higgins, Doug Kahn, Rebecca Kim, Reinhold Martin, David Patterson, Ben Piekut, and Julia Robinson, and, before all of them, Yve-Alain Bois, Norman Bryson, and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh. Thanks are also due to my editors at Bloomsbury, Ally-Jane Grossan, Michelle Chen, and Leah BabbRosenfeld, to project manager Balaji Kasirajan, and to Gabriel Rodriguez and Emily Shaw at the Media Center for Art History, Columbia University. Heartfelt gratitude is due to Laura Kuhn of the John Cage Trust, whose knowledge, generosity, and support have marked the entire field of Cage studies. Thanks also to Nancy Perloff of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, and to the staffs of the Northwestern University Music Library in Evanston, Illinois, the Columbia University Libraries in New York, and the New York Public Library, as well as New York University’s Bobst Library, which has served as a particularly valuable and hospitable site for my research on Cage over a great many years. For help with images and permissions, thanks are also due to Gene Caprioglio of C.F. Peters Corporation, Hannah Higgins, Julia Robinson, and Christian Xatrec. Extra special thanks are due, as always, to Felicity D. Scott for everything. Earlier versions of these chapters have appeared as: “ ‘A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers’: The Development of John Cage’s Early Avant-Garde Aesthetic Position,” in John Cage: Music, Philosophy, and Intention, 1933–1950, ed. David W. Patterson (New York: Routledge, 2002); “Hitchhiker in an Omni-Directional Transport: The Spatial Politics of John Cage and Buckminster Fuller,” ANY Magazine 17 (1997); “John Cage and the Architecture of Silence,” October 81 (Summer 1997); “Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity,” in The Anarchy of Silence: John Cage and Experimental Art, ex. cat., ed. Julia Robinson (Barcelona:

Acknowledgments

ix

Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona [MACBA], 2009); and “HPSCHD— Ghost or Monster?” in Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts, ed. Hannah B. Higgins and Douglas Kahn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). Much of the research in Chapters 1, 4, and 5 first appeared in my Ph.D. dissertation “Experimental Art: John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and the Neo-Avant-Garde” (1999). Although I have endeavored in all cases to take into account the current state of Cage research, the chapters that follow inevitably reflect, and are no doubt limited by, the contexts and circumstances of their original publication. Throughout these essays, I have elected not to retain the beautiful eccentricities of Cage’s often chance-derived typographical innovations.

List of Illustrations John Cage, 4'33", 1952. Score in proportional notation, 1953. Key and first page. Copyright © 1960 by Henmar Press Inc. Used by permission of C.F. Peters Corporation. ii–iii I.1 Allan Kaprow, 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, 1959. From left: Shirley Prendergast, Rosalyn Montague, Kaprow, and Lucas Samaras, Ruben Gallery, New York. Photo by Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images. 1 I.2 John Cage, 1958. Photo by Ben Martin/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images. 2 I.3 Allan Kaprow, The Courtyard, 1962. William Mahin, Letty Eisenhauer, and Charles Simon atop giant “mountain” construction. Photograph by Lawrence N. Shustak. 4 I.4 Skee-Ball at Dillon’s Bar, New York, 1959. From left: Bill Giles, Anna Moreska, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Jasper Johns. Photo by Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images. 6 I.5 John Cage, Theatre Piece, Part 2, 1960. One page. Copyright © 1977 by Henmar Press Inc. Used by permission of C.F. Peters Corporation. 12 I.6 Allan Kaprow, Cave plan for Eat, 1964. Caves of the former Ebling Brewery, South Bronx. Environment sponsored by Smolin Gallery. Courtesy Allan Kaprow Estate and Hauser & Wirth. 13 I.7 Carolee Schneemann, Meat Joy, 1964. Performance. Photo by Al Giese. Courtesy of the artist. 18 I.8 Carolee Schneemann, Snows, 1967. Performance. From left: Tyrone Mitchell, Shigeko Kubota, and Phoebe Neville. Courtesy of the artist. 20 1.1 Mark Tobey, Broadway, 1935–36. Tempera on Masonite. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Arthur Hoppock Hearn Fund, 1942. (42.170) Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY. © 2015 Mark Tobey/ Seattle Art Museum, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 37 1

List of Illustrations

xi

1.2 László Moholy-Nagy, Gutter [Street Drain (Rinnstein)], 1925. Gelatin-silver print. Courtesy George Eastman House. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. 39 1.3 Luigi Russolo, in his laboratory of noise instruments with Ugo Piatti. From Luigi Russolo, L’Arte dei rumori. Edizioni Futuriste di “poesia,” Milan, 1916. Collection of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 40 1.4 John Cage, First Construction (in Metal), 1939. First page. Copyright © 1962 by Henmar Press Inc. Used by permission of C.F. Peters Corporation. 46 1.5 Mark Tobey, Crystallization, 1944. Tempera on board. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University. Mabel Ashley Kizer Fund, Gift of Melitta and Rex Vaughan, and Modern and Contemporary Acquisitions Fund. © 2015 Mark Tobey/ Seattle Art Museum, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 59 1.6 László Moholy-Nagy, Graph of “Sectors of human development” from The New Vision. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. 61 2.1 Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao, Project for Floating Cloud Structures (Cloud Nines), 1960. Courtesy, The Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller. 83 2.2 Buckminster Fuller, Sketch for 4D Transportation Unit, ca. 1929. Ink and graphite on paper. Courtesy, The Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller. 84 2.3 John Cage, Concert for Piano and Orchestra, 1957–58. Solo for Piano, page 12, notation T. Copyright © 1960 by Henmar Press Inc. Used by permission of C.F. Peters Corporation. 89 2.4 John Cage Picking Mushrooms, 1967. Photo by William Gedney. William Gedney Collection, Duke University, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 91 2.5 Buckminster Fuller watching U.S. Marine Corps helicopter transporting a geodesic dome, 1954. Courtesy, The Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller. 94 3.1 Le Corbusier, The Modulor, ca. 1945. © F.L.C./ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2015. 102 3.2 Paul Williams, Gatehill Cooperative Community, ca. 1956. Upper square. Western facade of Williams-Cage House at

xii

3.3 3.4 3.5

3.6

3.7 3.8

3.9

3.10

3.11

List of Illustrations

lower left. Photo by Walter Rosenblum. Courtesy of the Williams family. Paul Williams, South facade of Williams-Cage House, ca. 1956. Photo by Walter Rosenblum. Courtesy of the Williams family. Paul Williams, Drawing for Williams-Cage House, ca. 1954. Courtesy of the Williams family. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois. Exterior view, ca. 1945–51. Photo by Heinrich Blessing. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/ Art Resource, NY. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Glass Skyscraper, Berlin, Germany, 1922. Model (no longer extant). Courtesy The Mies van der Rohe Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Kurt Schwitters, Merz Column, ca. 1923. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915–23. Oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, and dust on two glass panels, 109 1/4 × 69 1/4 inches (277.5 × 175.9 cm). Bequest of Katherine S. Dreier, 1952. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. Photo: The Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2015. John Cage, Music for Carillon (Graph) No.1, 1952. Page 7. Copyright © 1961 by Henmar Press Inc. Used by permission of C.F. Peters Corporation. John Cage, Variations II, 1961. One possible configuration of transparencies. Copyright © 1961 by Henmar Press Inc. Used by permission of C.F. Peters Corporation. Le Corbusier, Table from The Modulor showing possible combinations of harmonious proportions, 1948. © F.L.C./ ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2015.

104 104 105

108

109 110

113

114

116

119

List of Illustrations

3.12 Interior view of John Cage apartment in Williams-Cage House with Merce Cunningham, 1956. Photo by Valenti Chasin. Courtesy the John Cage Trust. 4.1 George Brecht, Drip Music, 1959–62. Performed by Dick Higgins at Fluxus-Musik og Anti Music det Instrumentale Teater, Nokolai Kirke, Copenhagen, Denmark, November 25, 1962. Photo by Poul Hansen for Dagbladet AKTUELT newspaper. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 4.2 Marcel Duchamp, Erratum Musical, 1913. Parts for Yvonne and Magdeleine. Autograph sketch for “Le grand verre,” 1912–15. Crayon and ink on paper, 31.7 × 48.2 cm. AM1997-96(60). Photo by Jean-Claude Planchet. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. © CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMNGrand Palais/Art Resource, NY. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2015. 4.3 John Cage, Music of Changes, 1951. First page of part II. Copyright © 1961 by Henmar Press Inc. Used by permission of C.F. Peters Corporation. 4.4 John Cage, Music for Piano 69–84 (#73), 1956. Copyright © 1960 by Henmar Press Inc. Used by permission of C.F. Peters Corporation. 4.5 John Cage, Concert for Piano and Orchestra: Piano Solo, 1957–58. Page 52. Copyright © 1960 by Henmar Press Inc. Used by permission of C.F. Peters Corporation. 4.6 George Brecht, chart of relations between composer, listener, sound, performer, and notation, from Notebook [III], April 1959– August 1959. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. 4.7 George Brecht in John Cage’s classroom at the New School for Social Research, August 5, 1959. Photo by Fred. W. McDarrah/ Getty Images. 5.1 HPSCHD Event Poster, 1969. Courtesy of the University of Illinois Archives.

xiii

121

136

139

140

144

145

162

163 174

xiv

List of Illustrations

5.2 John Cage and Lejaren Hiller inspecting the screens on which images will be projected during the performance of HPSCHD, 1969. Photographer unknown. 5.3 ILLIAC II computer, ca. 1958. Harold Lopeman uses a step ladder to work on the ILLIAC II. Courtesy of the University of Illinois Archives. 5.4 John Cage and Lejaren Hiller. Program (KNOBS) for the Listener, 1969. Output Sheet No. 10929 (detail) issued with LP of Cage and Hiller, HPSCHD, 1967–69, Nonesuch Records H-71224, 1969. Copyright © 1968 by Henmar Press Inc. Used by permission of C.F. Peters Corporation. All rights reserved. 5.5 Robert Rauschenberg, Sky Garden (Stoned Moon Series), 1969. Color lithograph and silkscreen on paper. From an edition of thirty-five published by Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles. Collection of the artist. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and Gemini G.E.L./Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Published by Gemini G.E.L. 5.6 John Cage, performing Variations VII at “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering” at the 69th Regiment Armory, New York, 1966. Photo by Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images.

175

177

182

191

192

Introduction: Interpenetrations and Displacements

In the summer of 1966, the Tulane Drama Review published a letter to the editor by Allan Kaprow. In it, he questioned the prominence given to John Cage and Marshall McLuhan in the journal’s special issue on happenings, a genre of artistic performance with which he had been closely associated since the debut of 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959) (Figure I.1). Kaprow characterized

Figure I.1  Allan Kaprow, 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, 1959.

2

Experimentations

the significance afforded to the American composer and the Canadian media theorist as “oversimplified,” proposing, ultimately, that it was “really unfair to these men.”1 In actuality, since McLuhan’s name only appeared briefly toward the end of Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner’s interview with Cage, it was almost certainly toward Cage that Kaprow primarily directed his response (Figure I.2). Cage had indeed figured prominently throughout the issue, both in the editors’ lengthy interview and in Kirby’s opening, overview essay, “The New Theatre,” which pronounced him “the touchstone” of happenings, Fluxus events, and

Figure I.2  John Cage, 1958.

Interpenetrations and Displacements

3

“chance theatre” pieces such as Jackson MacLow’s The Marrying Maiden (1959).2 Contending that “Cage’s thought, in his teaching, writing, lectures, and works, is the backbone of the new theatre,” Kirby discussed Cage’s Black Mountain College Event (Theatre Event #1, 1952) and Theatre Piece (1960), his interest in chance operations and arraying musicians throughout the available space, and the acoustic intermingling of “art” and “life” effected by his infamous silent composition 4'33" (1952).3 Kaprow, as the most active and visible proponent of the happening, not surprisingly blanched at being positioned as a mere epigone, his attendance of Cage’s experimental composition courses at the New School deployed, however inadvertently, to make him appear as something of a student following the iconoclastic composer’s lead. It was almost certainly not Kirby’s essay, however, that inspired Kaprow’s letter, but rather the unexpectedly harsh criticism lobbed his way in Kirby and Schechner’s interview. In discussing the question of intention, Cage disparaged Kaprow’s turn toward increasingly evident symbolism in happenings like The Courtyard (1962), where Letty Eisenhower appeared in the guise of “the Earth Mother” (Figure I.3).4 “She is the nature goddess (Mother Nature),” Kaprow explained in Kirby’s Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology, which Cage had clearly read. “She is either benign, yielding nature or devouring, cruel nature … she was Aphrodite (Miss America) as well—a goddess of Beauty, which is another subdivision of the large, benign nature image.”5 Cage clearly found the whole business retrograde. In appealing to such symbols, he declared, “You’re involved in a whole thing that we have been familiar with since the Renaissance and before.”6 More consequential, however, was Cage’s denunciation of Kaprow’s obliging the audience of 18 Happenings in 6 Parts to move from room to room as a “policed moment”—an illegitimate imposition of force.7 Clearly stung, Kaprow responded by distancing himself from the composer’s aesthetic parentage. “Cage’s indirect stimulation should not be underestimated,” he declared, but to place upon him the burden of sponsorship for a range of activities which in part he had nothing to do with, and which in part he is not comfortable with, is to do him a disservice. I do not know how McLuhan feels about this, but Cage is apparently uncomfortable with his assigned role; his interview in T30 [the special issue of Tulane Drama Review] made that perfectly clear.8

After emphasizing the happening’s roots in futurism, dada, surrealism, and abstract expressionism (a lineage that, in fact, Kirby had indicated toward the

4

Experimentations

Figure I.3  Allan Kaprow, The Courtyard, 1962.

Interpenetrations and Displacements

5

end of “The New Theatre”), Kaprow moved to downplay the significance of Cage’s New School courses. “I did my first Happenings in his classroom,” he conceded. “Yet I possibly learned things which Cage was not inclined to teach, although I was quite satisfied. This is reason enough to relieve him of any responsibility for my different interests.”9 Even in attempting to distance himself from Cage, however, Kaprow betrayed how closely their legacies were interwoven. His line about relieving Cage of responsibility was only a thinly veiled paraphrase of Cage’s own response to critiques leveled against him in the 1950s. “I am told that Alan Watts has questioned the relation between my work and Zen,” Cage noted in the first pages of his book Silence. “I mention this in order to free Zen of any responsibility for my actions.”10 Kaprow clearly expected the allusion to be recognized, and his message was presumably the same as that of Cage to Watts. As Cage stated about his heretical actions, “I shall continue making them, however.”11 Cage and Kaprow’s disagreement will be taken up again in Chapter 5 within the context of the monumental, multimedia opus HPSCHD (1967–69) that Cage composed with Lejaren Hiller. Here, however, I wish simply to draw attention to two evident but nonetheless important factors in their exchange. The first concerns its cross-disciplinary nature. Given how long Cage has figured within art historical discourse, one tends to overlook the fact that he was, and remained, primarily a composer (“a professional composer,” in the words of Henry Flynt), however much he had expanded that designation by the mid-1960s, while Kaprow was a visual artist (equally professionally, holding positions at various universities) with a background in painting and collage.12 Because of Cage’s close association with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns (Figure I.4), with the abstract expressionists before them, and with Marcel Duchamp, this fact hardly seems remarkable—indeed, Cage dismisses it as such in his interview with Kirby and Schechner.13 Nevertheless, it is a testament to Cage’s unique status within the visual arts that one could scarcely imagine Kaprow feeling pressed to respond to similar or even worse criticism from, say, Aaron Copland, Milton Babbitt, or Karlheinz Stockhausen, or even Richard Maxfield or Henry Cowell, to name two other composers whose New School courses appealed to visual artists. (As a point of contrast, it might be noted that neither the theater actor George Grizzard nor the director Alan Schneider, both of whom came in for much harsher and more personal criticism during Cage’s interview with Kirby and Schechner, felt the need to reply despite the Tulane Drama Review’s significance for their field.)

6

Experimentations

Figure I.4  Bill Giles, Anna Moreska, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Jasper Johns at Dillon’s Bar, New York, 1959.

Although primarily devoted to Cage’s music and thought, this book nonetheless approaches him from a perspective rooted in art history, my primary discipline, examining his work and writings with an eye toward what they gained from and contributed to the visual arts, including architecture. However much is drawn from the literature and methodologies of musicology, this art historical perspective clearly influences the types of questions raised, the specific compositional techniques and aesthetic strategies examined, and the interlocutors (like Kaprow) afforded particular prominence. The study of twentieth-century art has long been concerned with issues of the relationship of artistic practice to commodification, the interactions between the historical avant-garde movements of the 1910s and 1920s and their neo-avant-garde

Interpenetrations and Displacements

7

counterparts after World War II, and the associated topics of collage, montage, perceptual estrangement, and the readymade. The essays collected in this volume are all marked by such concerns, which, as I hope to have shown, seem legitimately to have been Cage’s as well. But those concerns are likely not the most pronounced aspect of the art historical perspective brought to bear on Cage’s production. That is rather to be found in the manner in which attention is given less to individual scores or compositions than to a succession of aesthetic strategies, techniques, or concepts developed over the course of Cage’s career. Making such practices legible is, to some degree, what this book sets out to accomplish, and it involves not only the isolation and exploration of terms such as “space,” “silence,” “transparency,” “multiplicity,” and “actualization,” but also the formulation—even, in some sense, the formalization—of them as distinct strategies with consistencies that have heretofore often gone unrecognized. The most relevant art historical precedent for such an approach is found in the study of Duchamp, whose legacy has been understood as a series of distinct conceptual strategies (including chance, the readymade, the index, “precision optics,” “pictorial nominalism,” even the transvestism of Rrose Sélavy), the reception of which can be traced through a number of progressive phases.14 Within art history, however, Duchamp’s precedent has generally been utilized to minimize, dismiss, or negate the significance of Cage, as the latter is presented as simply repeating the elder dadaist’s innovations or merely conveying them to a new generation. The following investigations, by contrast, point toward a much greater distinction between the two figures than generally acknowledged. As outlined, for instance, in Chapter 3, the Duchampian strategy of the readymade seems less important for Cage than the relatively lesser known engagement with issues of space and transparency that brought Duchamp’s The Large Glass together with Mies van der Rohe’s glass architecture. Similarly, as argued in Chapter 4, Cage left the chance techniques of the historical avant-garde behind in the 1950s for a more complex engagement with issues of indeterminacy, multiplicity, and actualization. It is surely a mark of something more like parity between the composer and the artist that minimal sculptor Robert Morris could equate their contributions, writing to a skeptical Flynt in 1962, “The problem has been for some time one of ideas—those most admired are the ones with the biggest, most incisive ideas (e.g. Cage & Duchamp).”15 The second notable feature of Cage and Kaprow’s exchange in Tulane Drama Review concerns the fact that it revolved around issues of political, rather than merely aesthetic import. Especially (although not solely) for readers

8

Experimentations

approaching Cage from the discipline of art history, where he is routinely discussed as apolitical, this may be somewhat more striking than his high regard in artistic circles. However, as argued beginning in Chapter 1, certain social and political concerns motivated Cage’s work almost from its inception, and an attentiveness to them is important for understanding the direction and stakes of his subsequent development. At the same time, though, as I contend in Chapter 5, the limitations of Cage’s aesthetic project may be approached via certain antinomies in the avowedly anarchist political outlook he adopted and espoused beginning in 1960. For a brief period around 1972, partly on account of a fleeting and precarious alliance with Maoism, Cage’s aesthetic and political project effectively turned against itself, severely compromising the liberatory goals he had pursued for nearly three decades. This book concludes with a reflection on this cautionary moment in Cage’s artistic development. * The approach taken in the following chapters traverses, to some extent, what Benjamin Piekut has recently characterized as two distinct stages of Cage’s musicological reception. As Piekut outlines it in the introduction to his book Experimentalism Otherwise, “The first wave of Cage studies that appeared in the late 1980s and early 1990s was concerned with legitimating the composer’s music in an environment that had been all too quick to dismiss him as nothing more than a philosopher and writer.”16 To accomplish this task, musicologists adopted “the methodology of archival recovery and explication,” employing textual exegesis and score analysis, reconstructing historical timelines and contexts, and establishing paths of compositional development.17 “This approach,” Piekut rightfully maintains, “creates and stresses continuities between Cage and the Western European tradition by concentrating on scores and sketches—which extend the network [of experimental composers] in time and give it further stability once they are housed in an archive—while simultaneously attenuating the ruptural possibilities of his work.”18 Although Piekut leaves the definition of the second wave of Cage studies implicit, its contours are exemplified by his own research, which interrogates the “network” of experimental composers not just for moments of continuity, but also for points of division, heterogeneity, and even conflict in order to comprehend the particular range of allowances and prohibitions that were afforded to, or asserted by, musicians and composers who realized Cage’s works and/or looked to his example. By examining such interactions, Piekut aims not simply to chart,

Interpenetrations and Displacements

9

but also to question the relations by and within which experimental musical practices—what he terms “actually existing experimentalism”—have been defined.19 In Experimentalism Otherwise, Piekut perceptively analyzes such incidents as the New York Philharmonic’s 1964 performance of Atlas Eclipticalis (1961), which provoked resistance among members of the orchestra, and cellist Charlotte Moorman’s realization of 26'1.1499" for a String Player (1955), which elicited a censorious response from Cage, who described it as tantamount to “murder.” Other “second wave” Cage studies would include Rebecca Y. Kim’s examination of Cage’s collaboration with the AACM-associated Joseph Jarman Quartet in 1965, Sara Heimbecker’s critique of the de facto exclusion of AfricanAmerican audiences from HPSCHD due to Cage and Hiller’s institutional affiliation with the University of Illinois, and Ryan Dohoney’s analysis of Cage’s forceful repudiation of African-American composer and musician Julius Eastman’s homoerotic 1975 realization of Song Books (1970).20 Piekut, Kim, Heimbecker, and Dohoney all draw upon George E. Lewis’s incisive, and now canonic, critique of the cultural segregation induced by Cage’s conceptual and terminological distinction between the musical legacies of indeterminacy and improvisation, what Lewis has termed the “Eurological” and the “Afrological” approaches to spontaneity within the lineage of experimental music.21 Presciently demonstrated by such second wave investigations into the conflicts and exclusions surrounding Cage’s oeuvre is not so much the existence of unacknowledged contradictions within Cage’s practice—that, for instance, he preached an aesthetic of “anything goes” in theory, but disallowed it in fact— but, more accurately and consequentially, the presence of a series of limitations constitutive of Cage’s aesthetic outlook: that a statement such as “Actually, anything does go but only when nothing is taken as the basis” authorizes only a delimited set of allowances and prohibitions, ones that all too frequently, but not exclusively, founder on the question of racial difference.22 This line of inquiry intersects with another, which examines the potential relationship between Cage’s compositional output and his sexual orientation. Here, the pathbreaking work of art historians Caroline A. Jones and Jonathan D. Katz has been central, their investigations more recently joined and extended by musicologists like Philip Gentry and Dohoney.23 This area of research maps out an equally important series of prohibitions and refusals: the cultural prohibition on openly expressed homosexuality within the McCarthyite America of the 1950s, in the first instance; the potential complicities with and/or resistances to such measures effected by Cagean silence, in the second; and, with another turn

10

Experimentations

of the screw, the prohibitions that Cage himself sought to enforce on more overt homoerotic expressions such as Eastman’s performance of Song Books.24 Taken as an ensemble, the second wave of Cage studies represents some of the most interesting, important, and productive research within the field, scholarship that promises ultimately to rechart the networks or assemblages of “actually existing” experimental practices that were often more diverse, differentiated, and conflictual than conventional art and music histories currently allow.25 The five essays collected in this volume run at something of a tangent to Piekut’s two waves of musicological reception. Substantial portions of them are devoted to reconstructing aspects of Cage’s historical context, explicating passages from his writings, and analyzing individual scores. In part, this tendency is a result of the period in which my research began. At the turn of the twenty-first century, art history was still strongly influenced by the Englishlanguage publication of Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde, which, as Hal Foster has indicated, “projects the historical avant-garde as an absolute origin whose aesthetic transformations are fully significant and historically effective in the first instance” and consequently dismisses the contributions of the neo-avant-garde after World War II.26 Much of Chapter  1 is directed toward fleshing out Cage’s engagement with various historical avant-garde strategies with an eye toward comprehending the bases from which his work developed. In that sense, key sections of this book openly pursue a legitimating function similar to that characterizing the first phase of Cage’s musicological reception.27 In recent years, Cage’s reputation within art history has increased enormously as the result of parallel investigations on the part of scholars and curators like Liz Kotz, Julia Robinson, and Eva Díaz, as well as theorists of sound art such as Brandon LaBelle, Douglas Kahn, and Seth Kim-Cohen.28 Their valuable contributions notwithstanding, the conditions of Cage’s growing art historical acceptance too often resemble those of his previous marginalization, as his legacy is commonly reduced to a single factor such as “chance.” The following investigations into a wider range of Cage’s aesthetic strategies will hopefully serve to further broaden and variegate our understanding of his importance within contemporary art and music. However, the exploration of such strategies does not aim solely to extend continuities with the Western European avant-garde, but also to articulate points of resistance and rupture, the means by which artists critically (and not just affirmatively) engaged with, rejected, and/or sought to surpass certain tenets of the Cagean project. Running

Interpenetrations and Displacements

11

counter to conventional art historical approaches that lump artists together on the basis of overarching similarities based on style, movement, medium, or genre (such as happenings), such an approach opens the possibility instead of comprehending moments of heterogeneity, conflict, and antagonism. Once recognized, a previously little-noted Cagean concept such as “transparency” can be seen to provoke a range of different responses. Fluxus artist Dick Higgins, for example, would embrace it thoroughly, describing the “transparency” of his performances in the following terms: “the work should acquire its meaning by what you can see through it and how this looks in relation to the work.”29 Claes Oldenburg, on the other hand, would cite the idea in order to distinguish his work from Cage’s. It was “foolish,” he proclaimed, “to compare my hpgs [happenings] with Cages [sic] or others,” because “They are psychological a thing an obstacle, not a thing to see through.”30 In 1966, Kaprow would present much the same opposition, although in a more oblique manner. Devoting a substantial portion of the book Assemblage, Environments, and Happenings to differentiating his aesthetic from Cage’s, Kaprow juxtaposed “Change” with Cage’s involvement with “Chance.” Criticizing chance operations as overly analytical, inordinately procedural, and ultimately promoting a “denial of art and self ” that could never be fully accomplished, Kaprow advocated a more subjective and expressive informality in line with the direction his own work had taken.31 “Chance, then,” he argued, is meant to be a purposive following of rules, whereas Change is the following of intuition and wisdom. The rules of Chance are extended to persons and history, while Change (even systematized into rules derived from, say, the Chinese I Ching: The Book of Changes) is dependent upon human experience. Chance operations are means to an end in which they are not necessarily inherent, but Change operations reflect a view of nature held by the artist, and as such are revealed in the transformations of the art.32

In developing this series of oppositions, Kaprow came to endorse, in implicit contrast to Cage’s promotion of Mies van der Rohe’s glass buildings, modern architecture’s organicist tradition (Figures I.5 and I.6). “[A]rchitecture as such is about to come to grips with what Frank Lloyd Wright only incompletely dreamed of,” he contended, an organism which would flow from part to part, not only easily within itself, but within the forms of nature (now quite possible with sprayed plastic and concrete techniques) … Instead of a compass-and-ruler style, [younger architects] are

12

Experimentations seeking one whose forms would emerge more from the feel of nature itself in all its variety and sense of the spontaneous and unplanned. When this happens, nature and architecture may truly (and not tentatively as in Bear Run and Taliesin West) become continuous with one another. The movement in this direction has already begun in the other media.33

Opaque, rather than transparent, Kaprow’s architectural enclosures imitate the forms of a nature that, understood as “spontaneous and unplanned,” further justified his increasingly subjective aesthetic (“those subtle and spontaneous feelings and responses that were the living expression of change”).34 Thus,

Figure I.5  John Cage, Theatre Piece, 1960.

Interpenetrations and Displacements

Figure I.6  Allan Kaprow, Cave plan for Eat, 1964.

13

14

Experimentations

not only did Kaprow recognize an array of specific Cagean concepts, he felt it necessary to distinguish his position from that of the composer by addressing them as an ensemble: chance versus change, transparency versus organicism, and artistic self-denial versus artistic self-expression, along with conflicting ideas of nature.35 It is in the manner in which the identification of particular Cagean strategies can lead not only to a more nuanced understanding of his reception within the visual arts, but also to a greater comprehension of the points of resistance to it that the essays in this book intersect with those of the second wave of Cage studies. As was the case in the musicological inquiries mentioned above, the resistances that such an approach helps make legible also revolve around issues of politics, if sometimes in a more abstract or theoretical register. As previously noted, the friction between Cage and Kaprow arose out of differing conceptions of the political implications of authorship, expression, and audience engagement. Oldenburg’s resistance to Cage also centered on political concerns, as he sought to defend his work against the charge of invoking “[p]olice procedures.”36 “My happening is not theater,” he noted, it is more like a paining or sculpt. (a construction) that the “audience” helps compose. Its [sic] therefore they feel trapped in what Cage calls a “police” situation. They are taken possession of. Whats [sic] required of them is a willingness to let themselves be used, including their emotions as fex. [for example] of resistance to being told what to do.37

* Given the predominantly monographic scope of this book, it is potentially worthwhile to pause here and examine in more detail another case in which an artist, Carolee Schneemann, engaged with and distinguished herself from Cage’s legacy on account of the political implications of particular concepts or strategies. (Those who wish to move to Cage more quickly may elect to skip this section and return to it after reading Chapter 5.) Although routinely associated with the genre of the happening, Schneemann actually felt herself only partly, and problematically, accepted into the network of its early practitioners. Despite the substantial publicity surrounding her most well-known performance, Meat Joy (1964), in Paris, London, and New York, she was left out of Kirby’s anthology of happenings and received only the most passing mention in his and Schechner’s special issue of Tulane Drama Review. In 1974, Schneemann gave voice to her sense of exclusion in an unsent letter

Interpenetrations and Displacements

15

to Kaprow wherein she complained of “having been methodically repulsed by those with whom I felt affinity” during the previous decade.38 Over the course of five brief but dense pages, Schneemann subjectively, but insightfully, mapped out a series of tensions, ruptures, and affinities that played out across the particularly wide and diverse network of artistic groups with which she associated, including not only the practitioners of North American and Western European happenings (and the differences between them), but also Fluxus, the Judson Dance Theater, the New York poetry scene, technicians at Bell Labs such as Billy Klüver, female musicians and artists such as Moorman, Jackie Ferrara, and Bici Hendricks, and the then-emerging feminist movement, which helped forge new types of personal and professional acquaintances. Schneemann cogently stresses the fact that the connections (and exclusions) within such networks were both discursive and material, leading not only to the appreciation and/or realization of specific artworks but also to related practices of “explaining, writing, introducing, meeting, making projects, plans … placing articles, lining up reviews, dealers, dinners … ”39 “The issue of aid, support and concern for one another is real,” she underscored; “if my considerations seem peculiar, wrong-headed, that is a measure of my exclusion—or qualified inclusion—and its crippling effects.”40 Although Schneemann acknowledges Kaprow’s interest (which she describes as nearly unique among her male artistic peers) in her work, she admonishes him for offering only limited support, what she characterized “as men helping me to sustain what I had but not to enlarge its scope or enjoin them in their world.”41 Schneemann had been close to Cage since the early 1960s, both directly and on account of James Tenney, her partner, who would perform Cage’s music in the ensemble Tone Roads.42 For years, she would refer to Cage’s aim of subjective transformation (“a process of what Cage calls ‘self-alteration’ ”) as one of her artistic goals.43 The means by which she pursued it in her happening-like “kinetic theater” performances, however, simultaneously drew upon and broke with Cage’s precedent, although she would never openly criticize him the same way she publicly called out Kaprow.44 The relevant Cagean concepts are “unimpededness and interpenetration.” Derived from the Zen teachings of Daisetz T. Suzuki, the two terms characterized an ontological outlook that Cage adopted as an aesthetic goal, one of the criteria by which music could imitate “nature in her manner of operation.”45 “The sounds,” as Cage wrote about Music of Changes (1951), “enter the time-space centered within themselves, unimpeded by service to any

16

Experimentations

abstraction, their 360 degrees of circumference free for an infinite interplay of interpenetration.”46 “Unimpededness and interpenetration” also underlay the premises of Cage’s political ideals. As freedom from external regulation, force, or norm, “unimpededness” referred to the capabilities of individuals to act from their “own centers,” while “interpenetration”—understood as a state of virtual, anarchic interaction and sociability—was the means by which such individuated entities, whether sounds or people, could evade solipsistic isolation. “Interpenetration” is thus a key term in Cage’s lexicon, countering the oft-repeated claim that he sought merely to free sounds and/or people to be themselves without any subsequent connection. On a social level, however, Cage seemed to endorse interpenetrations of only the most abstract kind. Any bonds, even affective bonds, were regarded as potential power relations, better replaced where possible with disinterestedness. “What is important,” Cage explained, is to insert the individual into the current, the flux of everything that happens. And to do that, the wall [of the ego] has to be demolished; tastes, memory, and emotions have to be weakened; all the ramparts have to be razed. You can feel an emotion; just don’t think that it’s so important … Take it in a way that you can then let it drop!47

Schneemann both followed and broke from Cage on this point, assiduously replacing his terminology of “unimpededness and interpenetration” with that of “interpenetration and displacement.” On one level, Schneemann’s terminological pair refers to the transformative physical interactions that take place among performers in the context of her productions. As she wrote about the multimedia anti-war performance Snows (1967), I am after the interpenetrations and displacements which occur between the performers themselves and the theatrical material; which is not to indicate a democratic process or structure [by which she seems to mean atomized, if equal, individuation], rather an evolutionary one. The physical qualities of the performers add to the shape and character of the work; their personalities emerge in contrasting contacts—juxtapositions of individual presence focused on actions and materials presented or provoked.48

Contrary to Cage’s ideal of pure disinterestedness, Schneemann’s “interpenetrations” had everything to do with affective relations, staged both on the level of theme—acts of coupling and metaphors of erotic interaction appear throughout Meat Joy, Snows, and other performances—and on that of realization, consistently predicated on modes of physical and interpersonal

Interpenetrations and Displacements

17

connection, including conflict (Figure I.7). “Since all the movements of Meat Joy take shape by sequences of bodily contact between the performers,” wrote Schneemann, we had to establish trusting and pleasurable feelings among ourselves … This would necessitate leading them into actions, physical movements which would in themselves answer questions of feeling and response and relationship— the experiences of the body would re-form/inform their mental stance. Early rehearsals began with wrestling sessions: all eight of us on a small mat going through “exercises” of pinching, poking, rolling, tumbling, and crawling … We disposed of conventions of reserve exploring these modes of contact while concentrating a responsive attentiveness on one another.49

The Judson Dance Theater, under the auspices of which Schneemann staged her earliest New York events, had evolved out of Robert Dunn’s workshops on applying Cage’s compositional tools to choreography. On joining the group, Schneemann not surprisingly found her peers steeped in Cagean principles, further encouraged by several members’ studies with Merce Cunningham. “The dancers,” explained Schneemann, “had been developing randomizing processes, chance methods, and natural movement, where each person tended to realize instructions or tasks as an independent, self-reliant unit/ entity.”50 “Aside from the visual emphasis, the crucial deviation from existing performance investigations” that Schneemann, by her own estimation, brought to Judson entailed a greater degree of performers’ involvement with one another, “introducing risk, uncertainty—reliance on reactions and inter-relations which could be immediate, impulsive and sensitive … I wanted touch, contact, tactile materials, shocks—boundaries of self and group to be meshed and mutually evolving.”51 One of the models for Schneemann’s early work was biological (“an organism interchanging its parts (phagocyte)”), and as such the performers’ spatialization did not equal disconnection.52 “The distribution of the performers in space,” she noted, “evolves the phrasing of a time sequence … The active qualities of any one element (body, light, sound, paper, cloth, glass) find its necessary relation to all other elements and through conjunction and juxtaposition the kinetic energy is released.”53 If, for Cage, arrangement throughout the available space was a way for each element (whether sound or action) and each agent (whether loudspeaker, musician, or actor) to be their own, non-obstructed center, interpenetrating solely in the ears and eyes of members of the audience, Schneemann saw

18

Experimentations

Figure I.7  Carolee Schneemann, Meat Joy, 1964.

Interpenetrations and Displacements

19

spatialization as producing the necessary distance (hence, time) to allow different elements to run up against each other. In the passage quoted above, Schneemann implicitly counterposes Cage’s terminology of “unimpededness and interpenetration” with that of “conjunction and juxtaposition,” the outcome of which is a release of “kinetic energy.” Whereas Cage seemed primarily interested in lowering affective pull, formulating the means to allow individual musicians, for instance, to act without altering or determining the actions of their peers, Schneemann aimed to heighten the reciprocal influences that her performers had upon one another. Hence the importance of her piece Lateral Splay (1963), in which individuals careen across the floor—pure vectors of intensive force—before colliding with “obstacles,” including “the walls of the [Judson] church, the audience, the steel girders, the mountain of chairs, and other runners,” any of which would necessarily alter their initial trajectories.54 Injuries were to be avoided by reciprocal interactions, as the potentially violent impact of performers with one another is transformed into mutually supportive tumbles to the ground. In the event of colliding with “another runner,” Schneemann instructed, “grab them (support them, they will be off balance) and fall down in an embrace.”55 Far from “unimpeded,” then, Schneemann’s performers were situated within a field of mutually interacting forces, which she expressly staged in terms of hierarchical and inegalitarian power dynamics (recall her remarks about them not being “democratic”), between activity and passivity, subject and object, male and female, hegemonic (white) and non-hegemonic bodies, and, most notably in Snows, “pursuers” and “victims” (Figure I.8).56 In no case, however, did Schneemann present such hierarchies as inalterable. Throughout her kinetic theater performances, the functions of active and passive, subject and object, “image” and “image maker” alternate between male and female performers; men’s endeavors to manipulate women like objects repeatedly fail; and violators and violated switch genders, races, and roles.57 As she wrote about Snows, The performance imagery is finally ambiguous: shifting metaphors in which performers are aggressor and victim, torturer and tortured, lover and beloved, as well as simply themselves. We set each other on fire, we extinguish the fire, we create each other’s face and body, we abandon each other, we save each other, we take responsibility for each other, we lose responsibility for each other, we reveal each other, we choose, we respond, we build, we are destroyed.58

20

Experimentations

Figure I.8  Carolee Schneemann, Snows, 1967.

The extensive rehearsals necessary for nearly all of Schneemann’s performances invariably incorporated “grabs and falls” and “catches and carries,” exercises similar to the mutually supportive collisions of Lateral Splay in which intersecting forces are detourned toward reciprocal care.59 Amid the political ferment of the 1960s, Schneemann even took such exercises into the streets, seeing them as potentially effective techniques to counter the aggression

Interpenetrations and Displacements

21

unleashed by riot police on non-violent civil rights and anti-war protestors—a means of altering the asymmetrical lines of force within confrontational situations.60 The second component of Schneemann’s notion of “interpenetration and displacement” concerns the individual sensorium. “I am after the interpenetrations and displacements which occur between various sense stimuli,” she explained; “the interaction and exchange between the body and the environment outside it; the body as environment … for the mind … where images evolve … that total fabric wherein sensation shapes image, taste, touch, tactile impulse; various chemical changes and exchanges within the body and their effect on the immediate present, on memories [sic] action in the present.”61 Schneemann’s multisensory, embodied, and once again near-biological notion of sensory interactions poses further challenges to the Cagean paradigm. As Cage insisted in his interview with Kirby and Schechner, an appropriately expansive and, to his mind, non-exclusionary definition of theater was “simply … something which engages both the eye and the ear.”62 Like Kaprow, Schneemann extended such a concept of theater to include all five senses. While this seems like a logical continuation of Cage’s expansion of music into theater (from “[a]n ear alone” to “eyes as well as ears”), it actually represented a significant break.63 For, as discussed in Chapter 5, Cage assiduously limited theater to sight and sound, those senses being the only ones he felt appropriate to public spaces, and viewed the others as implying exchanges of a more private sort. Cage’s surprisingly strict demarcation of public and private realms undoubtedly had much to do with the potential relationships of taste, touch, and smell to physical intimacy and sexual arousal. It is as though he accepted the Marquis de Sade’s proclamation that every man wishes to be a dictator in the bedroom and sought to maintain an inviolable separation between the bedroom and the public square in order to preserve his ideal of unimpeded, anarchic sociability. Whereas Kaprow seems to have contravened Cage’s sensory boundary chiefly for formal reasons—utilizing tastes, odors, and tactile stimulation as components of a more expansive artistic palette—Schneemann fully understood transgression of the cordon between public and private spheres to be crucial both to her aesthetic goals and to her political objectives. The “premise of all my works,” she noted, is “physical contact; erotic trust touch trust giving over to mutual awareness developed non-verbally; learning each other’s musculature weight response energy capacity; every bend fold, tactile smell expression as

22

Experimentations

language with which each other on the development of the situation we unfold.”64 For Schneemann, taste, touch, and smell, especially of other bodies (and even of one’s own), were not simply left in private, they were actively repressed by means of powerful social taboos, nowhere more so than in the case of gender and, particularly, of women’s bodies, which were socially acceptable only as plastic ideals, devoid of odor or discharge. “[T]he living beast of their flesh embarrasses them,” she wrote of women’s social conditioning; “they are trained to shame … blood, mucus, juices, odors of their flesh fill them with fear. They have some abstracted wish for pristine, immaculate sex … cardboard soaked in perfume.”65 Schneemann’s rehearsal exercises expressly aimed to overcome such taboos, breaking through pristine, phantasmatic, or frightening images of the other (whether defined by gender or by race) via actual, intimate engagements with corporality. “I’m after an immediate, sensuous environment on which a shifting scale of tactile, plastic, physical encounters can be realized,” she declared. “The nature of these encounters, while personal to me, exposes and confronts a social range of current cultural taboos and repressive conventions.”66 Schneemann’s outlook drew upon her long-standing engagement with the writings of Wilhelm Reich, who not only pitted erotic physicality against imaginary figurations of the other (to be dissolved, ultimately, in an orgasmic encounter), but also preached the necessity of opening the door between the bedroom and the public sphere in order to exorcise those potentially dictatorial desires that Cage hoped to confine within the former’s (decidedly non-transparent) boundaries.67 Like Cage, Schneemann regarded her aesthetic practice as continuous with a wider social and political project.68 However, by modeling situations of intersecting forces, both physical and affective, she presented liberation not as freedom from any and all attachments and controls, but as a practice whereby existing hierarchies could be contested, overturned, and transformed into relations of mutual recognition and care. As she described it, “Loving trust enables us to take physical chances together, to engage in struggles, violent movements; assaults, captures, grabs and falls, to drag, carry, even drop one another, knock one another down; loving trust keeps us focused on each other, expressive without self-consciousness, without an ‘idea’ of expressivity, free in a process which in itself is transforming, releasing our intentions.”69 While sharing Cage’s concern for social transformation, Schneemann refused any expectation of being able to evacuate or transcend power relations altogether,

Interpenetrations and Displacements

23

an issue that, as we will see below, goes to the heart of the Cagean project. As made clear by Schneemann’s proposal to take her rehearsal exercises into the streets, she sought not simply to avoid “policed moments” (including moments involving actual, rather than just metaphorical, police), but to confront and counter them directly. As with Kaprow’s critical response to Cage’s ideas of chance and transparency, Schneemann’s reception of “unimpededness and interpenetration” opens onto a much larger complex of interrelated artistic and political issues, ones consistent with those illuminated by the second wave of Cage scholarship and every bit as consequential as the material exclusions she outlined in her unsent letter of 1974. * In 1966, Kaprow opened yet another front in his ongoing dispute with Cage by publishing the article “Experimental Art.” On account of such essays as “Experimental Music,” “Experimental Music: Doctrine,” and “History of Experimental Music in the United States,” the idea of an “experimental action,” defined with deceptive simplicity as “one the outcome of which is not foreseen,” had been associated with Cage for more than a decade.70 Although Kaprow introduced the term “To Experiment” in a manner that was clearly indebted to Cage—as “something never before done, by a method never before used, whose outcome is unforeseen”—he avoided any mention of the composer, promoting instead a more voluntarist aesthetic reminiscent of Harold Rosenberg’s discussion of action painting.71 Brandishing tropes of “alienation,” “suicide,” and “the general existential crisis,” Kaprow proclaimed that “The detachment of cultural experimenters from the body of culture must be so great that their state is not so much lonely as metaphysically nameless.”72 However, even as he exhorted readers to “reject the facility for metaphor making whenever it becomes apparent,” the examples of experimental art that he provided approached the same types of “general” and “archetypal” symbolism that had motivated The Courtyard.73 “What do experimental artists do?” asked Kaprow: They might sit quietly with friends in a tree, all of them painted black, and when starlings alight, screech with them. Microphones amplify the noise across hidden public-address systems. Earsplitting. Probably silence soon. They might rent a bulldozer and throw up a man hill near an ant hill. People slowly crawl like ants up and then down the mound, and on and away, in a file.74

24

Experimentations

Far from backing away from Cage’s critique of intentional symbolism, Kaprow was doubling down, seeking nothing less than to appropriate and redefine one of the composer’s signature ideas.75 As indicated by this book’s title, the notion of “experimentation” serves as something of a leitmotif throughout the following chapters. In approaching it, I have looked not only toward Cage’s own statements on the subject, but also to the role that it came to play in the theoretical and analytical writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (beginning in Chapter 2). Perceptively discerning the manner in which Cage’s indeterminate compositions strove to undermine or overcome the constraints of a priori structures or overarching aesthetic forms (what they term “properly aesthetic molar formations”), Deleuze and Guattari adopted experimentation as central to their thinking about artistic production.76 As they wrote in Anti-Oedipus, the value of art is no longer measured except in terms of the decoded and deterritorialized flows that it causes to circulate beneath a signifier reduced to silence, beneath the conditions of identity of the parameters, across a structure reduced to impotence … It is here that art accedes to its authentic modernity, which simply consists in liberating what was present in art from its beginnings, but was hidden underneath aims and objects, even if aesthetic, and underneath recodings or axiomatics: the pure process that fulfills itself, and that never ceases to reach fulfillment as it proceeds—art as “experimentation.”77

To this, they append what is surely one of the most comprehensive footnotes ever published: “See all of John Cage’s work, and his book Silence.”78 Whereas Cage, as we have seen, seemed to deny desire as a means of authoritarian imposition, Deleuze and Guattari associated experimentation closely with their understanding of desire’s function within the unconscious. “The signifying chain of the unconscious, Numen,” they explain, in a manner that parallels Cage’s opposition between experimentation and interpretation, “is not used to discover or decipher codes of desire, but to cause absolutely decoded flows of desire, Libido, to circulate, and to discover in desire that which scrambles all the codes and undoes all the territorialities.”79 As “a pure dispersed and anarchic multiplicity, without unity or totality,” the topology of the unconscious described by Deleuze and Guattari closely resembles the “unimpededness and interpenetration,” continuity of “no-continuity,” or, following Antonin Artaud, “objective synthesis” produced by Cage’s indeterminate compositions.80 “[W]hether organs or fragments of organs,” they write,

Interpenetrations and Displacements

25

the partial objects do not refer in the least to an organism that would function phantasmatically as a lost unity or a totality to come. Their dispersion has nothing do with a lack, and constitutes their mode of presence in the multiplicity they form without unification or totalization. With every structure dislodged, every memory abolished, every organism set aside, every link undone, they function as raw partial objects, dispersed working parts of a machine that is itself dispersed.81

Deleuze and Guattari’s reception of Cage was mediated, in part, by French musicologist Daniel Charles, specifically by the lecture “Musique et An-Archie,” originally delivered before an irate Pierre Schaeffer at the Société française de Philosophie in 1971.82 In it, Charles emphasized the manner in which Cagean indeterminacy not only opposed any recourse to archaic symbolism (of the type sought by Kaprow), but aimed to “wrest sounds from all those archai [causes, first principles, or origins], from all those forms of domination that invest them and subjugate them to the production of the oeuvre as a finite object.”83 Whereas Cage most often spoke about sounds, liberated from “any abstraction” and thereby free for a range of more contingent and multiplicitous interactions, Charles’s essay focused somewhat more attention on the transformations undergone by those listening subjects (including musicians and composer) who were able to overcome the fixation on composition as a delimited aesthetic object.84 To embrace a Cagean conception of “silence,” which “allows sounds to show through it [laisse transparaître les bruits],” explains Charles, “is to return the oeuvre to the environment and ‘musical’ time to ‘ordinary’ time—and, above all, to collapse the subject-object relationship so long as it congeals and paralyzes the aesthetic impression.”85 The “finitude” of the autonomous artwork, he continues, actually appears as a self-mutilation of the subject, apparently anxious to [désireux de] bring his object to heel, and who exhausts himself in attempting to “empty” silence of adventitious noises. But because the object does not, for all that, cease to be inextricably tied to that which it is not [i.e., ambient noise], the knowledge that concerns the object reveals itself to be a will of the subject; but it is a will that never fully fulfills itself, that is to say, a nihilistic will.86

In contrast, Charles insisted, Cage’s reformulation of composition as experimental process rendered it the product of “a series of gestures carried out in accordance with the demands of a non-knowledge: outside of all teleology as

26

Experimentations

well as all scientism, outside of all the archai to which one subjects sounds in imposing silence upon them.”87 The juxtaposition Charles underlines between a paralyzed and unfulfilled will, fixated on an aesthetic object, and its overcoming in an openness to unwilled, indeterminate, and external processes would find its counterpart in the opposition Deleuze and Guattari posited between a blocked and submissive desire, enclosed within the Oedipal triangle, and its overturning in the unleashing of “molecular” flows of “real-desire, apprehended below the minimum conditions of identity.”88 It likely did not go unnoted by Deleuze and Guattari that Cage had expressly opposed his notion of experimentation to “psychology,” by which he meant orthodox psychoanalysis, a point on which he cited Franz Kafka.89 In the book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari would assimilate Cage to an understanding of “experimental desire”—“strengthening desire instead of cramping it, displacing it in time, deterritorializing it, proliferating its connections, linking it to other intensities.”90 For Deleuze and Guattari, the molecular deterritorialization of molar formations underlies all liberatory experiences, whether they be the experimental undermining of structure and signifier within an aesthetic regime, the “schizoanalytic” overturning of the ego and blockages of desire in a psychological one, or the “schizorevolutionary” overthrowing of hierarchies of power in the realm of politics. “In the subjugated groups, desire is still defined by an order of causes and aims,” they write, in terms that recall Charles’s archai and teleologies, “and itself weaves a whole system of macroscopic relations that determine the large aggregates under a formation of sovereignty.”91 “A subjectgroup, on the contrary,” they argue, “is a group whose libidinal investments are themselves revolutionary; it causes desire to penetrate into the social field, and subordinates the socius or the form of power to desiring-production.”92 As such, experimentation becomes intimately and integrally related to Deleuze and Guattari’s wider political thinking. Yet, if Deleuze and Guattari’s take on experimentation informs my appreciation of the most radical potentials of Cage’s project, it also underlies an understanding of its limitations. Attempting to move, at times, toward a state of absolute molecularization—entirely free of taste, memory, psychology, history, and tradition—Cage’s anarchist politics ultimately seems to withdraw from the social field much more effectively than it penetrates it. “Sometimes one overdoes it, puts too much in, works with a jumble of lines and sounds,” Deleuze and Guattari caution, partly with regard to Cage. “The claim is that

Interpenetrations and Displacements

27

one is opening music to all events, all irruptions, but one ends up reproducing a scrambling that prevents any event from happening. All one has left is a resonance chamber well on the way to forming a black hole.”93 As Schneemann seems to have understood better than Cage, one cannot divest oneself of all vestiges of power, nor overturn existing power structures without engaging with them. As argued in Chapter 5, by the early 1970s, precisely the moment when Deleuze and Guattari would take up his example, Cage’s attempt to transcend the impositions of a power that he recognized primarily in the form of sovereignty would lead to an impasse that could no longer be ignored. That this book concludes by pointing to certain limitations of Cage’s aesthetic is not intended as an act of critical foreclosure. A great deal more work stands to be done on Cage, on his relation to the visual arts, and on his impact on and affinities with the writing of theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari, as well as on his reception within the context of French poststructuralism more generally. Although the essays collected here address issues covering nearly five decades of Cage’s career, they aspire to be neither definitive, nor exhaustive. (Nor, despite my title, do they endeavor to be experimental in their form.) Rather, their function is more akin to that of a series of detailed “glosses”—to borrow from the title of Charles’s own essay collection—on different aspects of Cage’s music, thought, and writing.94 The hope is that they will not only help to broaden comprehension of the scope of Cage’s accomplishments, but also to inspire further research into the many “interpenetrations and displacements” that his legacy has undergone within the reams of music, art, and architecture.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

Allan Kaprow, “Letters: On Happenings,” Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 4 (T32) (Summer 1966): 281. Michael Kirby, “The New Theatre,” Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2 (T30) (Winter 1965): 41. Ibid., 24. Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner, “An Interview with John Cage,” Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2 (T30) (Winter 1965): 69. Allan Kaprow, “A Statement,” in Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology, ed. Michael Kirby (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1965), 49–50. Kirby and Schechner, “An Interview with John Cage,” 69.

28 7

8 9 10

11 12

13 14

15 16 17 18 19

20

Experimentations Ibid. On the happenings’ impositions on the audience, see Susan Sontag, “Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition,” in Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 263–274. On Cage’s invocation of “police,” see also Hervé Vanel, “John Cage’s Muzak-Plus: The Fu(rni)ture of Music,” Representations 102, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 94–128. Kaprow, “Letters: On Happenings,” 281. Ibid., 282. John Cage,“Foreword,” in Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), xi. Cage’s comments were originally made in John Cage, “Preface to Indeterminacy” (1959), in John Cage: Writer, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight Editions, 1993), 79. Cage, “Foreword,” in Silence, xi. Henry Flynt, “Mutations of the Vanguard: Pre-Fluxus, During Fluxus, Late Fluxus,” in Ubi Fluxus ibi motus, 1990–1962, ed. Achille Bonito Oliva (Milan: Nuove edizioni Gabriele Mazzotta, 1990), 103. Kirby and Schechner, “An Interview with John Cage,” 67. See, for instance, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 105–143; and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Rosalind Krauss, et al., “Conceptual Art and the Reception of Duchamp,” October 70 (Autumn 1994): 126–146. On Rrose Sélavy, see Jonathan D. Katz, “Identification,” in Moira Roth and Jonathan D. Katz, Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1998), 55–61. Robert Morris, “Letter from Bob Morris to Henry Flynt dated 8/13/62,” in Henry Flynt, Down with Art (New York: Fluxpress, 1968), n.p. Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 15. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 18. Cf. Georgina Born’s discussion of an “agonistic-antagonistic” mode of interdisciplinary research in Georgina Born, “For a Relational Musicology: Music and Interdisciplinarity, Beyond the Practice Turn,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135, no. 2 (2010): 205–243, esp. 211. Rebecca Y. Kim, “In No Uncertain Musical Terms: The Cultural Politics of John Cage’s Indeterminacy,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2008, 283–304; Sara Heimbecker, “HPSCHD, Gesamtkunstwerk, and Utopia,” American Music 26, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 474–498; and Ryan Dohoney, “John Cage, Julius Eastman, and the Homosexual Ego,” in Tomorrow Is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies, ed. Benjamin Piekut (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,

Interpenetrations and Displacements

21

22 23

24

25

29

2014), 39–62. Given the context, we might add Fred Moten’s discussion of Samuel Delany’s experience of Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts; Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 149–169. George E. Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” Black Music Research Journal 16, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 91–122; and George E. Lewis, “Afterword to ‘Improvised Music after 1950’: The Changing Same,” in The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 163–172 (Lewis’s first essay appears in that volume, 131–162). It might be noted that Kirby insisted upon Cage’s distinction of indeterminacy and improvisation in “The New Theatre,” 33–34. John Cage, “45' for a Speaker” (1954), in Silence, 175. Caroline A. Jones, “Finishing School: John Cage and the Abstract Expressionist Ego,” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 4 (Summer 1993): 628–665; Jonathan D. Katz, “John Cage’s Queer Silence; or, How to Avoid Making Matters Worse,” in Writings Through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art, ed. David Bernstein and Christopher Hatch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 41–61; Philip Gentry, “The Cultural Politics of 4'33",” in “The Age of Anxiety: Music, Politics, and McCarthyism, 1948–1954,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2008, 165–232; and Dohoney, “John Cage, Julius Eastman.” George Lewis favorably cites Katz’s essay in “Afterword,” 164; Dohoney extensively discusses both Katz and Jones. The argument for Cage’s complicity with American politics under McCarthy was made by Moira Roth in “The Aesthetic of Indifference,” Artforum 16, no. 3 (November 1977): 46–53; repr. in Roth and Katz, Difference/Indifference, 33–47. For a thoughtful critique of her position, see Katz, “Identification,” 49-68. For critical engagements with experimental music as networks or assemblages, see, for instance, Georgina Born, “On Musical Mediation: Ontology, Technology, and Creativity,” Twentieth-Century Music 2, no. 1 (March 2005): 7–36; Tim Lawrence, “Connecting with the Cosmic: Arthur Russell, Rhizomatic Musicianship, and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973–92,” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 3, no. 3 (November 2007): 1–84; and Benjamin Piekut, “Indeterminacy, Free Improvisation, and the Mixed Avant-Garde: Experimental Music in London, 1965– 1975,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 67, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 771–826. Piekut explicates his approach to “networks” of experimental composition in Benjamin Piekut, “Actor-Networks in Music History: Clarifications and Critiques,” Twentieth-Century Music 11, no. 2 (September 2014): 191–215. I have attempted to approach the networks of experimental music and art in Beyond the Dream

30

Experimentations

Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (New York: Zone Books, 2008). On related transformations in the modes of listening to experimental music, see David Grubbs, Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 19–43. 26 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 8; cf. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 27 Important historical and archival work on Cage is ongoing; recent publications would include Carolyn Brown, Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham (New York: Knopf, 2007); Martin Iddon, John Cage and David Tudor: Correspondence on Interpretation and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Laura Kuhn, ed., The Selected Letters of John Cage (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, forthcoming, 2016). 28 See, for instance, Liz Kotz, Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Julia Robinson, ed., The Anarchy of Silence: John Cage and Experimental Art (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona [MACBA], 2009); Eva Díaz, The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Douglas Kahn, Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (New York: Continuum, 2006); and Seth Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sound Art (New York: Continuum, 2009). For a good indication of the transformation in Cage’s artworld reception, see Ina Blom’s insightful review, “Signal to Noise,” Artforum 48, no. 6 (February, 2010): 170–175. Cage has, of course, long attracted cross-disciplinary interest from areas other than art history; see, for instance, the substantial writings by Marjorie Perloff, in literature, and Lydia Goehr, in philosophy. 29 Dick Higgins, “Blank Images” (1970), in A Dialectic of Centuries: Notes towards a Theory of the New Arts, 2nd ed. (New York: Printed Editions, 1978), 78. 30 Claes Oldenburg, Raw Notes (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1973), 222. 31 Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments, and Happenings (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1966), 180. 32 Ibid., 175–176. 33 Ibid., 151–152. 34 Ibid., 168. 35 Cage’s understanding of nature is discussed in Chapters 2–5. 36 Oldenburg, Raw Notes, 223. 37 Ibid., 219.

Interpenetrations and Displacements

31

38 Carolee Schneemann, “Unsent Letter to Allan Kaprow” (June 1974), in Cezanne, She Was a Great Painter (New Paltz, NY: Tresspuss Press, 1975), 1 (letter paginated separately). 39 Schneemann, “Unsent Letter,” 3 (ellipses in original). 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 1. 42 Cage’s importance is noted in Judith Olch Richards, “Oral History Interview with Carolee Schneemann,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (March 1, 2009); on-line at http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-historyinterview-carolee-schneemann-15672#transcript. (Last consulted August 9, 2015.) 43 Carolee Schneemann, More than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings, ed. Bruce R. McPherson, 2nd ed. (New York: Documentext, 1997), 227. See also Schneemann’s comment in Marilyn Belford, Lucy Lippard, et al., “Time and Space Concepts in Event Art,” in Time and Space Concepts in Art, ed. Marilyn Belford and Jerry Herman (New York: Pleiades Gallery, 1980), 50. The comment to which Schneemann refers is found in John Cage, “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) Continued 1968 (Revised),” in M: Writings '67–'72 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 17. 44 See, however, Schneemann’s oblique critique of the “Fro-Zen” tendency of contemporary art in Carolee Schneemann, “Notations (1958–1966),” Caterpillar 8–9 (October 1969): 31. 45 Cage, “45' for a Speaker,” 155. 46 John Cage, “Composition: To Describe the Process of Composition Used in Music of Changes and Imaginary Landscape No. 4” (1952), in Silence, 59. 47 John Cage and Daniel Charles, For the Birds (New York: Marion Boyars, 1981), 56 (ellipses in original). 48 Carolee Schneemann, “Snows,” Ikon 1, no. 5 (March 1968): 25. 49 Carolee Schneemann, “Meat Joy: Notes,” in Theatre Experiment, ed. Michael Benedikt (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), 360. 50 Schneemann, More than Meat Joy, 33. 51 Ibid., 32–33. 52 Ibid., 33. 53 Ibid., 11. 54 Ibid., 47. 55 Ibid., 48. 56 Schneemann, “Snows,” 27. Schneemann expressly and successfully strove to make her performance groups integrated with regard to both sex and race. For an explicit statement of intent, see, for instance, her comment in Contemporary Artists, ed. Colin Naylor and Genesis P-Orridge (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977), 857.

32

Experimentations

57 On “image” and “image maker,” see, for instance, Carolee Schneemann, “The Obscene Body/Politic,” Art Journal 50, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 33. 58 Schneemann, More than Meat Joy, 131–132. 59 Schneemann, “Snows,” 27; and Schneemann, “Meat Joy: Notes,” 360. 60 Schneemann discusses this work, among other places, in Belford, Lippard, et al., “Time and Space Concepts in Event Art,” 28; and Annabelle Ténèze, “Carolee Schneemann: Interview,” in Then and Now: Carolee Schneemann, Oeuvres d’Histoire, ed. Annabelle Ténèze (Rochechouart: Musée départemental d’Art contemporain de Rochechouart, 2014), 111–112. Cf. Danielle Goldman, “Bodies on the Line: Contact Improvisation and Techniques of Nonviolent Protest,” in I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 94–111. My thanks to Ben Piekut for this reference. 61 Schneemann, “Snows,” 25 (ellipses in original). 62 Kirby and Schechner, “An Interview with John Cage,” 50. 63 Cage, “45' for a Speaker,” 149; and John Cage, “Experimental Music” (1957), in Silence, 12. 64 Schneemann, “Notations,” 42. 65 Schneemann, More than Meat Joy, 58 (ellipses in original). 66 Laura Whittier, “Edios Presents Carolee Schneemann,” The Colby Echo (Waterville, Maine), November 1, 1968, page unknown (clipping located in the Carolee Schneemann archives, Stanford University, Stanford, CA). 67 For Cage’s negative reaction to the writings of Wilhelm Reich, see the recollections of Philip Corner in David W. Patterson, “ ‘Political’ or ‘Social’? John Cage and the Remolding of Mao Tse-Tung,” in Cage and Consequences, ed. Julia H. Schröder and Volker Straebel (Hofheim am Taunus: Wolke Verlag, 2012), 53. 68 See, for instance, Carolee Schneemann, “American Experimental Theatre: Then and Now,” Performing Arts Journal 2, no. 2 (Autumn 1977): 22. 69 Schneemann, “Snows,” 26. 70 John Cage, “Composition as Process II: Indeterminacy” (1958), in Silence, 39. 71 Allan Kaprow, “Experimental Art,” Art News 65, no. 1 (March 1966); repr. in Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 68–69; Kaprow cites Rosenberg, 71. 72 Kaprow, “Experimental Art,” 70, 72. 73 Ibid., 77; and Kaprow, “A Statement,” 50. 74 Kaprow, “Experimental Art,” 78; cf. Kaprow’s discussion of symbolism in Assemblage, Environments, and Happenings, 202–204. 75 On earlier differences over the idea of experimentation, see Lydia Goehr, “Explosive Experiments and the Fragility of the Experimental,” in Elective Affinities: Musical

Interpenetrations and Displacements

33

Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 108–135; and Díaz, The Experimenters. 76 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Mark Seem, Robert Hurley, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 370. 77 Ibid., 370–371. 78 Ibid., 371 note. 79 Ibid., 329. On the issues of interpretation and totality, see Chapter 4. 80 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 324; John Cage, “Lecture on Something” (1951), in Silence, 128–145; and John Cage, Letter to Pierre Boulez, May 22, 1951, in Jean-Jacques Nattiez, ed., The Boulez-Cage Correspondence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 96. Cage likely came across the concept of “objective synthesis” in Antonin Artaud, “The Shell and the Clergyman: Film Scenario,” trans. Stuart Gilbert, transition 19–20 (June 1930): 63–69. Cage’s engagement with “multiplicity” is discussed in Chapter 4. 81 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 324. 82 Daniel Charles, “Musique et An-Archie,” Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie 65 (July 1971): 69–112; repr., without the ensuing discussion with Schaeffer and others, in Daniel Charles, Gloses sur John Cage (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1978), 91–109. 83 Charles, “Musique et An-Archie,” 70. 84 Lydia Goehr stresses the importance of experimentation’s subjective aspects; Goehr, “Explosive Experiments,” 121. 85 Charles, “Musique et An-Archie,” 77. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid. Cage uses the term “non-knowledge” in “Composition as Process II: Indeterminacy” (1958), 39. Against the willful silencing of undesired noises, Charles sees Cage’s acceptance of external sounds as indicating an opening to others that he approaches via the ethical project of Emmanuel Levinas. 88 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 351. 89 John Cage, “Composition as Process III: Communication” (1958), in Silence, 47 : “Don’t you agree with Kafka when he wrote, ‘Psychology—never again?’ ” Cage’s use of “psychology” as a term of opprobrium, which may also have roots in Artaud (who contended that an “objective synthesis” arose from artistic materials “where action entirely ousts psychology”), reflects the fact that he came to pursue Zen ideals such as “unimpededness and interpenetration” after (and as part of) his rejection of an orthodox psychoanalysis that sought to incorporate his artistic expression more fully within a capitalist structure. See Artaud, “The Shell and the Clergyman,” 64–65; and Cage and Charles, For the Birds, 116.

34

Experimentations

90 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 4. 91 Ibid., 377. 92 Ibid., 348. 93 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 343–344. George Lewis makes much the same critique, quoting a statement made by improvising musician Ron Carter, “you can play as free as you want, only you should have some kind of background to relate to this freedom. Otherwise you’re putting yourself into a corner”; Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950,” 114–115. See also Goehr’s discussion of Cagean “becoming,” in Goehr, “Explosive Experiments,” 129. 94 Charles, Gloses sur John Cage.

1

A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers: John Cage’s Early Avant-Garde Aesthetic

In the sixth of ten interviews conducted by Daniel Charles, John Cage recollected a signature moment in his acquaintance with the painter Mark Tobey: One day we were taking a walk together, from the Cornish School to the Japanese restaurant where we were going to dine together—which meant we crossed through most of the city. Well, we couldn’t really walk. He would continually stop to notice something surprising everywhere—on the side of a shack or in an open space. That walk was a revelation for me. It was the first time someone else had given me a lesson in looking without prejudice, someone who didn’t compare what he was seeing with something before, who was sensitive to the finest nuances of light. Tobey would stop on the sidewalks, sidewalks which we normally didn’t notice when we were walking, and his gaze would immediately turn them into a work of art.1

While this is not one of Cage’s most frequently recounted stories, it is typical of him for the manner in which actual events become, in the telling, parables of his artistic development. The setting is Seattle, where Cage had relocated in the fall of 1938 to take a faculty position at the Cornish School.2 This move marked an important turning point in Cage’s career, largely coinciding with the abandonment of his interest in serial composition in favor of the percussion music that linked him to the “experimental” wing of the musical avant-garde.3 Throughout the following decade, in ways both explicit and subtle, Cage would investigate a host of earlier avant-garde ideas, adopting and adapting them for his own ends in what amounts to an important chapter not only in his own development but also in the broader history of the European avant-garde’s translation into the American context. Standing behind Cage’s account of his cross-town trek with Tobey is a much wider array of engagements with the legacies of futurism, dada, the Bauhaus, and the much lesser-known movement

36

Experimentations

verticalism, associated with the editors of transition magazine. Initially turning the insights gained from such historical avant-garde precedents toward the goal of an anonymous and collective musical practice, Cage would become motivated by a growing antipathy toward American commercialism and conformity to seek an aesthetic that promoted social cohesion while increasingly valuing and respecting individual difference. * Within the avant-garde of the late 1930s, stories of an artist like Tobey hoping to modify an individual’s perception of the contemporary urban environment were already familiar.4 Tobey must have been a particularly good companion for Cage’s walk through the city, as the modern metropolis was one of the painter’s most significant artistic stimuli. Inspired by New York’s Broadway, which he first committed to canvas in 1935, Tobey developed an abstracted, calligraphic style of painting to evoke the city’s energy and dynamism (Figure 1.1).5 This was not an environment that the young Cage had previously viewed with any sympathy. Writing to his former teacher Adolph Weiss, a few months after returning from New York to California in 1935, he lamented, “Somehow I am very sad that you are staying in New York. It is rarely that fine things come out of immense cities. Rather, it seems to me, reality is sucked in there and becomes unreal, meaningless.”6 It took Tobey’s example (and the much less imposing metropolitan environment of Seattle) to open Cage to an “unprejudiced” vision of such things as urban shacks, alleyways, and sidewalks. Yet, however important Cage’s revelation with Tobey, it must have served primarily as a reinforcement of the futuristinspired aesthetic that he was already pursuing. In the decade following his move to Seattle, Cage’s principal artistic concern was to accommodate the modern individual to his or her social and environmental conditions, conditions which included not only the city’s physical surroundings, but also the increasing development of social atomization. The dissolution of community and the cultural traditions by which it was marked had been of concern to Cage since the early 1930s, and as he looked out across the musical landscape he saw two predominant reactions to it. The first consisted of a retreat into traditionalism, an embrace of neo-classicism which Cage rejected out of hand, denigrating those whom he would accuse of “spend[ing] their lives with the music of another time, which, putting it bluntly and chronologically, does not belong to them.”7 Cage also openly disapproved of composers who

A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers

37

Figure 1.1  Mark Tobey, Broadway, 1935–36.

modernized their subjects without consequently modifying their form, lending a superficially progressive or revolutionary air to otherwise traditional work. As  Cage wrote disdainfully, “When this better social order is achieved, their songs will have no more meaning than the ‘Star-spangled Banner’ has today.”8

38

Experimentations

The second camp that Cage perceived consisted of modernists who sought to develop musical form but did so by such individualistic means as to reflect, or even exacerbate, the phenomenon of social fragmentation. In the article “Counterpoint” of 1934, the twenty-two-year-old Cage lamented “the relative absence of academic discipline and the presence of total freedom” in contemporary music.9 “Modern Music,” he argued, did not properly exist, being only a heterogeneous grouping of more or less distinct individual styles. After listing and briefly discussing some of them, Cage called for the creation of a new, universal style appropriate for the age: I sincerely express the hope that this conglomeration of individuals, names merely for most of us, will disappear; and that a period will approach by way of common belief, selflessness, and technical mastery that will be a period of Music and not of Musicians, just as during the four centuries of Gothic, there was Architecture and not Architects.10

The contemporary situation was thus a dichotomous one in which musical production accurately reflected the dissolution of social cohesion. While the first reaction, neo-classicism, provided tradition and community at the cost of modernity, the second achieved modernity only by sacrificing a common aesthetic structure. This situation forms the background against which Cage’s early avant-garde program developed. Although Cage found affinities between himself and Tobey, his early artistic orientation was more closely allied with the work of former Bauhaus instructor László Moholy-Nagy whom he had met while teaching at Mills College in the summer of 1938.11 Moholy-Nagy was one of the early practitioners of perceptual estrangement, the depiction of new and unfamiliar perspectives of the world in order to counteract outworn perceptual modalities. Decades before Tobey achieved his mature style, Moholy-Nagy was already using photography to create such effects. A Moholy-Nagy image such as that of a Paris street-side drain shot from above and close-up fulfilled a similar function of perceiving the mundane anew as Tobey’s pedagogical walk with Cage (Figure 1.2). Yet, while both experiences focused perception onto previously unseen aspects of the urban environment, Moholy-Nagy’s explicit desire to modernize the individual’s perceptual capabilities more closely matched Cage’s early interests.12 By the time of their meeting Cage had likely already encountered Moholy-Nagy’s Von Material zu Architektur, the English title of which, The New Vision, succinctly summarized its author’s artistic program. Cage, who later described The New

A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers

39

Figure 1.2  László Moholy-Nagy, Gutter [Street Drain (Rinnstein)], 1925.

Vision as “very influential for my thinking,” would work toward essentially the same objective as Moholy-Nagy, which, as Sigfried Giedion summarized it, was “to bridge the fatal rift between reality and sensibility which the nineteenth century had tolerated, and indeed encouraged … to give an emotive content

40

Experimentations

to the new sense of reality born of modern science and industry; and thereby restore the basic unity of all human experience.”13 In order to achieve the goal of modernizing auditory perception, Cage allied himself with music’s futurist and ultramodernist lineage, which included Luigi Russolo, Edgard Varèse, George Antheil, and Henry Cowell. Although all of them would be important for Cage’s development (some, as in the case of his former teacher Cowell, more than he tended to acknowledge), he placed particular emphasis on Russolo, the Italian futurist author of The Art of Noises (Figure 1.3).14 However Cage came upon Russolo’s manifesto, he began invoking it soon after arriving in Seattle, explaining for example that “Percussion music really is the art of noise and that’s what it should be called.”15 Further affinities arise in Cage’s “The Future of Music: Credo,” where phrases of Russolo’s such as “We must break out of this limited circle of sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds” are echoed in its first lines: “I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard.”16

Figure 1.3  Luigi Russolo, in his laboratory of noise instruments, with Ugo Piatti, 1916.

A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers

41

Russolo would have been important to Cage not only for providing indications of a futurist musical practice, but also for describing the musical equivalent of perceptual estrangement.17 In characterizing the state of modern composition, Russolo spun an apocryphal tale of music’s development into an autonomous, transcendental realm: Among primitive peoples, sound was attributed to the gods. It was considered sacred and reserved for priests, who used it to enrich their rites with mystery. Thus was born the idea of sound as something in itself, as different from and independent of life. And from it resulted music, a fantastic world superimposed on the real one, an inviolable and sacred world.18

Unfortunately, Russolo argued, this old, “sacred” realm of music had degenerated into irrelevancy, its sounds losing their exotic and awe-inspiring character and becoming so familiar as to seem, for a futurist at least, deadeningly boring.19 In contrast, the use of noise served two interrelated functions: (1) it negated the sacred space of music’s circumscribed sound field, thereby freeing listeners from their habitual perceptual modalities; and (2) it called attention to modern acoustical experiences. As Russolo explained, Every manifestation of life is accompanied by noise. Noise is thus familiar to our ear and has the power of immediately recalling life itself. Sound, estranged from life, always musical, something in itself, an occasional not a necessary element, has become for our ear what for the eye is a too familiar sight. Noise instead, arriving confused and irregular from the irregular confusion of life, is never revealed to us entirely and always holds innumerable surprises.20

Cage adopted Russolo’s understanding of noise as a means of jolting the listener out of his or her habitual acceptance of traditional, outworn sounds. Reinforcing Russolo’s position, he declared, “Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain.”21 It was not, however, in “The Future of Music: Credo,” but in the less evidently futurist lecture “Listening to Music,” attributed to his time in Seattle, that Cage provided a more detailed description of his view of traditional music. In explaining that a focus on musical rules hinders an actual experience of the sounds, Cage’s words recall Russolo’s foundational myth of music as religiously motivated ideology. Similarly decrying the autonomy or separation of music from an audience’s everyday experience, Cage noted,

42

Experimentations in the presence of a musician, the high priest who alone reads the books, most people are afraid to admit any reaction to music, for fear it be the wrong one, or that they mistook the Development for the Recapitulation. This state existing between audience and musicians amounts to an ever-widening gulf and is largely due to the musicians making music obscure, that is: difficult to understand.22

Cage went on to explain that “knowledge” of traditional musical structures only made matters worse, for it “often becomes a prejudice. The prejudiced ear is listening not to the sounds, but to the relationships of the sounds, and, not hearing the expected relationships, closes itself.”23 Adherence to such traditional knowledge also impeded music from developing the most modern means available. As Cage contended in “The Future of Music: Credo,” “Although the [Theremin] is capable of a wide variety of sound qualities, obtained by the turning of a dial, Thereministes act as censors, giving the public those sounds they think the public will like.”24 Thus, the predicament faced by Cage’s listeners was analogous to that which he himself had faced before Tobey taught him to see the urban environment with an unprejudiced eye: outdated musical preconceptions likewise inhibited perception of the modern (acoustical) world. Not coincidentally, perhaps, Cage used a visual metaphor—like Russolo’s invocation of “a too familiar sight”—to characterize his opposition to wornout sounds: “Just as I would recommend not keeping on one’s walls pictures which one no longer sees, so I would recommend not listening at all to music which one no longer hears.”25 In “Listening to Music,” Cage argued that because modern and non-Western musics violated, ignored, or operated utterly outside of the traditional rules established in the West, they were capable of achieving an estranging effect.26 Such music, he proposed, ultimately made sound (and noise) audible again by invoking a purportedly direct form of “hearing” against a more prejudiced form of “understanding.”27 The opposition between a mediated and a supposedly unmediated perception has a long history within the avant-garde. In “Listening to Music,” however, Cage’s distinction is more precise in the way it describes two types of musical reception. On the one hand, Cage characterized the receptive mode that the listener adopted before traditional music. In this case, the forms are more familiar (Cage’s example is the sonata), and the compositional rules more easily recognized. Consequently, he notes ironically, this mode of listening gives rise to such “games” as “HERE COMES THE THEME or What on Earth is

A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers

43

Happening Now?” “Most people will get completely mixed up,” he declares, “unless they have learned the rules by heart.”28 Within this mode of listening, the listener maintains self-possession, choosing at will whether to absorb himor herself within the work or remain engrossed within his or her own thoughts. As Cage’s comments make clear, when faced with traditional music, it is “very easy” for the listener to “[think] about something else while the music is being played.”29 Modern music, on the other hand, denies the listener a similar illusion of subjective autonomy and plenitude. As Cage explained, “One reason that modern music is not liked by some people is that it is more difficult to wonder what sort of weather there will be tomorrow when Bartok is being played than it is when we are listening to a symphony which we have heard at least twentyfive times.”30 Between the ideas voiced in “Listening to Music” and those developed in his compositional practice, Cage seems to be struggling to understand a distinction that Walter Benjamin had theorized a few years earlier in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In this now-very-wellknown essay, Benjamin argued that the avant-garde practices of collage and photomontage were like cinema in fundamentally disallowing traditional, contemplative modes of reception. Cage’s remark about Béla Bartók’s music recalls Benjamin’s quote of Georges Duhamel about the effect of moving film: “I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.”31 According to Benjamin, what disrupted Duhamel’s ability to achieve “free-floating contemplation,” in which he could “abandon himself to his associations,” was film’s use of discontinuous and startling shock effects, effects that were related not only to avant-garde aesthetic practices but also to similar effects produced by modern, and particularly urban, existence.32 In the modern world, Benjamin observed, “Man’s need to expose himself to shock effects is his adjustment to the dangers threatening him.”33 Whether in cinema or avant-garde art, montage techniques, he contended, “correspon[d] to profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus—changes that are experienced on an individual scale by the man in the street in big-city traffic, on a historical scale by every present-day citizen.”34 Like Benjamin, Cage saw avant-garde aesthetic production as integrally related to contemporary metropolitan conditions. In much the same way that dadaist collage and montage directly incorporated bits of everyday life such as newspaper clippings and ticket stubs, Cage’s percussion music appropriated noises from urban existence and technological production: struck percussion

44

Experimentations

and machine-made sounds. The perceptual modalities thereby fostered were more closely related to those developed to cope with the shocks of modern everyday life. As explained in one of Cage’s early press releases, Cage describes his work as the organization of sound. The source of his music lies not in primitive percussion music, but in the contemporary city sounds which are so integral a part of life today. He believes that through organization these sounds lose their nerve-wracking character and become the materials for a highly dramatic and expressive art form.35

According to Benjamin, the individual’s confrontation with such shocks brought about a “heightened presence of mind” which was necessary to counter their onslaught and thereby cushion their nerve-wracking impact.36 Benjamin, however, did not see the resultant mental attitude as a fully conscious form of knowledge or analytic understanding. Instead, he argued that the examination of reality brought about by such aesthetic production was “an absent-minded one,” a reformulation of the individual’s habits accomplished in a state of “distraction.”37 To a certain extent, this distinction corresponded to Cage’s contention in “Listening to Music” that one need not “understand” modern music, but rather must experience, or “hear,” it. For Cage, however, the shocks of modern existence seem to have been mastered almost entirely through habit, and his analysis largely omitted that component of dispassionate critical expertise that Benjamin saw arising with the decline of contemplation and the “aura” associated with the traditional artwork.38 For Cage, the notion of updating habitual perception so as to render it capable of countering perceptual shocks was described in terms of “therapy.” As he explained in 1943 to a reporter from Time magazine, “People may leave my concerts thinking they have heard ‘noise,’ but will then hear unsuspected beauty in their everyday life. This music has a therapeutic value for city dwellers … .”39 More than Russolo, Tobey, or Moholy-Nagy, it may have been the poet (and physician) William Carlos Williams who most directly provided Cage with a characterization of music’s therapeutic function. On the program for a concert that included the premiere of First Construction (in Metal) (1939), Cage included a quote by Williams: I felt that noise, the unrelated noise of life, such as this in the subway, had not been battened out as would have been the case with Beethoven still warm in the mind, but it had actually been mastered, subjugated. The composer has taken this hated thing, life, and rigged himself into power over it by his music. The

A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers

45

offense had not been held, cooled, varnished over, but annihilated, and life itself made thereby triumphant. This is an important difference. By hearing such music, seemingly so much noise, when I actually came upon noise in reality, I found I had gone up over it.40

Cage appropriated this passage from “George Antheil and the Canteline Critics,” an article Williams published in the avant-garde literary journal transition in 1928 (Figure 1.4).41 In it, Williams lambasted the critics’ reaction to Antheil’s U.S. concert premiere, defending in particular the Ballet Mécanique (ca. 1924). Invoking a bit of editorial license, Cage excised Antheil’s name from the original quotation, thereby rendering it applicable to the evening’s music, including his own. By reproducing it on the program of his most futurist piece to date, Cage apparently sought to inoculate his audience against the type of unsympathetic response that had greeted Antheil a decade earlier.42 * Cage’s familiarity with transition was not limited to a single article. Rather, it seems that the magazine played a significant, although heretofore unacknowledged, role in the development of Cage’s artistic ideas. transition was one of the most important means of transmitting information about the early European avant-garde to America, and it undoubtedly influenced Cage’s understanding of developments on that side of the Atlantic. Discovering transition in 1930 or 1931, around the same time that he began to pursue modern art and music, Cage later listed it as among the works having “the greatest influence on his thought.”43 He had been introduced to the magazine in Paris by Don Sample, an older, Harvard-trained poet who became Cage’s first important homosexual romantic relationship.44 It was through his relationship with Sample that Cage also visited the Dessau Bauhaus, the two returning to California (where they would live together) with a collection of related books and magazines, almost certainly containing the work of MoholyNagy.45 Subsequently familiarizing himself with transition’s entire run, Cage specified a preference for the issues of “the twenties,” before the publication shifted to American soil and became affiliated with the more staid modernism of the Museum of Modern Art.46 At the time of Cage’s introduction, transition had the reputation of being a thoroughly avant-garde magazine associated with an “extremist clique” of aesthetic revolutionaries, a factor that would have attracted Cage as much as the magazine’s association with two of his favorite

46

Experimentations

Figure 1.4  John Cage, First Construction (in Metal), 1939.

authors, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein.47 In a sense, Cage became transition’s “ideal reader,” heeding its call for a new generation of American avant-garde artists and subsequently taking up that call himself.48 Upon returning from Europe, he immediately set about composing music to accompany writings by Stein and others published in its pages.49

A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers

47

Although primarily remembered today for its association with surrealism and Joyce (who published an early version of Finnegans Wake in its pages), transition had its own aesthetic vision known, among variants, as verticalism. Verticalism would be promoted in nearly every issue by the magazine’s lead editor and ideologue Eugene Jolas, and he and the other editors’ writings were incipient avant-garde manifestos that called for disruptive assaults upon outworn linguistic and artistic rules. Programmatically stating their goals at the end of the first year of publication, Jolas and Elliot Paul, another of transition’s founding editors, declared that the journal’s evolution “was directed primarily by the idea that a conscious attitude of disintegration is necessary in order to combat the orthodox inertia characterizing modern art and letters.”50 This avant-gardist attitude, from which transition would not swerve until its final issues, reached a culmination with “The Revolution of the Word Proclamation,” in which the editors and some of the magazine’s fellow travelers declared war on grammatical and syntactic laws, advocating their destruction through an unfettered literary invention of linguistic forms. In each issue, Joyce, Stein, and the more radical practitioners of dada sound poetry were put forward as examples of the individual’s “right to use words of his own fashioning and to disregard existing grammatical and syntactical laws.”51 At times, not only Cage’s outlook, but also his rhetoric seemed to echo those of transition. Claiming in the article “Goal: New Music, New Dance” that “Percussion music is revolution,” he declared that, “a healthy lawlessness is warranted” to emancipate music from its submission to the outmoded “restrictions of nineteenth-century music.”52 Like the “revolution of the word” proposed by verticalism, Cage’s revolution of the noise-sound was to free the entire range of acoustical production from artificially imposed limitations. “The conscientious objectors to modern music will, of course, attempt everything in the way of counterrevolution,” he wrote. “But our common answer to every criticism must be to continue working and listening, making music with its materials, sound and rhythm, disregarding the cumbersome, top-heavy structure of musical prohibitions.”53 Although primarily a literary magazine, transition’s vision of aesthetic revolution extended to all the arts. In the editorial “Super-Occident,” where Jolas most programmatically addressed the future of music, a young Cage would have found a call for music’s modernization, an attack upon its ideological function, and a statement of its relationship to a wider realm of perceptual modernization. “Music, too, is liberating itself from historicism,” wrote Jolas:

48

Experimentations The search for new instruments, a minimizing of the use of the old melodic instruments, such as the voice and the violin, a search for new percussions and new intervals that will require a re-education of the human ear, and for a new scale, the development of rhythms that are both violent and unfamiliar, and a complete departure from the concept of music as a drug, a balm, a soothing syrup, or as a literary-programmatic composition, an attempt to give it its place as one of the vital forces of modern life corresponding to the forces of our time—this is the direction music is now taking.54

The composer transition most prominently featured as accomplishing this goal was George Antheil, who had been the subject of the Williams essay quoted by Cage. Between 1927 and 1929, Antheil was the author or subject of seven articles, far more than any other composer.55 He was invariably accorded high praise, and statements like “The Ballet Mécanique is surely the most significant musical composition since the Sacre du Printemps” were the rule rather than the exception.56 Undoubtedly, Cage’s early pro-futurist stance was as encouraged by Antheil as by Russolo, and at the end of the thirties he began to correspond with the American composer.57 Comments that Antheil made in the article “Music Tomorrow” about the use of technology, the increased use of silence, and the structuring function of lengths of time all reappear in Cage’s own writings.58 Furthermore, when looking toward futurism as a means of moving beyond serial composition, Cage would certainly not have failed to recall Antheil’s criticism of Schoenberg as “not in the first rank,” nor his flatly stated contention that “Atonality … too … will have nothing to do with the music of the future.”59 As vehement as it often was, transition’s will to destruction was always tempered by a striving toward the absolute. The “revolution of the word” was only the initial step in a process that would ultimately lead to the dialectical sublation of the rational and the creative sides of humanity into a new unity, one that would, in turn, provide the foundation for a new form of organic community. “The creative effort of this age goes towards totality,” Jolas explained in the first lines of “Notes on Reality.” “To achieve the new image of the world which we dimly perceive on the horizon we disintegrate the universe with all the means at our disposal and transform chaos into cosmos.”60 transition’s emphasis on the dialectical overcoming of fragmentation—on both the aesthetic and the social level—strongly resonates with Cage’s own understanding of the interdependence of music’s therapeutic and aesthetic functions. As his 1942 press release stated, it was through the “organization of

A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers

49

sound” that noises were simultaneously to “lose their nerve-wracking character” and create “a highly dramatic and expressive art form.” Like Williams, whose description of Antheil emphasized the dialectical reformation of noise into a new artistic unity, Cage saw composition as the formulation of an organic whole. As he declared in “Listening to Music,” In the case of music, we often find that this organizing has made otherwise startling sounds seem natural. From the beginning to the end of a fine piece of music the sounds follow one another in a natural sequence. The whole problem (…) of listening to music is this: Hear the sounds as belonging together. Let the composer spend his days making them belong together.61

Despite Cage’s embrace of modernity, music was to play a therapeutic or compensatory role, providing a hint or “image” of a utopian moment of reconciliation in the face of the apparent chaos of modern life. As he stated at the conclusion of “Listening to Music,” “the natural flow of sounds which music is reassures us of order just as the sequence of the seasons and the regular alternation of night and day do.”62 Although in “Listening to Music” Cage referred only obliquely to the use of noise (as “startling sounds”), his emphasis on creating an organic totality plays a no less important role in his understanding of percussion music. In order to achieve a therapeutic function, in order for the listener to sublate or “go up over” noise, the mimetic incorporation of city noises alone would not suffice. Rather, as Williams had made clear, these noises had to be “mastered and subjugated” dialectically into a work of art. This idea was further elaborated in “The Future of Music: Credo,” where Cage made certain to state that “We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments.”63 Here again, Cage’s phraseology recalled that of Russolo, who had written in a more bellicose manner: “And as I conceive it, The Art of Noises would certainly not limit itself to an impressionistic and fragmentary reproduction of the noises of life. Thus, the ear must hear these noises mastered, servile, completely controlled, conquered and constrained to become elements of art.”64 In collage and photomontage, as well as in poetry and performance, the most radical practitioners of dadaism specifically opposed the artistic formation of organic wholes. Indeed, a vehement opposition to totality is one of dada’s most important postulates, whether it is understood as the radically anarchic negation of traditional aesthetic rules; as a more sophisticated form of montage in which

50

Experimentations

the inorganically assembled materials force, on a second level of reception, a cognitive grasp of their underlying structure; or as a fragmenting of the apparently inalterable image of the world which thus opens up spaces for action. Yet, Cage seems to have been unresponsive to the most radical, anti-organic strains of European dada. In both music and the visual arts, the Italian futurists of whom he had knowledge advocated the reformation of non-traditional and initially shocking aesthetic materials onto a new form of expressive, organic whole. In addition to this totalizing thrust of futurism, however, a consideration of transition’s role in mediating the European avant-garde helps to understand Cage’s organicist impulse. For the view that transition provided of dada was one that had been thoroughly assimilated into Jolas’s more spiritual and organicist verticalism. Despite a close association with André Breton, Jolas had strong misgivings about surrealism and, in part, because of critics’ incessant conflation of transition with surrealism, his editorials voiced these reservations often. By contrast, he seems to have been entirely content to present his views as an extension of dada.65 While publishing the sound poetry of Kurt Schwitters, Hugo Ball, and Tristan Tzara as examples of the revolutionizing of the word, Jolas’s sympathies tended toward those examples of dada that displayed religious or spiritual impulses more closely aligned with his own interest in romantic mysticism.66 Jolas’s personal contacts with Hans Arp (with whom he was particularly close), Richard Huelsenbeck, and Raoul Hausmann all reinforced his impression that spirituality was an important component of dada, and he saw to it that those aspects of the movement were frequently touted within the magazine.67 As Hugo Ball wrote in “Fragments from a Dada Diary,” “What we are celebrating is at once buffoonery and a requiem mass.”68 Jolas and the editorship of transition never advocated a pure formalism— art for art’s sake—or the mere exaltation of the irrational. Although verticalism was to begin with the revolution of the word, its ultimate goal was to change social existence, a task in which the artist was to play an integral role. As Jolas affirmed, “If the liberation of man is the chief aim of action, the function of the creator is as essential as that of the politician or the economist. The creator liberates with the instrument of the word, the plastic organization, the rhythmic composition. His revolution aims at a complete metamorphosis of the world.”69 Cage shared Jolas’s understanding of art’s effectiveness, arguing in “The Future of Music: Credo” that music not only provided a model of reconciled society, but would itself be a means of enacting such reconciliation.70 In Double Music

A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers

51

(1941), written in collaboration with Lou Harrison, Cage attempted to create a musical situation in which two individuals—in this case composers rather than performers—could come together in anonymity, and he equated this method of collaboration with the anonymity associated with medieval art.71 If music was to address Cage’s concerns about social fragmentation, however, it was not enough that it be composed in such a manner as to form an organic totality. Rather, the process of accustoming the individual to the experience of modern sounds had to be founded on a universal structural principle. Cage speculated that once one or more such universal musical forms were “crystallized” and had been absorbed into the common practice, “the means will exist for group improvisations of unwritten but culturally important music.”72 This program for developing a universal aesthetic (one that did not yet exclude the legacy of African-American improvisation) both echoed Moholy-Nagy’s artistic outlook and resembled that found in the early issues of transition. As Jolas wrote in “Literature and the New Man,” If we wish to find a standard for life and literature, we cannot, of course, escape the results of the personal and collective experiences. But creative expression envisages the combined forces of the human spirit. The writer proceeds from his own individuality to a connection with the humanity around him. He does not shirk the dark and sinister aspects of life. He presents life in its universal relationships and is not afraid to destroy in order to create his vision.73

With such an insistence on the direct connection between music and society (in which a composition acts both as a model of social order for listeners and as an experience of reconciled society for performers), the question of exactly what structure music should assume takes on the utmost importance. From the outset, Cage showed himself attentive to the social and political implications of compositional form. He implicitly linked neo-classical, harmonic composition to a hierarchical structure where “each material, in a group of unequal materials” was assigned “its function with respect to the fundamental or most important material in the group.”74 Although in “Counterpoint,” Cage had idealized the Gothic period as one of organic social unity, he had no interest in returning to such a residually aristocratic form of social inequality. On the other hand, because it functioned without a fundamental tone, Cage initially saw Schoenbergian serialism as figuring a more holistic and democratic ideal. “Schoenberg’s method assigns to each material, in a group of equal materials, its function with respect to the group,” Cage explained. “Schoenberg’s method

52

Experimentations

is analogous to a society in which the emphasis is on the group and the integration of the individual in the group.”75 At the time, Cage accepted such integration unproblematically as a worthy aesthetic and ethical ideal. Years later, in discussing his initial enthusiasm for Schoenberg, he would recount, “those twelve tones were all equally important … one of them was not more important than another. It gave a principle that one could relate over into one’s life and accept, whereas the notion of neo-classicism one could not accept and put over into one’s life.”76 * Although Cage initially interpreted Arnold Schoenberg’s aesthetic in relation to his own desire for holistic social cohesion, reinforcing his preference for integration over that of individuality, this would soon undergo a significant transformation. In a 1942 article entitled “South Winds in Chicago,” Cage analyzed Paul Hindemith’s Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra (1940). In it he reiterated the idea that music acts as an analogue of social structure, although in Hindemith’s case it was not the musical tones but the instrumental parts that were seen as representative of individuals. “It is a concerto in which the soloist is not merely displaying virtuosity,” Cage proposed, “but one in which the cello is an individual and the orchestra is the group and the musical relationships are human relationships.”77 For Cage, Hindemith’s concerto was a drama of the individual’s plight within, and ultimate capitulation in the face of, mass society: This is particularly clear in the last movement in which the orchestra sets forth in martial character, the cello remaining distinct and apart, poetic and not marching, having, as it were, another point of view. The cello maintains the individual point of view with increasing intensity and up to the last possible moment. It is clear then that the choice is one between insanity and conformance. The latter course is followed and the cello becomes a subservient part of an overwhelming orchestra.78

The social condition that Cage outlines here is related to the same isolation of the individual from the community that he had commented on in 1934. In Hindemith, however, Cage did not find a utopian reformulation of a modern Gothic age, but a representation of the individual’s authoritarian subsumption into the mass, describing Hindemith’s musical figuration of society not in terms of “common belief ” and “selflessness,” but through allusions to militarism and

A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers

53

forced conformity. Hearing the concerto in the context of America’s entry into the war and the domestic conscription it entailed may have prompted Cage to reevaluate his earlier call for social unity. In light of the Italian futurists’ embrace of Mussolini, Cage may also have looked back at the implications of his abandonment of serialism in favor of the noise music of Russolo—who had wished to hear his materials “mastered, servile, completely controlled, conquered and constrained”—as somewhat more ominous.79 It is also probable that Cage’s growing relationship with Merce Cunningham and his deteriorating marriage to Xenia Kashevaroff fostered a growing attentiveness to the acceptance of individual difference (including, by implication, that of sexual orientation) amid the conformist climate of a nationalistic and soonto-be-McCarthyite United States.80 Whatever the exact reasons, over the next few years Cage’s understanding of the requirements of a utopian, organic community would change. While never abandoning the hope of social unification, Cage would begin more clearly to defend individual difference as a necessary component within it, a stance in which may be found the beginnings of his later anarchist ethos. In “Defense of Satie,” delivered in the summer of 1948 at Black Mountain College, Cage voiced his revised position. Opening with a by-now familiar critique of social fragmentation, Cage stated, On the one hand, we lament what we call the gulf between artist and society, between artist and artist, and we praise (…) the unanimity of opinion out of which arose a Gothic cathedral, an opera by Mozart, a Balinese combination of music and dance … . We admire from a lonely distance that art which is not private in character but is characteristic of a group of people and the fact that they were in agreement.81

While continuing to place a positive valuation on cultural agreement—even holding to the example of Gothic architecture—Cage now carefully articulated his opposition to mass conformity: “I would say that in life we would not be pleased if all of us dressed alike … . We feel imposed upon by G.I. clothing, Baltimore housing, and we would not like poetry in standard English or Esperanto. In the area of material, we need and are enlivened by differentiation.”82 A certain individuality, in fact, must be preserved, Cage explained further; this is why, “we admire an artist for his originality and independence of thought, and we are displeased when he is too obviously imitative of another artist’s work.”83 At this point, Cage’s problem was one of finding a universal aesthetic form that would

54

Experimentations

allow the preservation of individual difference, “an art that is paradoxical in that it reflects both unanimity of thought and originality of thought.”84 In the remainder of his lecture, Cage attempted to determine which aspects of aesthetic production should be agreed upon and which not, deciding ultimately that it was the composition’s structure that had to become universal, while form (by which Cage meant something more akin to expressive content) should remain free from uniformity; the nature of the musical materials and the methods of connecting them could be either conventional or individualistic. That having been decided, the question once again became that of the “proper” structure for music to take. Cage’s answer was that compositions should be based on divisions of time (“rhythmic-” or time-structures)—a technique he had used since First Construction (in Metal), but which he now firmly and flatly declared to be correct—while all compositions based on traditional forms of harmonic structure were deemed to be wrong. Blaming Beethoven for instigating modern harmonic composition, and crediting Anton Webern and Erik Satie with the invention of compositional structures based on lengths of time, Cage asked, Was Beethoven right or are Webern and Satie right? I answer immediately and unequivocally, Beethoven was in error, and his influence, which has been as extensive as it is lamentable, has been deadening to the art of music.85

Cage famously justified this declaration by arguing that only a structure constructed on time lengths could accommodate the entire range of acoustic possibilities without discrimination, including not only sound and noise, but also silence, which at this point Cage still understood as the absence of sound.86 If, during this second phase of his early development, Cage continued to reject harmony as a legitimate basis for composition, it was no longer because he understood it to represent an inegalitarian social formation, nor simply because he had never had any natural inclination for it. Rather, his increasingly vehement opposition to harmony reflected a different understanding of its role. In part, this can be attributed to Cage’s introduction to the writings of Indian art historian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, writings that greatly reinforced his convictions about the crisis of Western culture.87 For Coomaraswamy, the contemporary social crisis was caused by the rise of individuality that began in the Renaissance and severed the individual’s ties not only to the remainder of society but also

A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers

55

to reality’s more universal and spiritual manifestations. Post-Renaissance Western art was an expression of the individual’s alienation, an alienation which, Coomaraswamy contended, distinguished it from the healthier outlook characterizing Asian and medieval Western perceptions of art.88 Although Cage seems to have come to understand harmony as a metonym of Western culture in general, his opposition to it was not simply motivated by a loose definition of the latter’s spiritual bankruptcy. Rather, as he explained in “The East in the West,” his opposition was predicated on an understanding of harmony’s connection to commercialism. “This element, harmony, is not medieval nor Oriental but baroque,” Cage declared in allusion to Coomaraswamy’s ideas. “Because of its ability to enlarge sound and thus to impress an audience, it has become in our time the tool of Western commercialism.”89 Earlier in 1946, Cage clearly voiced his opposition to commercialism in a stinging critique of George Antheil. In a short piece written for Modern Music, he outlined the progressive cooption by commercial interests of one of his former avant-garde models. According to Cage, the first corrupting influence to which Antheil succumbed was that of “Stravinsky and the business of neo-classicism,” soon after which he “was persuaded to write operas with the pre-Hitler German opera-loving audiences in mind.”90 More devastating than either Antheil’s embrace of harmonic structure or his purported flirt with fascist aesthetics, however, was the “spell of Hollywood,” under which he fell after returning to the United States. “He took some time,” Cage noted wryly, “to recognize Hollywood’s commercialism as a bad influence, incompatible with serious composition.”91 Reproaching Antheil for a “cheap gaudiness” of character no less than of composition, Cage concluded by connecting these commercial interests to both harmonic structure and the desire to impress the masses through kitsch and musical pandering: The part of Hollywood that stays with him still is his interest in writing for the “great public.” This confirms his present choice of models: late Beethoven, Mahler, Bruckner, and, as he himself says, “even Sibelius.” There is no longer any remembrance of the dream; instead he dedicates the Fourth Symphony to “Hedy Lamarr and all the living heroes of all countries,” the Fifth to “the young dead of this war, the young dead of all countries.” Something quite empty is being inflated with a vast amount of volatile profundity.92

Two years later, Cage was even less reticent about linking harmony to commercialism, holding that the “decadence” into which Beethoven had thrust

56

Experimentations

music was at one with the crisis brought on by capitalism.93 Toward the end of “A Composer’s Confessions,” he reiterated his conviction that harmony served only “as a device to make music impressive, loud and big, in order to enlarge audiences and increase box-office returns,” and shortly thereafter he launched into a veritable tirade about the current state of composition: I don’t sympathize with the idealization of masterpieces. I don’t admire the use of harmony to enlarge and make music impressive. I think the history of the so-called perfecting of our musical instruments is a history of decline rather than of progress. Nor am I interested in large audiences or the preservation of my work for posterity. I think the inception of that fairly recent department of philosophy called aesthetics and its invention of the ideas of genius and self-expression and art appreciation are lamentable. I do not agree with one of our most performed composers who was quoted in a recent Sunday Times article called Composing for Cash as saying that what inspired him and should inspire others to write music today is the rising crescendo of modern industrialism. I think this and the other ideas I have just been ranting about may be labeled along with others, that at present I haven’t the calmness to remember, as being sheer materialistic nonsense, and tossed aside.94

Although his views were augmented by Coomaraswamy’s conviction of the West’s cultural decline and the role that the idea of expressive genius played within it, Cage was still passionately decrying the same social fragmentation he had lamented since the early thirties. Yet, what Cage previously credited to individual stylistic divergence, he now attributed to the pursuit of commercial success. It was, he declared, the composer’s desire for “fame, money, selfexpression and success” that had “[brought] about the state of music as it is today: extraordinarily disparate, almost to the point of a separation between each composer and every other one, and a large gap between each one of these and society.”95 For Cage, music’s implication within the modern social crisis was not confined to neo-classicism, the Hollywood culture industry, or the associated cult of expressive genius. Avant-garde musical production was equally compromised by commercialism, especially the futurist strain to which he had earlier been dedicated. For Cage, the current state of social fragmentation seems to have been attributed to the loss of spiritual belief and the rise of consumer society: “That which formerly held us together and gave meaning to our occupations was our belief in God. When we transferred this belief first to

A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers

57

heroes, then to things, we began to walk our separate paths.”96 Rather than being an oppositional or even conciliatory force, futurist music—with its pursuit of ever new sounds, noises, and the technological means to produce them— merely traveled in the wake of these developments, confronting a decaying cultural superstructure with the aesthetic possibilities of a modern economic base. By 1948, the realization of a homology between futurism and capitalist development led Cage nearly to renounce his earlier aesthetic project. “In view of these convictions,” he confessed, “I am frankly embarrassed that most of my musical life has been spent in the search for new materials.” Connecting the modernist exaltation of the new to the perpetual manufacture of consumer desire, Cage explained, The significance of new materials is that they represent, I believe, the incessant desire in our culture to explore the unknown. Before we know it, the flame dies down, only to burst forth again at the thought of a new unknown. This desire has found expression in our culture in new materials, because our culture has its faith not in the peaceful center of the spirit but in an ever-hopeful projection on to things of our own desire for completion.97

In part, Cage’s idealization of Eastern and pre-modern Western cultures was based on the conviction that they were free of the corrupting influence of commodification. The interrelation between Cage’s turn toward the East and his opposition to harmony and commercialism was most clearly articulated at the conclusion of “Defense of Satie”: It is interesting to note that harmonic structure in music arises as Western materialism arises, disintegrates at the time that materialism comes to be questioned, and that the solution of rhythmic structure, traditional to the Orient, is arrived at with us just at the time that we profoundly sense our need for that other tradition of the Orient: peace of mind, self-knowledge.98

Cage’s use of the term “disinterestedness” to describe this peace of mind further supports the contention that his opposition to commercialism played an important role in shifting his thinking toward Eastern philosophy. If, in the Huang-Po Doctrine of Universal Mind, the idea of disinterestedness refers to a dispassionate stance toward worldly existence, in “A Composer’s Confessions,” where Cage first mentions disinterestedness, it seems weighted toward a meaning of “not for commercial gain”: “If one makes music, as the Orient would say, disinterestedly, that is, without concern for money and fame but simply for the love of making it, it is an integrating activity and one will find moments

58

Experimentations

in his life that are complete and fulfilled.”99 Even as Cage brought more of the Eastern nuances of disinterestedness into play, he maintained the connotation of anti-commercialism as an important aspect of his use of the term. As he wrote, for example, in the “Lecture on Nothing,” “Continuity today, when it is necessary, is a demonstration of disinterestedness. That is, it is a proof that our delight lies in not possessing anything.”100 * There is a second half to the story that Cage told about his enlightening walk with Tobey. The setting is no longer Seattle but New York, to which Cage had moved in 1942 after spending a year teaching in Chicago at Moholy-Nagy’s New Bauhaus. The story’s second part largely replicates the first, with the difference that it is no longer Tobey the artist but Tobey’s art that provides Cage with an appreciation of the urban environment. “[T]here was an exhibition at the Willard Gallery which included the first examples of white writing on the part of Mark Tobey,” Cage recalled: [W]hen I left the Willard Gallery exhibition, I was standing at a corner on Madison Avenue waiting for a bus and I happened to look at the pavement, and I noticed that the experience of looking at the pavement was the same as the experience of looking at the Tobey. Exactly the same. The aesthetic enjoyment was just as high.101

Cage subsequently purchased one of the most abstract paintings in the show, Crystallization (1944), for which he paid on an installment plan over the course of a year (Figure 1.5). Yet this half of the story is somewhat deceptive. For if, by 1944, the year of Tobey’s exhibition, Cage could declare himself accommodated to the physical aspects of the modern urban environment, he could not make the same claim with regard to its saturation by commercialism. He lamented the commercial nature of life in New York, which he referred to as “the center and the marketplace.”102 And although he claimed to be able to perceive even the pavement in an aesthetic manner (thanks to Tobey), he nonetheless conceded the necessity of turning away from the city to find the spiritual tranquillity he so desired. As he acknowledged in 1948, it was only within the relative retreat of his apartment on the East River, “which turns its back to the city and looks to the water and the sky,” that he was able to contemplate the spiritual side of musical composition.103

A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers

59

Figure 1.5  Mark Tobey, Crystallization, 1944.

Along with the change in Cage’s characterization of the city came a change in his understanding of the social illness that it caused—the affliction for which music was to serve a therapeutic function. Previously describing it in terms of a vague nervous disorder associated with perceptual shock, Cage now explicitly

60

Experimentations

introduced the term “neurosis” to characterize this social malaise. Somewhat humorously, he stated in “Defense of Satie,” “We go so far as to give some credence to the opinion that a special kind of art arises from a special neurosis pattern of a particular artist. At this point we grow slightly pale and stagger out of our studios to knock at the door of some neighborhood psychoanalyst.”104 Although Cage may be referring here to his own experience with psychoanalysis or to a more general interest in psychoanalytic therapies within the New York art scene, he provided a more specific diagnosis in “A Composer’s Confessions,” explaining that the cause of such neuroses was occupational specialization and the division of labor: “The occupations of many people today are not healthy but make those who practice them sick, for they develop one part of the individual to the detriment of the other part. The malaise which results is at first psychological, and one takes vacations from his job to remove it. Ultimately the sickness attacks the whole organism.”105 This idea resonated strongly with Coomaraswamy’s ideas about the separation of individuals from spiritual knowledge. However, in addition to the unquestionable importance of Coomaraswamy and other sources of Eastern thinking, Cage’s thoughts about the contemporary individual’s neurosis—as well as the clinical vocabulary he used to describe it—seem also to have derived from sources with which he was already familiar: transition and Moholy-Nagy.106 Cage stated that one of the things that most interested him in Moholy-Nagy’s The New Vision was the discussion of the plight of the modern individual. As Cage recalled, “Near the beginning of Moholy’s book there is a circle which describes the individual, an individual human being, and shows that the individual is totally capable, that is to say, each person is able to do all the things that any human being can do. But through circumstances and so forth we often become specialists rather than whole people” (Figure 1.6).107 MoholyNagy indicated that these circumstances were those of contemporary industrial capitalism, specifically the division of labor foisted on individuals for the purpose of maximizing profits. “Today neither education nor production springs from inner urges, nor from urges to make goods which satisfy one’s self and society in a mutually complementary way,” he explained: The educational system is the result of the economic structure. During the frenzied march of the industrial revolution, industrialists set up specialized schools in order to turn out needed specialists quickly. These schools in very few instances favored the development of men’s power. They offered them no opportunity to penetrate to the essence of things, or to the individual himself.108

A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers

61

Figure 1.6  László Moholy-Nagy, graph of “Sectors of human development” from The New Vision.

Moholy-Nagy, of course, did not advocate a retreat from this situation, but, urging that “the future needs the whole man,” he proposed reforming education to achieve a more integrated and well-rounded training.109 To Cage, Moholy-Nagy’s call for the “whole man” would likely have been associated with transition’s promotion of the “new man.” As Jolas explained in “Literature and the New Man,” The new man should combine in himself the possibilities for universality. He will not be the homo faber, the homo sapiens, the metaphysical man, the dionysian man, the automatic man, the economic man. He will be all of them in one … . The industrial revolution needs an individual who will blend the intellectual and emotional side of his nature, who will harness science to eternal humanity, who will nullify the autonomy of nature and man.110

Although Jolas was as staunchly modernist as Moholy-Nagy, Cage may well have found Jolas’s description of the crisis of Western society and his interest

62

Experimentations

in the spiritual impulses of humanity to have been more compatible with Coomaraswamy’s ideas than were those of Moholy-Nagy. The recognition of similar ideas within Jolas’s uncompromisingly avant-garde program would have provided Cage with a means of overcoming Coomaraswamy’s avowed antimodernism and helped him justify integrating traditional Eastern thought into his own, still decidedly avant-garde position.111 Cage used a similar clinical vocabulary as Jolas to describe the contemporary situation of social crisis. Jolas frequently made statements to the effect that the new man “must needs be against the excessive, decadent individualism which produced the art of the neuroses.”112 Although he railed against such excessive individuality, Jolas also resolutely held that a new, holistically unified individual was indispensable for achieving the thoroughly reformulated social totality of the future: “The new man, represented by the creative spirit, will build his work on the consciousness of a purified individualism. It will be an individualism that is sufficiently deep to produce a compensation with [different] groups, races, civilizations, economic systems, and even linguistic aggregations.”113 Jolas’s defense of individuality was categorical. Indeed, the most important principle of verticalism was an unwavering struggle against the contemporary forces of standardization. Throughout his career, Jolas staunchly opposed fascism, communism, and Western mass conformity, all of which he saw as threats to individual difference. He reiterated this opposition frequently in transition, especially during the early period for which Cage expressed a preference.114 As Jolas observed in the article “Notes,” I know the tendency of this age is towards collectivism … . We consider the increasing tendency toward centralisation, both in the economic and political sphere, dangerous, unless curbed by a regional consciousness.  … the sense of universalism can only develop, when the sense of the indigenous remains as a catapulting force. That is why we regard the development of the collectivistic era in America with so many misgivings, having already observed during the brief period of its prologue how the regional particularities are being destroyed, how the mass consciousness becomes a paroxysm of parallel tendencies, how life in general becomes grey and monotonous.115

When Stuart Gilbert, another of transition’s editors, looked back over the journal’s earlier phase, he characterized the defense of individual difference as its central and defining contribution. In “The Creator Is Not a Public Servant,”

A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers

63

Gilbert announced, “Standardization is the creator’s enemy, standardization of every kind: social, political, economic, linguistic. For standardization, a levelling out and a crumbling away, is the instrument of death, the antithesis of creation.”116 Afterward, he concluded, The disease of our age, one of the many consequences of the war, no doubt, is the desire that every man should fall into line. By the right … Dress! Against such literary sergeant-majors, whether academical or demagogic, transition has waged a Three Years’ War. Much ground has been won for the forces of individual creative effort and the occupied territory will be held.117

Within this “war,” as Gilbert phrased it, one of the clearest communiqués of transition’s position was Jolas’s editorial “Super-Occident,” the article that included his most programmatic statement about the musical avant-garde. Here, Jolas summarized the global situation as “deterministic and anti-individual,” making abundantly clear that the emergence of mass movements on both the right and the left posed equally troubling threats to individuality.118 Describing such contemporary cultural leveling as the “metaphysical sordidness” of the age—no less repellent than excessive individuality—Jolas went on to describe it explicitly: While concentration of wealth is getting more and more absolute, selfsatisfaction, megalomania, cynicism run riot. Mad with mercantile-utilitarian vision, the power of the bankers has centralized everything so that all variations from their arbitrarily established norm are considered pathological cases. A wave of intolerance will sweep the country under the guise of democratic liberalism. The ruthless suppression of all protesting voices will be the result.119

Although the nihilistic element of transition’s agenda was in direct revolt against this form of cultural standardization, the ultimate end sought by Jolas was still the utopian, social totality prefigured in romanticism. This organicist vision differed from the actually encroaching mercantilist totalization of the world, however, because it would embrace difference rather than standardization. In reference to his idea of a “super-occident,” Jolas wrote, The new Atlantic World … will be the prolongation of Europe and Asia combined. It will be made possible by the human adjustment to the mechanical civilization so that not only North-America, but also Latin-America, through mutual inter-penetration of ethnic and cultural and linguistic organisms can create a spirit which creates a totality. But this totality cannot be achieved at the expense of differentiation.120

64

Experimentations

In this, Cage’s position in “Defense of Satie” seems to have descended from the one that was advocated by Jolas and transition generally: a utopian social totality initially modeled in a universal aesthetic form, but which protected within its philosophy individual difference. Before this revolutionary, utopian reconciliation of society could be achieved, however, the fragmentation of the modern individual had to be  resolved. In a manner reminiscent of both Coomaraswamy and Moholy-Nagy, Jolas held that an increasing mechanization and industrialization had led to an unhealthy split within the individual subject, which, in Jolas’s words, “made the clash between the rational and the irrational a grave one.”121 For Jolas, the nonrational aspects of reality with which the individual had to be reunited lay both in the unconscious and in spiritual realms, and he drew frequently and explicitly upon the lessons of psychoanalysis. Although transition had evinced a sustained interest in the work of Sigmund Freud, as of late 1929 it began to champion the work of Carl Jung. In “Literature and the New Man,” Jolas critiqued Freud (and the surrealists who followed him) for being too focused on the individual’s neuroses: Although we stand in reverence before the genius of the scientist who in The I and the It and more recently in The Malaise in Civilization has gone beyond his initial point of departure, we feel nevertheless that he does not entirely meet our conceptions of the creative spirit. By reducing everything to the dogma of a neurosis, he eliminates layers of the poetic genesis that are essential for esthetic understanding.122

In Jung’s writings, Jolas found an understanding of the unconscious that related not only to the personal but also to the universal and “the collective life of humanity.”123 This more closely coincided with the spiritual element of transition’s aesthetic, which likewise attempted to access universal totality. Jung’s work also encouraged Jolas to seek the possibility of a therapeutic means of fostering the individual’s holistic integration. As Jolas hypothesized, the new man, who would unite in himself all aspects of human personality, “will become conscious to a very high degree, because he will finally, through [Jungian] analysis, come to know himself.”124 It is probably then not coincidental that after “eighteen months of studying oriental and medieval Christian philosophy and mysticism,” Cage “began to read Jung on the integration of the personality.”125 In a form compatible with Cage’s interest in South Asian philosophy, Jung expressed the necessity of overcoming

A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers

65

the limitations of the self, the individual ego, and the isolated neurosis in order to achieve artistic creation. As Cage explained in “A Composer’s Confessions,” after referencing his reading of Jung, “a composer may be neurotic, as indeed being a member of contemporary society he probably is, but it is not on account of his neurosis that he composes, but rather in spite of it. Neuroses act to stop and block. To be able to compose signifies the overcoming of these obstacles.”126 Whatever Jung he read at the time, Cage would already have been acquainted with such ideas from “Psychology and Poetry,” an article Jolas translated and published in transition and for which “Literature and the New Man” served as an introduction. In it, Jung explained, the essence of the work of art does not consist in the fact that it is charged with personal peculiarities—in fact the more this is the case, the less the question of art enters in—but that it rises far above the personal and speaks out of the heart and mind and for the heart and mind of humanity. The personal is a limitation, yes, even a vice of art.127

Like Jolas, Cage saw artistic expression as a way to fulfill much the same function as this aspect of Jungian psychoanalysis. As he pointed out in “Defense of Satie,” “Music then is a problem parallel to that of the integration of the personality: which in terms of modern psychology is the co-being of the conscious and the unconscious mind, Law and Freedom, in a random world situation.”128 Or as he explained in “A Composer’s Confessions,” “Music does this by providing a moment when, awareness of time and space being lost, the multiplicity of elements which make up an individual become integrated and he is one.”129 In statements such as these, we encounter a position reminiscent of that espoused by Cage a decade earlier in “Listening to Music,” one that emphasizes the moment of individual reconciliation within an encompassing musical experience. Cage still sought to fulfill a therapeutic function within society; however, by this time, the goal was no longer that of overcoming the shock of modern acoustical stimuli, but of allowing the individual to experience a moment of unity that transcends the psychic fragmentation brought on by modern economic specialization. As he wrote in reference to performances of Webern and Ives, “We were simply transported. I think the answer to this riddle [of the music’s effect] is simply that when the music was composed the composers were at one with themselves. The performers became disinterested to the point that they became unselfconscious, and a few listeners in those brief moments of listening forgot themselves, enraptured, and so gained themselves.”130

66

Experimentations

Jolas’s understanding of art’s effectiveness—its role in promoting or actually producing social and subjective change—led him to critique Freud for emphasizing individual fragmentation and neurosis over an integrative form of healing. Cage’s likening of Schoenberg to Freud seems the product of a similar line of thinking. Initially linking the two in “The East in the West,” Cage wrote that “Schoenberg analyzes and fragmentizes his music, so that he seems with Freud to be a founding father of today’s cult of the neurosis.”131 Cage made another reference to the idea in “A Composer’s Confessions,” citing “the cerebral, even psychoanalytical, and non-sensuous aspect of much twelve-tone music.”132 Cage’s rather oblique criticism of Schoenberg for not transcending the level of individual neuroses found its social and aesthetic parallel in his critique of the Viennese master’s treatment of musical structure. If, in “The Future of Music: Credo,” Cage contended that new compositional forms would likely bear “a definite relation to Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system,” by 1942 he had begun to critique Schoenberg’s serialism for failing to provide music with a new structural basis.133 Four years later, Cage argued that Schoenberg evaded or simply negated harmony rather than producing a new compositional system. “[Schoenberg’s] erstwhile avoidance of harmony is neither Eastern nor Western,” he wrote in “The East in the West.” “It suggests the Orient, since the East does not practice harmony; but, at the same time, since avoidance is an admission of presence, it suggests the Occident.”134 Although never so bold or straightforward as he would be with regard to Beethoven, Antheil, or Hindemith, the evolution of Cage’s thinking brought about a more critical re-evaluation of Schoenberg. By 1948, he fully discounted the possibility of Schoenberg providing a new form of musical structure. Upon making a strict distinction between structure and method in “Defense of Satie,” Cage categorized serialism as a mere “method,” a means of getting from one place to another within a structure: Tonality essential to the harmonic structure of Beethoven disintegrated within fifty to seventy-five years, to bring into being the concept of atonality. This, by its denial of the meaning of harmony, required a new structural means or, let us say, the true structural means. Schoenberg provided no structural means, only a method—the twelve-tone system—the nonstructural character of which forces its composer and his followers continually to make negative steps: He has always to avoid those combinations of sound that would refer too banally to harmony and tonality.135

A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers

67

Schoenberg’s atonality represented, then, not the rejection or overthrow of harmony, but only the death throes or “disintegration” of a structure that once held sway.136 For Cage, harmonic disintegration corresponded to the social fragmentation that had arisen with commercialism. Like Freudian psychology, Schoenbergian serialism revealed or reproduced, but did not transcend or remedy, the contemporary crises of society and the individual. According to Cage, Schoenberg, devoid of a new means of structuring music, necessarily had to rely (albeit negatively) on earlier, outdated ones; as Cage made clear, “Schoenberg made structures neoclassically.”137 Indeed, in merely representing society’s plight under commercialization and the division of labor, Schoenberg, as Cage came to characterize him, was “simply Beethoven brought up to date.”138 With this evaluation in mind, Cage’s earlier observation that Schoenberg’s work represented the integration of individuals within a group potentially takes on a different characterization. A compositional model in which a fragmented and atomized musical material was held together by an outdated, neo-classical structure corresponded on a social level to the false sublation of the individual within the group—not the individual’s eradication within the martial and conformist mass signaled by Hindemith’s orchestra but his or her solitary integration into the “lonely crowd” of Western capitalism.139 As Cage first outlined in his critique of Antheil, harmony and commercialism were interrelated, in part, by their common interest in making things big, loud, and impressive. Around the time of World War II, during which Cage developed his antipathy toward commercialism, he came to the opinion that “there seemed to me to be no truth, no good, in anything big in society,” and cited the conglomerates “Life, Time and Coca-Cola” as negative examples.140 “Half intellectually and half sentimentally,” Cage was led to decide on account of this conviction “to use only quiet sounds.”141 Here, however, he was caught in a reactive stance, merely avoiding the impressiveness of harmony and commercialism. In this respect, the critique he leveled against Schoenberg applied to himself as well, for Cage, too, was merely, if more thoroughly, avoiding harmony—providing its simple negation, rather than overcoming or subverting it. By 1948, he seems to have recognized the problematic status of this situation: “My feeling was that beauty yet remains in intimate situations; that it is quite hopeless to think and act impressively in public terms. This attitude is escapist, but I believe that it is wise rather than foolish to escape from a bad situation.”142

68

Experimentations

Upon this realization, Cage began to feel it necessary to reconsider the sounds of conventional harmonic instruments. In “A Composer’s Confessions,” in which he famously announced his intention to compose a silent piece and a work scored exclusively for radios—realized respectively as 4'33" (1952) and Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951)—he also stated his desire to work with a conventional orchestra. As he explained, “Writing for orchestra is, from my point of view, highly experimental and the sound of a flute, of the violins, of a harp, of a trombone, suggest to me the most attractive adventures.”143 This return to customary instrumentation was not a retreat from his earlier, avantgarde project. Rather, it represented the fulfillment of his goal of formulating an aesthetic structure that could encompass the entirety of available sounds (including the most orthodox), and it would lead Cage to a series of significant aesthetic breakthroughs, first in the String Quartet in Four Parts (1949–50) and then in the Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1950–51). In the Concerto for Prepared Piano, Cage would succeed in producing an example of the aesthetic and social program he had outlined in “Defense of Satie.” Like Hindemith’s Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra, Cage’s concerto was to act as an analogy of human relationships: the piano plays the role of the individual, while the orchestra, as it did in the Hindemith work, functions as the group. The integration of Cage’s soloist into the orchestral ensemble, however, is figured differently. In Hindemith’s concerto, the soloist was heard as capitulating to the expressive needs of a uniform, militarist mass, relinquishing his or her individuality (and the attendant risk of neurosis) in favor of “conformance.” In Cage’s concerto, by contrast, the integration of individual and group takes on a different valence. As James Pritchett has demonstrated, the orchestra evinces a “disinterested” movement from sonority to sonority as determined in an impersonal manner by Cage’s use of compositional charts.144 The piano’s progressive move from a subjectively written part to one determined by a series of impersonal moves on the charts (including, in the third movement, Cage’s first employment of the I Ching) represents a release from the concerns he attributed to Western individualism in favor of those he associated with Eastern “disinterestedness.” In the concerto’s final movement, the piano, now having overcome what he cast as expressive individualism, is able to come together with the orchestra in such a manner that its presence is never entirely subsumed. Thus, to Pritchett’s characterization of Cage’s concerto as representing the resolution of the “law” of compositional structure and the “freedom” of musical content can be added its figuration of the utopian reconciliation of individual and society.

A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers

69

With the important role played by the I Ching and the idea of disinterestedness, the Concerto for Prepared Piano presents Cage’s turn toward the East not merely as a means of escaping the West, but as a manner of attaining the new “Gothic” art form for which he had always longed. Situated at the culmination of the second phase of Cage’s early aesthetic, the Concerto for Prepared Piano also marks the beginning of his work’s next stage. Cage’s integration of chance procedures into the process of composition would quickly be extended in Music of Changes (1951), where even the work’s structure would be submitted to the same type of chance determinations as the sequencing of sounds had been in his concerto. Eventually, this would lead Cage to pursue the dissolution of the musical structure that he had sought for over a decade and focus more explicitly on the independence of individual parts from any overarching organization. As we will see in subsequent chapters, the social and political aspects of Cage’s thinking would nonetheless remain important, even as the holistic or organicist foundations of his earlier compositional goals were overturned and pathways opened toward the more explicitly anarchist outlook that he began to espouse openly in 1960.

Notes 1 2

3

John Cage, in John Cage and Daniel Charles, For the Birds (New York: Marion Boyars, 1981), 158. On Cage’s years in the Pacific Northwest, see Robert Stevenson, “John Cage on His 70th Birthday: West Coast Background,” Inter-American Music Review 5, no. 1 (Fall 1982), 10; and Leta E. Miller, “Cultural Intersections: John Cage in Seattle (1938–1940),” in John Cage: Music, Philosophy, and Intention, 1933–1950, ed. David W. Patterson (New York: Routledge, 2002), 47–82. James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 9–11. On Cage’s relationship to the musical avant-garde, see David Nicholls, American Experimental Music, 1890–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Leta E. Miller, “The Art of Noise: John Cage, Lou Harrison, and the West Coast Percussion Ensemble,” in Perspectives on American Music, 1900–1950, ed. Michael Saffle (New York: Garland, 2000), 215–263; Leta E. Miller, “Henry Cowell and John Cage: Intersections and Influences, 1933–1941,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 59, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 47–112; and David Nicholls, “Cage and the Ultramodernists,” American Music 28, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 492–500.

70 4

5 6

7 8

9 10 11 12

13

Experimentations See George J. Leonard’s comments on Cage’s relationship to the early, historical period of the avant-garde. George J. Leonard, Into the Light of Things: The Art of the Commonplace from Wordsworth to John Cage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), esp. 136–146. Eliza E. Rathbone, Mark Tobey: City Paintings (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1984). John Cage, letter to Adolph Weiss (late April, 1935), repr. in William Bernard George, “Adolph Weiss,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Iowa, 1971, 310. On the date of this letter, see Michael Hicks, “John Cage’s Studies with Schoenberg,” American Music 8, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 136 note 7. Hicks established that Cage traveled to New York to work with Cowell and Weiss in 1934 and returned to Los Angeles with Cowell that December to study with Schoenberg from the spring of 1935 into 1936 (Hicks, 127–130); Nicholls reports the same dates (Nicholls, American Experimental Music, 182). John Cage, “Defense of Satie” (1948), in John Cage: An Anthology, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Da Capo, 1970), 78. John Cage, “Credo,” handwritten manuscript, 1940, John Cage Archive, Music Library, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL; repr. in Barry Michael Williams, “The Early Percussion Music of John Cage, 1935–1943,” Ph.D. dissertation, Michigan State University, 1990, 229. John Cage, “Counterpoint” (1934), in Writings about John Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 16. Ibid., 17. On Cage meeting Moholy-Nagy at Mills College, see Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors (New York: Penguin, 1968), 90. By the time Cage met Tobey and Moholy-Nagy, he was not entirely unaware of the strategy of perceptual estrangement, having practiced a version of it in his painting of the early 1930s. As he recalled about his canvases: “What it was was that I would look at a landscape and instead of seeing it straight, I would see it as though it were spherical. As though it were reflected in the headlight of an automobile … I would look at houses and make them in this curious roundness” (Paul Cummings, “Interview with John Cage,” transcript of tape-recorded interview, May 2, 1974, Archives of American Art, Washington, DC, 4). What had such an effect on Cage, then, walking across Seattle seems to have been less Tobey’s artistic procedure than the particularity of the urban setting in which it was practiced. John Cage, “Reflections of a Progressive Composer on a Damaged Society,” October 82 (Fall 1997): 78; and Sigfried Giedion, “Moholy-Nagy” (1935), in Moholy-Nagy, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Praeger, 1970), 199. Cage also noted the importance of The New Vision and “various books about the Bauhaus” in John Cage

A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers

14

15

16

17

71

and Joan Retallack, Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art, Music (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England, 1996), 87. Cage listed Russolo’s The Art of Noise as one of the books with the greatest influence on his thinking; John Cage, “List No. 2” (1960–61), in John Cage: An Anthology, 138. On Russolo’s role as the initiation of an avant-garde musical aesthetic, see Cage’s comments in Kostelanetz, John Cage (Ex)plain(ed) (New York: Schirmer Books, 1996), 63; and “A Composer’s Confessions” (1948), in John Cage: Writer, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight Editions, 1993), 32. Barry Michael Williams quotes a letter written by Cage to the music critic Peter Yates around 1941, in which Cage relates his Imaginary Landscape No. 1 to Russolo’s work (Untitled document in notebook, John Cage Professor Maestro Percussionist Composer vol. I, John Cage Archive; repr. in B. Williams, 203). On Cage’s relationship to Cowell, see Miller, “Henry Cowell and John Cage”; and Nicholls, “Cage and the Ultramodernists.” Program, “Percussion Concert,” Cornish School Theater, Seattle, December 9, 1938, in notebook John Cage Professor Maestro Percussionist Composer vol. I, John Cage Archive; cited in B. Williams, 11. See also, Theresa Stevens, “Talent Trails: A Column of Chatty Gossip About Your Seattle Neighbors Who Write and Paint,” Seattle Star, February 14, 1939, cited in Stevenson, “John Cage on his Seventieth Birthday,” 13. Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, trans. Barclay Brown (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986), 25; and John Cage, “The Future of Music: Credo” (1940), in Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 3–4. On the dating of Cage’s essay, see Miller, “Cultural Intersections,” 54, 56. For further affinities with Russolo, see Nicholls, American Experimental Music, 190–191; and Nicholls, “Cage and the Ultramodernists,” 496–497. On Cage’s exposure to The Art of Noises, possibly via Varèse or Cowell, see Nicholls, “Cage and the Ultramodernists,” 496; and Miller, “The Art of Noise,” 215. Although Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939) employed a combination of variable-speed turntables and frequency recordings to create dynamic, sliding glissandi in a manner reminiscent of Russolo’s descriptions in The Art of Noises, Cage’s actual knowledge of Russolo’s music would have been extremely limited. Cage applied the term “percussion” widely, using it to refer to any music incorporating noise (see Cage, “A Composer’s Confessions,” 32), and he felt that the music of the future had to be “free from the concept of a fundamental tone” (Cage, “The Future of Music: Credo,” 5). Russolo, on the other hand, was interested primarily in expanding the notion of harmony, rather than doing away with it, arguing that a fundamental tone could be isolated within all noises. See, for example, Russolo, The Art of Noises, 39. Russolo’s famous “noise

72

Experimentations

instruments”—even those with names such as “bursters” and “cracklers”—were not percussive, but involved rotary mechanisms that through variations in speed could, according to him, cover the entirety of a tonal range, creating a microtonal or enharmonic continuum that did away with the separation in steps of the diatonic scale. For the names and a discussion of Russolo’s instruments, see Barclay Brown, “The Noise Instruments of Luigi Russolo,” Perspectives of New Music 20, no. 1/2 (Autumn 1981–Summer 1982): 31–48. Brown also points out that Russolo’s actual music “has a clearly harmonic intent” (36). (It should be noted that Russolo redefines the “fundamental” as the loudest of the complex sounds produced by a noise instrument, not necessarily the actual harmonically fundamental tone.) 18 Russolo, The Art of Noises, 23. 19 “Everyone will recognize that each sound carries with it a tangle of sensations, already well-known and exhausted, which predispose the listener to boredom, in spite of the effects of all musical innovators”; Russolo, The Art of Noises, 25. 20 Russolo, The Art of Noises, 27. 21 Cage, “The Future of Music: Credo,” 3. 22 John Cage, “Listening to Music” (1937/38), in John Cage: Writer, 17. 23 Ibid., 18. 24 Cage, “The Future of Music: Credo,” 4. 25 Cage, “Listening to Music,” 18. 26 Ibid., 17. 27 Ibid. For a discussion of the avant-garde strategy of perceptual estrangement and its romantic pitfalls, see Simon Watney, “Making Strange: The Shattered Mirror,” in Thinking Photography, ed. Victor Burgin (London: Macmillan, 1982), 154–176. 28 Cage, “Listening to Music,” 16. 29 Ibid., 18. 30 Ibid. 31 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 238. 32 Ibid., 226, 238. 33 Ibid., 250 note 19. 34 Ibid. 35 Statement attributed to John Cage in “John Cage Percussion Group Press Release” in 1942 file, John Cage Archive. 36 Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 238. 37 Ibid., 241. 38 Benjamin’s discussion of the dissolution of the “aura” can be found in “The Work of Art.” It is not at all certain that Cage fully shared the avant-garde project of destroying the aura of the work of art at this time. Certainly, he sought through his

A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers

73

music “the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage” (Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 221). However, Cage’s consistent relation of music and musical reception to spiritual impulses reveals an interest in retaining certain dimensions of art’s traditionally cultic orientation. This may reflect Cage’s adherence to an outlook akin to that of Carlos Chavez, whose book Toward a New Music: Music and Electricity (New York: Norton, 1937) Cage found important (Cage, “List No. 2,” 138). In it, Chavez draws conclusions about the role of technology and the technological reproduction of music that are diametrically opposed to those of Benjamin. For Chavez, the use of mechanical reproduction and the electronic transmission of music allow for an increased authenticity of performance and a better approximation of the intentions of the individual, still hierarchically privileged, composer. 39 “Percussionist,” Time magazine 41, no. 8 (February 22, 1943): 70 (ellipses in original). 40 Program for Cage’s percussion concert, Cornish Theatre, Seattle, December 9, 1939, in notebook John Cage Professor Maestro Percussionist Composer vol. I, John Cage Archive; repr. in Miller, “Cultural Intersections,” 61. 41 William Carlos Williams, “George Antheil and the Cantilene Critics: A Note on the First Performance of Antheil’s Music in New York City; April 10–1927,” transition 13 (Summer 1928): 240. 42 See also Cage’s paraphrase of William Carlos Williams in Program, “Cage Percussion Players,” Reed College, Portland, Oregon, February 14, 1940, in notebook John Cage Professor Maestro Percussionist Composer vol. I, John Cage Archive; cited in B. Williams, 14–15; and William Fetterman, John Cage’s Theatre Pieces: Notations and Performances (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996), 3. 43 Thomas S. Hines, “ ‘Then Not Yet “Cage”’: The Los Angeles Years, 1912–1938,” in John Cage: Composed in America, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 81; Retallack, Musicage, 86; and Cage, “List No. 2,” 138. See also Cage’s comment on transition in Conversing with Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight Editions, 1994), 133. 44 Kenneth Silverman, Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 8–10; and Rob Haskins, John Cage (London: Reaktion, 2012), 22–23. 45 Christopher Shultis, “Cage and Europe,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, ed. David Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 22–23. 46 Cage, “List No. 2,” 138. The first period of transition actually comes to a close in June, 1930 with the publication of nos. 19–20 and the suspension of publication at that time. On the difference in the periods of transition, see Dougald McMillan, transition: The History of a Literary Era, 1927–1938 (New York: George Braziller, 1976), 70–71. A copy of transition 26 (1937), for which Duchamp did the cover, was

74

Experimentations

located in Cage’s library at the time of his death. That Cage had no other copies is not surprising since, as Patterson reports, he sold off his book collection for money during the 1950s (David Wayne Patterson, “Appraising the Catchwords, c.1942– 1959: John Cage’s Asian-Derived Rhetoric and the Historical Reference of Black Mountain College,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1996, 134). 47 McMillan, transition, 3–5. 48 For transition’s call for an American avant-garde, see, for example, The Editors, “Introduction,” transition 1 (April 1927): 135–138; Jean George Auriol, “The Occident,” transition 2 (May 1927): 153–159; and Eugene Jolas and Elliot Paul, “A Review,” transition 12 (March 1928): 139–147. 49 Cage, Conversing with Cage, 57. 50 Jolas and Paul, “A Review,” 139. 51 transition 16/17 (June 1929): 13. 52 John Cage, “Goal: New Music, New Dance” (1939), in Silence, 87. 53 Ibid. Cf., for example, Jolas: “But before this development is possible, a continuous subversive action will have to take place. Sympathy for any creative action that tends to destroy the present system should be encouraged … . Combating the sociological and esthetic defenders of this anachronistic regime must be the fundamental aim” (Eugene Jolas, “Super-Occident,” transition 15 [February 1929]: 13). 54 Jolas, “Super-Occident,” 14. 55 Elliot Paul, “Zukunftsmusik,” transition 1 (April 1927): 147–150; George Antheil, “Music Tomorrow,” transition 10 (January 1928): 123–126; Syd S. Salt, “Antheil and America,” transition 12 (March 1928): 176–177; A. Lincoln Gillespie Jr., “Antheil and Stravinsky,” transition 13 (Summer 1928): 142–144; Williams, “George Antheil and the Cantilene Critics”; George Antheil, reply to “Why Do Americans Live in Europe?” transition 14 (Fall 1928): 101–102; and William Carlos Williams, “The Somnambulists,” transition 18 (November 1929): 147–151. 56 Paul, “Zukunftsmusik,” 148. 57 The first line of Cage’s “Future of Music: Credo,” which recalls Russolo, echoes just as clearly Atheil’s pronouncements in “Music Tomorrow”; on Cage’s correspondence with Antheil, see David Revill, The Roaring Silence: John Cage: A Life (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992), 64. 58 See Antheil, “Music Tomorrow,” 124. The relationship between Antheil and Cage’s early avant-garde musical aesthetic has repeatedly been noted, although to my knowledge never fully explored. See Virgil Thomson, “Expressive Percussion” (1945), in John Cage: An Anthology, 72; Henry Cowell, “Current Chronicle” (1952), in John Cage: An Anthology, 97–98; Paul Griffiths, Cage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 11; Revill, The Roaring Silence, 50; Nicholls, American

A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers

75

Experimental Music, 208; and Pritchett, The Music of John Cage, 12. Suzanne Robinson notes that Virgil Thomson “was at pains to establish Cage’s European and American ancestry through the Italian futurists, Cowell, Varèse, and Antheil”; Robinson, “ ‘A Ping, Qualified by a Thud’: Music Criticism in Manhattan and the Case of Cage (1943–58),” The Journal of the Society for American Music 1, no. 1 (February 2007): 93. 59 Antheil, “Music Tomorrow,” 124 (ellipses in original). Antheil’s statement would have received support in the same issue from Elliot Paul who soundly thrashed Cage’s former teacher: “His recent series of concerts in Paris should, it seems to me, remove any lingering suspicions that he is a modern composer” (Paul, “The Schoenberg Legend,” transition 10 [January 1928]: 142). 60 Jolas, “Notes on Reality,” transition 18 (November 1929): 15. 61 Cage, “Listening to Music,” 18. 62 Ibid., 19. 63 Cage, “The Future of Music: Credo,” 3. 64 Russolo, The Art of Noises, 86–87. 65 McMillan, transition, 102. 66 On Jolas’s interest in romanticism, see McMillan, transition, 32–34. 67 McMillan, transition, 102–103. Letters reveal Hausmann and Jolas in agreement on their interpretation of dada, including a revolution in language, an avoidance of political parties, and a certain level of mysticism or religious impulse. See Andreas Kramer and Richard Sheppard, “Raoul Hausmann’s Correspondence with Eugene Jolas,” German Life and Letters 48, no. 1 (January 1995): 39–55. 68 Hugo Ball, “Fragments from a Dada Diary,” transition 25 (Fall 1936): 73. 69 Eugene Jolas, “Vertigral Workshop: Race and Language,” transition 24 (January 1936): 111. This idea was as clearly articulated in transition’s early issues; see, for example, “The Innocuous Enemy,” Jolas’s polemical response to critiques launched by Wyndham Lewis, in transition 16–17 (June 1929): 208. 70 Cage, “The Future of Music: Credo,” 5–6. Cage would write in “Lecture on Something,” “art is a sort of experimental station in which one tries out living” (John Cage, “Lecture on Something” [1951], in Silence, 139). 71 Jean-Jacques Nattiez, ed., The Boulez-Cage Correspondence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 29. 72 Cage, “The Future of Music: Credo,” 5. 73 Eugene Jolas, “Literature and the New Man,” transition 19–20 (June 1930): 19. 74 Cage, “The Future of Music: Credo,” 5. 75 Ibid. 76 Alan Gillmor, “Interview with John Cage,” Contact 14 (Autumn 1976): 18. 77 John Cage, “South Winds in Chicago” (1942), in John Cage: An Anthology, 68.

76

Experimentations

78 Ibid. 79 Perhaps on account of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s more visible embrace of fascism, Cage attempted to distance Russolo from him at the beginning of “The Dreams and Dedications of George Antheil” (1946), in John Cage: An Anthology, 73. On the continued efforts to distance Russolo from fascism, see Luciano Chessa, Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 8–9. 80 Caroline A. Jones, “Finishing School: John Cage and the Abstract Expressionist Ego,” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 4 (Summer 1993): 628–665; Jonathan D. Katz, “John Cage’s Queer Silence; or, How to Avoid Making Matters Worse,” in Writings Through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art, ed. David Bernstein and Christopher Hatch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 41–61; and Philip Gentry, “The Cultural Politics of 4'33"”, in “The Age of Anxiety: Music, Politics, and McCarthyism, 1948–1954,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2008, 165–232. 81 Cage, “Defense of Satie,” 78. On the circumstances and reception of Cage’s lecture, see David Patterson, “Two Cages, One College: Cage at Black Mountain College, 1948 and 1952,” in Black Mountain College Studies 4 (Spring 2013); on line at http://www.blackmountainstudiesjournal.org/wp/?page_id=1866 (last consulted December 27, 2015). 82 Cage, “Defense of Satie,” 79. 83 Ibid., 78. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid., 81. 86 Ibid. 87 On Ananda Coomaraswamy and Cage, see David W. Patterson, “The Picture That Is Not in the Colors: Cage, Coomaraswamy, and the Impact of India,” in John Cage: Music, Philosophy, and Intention, 177–215. Patterson notes that Cage was most likely introduced to Coomaraswamy’s writings by Joseph Campbell soon after 1942 when Cage and Xenia Kashevaroff came to stay with Campbell and his wife, dancer Jean Erdman (Patterson, “The Picture That Is Not in the Colors,” 179–180). 88 Patterson, “The Picture That Is Not in the Colors,” 183–184. 89 John Cage, “The East in the West” (1946), in John Cage: Writer, 25. 90 Cage, “The Dreams and Dedications of George Antheil,” 74. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid. At the time, Cage was undoubtedly unaware of Hedy Lamarr’s role as co-inventer with Antheil of “frequency hopping,” a system for the radio control of airborne torpedoes. 93 Cage, “Defense of Satie,” 81.

A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers

77

94 Cage, “A Composer’s Confessions,” 40, 42–43. 95 Ibid., 44. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid., 43. 98 Cage, “Defense of Satie,” 84. 99 Cage, “A Composer’s Confessions,” 42. On the Huang-Po Doctrine of Universal Mind, see Patterson, “Appraising the Catchwords,” 156–157. 100 John Cage, “Lecture on Nothing” (1950), in Silence, 111. More direct are Cage’s comments in “Satie Controversy”: “Satie, however, was disinterested … Forced, nervous laughter takes place when someone is trying to impress somebody for the purposes of getting somewhere. Satie, free of such interest, entitled his first pieces commissioned by a publisher Three Flabby Preludes for a Dog. It being fairly clear who is referred to by the word ‘dog,’ giving that title was evidently a social act militant in nature”; John Cage, “Satie Controversy” (1950), in John Cage: An Anthology, 89. 101 Conversing with Cage, 174–175. 102 Cage, “A Composer’s Confessions,” 38. 103 Ibid., 41. Cage would later attribute a further transformaton in his appreciation of the city to the work of Robert Rauschenberg; John Cage, “Letter to Paul Henry Lang” (1956), in John Cage: An Anthology, 118. 104 Cage, “Defense of Satie,” 78. 105 Cage, “A Composer’s Confessions,” 41. 106 Such a return to earlier sources is entirely characteristic of Cage’s working method. Cage can be seen to have studied with increasing thoroughness both his Eastern and Western sources, often over a period of several years, in pursuit of his own musical and artistic ends. 107 Cage, “Reflections of a Progressive Composer,” 78–79. 108 László Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision and Abstract of an Artist, trans. Daphne M. Hoffman, 4th rev. ed. (New York: George Wittenborn, Inc., 1947), 15. 109 Ibid. See also the discussion of John Cage and László Moholy-Nagy in Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 110 Jolas, “Literature and the New Man,” 17. 111 On Cage’s rejection of Coomaraswamy’s anti-modernism, see Patterson, “The Picture That Is Not in the Colors,” 200–202. 112 Jolas, “Literature and the New Man,” 17. 113 Ibid. 114 McMillan, transition, 30–31, 44–46. Jolas’s stance against the dehumanization caused by the forces of mechanization developed even before he began transition and was maintained in the face of the increasing pressures of communism

78

115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122

123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131

132 133 134 135 136 137 138

139

Experimentations and fascism. Hugh Fox, “Eugene Jolas and transition: The Mantic Power of the Word,” West Coast Review 7, no.1 (1972): 3; and McMillan, transition, 183. Eugene Jolas, “Notes,” transition 14 (Fall 1928): 181–182. Stuart Gilbert, “The Creator Is Not a Public Servant,” transition 19–20 (June 1930): 148. Ibid., 149 (ellipses in original). Jolas, “Super-Occident,” 12. Ibid., 13. Eugene Jolas, “The Machine and ‘Mystic America,’ ” transition 19–20 (June 1930): 383. Jolas, “Super-Occident,” 12. Jolas, “Literature and the New Man,” 15. Cf. Cage’s comment, “Surrealism … relates to therapy, whereas Dada relates to religion”; Gillmor, “Interview with John Cage,” 21. Jolas, “Literature and the New Man,” 15. Ibid., 17. Cage, “A Composer’s Confessions,” 41. Ibid., 41–42. Carl Jung, “Psychology and Poetry,” transition 19–20 (June 1930): 40–41. Cage, “Defense of Satie,” 84. Cage, “A Composer’s Confessions,” 41. Ibid., 42. Cage, “The East in the West,” 25. Jean-François Lyotard will take up Cage’s relation of Schoenberg and Freud in “Several Silences” (1972), trans. Joseph Maier, in Driftworks (New York: Semiotext(e), 1984), 103–108. Cage, “A Composer’s Confessions,” 34. Cage, “For More New Sounds,” 66. Cage, “The East in the West,” 22. Cage, “Defense of Satie,” 82. John Cage, “Forerunners of Modern Music” (1949), in Silence, 63. John Cage, “Mosaic” (1965), in A Year from Monday (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 45. See letter from Peter Yates to John Cage, June 9, 1960: “Now as to Schoenberg. Putting aside your objection that S[choenberg] is simply Beethoven brought up to date, which is quite true”; located in the John Cage Archive. To a certain extent, this position coincides with Theodor Adorno’s later assessment of Schoenberg’s move from free atonalism to the twelve-tone technique. Theodor W. Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle” (1961), in Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1994), 269–322.

A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers 140 Cage, “Lecture on Nothing,” 117. Cf. Cage, “A Composer’s Confessions,” 39. 141 Cage, “Lecture on Nothing,” 117. 142 Cage, “A Composer’s Confessions,” 40. 143 Ibid., 44. 144 Pritchett, The Music of John Cage, 60–70.

79

2

Hitchhiker in an Omni-Directional Transport: The Spatial Politics of John Cage and Buckminster Fuller

Utopia is not a good concept because even when opposed to History it is still subject to it and lodged within it as an ideal or motivation … To think is to experiment, but experimentation is always that which is in the process of coming about—the new, remarkable, and interesting that replace the appearance of truth and are more demanding than it is. —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? John Cage and Buckminster Fuller first met as faculty at Black Mountain College in the summer of 1948, a period that would prove seminal for both. There, Fuller experimented with Tensegrity structures and made his first attempt at erecting a geodesic dome. This trial was, in the end, a failure, since the “Supine Dome,” as it would become known, resolutely refused to assume a hemispherical shape and remained instead sprawled lifelessly on the ground.1 During the same summer, Cage delivered his infamous lecture “Defense of Satie.” Although, according to some recollections, the talk offended a majority of the faculty with its unequivocal denouncement of Beethoven, Cage nonetheless managed to lay the groundwork for his later artistic position, an aesthetic shift that would lead him to reject dualistic thinking and delve into the multiplicitous realms of chance and indeterminacy. Cage’s lecture was only one of several events comprising a festival that he had organized around the work of composer Erik Satie. In addition to other lectures and recitals, the festival featured a performance of Satie’s play The Ruse of Medusa (1914) with a soonto-be-famous cast that included—in addition to Merce Cunningham and Elaine de Kooning—Buckminster Fuller, who played the lead role of Baron Medusa. By all accounts, Fuller’s three-hour lectures mesmerized his summer audience, Cage included. Already in “Defense of Satie” Cage mentioned

82

Experimentations

Fuller, albeit only to note in passing that he “proposes a new method of living.”2 Two years later, in “Lecture on Something,” Cage again cited Fuller, recalling the architect’s narration of the Eastern and Western migrations of humanity. “Actually there is no longer a question of Orient and Occident,” Cage explained. “All of that is rapidly disappearing; as Bucky Fuller is fond of pointing out: the movement with the wind of the Orient and the movement against the wind of the Occident meet in America and produce a movement upwards into the air—the space, the silence, the nothing that supports us.”3 This passage appears in Cage’s discussion of “enlightenment,” and the concepts of space, silence, and nothingness to which Cage assimilated Fuller’s notion of airborne movement integrally relate to his understanding of that term. According to Cage, an enlightened individual is dedicated to nothingness and thereby free of attachments to taste, desire, and—in his brand of distinctly avant-garde Zen—any form of artistic tradition or conventional limitation. Indeed, in the section immediately following the above passage, Cage implicitly contrasts his own musical embrace of silence and nothingness with other composers still “clinging to the complicated torn-up competitive remnants of tradition.”4 In “History of Experimental Music in the United States,” Cage cited Fuller for a third time, again recounting at length the same tale of human migration. “These two tendencies,” he concluded, “met in America, producing a movement into the air, not bound to the past, traditions, or whatever.”5 Cage reinforced the emancipatory implications of Fuller’s airborne image by defining “that resource which distinguishes [America] from Europe and Asia” as “its capacity to easily break with tradition, to move easily into the air, its capacity for the unseen, its capacity for experimentation.”6 On a musical level, Cage’s image of airborne movement provided a metaphor for freeing sound from its submission to artistic mannerisms and traditional compositional structures. More importantly, however, this concept served as the touchstone for Cage’s larger project of emancipating individuals from the restrictions of oppressive power. “Giving up control so that sounds can be sounds,” he wrote, “means for instance: the conductor of an orchestra is no longer a policeman.”7 * The vision that Cage adopted of an emancipatory movement into the air was central to Fuller’s project. In his 4D proposals of 1928, Fuller had already foreseen an increasingly weightless architecture, the logical outcome of which

Hitchhiker in an Omni-Directional Transport

83

would be permanently airborne homes. “We are leaving the land sphere and progressing ever higher and away from it,” Fuller stated, adding that “Despite ever increasing population there is less and less contact with the earth.”8 Fuller’s mass-produced housing was intended to advance this trend, and he ultimately elaborated the idea into geodesic “Cloud Nines” of a half-mile or more in diameter that would hover about the earth thousands of feet above the ground (Figure 2.1). As such an example makes clear, the most important model for Fuller’s domestic architecture was air travel, and the spatial regime that it would usher into place was modeled on the atmosphere. Life in the ensuing “skyocean world” would resemble a series of layovers: from the Arctic to the Antarctic, one could inhabit for as brief or extended a period as desired any point that could be flown over by airplane. The ability to traverse the globe without pause or impediment represented for Fuller an emancipation not only from geographic particularities but eventually from temporal and seasonal variation as well.9 Humanity would accede to a realm of homogeneity approaching that of geometric abstraction. Fuller presented spatial expansiveness more as an imperative than an option. In the essay that accompanied his 4D sketchbook, he asserted that dispersion of the population was already a foregone conclusion. “Henry Ford with his automobiles and airplanes, the great railroad systems, for long the backbone

Figure 2.1  Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao, Project for Floating Cloud Structures (Cloud Nines), 1960.

84

Experimentations

of national investment, are providing transportation of excellence hardly realized, greatly enhanced by the new vast bus mileage. Everything points towards decentralization.”10 In the way he deployed his 4D towers (which were to be flown from the manufacturing plant to their sites by zeppelin), Fuller incorporated and hypostatized decentralization’s centrifugal force. For Fuller, such mobility was a prerequisite of individual freedom, a freedom which found an early instantiation in Fuller’s omni-directional transport: an amphibious automobile-aircraft originally intended to be capable of taking off from and landing on virtually any terrain (Figure 2.2). This dream of unlimited mobility guided Fuller’s entire career, finding expression not only in the helicoptercarried geodesic domes of the 1950s and the “mechanical wing” trailer of the decade before but also in the more distant visions of “floating tetrahedronal cities,” “air-deliverable skyscrapers,” “flyable dwelling machines,” and “rentable, autonomous-living black boxes.”11 As Anne Hewlett Fuller described it, the world that her husband’s programs would provide was “a continually shifting population living in houses which can be moved from place to place, from country to country, and cities which grow up and melt away in a season.”12

Figure 2.2  Buckminster Fuller, Sketch for 4D Transportation Unit, ca. 1929.

Hitchhiker in an Omni-Directional Transport

85

For Fuller, a mobile, airborne architecture represented more than a metaphor of emancipation; it was presented as no less than the means of liberation from despotic oppression. Fuller called this “feudalism” and defined political force as “one of the survivals of feudalistic patronage systems, embodying self indulgence of the few.”13 Amalgamating the concepts of space and power, he described feudalism in terms of the same elements of static architecture that he so vehemently opposed. Primary among those was weight, and Fuller explained that “As part and parcel of the era before the metalic or mechanistic age [of which his own housing would form a part], was the feudal system with its stone age or oppressive style of building, its oppressive style of living, its maintenance of ignorance by the masses.”14 Such ignorance was fostered by the continued concentration of urban populations: “Unscrupulousness in politics thrives on the unenlightenment, and unindividualism of mobs,” Fuller explained. “So called ‘Mob psychology’ is only group motivation through animal instinct, selfconsciously denying itself of its individual reasoning power, ‘Believing’ anything it may be told by its feudalistic master.”15 Fuller’s model of decentralization would counteract such control: “The hold of all creeds and sects, dependent on close mass control must be broken with decentralization, health and happiness. The enforced familiarity of massed city living, which surely breeds contempt will be dispersed with decentralization to be replaced by honor and clarity of thought.”16 Feudal political domination, Fuller contended, also depended on containing people within national and geographic borders and the “legislation of the relatively diminishing land units.”17 Increased domestic mobility would thus do away with such limitations, and Fuller fearlessly predicted that “In the complete independence of the new home will the last of feudalistic boundaries be erased.”18 In the fight for acceptance of his architectural program, Fuller felt that he had a very important ally. Simply put, truth was on his side. “There is only one truth,” he declared, “and therefor anything based on a lie or fallacy is wrong and must eventually go.”19 While Fuller’s confidence in truth was offered as the philosophical guarantee for his architectural vision, in fact the two were reflections of one another—the supposed universality of truth corresponding to the single spatial expanse into which his architecture would transform the world. Furthermore, the unique nature of truth served to justify architectural standardization. “As mechanical truths are revealed,” Fuller reasoned, “so do we progress towards perfection; though there can be no absolute perfection in

86

Experimentations

the material world. So has the automobile or airplane continually approached perfection. As it has approached perfection, by the process of the application of truth, so has it approached one final design.”20 Or, as Fuller summed up succinctly, “Standard then means truth and should no more be avoided than truth.”21 At the beginning of his career, Fuller was so certain that the evident truth and rationality of his plans for mass-produced housing would eliminate outdated architectural traditions that he implored his mother to divest herself immediately of the family’s mainland property, since real estate prices would plummet with the adoption of 4D.22 When his ideas met with unforeseen resistance, however, Fuller had to explain how people could fail to embrace such a beneficial plan. In other words, Fuller had to devise a theory of ideology. To the ignorance that prevented massed, static populations from adopting his plans, Fuller added a number of other factors, ranging from overt political suppression to the overabundance of commercial advertising that crowded out the news of his discoveries. By 1970, he would list the following factors as barriers to the “timely recognition of the fundamentals of evolution”: “vision-blinding national and local egocentricities; obsessions with legendary ‘perfections’ of yesterday; preoccupation with murder and scandal news; molelike shortsightedness developed by constant attention to beforethe-nose successive personal and local crises and ambitions; narrowness of focus due to specialization; pride; inferiority complex; and spring fever.”23 Nevertheless, despite an ever-widening range of possible explanations, Fuller never advanced beyond a notion of ideology as false consciousness in which the unenlightenment of the masses assured the reproduction of social relations for the benefit of those in power. This becomes evident in the fables that Fuller created to illustrate his ideas, such as the alien finance capitalists of planet 80XK 23 who, in Nine Chains to the Moon, deflected the progression of industry for their own benefit or, later, the “great, master world pirates” of Utopia and Oblivion, who foisted specialization onto the landlocked populace and used universal truths for their own ends.24 Fuller’s confidence that the simple demonstration of truth would suffice to dispel illusion explains the importance he placed on creating a device to present a clear, visual depiction of the worldwide trends on which he justified his program. From The Game of Life, to the Minni-Earth or Geoscope, to The World Game, Fuller proposed means to reveal the progression of such trends as global population migrations and the flows of capital and natural resources. Once charted globally, these could be projected forward to display their future

Hitchhiker in an Omni-Directional Transport

87

development and demonstrate the supposed inevitability of Fuller’s plans. Because of his belief in the relative transparency of universal and rational truths, Fuller had absolute confidence in the validity and accuracy of the predictions made accordingly. At times, he spoke of his role as that of neither an inventor nor a visionary but simply of one who understood the direction of existing trends. Only an irrational act of political destruction, it seemed, could threaten their teleological progression. Yet, for all their apparent audaciousness, Fuller’s prognostications about life in the future ultimately collapse into the linear projection of present circumstances. Such positivism precludes from the outset consideration of any development that would be opaque, unknown, or external to a contemporary understanding. Theodor Adorno, discussing the antithetical, but equally positivist utopianism of Aldous Huxley, clearly delineated the limitations of such futurology: [T]he very attempt to see into the distant future in order to puzzle out the concrete form of the non-existent is beset with the impotence of presumption … . No matter how well equipped technologically and materially, no matter how correct from a scientific point of view the fully drawn utopia may be, the very undertaking is a regression to a philosophy of identity, to idealism.25

The spatial homogeneity and architectural standardization of Fuller’s future appear as the strict analogues of this philosophy of identity. Universal accessibility is gained at the cost of rendering the world universally similar. A Fulleresque critique of ideology—where irrationally imposed power gives way to abstract truth—merely substitutes one form of transcendence for another. Although Fuller foresaw people inhabiting this second abstraction rather than being reigned over by it, the emancipatory effect of this substitution is by no means self-evident. One must take into account the sensation of living in this future world, a sensation evoked, perhaps inadvertently, by Fuller’s description of the dynamic point of view that accorded with his architectural vision. “The reorientation [from a static to a dynamic frame of reference] is severe,” he wrote, “because it is more than an uprooting. Realization of relativity spontaneously evokes a springing, to dive from a then vanishing springboard into an infinite dynamic sea where man must learn to swim tirelessly, naturally, before he sinks.”26 Not only does this passage make particularly clear both the imperative of motion and the homogeneity of Fuller’s version of a liberated future, but it

88

Experimentations

uncannily recalls what Ernst Bloch described as “the strongest counter-utopia.” “There is a picture by Voltaire of despair,” Bloch offered in conversation with Adorno, the total despair of a shipwrecked man who is swimming in the waves and struggling and squirming for his life when he receives the message that this ocean in which he finds himself does not have a shore but that death is completely in the now in which the shipwrecked man finds himself. That is why the striving of the swimmer will lead to nothing, for he will never land. It will always remain the same.27

While Bloch was the twentieth century’s most dedicated philosopher of utopia, a more apposite description of a Fulleresque counterutopia may be found in the less exalted figure of Rod Serling. In a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone, Serling modernized the scenario described by Bloch into the plight of Nan Adams: a driver on an endless road, dead but not yet knowing it, continuously moving from place to place and encountering everywhere virtually identical gas stations, farmhouses, and the exact same hitchhiker. Substitute geodesic domes for gas stations, and Serling’s picture of despair puts a darker cast on Fuller’s vision of the future. * In his inveterate optimism, Cage would never have emphasized the dark side of Fuller’s project. On the contrary, Fuller’s airborne metaphor seems to have encouraged Cage to assimilate his own notion of emancipation to a certain spatial morphology. According to Cage, the most stultifying musical limitation was the harmonic scale, the discrete divisions of which he likened to “moving along steppingstones.”28 Noting that “one may fly if one is willing to give up walking,” Cage juxtaposed such harmonic limitations to the wholly undivided sound-space that experimental music made available.29 “This cautious stepping is not characteristic of the possibilities of magnetic tape,” he stated, “which is revealing to us that musical action or existence can occur at any point or along any line or curve or what have you in total sound-space.”30 Like the atmospheric space described by Fuller, Cage’s sound-space ignored boundaries and divisions: “Any sound at any point in this total sound-space can move to become a sound at any other point.”31 Cage placed virtually no limitations upon a sound’s acoustic parameters and made no distinction between musical sound and so-called nonmusical noises. “We’re getting into our heads that existence, the existence

Hitchhiker in an Omni-Directional Transport

89

of a sound, for instance, is a field phenomenon,” he explained, “not one limited to known discrete points in that field—the conventionally accepted ones—but capable of appearance at any point in the field” (Figure 2.3).32 Although Cage’s space resembles Fuller’s in that it allows for unhampered mobility, it reveals a radically different texture. Rather than invariably uniform in character, Cagean space is thoroughly inhomogeneous and phenomenologically  distinct at each and every point. “I believe, of course,” Cage explained, “that what we’re doing is exploring a field, that the field is limitless and without qualitative differentiation but with multiplicity of differences.”33 Although not qualitatively distinct in the sense of being hierarchically ordered (i.e., no part is qualitatively “better” than any other), the differences constituting Cagean space are neither commensurate nor exchangeable, and the corresponding spatial field is neither continuous, nor predictable. Instead, as James Pritchett described Cage’s music, “events can happen suddenly, at any time, and then disappear just as suddenly.”34 In a piece such as Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–58), even the passage of time cannot be foreseen since the conductor becomes, in essence, a clock whose arms advance at unpredictably varying speeds.35 If Fuller’s space reflects the uniformity and universal exchangeability of idealistic abstraction, Cagean space acknowledges the wider, infinitely diversified field of the non-identical. As such, one must relinquish any idea of accurately forecasting a trajectory through that space. “In view, then, of a totality of possibilities,” Cage explained, “no knowing action is commensurate, since the

Figure 2.3 John Cage, Concert for Piano and Orchestra, 1957–58. Solo for Piano, notation T.

90

Experimentations

character of the knowledge acted upon prohibits all but some eventualities.”36 For Cage, like Adorno, history could not be foretold by extrapolating the present into the future. Rather, “History is the story of original actions.”37 Ironically, it is the same concept of “experimentation” that Cage linked to Fuller’s image of airborne movement that most clearly distinguishes his epistemological outlook from that of the Dymaxion architect. Explicitly countering the methodology underlying Fuller’s prophesying, Cage defined “experimental action” as “an action the outcome of which is not foreseen.”38 Such experimentation, Cage noted, “does not move in terms of approximations and errors, as ‘informed’ action by its nature must, for no mental images of what would happen were set up beforehand; it sees things directly as they are: impermanently involved in an infinite play of interpenetrations.”39 For Cage, the indeterminate results of experimental actions made it possible to leap beyond normative or predictable categories. “It is therefore very useful,” Cage explained, “if one has decided that sounds are to come into their own, rather than being exploited to express sentiments or ideas of order.”40 In contrast to Fuller, Cage’s concept of experimentation proposed a means of escape from traditional or ideological limitations without resorting to another form of abstraction. The Cagean project at its most radical would effect an anarchistic decoding of all forms of transcendence. Any overarching, normative structure would collapse into the multiplicitous discontinuity of a single plane or field, one inseparable from quotidian existence. Thus, Cage’s interest in Eastern religion must be seen as fused with a certain materialism; Cagean enlightenment is a distinctly worldly condition.41 It is the antitranscendental thrust of Cage’s project, with its challenges to ideology, purely rational subjectivity, and dialectical thinking, that appealed to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose ideas of experimentation and smooth space relate directly to those of the composer.42 Despite Cage’s initial affinity for Fuller’s example, the model of movement through Cagean space is less that of an airplane than that of a lost traveler: someone who might move in an apparently straight line only to come unexpectedly back to familiar points or else realize that he or she has traveled much further than predicted, arriving “without visible transition in distant places.”43 It is this notion of space that connects Cage’s musical ideas to his infamous mushroom hunts. When discussing the latter, Cage often related how he found a certain species of mushroom at an unforeseen location or how an area already traversed was suddenly transformed by a previously unnoticed stand of edible fungi.44 Cagean space consists of specific micro-differentiations

Hitchhiker in an Omni-Directional Transport

91

Figure 2.4  John Cage Picking Mushrooms, 1967.

of this sort, not vast, abstract, eventless expanses. As Cage noted, “any woods will do for my wandering in them, and nothing could be more frustrating than our necessary long trips that take us quickly over large territories, each square foot of which would be suitable for exploration” (Figure 2.4).45

92

Experimentations

* If Cage’s idea of experimentation has the advantage of counteracting the predictionism to which Fuller fell prey, the latter’s vision of globalization is not thereby rendered insignificant. Its ultimate importance, however, lies not in providing a ready blueprint for emancipation or in presenting an architectural model of universal truth but rather in depicting the intertwined phenomena of capitalist “deterritorialization” and the spatial aspirations of a globalized military machine. An acceleration of the movements of capital and an intensified strategy of capitalist reinvestment were prerequisites for Fuller’s architectural plans. Elimination of the gold standard and an expansion of rapid credit were to accompany an accelerated cycle of consumption, obsolescence, recycling, and replacement of goods.46 Indeed, this dynamic of industrialized capitalism seems actually to have served Fuller as the driving force behind liberation from feudalism. According to him, trade and industry, as opposed to the divisions fostered by politics, tended toward universal integration. “This world-identityonly trending of big business,” Fuller wrote, “promises a surprise which is that world citizenship will not occur as a political initiative. The economics of this exploding industrial-world activity soon will require world citizenship for its personnel.”47 The comprehensive scope and universal interchangeability of Fuller’s future spatial regime echoed both the expansive movement of the supranational flows of capital and the increasing importance of economic and symbolic exchange value that defined consumer society. “Industrialization,” wrote Fuller, by which he encompassed all aspects of production, distribution, and consumption, “is inherently comprehensive and omni-interrelated in respect to all humanity and all of humanity’s ecological environment. This includes the sun and moon and all physical phenomena.”48 Ultimately such industry was to supplant politics altogether; Fuller even predicted that “The ever more economically important stock market will eventually replace the political polling booth for registration of public opinion.”49 These beliefs followed in part from Fuller’s reduction of all political conflict to the competition for goods amid scarcity. Political strife could therefore be eliminated by the technological achievement of worldwide abundance. Once again, however, Fuller’s image of a universal society reveals itself to be the product of idealism. Here, we might follow the political theorist Chantal Mouffe, who argues that the political cannot simply be eliminated in favor of the economic because (since any social identity must be defined through

Hitchhiker in an Omni-Directional Transport

93

opposition to another) political divisions are inherent in the very constitution of society.50 On the other hand, even given the possibility that the economic could abolish the political, the dynamic of capitalist development is such that it never operates without limitation. Extrapolating from a passage by Marx, Deleuze and Guattari propose that although capitalism has the capability of effecting an ever wider series of deterritorializations, it cannot do so without simultaneously reterritorializing itself in the erection of further limitations and boundaries: Under the first aspect capitalism is continually surpassing its own limits, always deterritorializing further, “displaying a cosmopolitan, universal energy which overthrows every restriction and bond”; but under the second, strictly complementary, aspect, capitalism is continually confronting limits and barriers that are interior and immanent to itself, and that, precisely because they are immanent, let themselves be overcome only provided they are reproduced on a wider scale (always more reterritorialization—local, world-wide, planetary).51

Although Fuller longed for a state of such impossibly complete deterritorialization, he did not overlook this dynamic. He failed, however, to consider the immanent nature of capitalism’s limitations. In Fuller’s writings, power appears in only one form: the despotic structure of feudalism. Thus, he could only understand barriers to industrial and economic development as resulting from the external impositions of a despotic, most often personified, law. “The exploiters,” as Fuller termed unenlightened capitalist leaders, “successively successful, have attempted in vain to anchor or freeze the dynamic expansion [of industry] at the particular phase of wealth generation which they had come to monopolize.”52 Although Fuller’s universal, homogeneous space seems no more than an idealization, it was one nonetheless coveted by modern military power. As expressed most cogently by Paul Virilio in L’Insécurité du territoire, weaponry’s ascension into the air led to the effective homogenization of space and the concomitant possibility of eliminating fronts and frontiers.53 As a result, the military became, at least in theory, privy to the entirety of Fuller’s “skyocean world,” freed of geographic impediments and able to engulf the globe in the totalized threat exemplified by nuclear arms. Fuller was aware of the role that military technology played in the development of an unimpeded spatiality; according to him, all technological advances had their roots in military applications, and his were no exception. Although it was always Fuller’s goal to appropriate the developments of weaponry (or “killingry” as he dubbed it)

94

Experimentations

to further “livingry,” the resemblance of Fulleresque space to the space sought by the military was not lost on the armed forces who showed a consistent interest in Fuller’s architectural production. It is not, after all, wholly by chance that the DEW (Distant Early Warning) line is marked out by Fuller’s geodesic radomes (Figure 2.5).

Figure 2.5  Buckminster Fuller watching U.S. Marine Corps helicopter transporting a geodesic dome, 1954.

Hitchhiker in an Omni-Directional Transport

95

If we are to attribute such universalist notions to idealism, then the totalized oppression of a single military power reveals itself as another of its guises. The ultimate failure of such an impossibly heady dream of power might be addressed (via Mouffe again) through the continued intractability of political divisions in the post–Cold War era and the resurgent proliferation of nationalist and ethnic divisiveness. Or, we may continue to follow the argument laid out by Virilio and adopted by Deleuze and Guattari: that the universalizing development of militarized space brought about the reinscription of frontiers inside the regions thereby subsumed and a redefinition of the enemy as diffused throughout the ensuing spatial regime. Command over such a situation is seen to necessitate continuous efforts of detection and repression, thus giving rise to the regime of power that Deleuze dubbed “control society,” where both despotic power and disciplinary confinement give way to ever finer and more intricate networks of control not imposed from above but circulating immanently throughout the plane of social existence.54 These networks are characterized by continual checks on location, identity, and behavior made possible by the technologies of surveillance and computerization. Such a diffuse mode of power no longer finds its spatial model in the weighty, despotic structures Fuller opposed, with their circumscribed possibilities of movement, but in a weightless web of ceaseless control, able to track an unbound subject across even the most wide-open expanses.55 In this light, Fuller’s model of unimpeded movement can no longer be accepted de facto as a viable image of liberation but must be seen as historically outmoded. * In the 1950s, Cage radicalized Fuller’s vision of a uniform and interchangeable emancipatory space into one of multiplicitous heterogeneity. When, in the following decade, he turned toward a more explicit program of social change and began to engage once again with Fuller’s thinking (although, as late as 1961, he had still not actually read any of Fuller’s books), he faced the difficulty of having to reconcile the discrepancies between their two visions.56 Cage’s solution consisted of accentuating the contrast between the two spatial regimes while viewing them as coexistent. In part, Cage assimilated Fuller’s ideas on comprehensive design and the rational planning of utilities to his own definition of musical structure. Put briefly, Cagean structure was intended to function without regulating the existing sound-space within and around it. When attributed to Fuller’s global utilities, Cage’s idea of a structure—which, as he explained, “doesn’t

96

Experimentations

seem to me to affect anything that happens in it”—prophesied an unassuming infrastructural organization both invisible and unoppressive.57 Regarded in this fashion, Cage could understand Fuller’s comprehensive design and his own version of liberated existence as complementary rather than mutually exclusive. “Now what will happen when it [the past, the world] is organized?” Cage asked himself. “We then will be able to take great advantage from being ourselves disorganized. We will be able to socially be anarchists individually to live in chaos.”58 The texture of Cage’s liberated life, as this statement indicates, was to be as unpredictable, inhomogeneous, and infinitely differentiated as the sound-space of his compositions. As he put it elsewhere, “It’ll be like living a painting by [Jasper] Johns: Stars and Stripes’ll be utilities, our daily lives the brushstrokes.”59 However, while Cage’s solution of submerging the regular structure of Fuller’s utilities into his own radically heterogeneous space entailed accepting certain of the architect’s predictions, never was the tension between either their epistemological or their spatial concepts fully resolved. Instead, Cage implied that his differentiated space would become increasingly necessary to counteract the homogeneity of the world Fuller envisioned. “I think it quite inevitable,” Cage contended, that within I don’t know how many decades but not too many, all the houses will be geodesic in structure, and our houses will be as identical to one another as our telephones are. Now, in a world like that, the perceiving of difference in the repeated, mass-produced items is going to be of the greatest concern to us.60

If Cage could reconcile his and Fuller’s spatial projects, it may be because they both rest upon an underlying and potentially limiting assumption. Despite describing a more radical emancipatory spatiality, Cage seemed to share Fuller’s understanding of power as overwhelmingly characterized by despotic law. This is evident in Cage’s descriptions of “the cumbersome, top-heavy structure of musical prohibitions,” as well as in references to the imposing forces of the police and political organizations.61 And while Cage rejected Fuller’s abstract notion of liberation in favor of an antitranscendental enlightenment, the spatial model corresponding to this vision still postulated an unrestricted mobility. The enlightened subject is, as Cage put it simply, “no longer attached.”62 It is on this front that an effective critique of the Cagean project might begin, not through the persistent charge of a supposedly uncritical aestheticization of everyday life so often leveled against him. In the postmodern world that Cage’s thinking has

Hitchhiker in an Omni-Directional Transport

97

done so much to usher in, power itself has eschewed limiting, transcendent structures and evolved into intricate networks of freely circulating control. If we accept these conditions, then the equation of movement with freedom in Cage’s model of emancipation would ultimately be as outmoded as Fuller’s. Given the inveterate optimism of both Cage and Fuller (whose interactions, as we will see in Chapter 5, continued well into the following decades), concluding our analysis at this point may seem overly pessimistic. Yet, the dark side of things has its attractions. After all, the point to remember from that 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone is not the freedom found in Nan Adams’s crosscountry vacation but the control effected by the hitchhiker watching from the rear-view mirror.

Notes On Cage and Fuller at Black Mountain College, see Mary Emma Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987); and Eva Díaz, The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 2 John Cage, “Defense of Satie” (1948), in John Cage: An Anthology, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Da Capo, 1970), 79. 3 John Cage, “Lecture on Something” (1951), in Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 143; cf. Buckminster Fuller, Ideas and Integrities (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963), 130–131. 4 Cage, “Lecture on Something,” 144. 5 John Cage, “History of Experimental Music in the United States” (1959), in Silence, 73. 6 Ibid., 73–74. 7 Ibid., 72. 8 Buckminster Fuller, 4D Time Lock (1928; Albuquerque, NM: Biotechnic Press, 1970), 32–33. 9 Buckminster Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion (London: Allen Lane, 1970), 407. 10 Fuller, 4D Time Lock, 8. 11 Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion, 407. 12 Fuller, 4D Time Lock, 78. 13 Ibid., 5–6. 14 Ibid., 12. 15 Ibid., 6. 1

98

Experimentations

16 Ibid., 5. 17 Ibid., 31. 18 Ibid., 34. 19 Ibid., 10. 20 Ibid., 11. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 73. 23 Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion, 311. 24 Buckminster Fuller, Nine Chains to the Moon (New York: J.B. Lippincott, 1938); and Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion. 25 Theodor Adorno, “Aldous Huxley and Utopia,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 116. 26 Fuller, Ideas and Integrities, 232. 27 “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing,” in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 9. 28 John Cage, “45' for a Speaker” (1954), in Silence, 183. 29 John Cage, “Experimental Music” (1957), in Silence, 9. 30 Cage, “Experimental Music,” 9. 31 Ibid. 32 John Cage, “Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?” (1961), in Silence, 199. 33 Ibid., 204–205. 34 James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 57. 35 John Cage, “Composition as Process II: Indeterminacy” (1958), in Silence, 40. 36 John Cage, “Experimental Music: Doctrine” (1955), in Silence, 15. 37 Cage, “History of Experimental Music in the United States,” 75. 38 Ibid., 69. 39 Cage, “Experimental Music: Doctrine,” 15. 40 Cage, “History of Experimental Music in the United States,” 69. 41 “We learned from Oriental thought that those divine influences are, in fact, the environment in which we are”; John Cage, “Memoir” (1966), in John Cage: An Anthology, 77. 42 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 370–371. Deleuze and Guattari attribute the notion of smooth space most explicitly to Pierre Boulez; nevertheless, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 267, where they

Hitchhiker in an Omni-Directional Transport

99

note: “It is undoubtedly John Cage who first and most perfectly deployed this fixed sound plane, which affirms a process against all structure and genesis, a floating time against pulsed time or tempo, experimentation against any kind of interpretation, and in which silence as sonorous rest also marks the absolute state of movement.” 43 Cage, “Experimental Music,” 9. Cage relates being lost in the woods in “Diary: Emma Lake Music Workshop 1965,” in A Year from Monday (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 23–24. 44 John Cage, “Indeterminacy” (1958), in Silence, 264–265; Cage, A Year from Monday, 25. 45 Cage, “Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?” 218–219. 46 Fuller, 4D Time Lock, 143. 47 Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion, 132. 48 Ibid., 370–371. 49 Fuller, 4D Time Lock, 19. 50 Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (New York: Verso, 1993). 51 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 259. 52 Fuller, Ideas and Integrities, 180. 53 Paul Virilio, L’insécurité du territoire, 2nd ed. (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993). 54 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” in Negotiations, 1972–1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 177–182. 55 See Deleuze and Guattari’s commentaries on Virilio in A Thousand Plateaus, esp. 466–469 and 571 note 64; and Virilio, L’Insécurité du territoire, esp. 155–161 and 211–242. Deleuze sketches three regimes of power (sovereignty, discipline, and control) in “Postscript on Control Societies,” 177–182; and provides the spatial model of control in “Control and Becoming,” in Negotiations, 175. 56 John Cage, “List No. 2,” in John Cage: An Anthology, 139. Laura Kuhn notes Cage’s difficulty in resolving his ideas with those of Fuller in Laura Kuhn, “John Cage’s ‘Europeras 1 & 2’: The Musical Means of Revolution,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1992, 220 ff. 57 Cage, “45' for a Speaker,” 159. 58 John Cage, “The Cage around Us,” Connection: Visual Arts at Harvard 4, no. 2 (Spring 1967): 23. 59 John Cage, “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) 1965,” in A Year from Monday, 19. 60 John Cage, “Questions,” Perspecta 11 (1967): 71. 61 John Cage, “Goal: New Music, New Dance” (1939), in Silence, 87. 62 Cage, “Lecture on Something,” 143.

3

The Architecture of Silence

In 1961, Gyorgy Kepes invited John Cage to contribute an article to the book Module, Proportion, Symmetry, Rhythm, part of the series he was editing under the collective title Vision and Value. When the anthology appeared, Kepes pitched Cage’s article “Rhythm Etc.” as “a personal statement on the creative power and use of the module, rhythm, and proportion,” although he knew full well that Cage—sounding the only discordant voice in the collection— had expressly opposed the aesthetic value of any of the aforementioned principles.1 When preparing “Rhythm Etc.,” Cage correctly surmised that what united the themes of Kepes’s book was an interest in Le Corbusier’s proportional measuring device, the Modulor, and it was against this that Cage directed his critique (Figure 3.1). Cage was, not surprisingly, annoyed at what he called the “farfetched analogy to music of previous times” that ran through Le Corbusier’s book on the Modulor.2 More significantly, however, as an instrument of visual and architectonic harmony, the Modulor was diametrically opposed to Cage’s own artistic project, which was premised on the rejection of harmony as a legitimate basis for musical composition. Cage saw harmony as an outdated and abstract ordering principle which served to regulate the otherwise continuous field of sound, and he sought in his own work to substitute for harmony different structures, based solely on lengths of time. (Although Cage termed these “rhythmic structures,” they had little to do with conventional rhythm as such.)3 If Cage hoped definitively to end the reign of musical harmony, Le Corbusier proposed to extend it, by using the Modulor as a means of propagating harmonic proportion throughout the realms of the visual and the architectonic. As Le Corbusier envisioned it, the Modulor would play a role at every building site as a proportional scale that would “serve as a rule for

102

Experimentations

Figure 3.1  Le Corbusier, The Modulor, ca. 1945.

the whole project, a norm offering an endless series of different combinations and proportions,” which, “different and varied as they are, will be united in harmony.”4 Cage responded to Le Corbusier’s project with unequivocal condemnation and exposed what he saw as the authoritarian implications of the Modulor. As Cage stated, “once the measurements are made (not in rubber but in some inflexible material), the proper relationships determined (…), a police force is in order.”5 As proof, he cited a passage from Le Corbusier’s own text: “Concord between men and machines, sensitivity and mathematics, a harvest of prodigious harmonies reaped from numbers: the grid of proportions. This

The Architecture of Silence

103

art … will be acquired by the effort of men of good will, but it will be contested and attacked … . It must be proclaimed by law.”6 To this decree, Cage replied succinctly, “Art this is called. Its shape is that of tyranny.”7 However, against the impending threat of Le Corbusier’s “reign of harmony,” Cage did not immediately counterpose the example of his own music, instead making reference to the alternative of a vitreous architecture.8 “Unless we find some way to get out we’re lost,” he warned, and then, “The more glass, I say, the better.”9 Although never mentioned by name, an important intermediary who facilitated the debate between Cage and Le Corbusier was the architect Paul Williams. Williams studied for some years at the Harvard School of Architecture and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), but was, more importantly, a student and resident architect at Black Mountain College where he met Cage in 1948.10 It was from Williams that Cage borrowed the copy of Modulor that he studied to prepare “Rhythm Etc.”11 Moreover, it was one of Williams’s buildings that Cage had in mind when alluding to an anti-authoritarian architecture of glass. This building, in fact, was none other than Cage’s own home. Since the summer of 1954, Cage had lived at the Gatehill Cooperative Community in Stony Point, New York, an experiment in communal living organized to function, in part, as a successor to that aspect of Black Mountain College (Figure 3.2).12 Located in Gatehill’s upper square, Cage’s apartment occupied the western quarter of a duplex that he shared with Paul Williams and the rest of the architect’s family. Like the other buildings surrounding the upper square, the Williams-Cage House evinces a high modernist formal sensibility akin to that of Marcel Breuer’s contemporary domestic architecture. Supported by a weighty central core and barely perceptible wooden columns, the rectangular mass of the house rests, on one side, against the upper slope of a densely forested hillside, while the opposite end of the structure stretches out at some distance above the ground. The main structure’s sense of lightness, which is accentuated by its exceedingly thin lines and windows that run from floor to ceiling, makes the building appear almost to perch atop the site. Contrasting with the building’s sylvan environment, the frame is clad in panels of prefabricated, industrial materials, ranging in texture from corrugated aluminum to fiberglass and asbestos (Figures 3.3 and 3.4). Separated from the remainder of the building by a free stone wall that Cage and Vera Williams built by hand, Cage’s living quarters, with the exception of a small bath and kitchenette, consisted originally of a single room, the western

104

Experimentations

Figure 3.2  Paul Williams, Gatehill Cooperative Community, ca. 1956. Western facade of Williams-Cage House visible at lower left.

Figure 3.3  Paul Williams, South facade of Williams-Cage House, ca. 1956.

The Architecture of Silence

105

Figure 3.4  Paul Williams, Drawing for Williams-Cage House, ca. 1954.

and southern walls of which were made up almost entirely of vertically sectioned glass windows. While the southern view looks out onto the other buildings at Gatehill, the western wall faces directly onto the steeply climbing hillside. This wall is the most striking aspect of the building, for Paul Williams designed it to slide open, coming to rest in a large wooden frame that stands next to the building as an extension of the facade. It was to this feature that Cage referred when he wrote in “Rhythm Etc.”: “Not only the windows, this year, even though they’re small, will open: one whole wall slides away when I have the strength or assistance to push it. And what do I enter?” Cage asked, once more taking a swipe at Le Corbusier, “Not proportion. The clutter of the unkempt forest.”13 While such a specific reference to the Williams-Cage House is unique to Cage’s polemic against Le Corbusier, it nonetheless forms part of a larger discursive figuration of glass and glass architecture that surfaces repeatedly throughout Cage’s statements and writings. Far from being simply a convenient metaphor, what I would like to argue is that this architectural trope is of particular importance for understanding the specificity of the neo-avant-garde artistic project that Cage pursued throughout the 1950s. The earliest reference to glass architecture that can be found in Cage’s writings occurs in the “Juilliard Lecture” of 1952. There, Cage stated with regard

106

Experimentations

to contemporary music, “It acts in such a way that one can ‘hear through’ a piece of music just as one can see through some modern buildings or see though a wire sculpture by Richard Lippold or the glass of Marcel Duchamp.”14 It is not insignificant that this first reference appeared in 1952, for that year marks the composition of Cage’s most famous work, 4'33": the manifesto presentation of his definition of silence as the presence of ambient and unintentional noise rather than the complete absence of sound. Indeed, the passage quoted from the “Juilliard Lecture” might well refer to 4'33", for as originally composed, the work consisted solely of an empty time-structure of three silent movements through which any sounds emanating from the environment could flow. Over the years, Cage would more explicitly relate his understanding of silence to the material properties of glass. In a lecture entitled “Experimental Music,” given in Chicago in 1957, Cage stated, For in this new music nothing takes place but sounds: those that are notated and those that are not. Those that are not notated appear in the written music as silences, opening the doors of the music to the sounds that happen to be in the environment. This openness exists in the fields of modern sculpture and architecture. The glass houses of Mies van der Rohe reflect their environment, presenting to the eye images of clouds, trees, or grass, according to the situation. And while looking at the constructions in wire of the sculptor Richard Lippold, it is inevitable that one will see other things, and people too, if they happen to be there at the same time, through the network of wires. There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.15

In the way that it subtly interrelates the conceptions of vision and hearing, space and time, music, sculpture, and architecture, this passage proves much richer and more complex than that in the “Juilliard Lecture.” Moreover, in this passage Cage makes a distinction between two modes of openness operating among the constellation of individuals grouped around the notion of transparency. Whereas one looks, as before, through the wire mesh of Lippold’s sculptures, in Mies van der Rohe’s architecture the observation of the environment is to be understood as a result of the reflections cast across the glass surfaces of the building. In this reformulation of transparency in terms of reflection, Cage returned to what was undoubtedly one of the primary sources of his interpretation—the discussion of architectural space presented by László Moholy-Nagy in the book The New Vision, the importance of which, as we have seen, Cage stressed on more than one occasion.16

The Architecture of Silence

107

As defined in The New Vision, truly spatial relations—as opposed to volumetric ones—were only achieved by modern architecture through the mutual interpenetration of the interior and exterior of the building.17 While Moholy-Nagy did reference the physical openness and flow of space in certain modernist buildings, he repeatedly presented his concept of architectural space as a consequence of the play of external reflections. This idea, he articulated most clearly in the caption placed below Lux Feininger’s photograph of the glass curtain wall of Walter Gropius’s Dessau Bauhaus. “Fenestrations,” MoholyNagy wrote, “produced the inward and outward reflections of the windows. It is no longer possible to keep apart the inside and outside. The mass of the wall, at which all the ‘outside’ previously stopped, is now dissolved and lets the surroundings flow into the building.”18 In Cage’s writing, this formulation of the reflection on the outside of the building forms a complementary pair with the effect of transparency from the inside as a means of visually opening up the building’s structure to the environment. It was the relation of the inside to the outside (and not the reverse) that Cage took as the operative part of MoholyNagy’s definition of architectural space. Cage’s reading would have been supported by Moholy-Nagy’s text, which described the end limit of spatial relations as the complete dissolution of architecture into its environment. At the end of The New Vision Moholy-Nagy speculated that A white house with great glass windows surrounded by trees becomes almost transparent when the sun shines. The white walls act as projection screens on which shadows multiply the trees, and the glass plates become mirrors in which the trees are repeated. A perfect transparency is the result; the house becomes part of nature.19

In “Rhythm Etc.” Cage would echo Moholy-Nagy’s understanding of a glass building’s ability to dematerialize. In apparent reference to Mies’s Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, Cage stated, “If, as is the case when I look at that building near Chicago, I have the impression it’s not there even though I see it taking up space, then module or no module, it’s O.K.” (Figure 3.5).20 Cage’s interpretation of Miesian architecture contrasts sharply with a reading such as that of K. Michael Hays, who has theorized Mies’s work in relation to the aesthetic strategies of the historical avant-garde. According to Hays, beginning with the skyscraper projects of the 1920s, Mies eschewed any prioritization of an internal formal logic from which the building’s meaning

108

Experimentations

Figure 3.5  Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois, ca. 1945–51.

could be derived and figured its signification instead through a mimetic immersion into the urban context. Reflecting the chaos of metropolitan existence across their surfaces, the vitreous facades of Mies’s buildings overtly register the disorder and anxieties of modern urban society. In comparing Mies’s skyscraper projects to Kurt Schwitters’s Merz Column (ca. 1923), Hays argues, “Both projects share an antagonism toward a priori and reasoned order.

The Architecture of Silence

109

Both plunge into the chaos of the metropolis to seek another order within it through a systematic use of the unexpected, the aleatory, the inexplicable” (Figures 3.6 and 3.7).21 Yet, in order for one of Mies’s buildings to function as a cognitive mechanism or what Hays, following Theodor Adorno, calls an “exact

Figure 3.6  Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Glass Skyscraper model, Berlin, Germany, 1922.

110

Experimentations

Figure 3.7  Kurt Schwitters, Merz Column, ca. 1923.

fantasy” of reality22—that is, in order for it to assume a critical, rather than merely superstructural function in relation to society—the dadaist montage of fragmentary appearances that materialize across its glass surfaces must be understood as part of a dialectical relationship formed with the relative autonomy of the building from its cultural as well as physical environment. A necessary condition of the building’s oppositional stance, it is this ability

The Architecture of Silence

111

to tear a disjunctive cleft out of the continuous surface of reality that Hays, following Manfredo Tafuri, has termed the “implacable silence” of Miesian architecture.23 Cage’s understanding of Mies differs from that of Hays most starkly in that it rejects the notions of relative autonomy and critical distance that Hays posits as indispensable. For Cage, any silence in Miesian architecture would not negate the environment but would open the building up to an interpenetration with its surroundings along the lines of Cage’s own definition of silence. Indeed, Cage figures the transparency of Mies’s glass buildings as a metaphor for his own goal of eradicating harmonic music’s alienation from the plane of everyday existence. Following the allusion made to the transparency of the Farnsworth House in “Rhythm Etc.,” Cage added, “It must be that eventually we will have a music the relationship of which to what takes place before and after (‘no’ music) is exact, so that one will have the experience that no experience was had, a dematerialization (not of facts) of intentions.”24 By abrogating any notion of critical distance, Cage opened himself up to a series of attacks by Adorno. In articles written at the beginning of the 1960s, Adorno criticized Cage’s interest in allowing sounds to be just sounds and reiterated what he saw as the compositional necessity to subjectively form musical materials into functioning relations.25 In the article “Vers une musique informelle” of 1961, Adorno wrote, “But the hypothesis that the note ‘exists’ rather than ‘functions’ is either ideological or else a misplaced positivism. Cage, for example, perhaps because of his involvement with Zen Buddhism, appears to ascribe metaphysical powers to the note once it has been liberated from all supposed superstructural baggage.”26 In imputing to Cage an attitude that fluctuated between pure immediacy and the ascription of metaphysical powers, Adorno located him at exactly the same “crossroads of magic and positivism” that he criticized Walter Benjamin for occupying nearly a quarter of a century earlier.27 And Adorno’s advice to Cage was much the same as that once offered to Benjamin: in a word, “more dialectics.”28 For Adorno, the failure to form one’s material dialectically—whether as critic or composer—was symptomatic of no less than a capitulation to the egoannihilating forces of instrumental reason and culture industry.29 “Composers tend to react to [the anthropology of the present age],” Adorno stated, “by renouncing any control of their music by their ego. They prefer to drift and to refrain from intervening, in the hope that, as in Cage’s bon mot, it will be not

112

Experimentations

Webern speaking, but the music itself. Their aim is to transform psychological ego weakness into aesthetic strength.”30 As Adorno viewed it, a Cagean aesthetic ultimately amounted to little more than an ineffectual revival of dadaism.31 “[I]n contrast to its Dadaist grandparents,” Adorno cautioned, “it degenerates at once into culture, and it cannot remain unaffected by this.”32 In this last assessment, Adorno’s judgment of Cage is typical of those who would view the composer as a victim of the historical neutralization of avant-garde aesthetics. Typical, but unjust, for Cage clearly understood the failure and co-optation that was the general fate of the earlier avant-garde movements. As he explained in his preface to Indeterminacy of 1959, “There is a connection possible between the two, but neither Dada nor Zen are fixed tangibles. They change; and in quite different ways in different places and times, they invigorate actions. What was Dada in the twenties is now, with the exception of the work of Marcel Duchamp, just art.”33 To this brief but insightful synopsis of the theory of the avant-garde, Cage added, still referring, in part, to the important exception of Marcel Duchamp, “I often point out that Dada nowadays has a space, an emptiness, in it that Dada formerly lacked.”34 In another article published the same year, Cage made it clear that this notion of space was the same as that he attributed to modern architecture.35 This fact is significant, for it indicates that behind Cage’s aim of collapsing art into life was not a renewed faith in the transgressive facticity of the unassisted readymade but an investigation into the modalities of transparency that brought Duchamp closer to Mies van der Rohe. In other words, the dadaist forebear of the Cagean project was not Duchamp’s Bottle Dryer (1914), but The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23). Because of its transparency, Duchamp’s Large Glass served for Cage as the model of an artwork with no determinate focal point or center of interest (Figure 3.8). “Looking at the Large Glass,” Cage explained, the thing that I like so much is that I can focus my attention wherever I wish. It helps me to blur the distinction between art and life and produces a kind of silence in the work itself. There is nothing in it that requires me to look in one place or another or, in fact, requires me to look at all. I can look through it to the world beyond.36

Beginning with the concept of silence exemplified by 4'33", Cage would seek ways of attaining a similar modality of unfocused perception in music. One manner in which Cage approached this goal may be seen in another composition

The Architecture of Silence

113

Figure 3.8  Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915–23.

of 1952, Music for Carillon (Graph) No. 1.37 The score for the piece consists of twenty-four three-by-ten-inch sections of quadrille graph paper onto which Cage added an array of points, the locations of which were determined by chance operations. Read from left to right, each of the inch-wide horizontal segments is equivalent to one second of performance time, while the vertical

114

Experimentations

axis corresponds in a relatively indeterminate manner to the disposition of high, middle, and low tones (Figure 3.9). As opposed to a traditional harmonic structure, the graph that serves as the “structure” of Music for Carillon No. 1 does not divide or regulate the continuum of pitch-time, but instead leaves its expanse completely intact.38 There is, for example, no necessity of lining up the points of the score with the abscissas and ordinates of the grid in order for them to be readable. Rather, while it is only through the presence of the graph that these random markings can be translated into music, the structure of Music for Carillon No. 1 remains as though on a different level from the graphic representation of the sound plane. Although in actuality the points are laid onto the quadrille paper, one might see the graph—from the other side, as it were—as a window through which the separate space of the sonic continuum can be viewed.39 Music for Carillon No. 1 does not consist merely of musical material left in an untransformed state of residual facticity. By allowing chance to determine the location of the points, Cage deliberately “composed” the work in such a manner as to avoid any result that could be related to harmony or any other form of consciously created musical continuity. The “aggregates” or “constellations”

Figure 3.9  John Cage, Music for Carillon (Graph) No.1, 1952.

The Architecture of Silence

115

into which Cage’s musical materials fall are thereby characterized by incidental rather than exclusive relationships. Lacking any determinate continuity on which to focus, the listener must then await “no matter what eventuality” and not simply those sounds integrally related to the music as composition.40 This openness to “no matter what” allows the listener to unfocus his or her attention and “hear through” the piece, accepting as equally proper any sound and even the environmental or unintentional noises that occur during performance. More specifically, the structure of Music for Carillon No. 1 functions to map out the space in which the points are situated, providing thereby the coordinates by which that space may be read and hence performed. That the graph acts as a map of pitch-time coordinates rather than as a traditional musical scale is made clear by the fact that the vertical axis is elastic in the sense that it may be recalibrated for instruments of differing octave ranges. Thus, the different sonic identities of the points in any given musical realization will depend upon the proportion of space between them rather than upon their location in relation to the lines of the graph. In the “Juilliard Lecture,” Cage described this notion of space as constitutive of difference by means of the example of leaves on a tree. “[A]ny other leaf even of the same tree,” he wrote, “[i]f it were the same as another leaf it would be a coincidence from which each leaf would be free because of its own unique position in space.”41 In all of Cage’s later point-drawing scores, different means of mapping space similarly allow for the musical realization of the constitutive difference between points. The unique acoustic result of each piece is determined solely by means of the particular structure through which the randomly located points are viewed. (As Cage wrote in “45' for a Speaker,” “Spots are spots and skill’s needed to turn them to the point of practicality.”42) Through subsequent scores such as Variations I (1958) and Variations II (1961), Cage further developed his ideas of transparent structure and spatial differentiation. In these scores, Cage’s “structures” literally take the form of transparencies, separate from but laid atop different spatial arrays of points. In Variations II, the structure has become six separate transparencies each of which is printed with a single line. Once the lines have been randomly arrayed on top of the points, the acoustic identity of a sound is determined by measuring the distances from a point to each of the six different lines in order to yield values corresponding respectively to the parameters of frequency, amplitude, timbre, duration, time of occurrence, and number of sounds (Figure 3.10). Here, not only pitch and time, but all aspects of a sound’s identity are determined by measurements made with reference to a

116

Experimentations

Figure 3.10  John Cage, Variations II, 1961.

transparent mapping. As each throw of the transparencies completely alters the configuration of the structure, the fixed intervals of harmonic structure have completely given way in favor of an infinite series of “intermittent aggregates” for which there is no underlying proportional rule.43

The Architecture of Silence

117

Although Cage’s aesthetic is clearly predicated on more than a misplaced trust in the supposedly transgressive nature of readymade material, nothing so far refutes the most damning aspect of Adorno’s judgment: that the failure of Cage’s compositions to attain an autonomy, however relative, from social conditions betrays an incapacity to achieve the distance necessary for a critical practice. Likewise, lacking any negativity vis-à-vis the urban context, Cage’s understanding of Miesian architecture would appear to strip it of any criticality. It would be mistaken, however, to argue that Cage’s interpretation of Mies was motivated by an uncritical acceptance of modern urban existence. (Cage speaks, for example, of his “disgust” at walking through Times Square.)44 If Cage had no interest in forming aesthetic devices to reveal the structures of an otherwise indecipherable chaos of modernity, it is because, for Cage, the aversion to the city and to the commercial culture engendered there was motivated not by a surfeit of irrationality, but by a dearth of it. For from his standpoint in midcentury America, what Cage could understand better than his dadaist predecessors on the Continent was that there was already a strict logic to the form of modern existence: one that had little to do with chaos, but instead had everything to do with repetition.45 This realization brings him closer to the position that Adorno and Max Horkheimer had arrived at during their years in California. As they stated in the opening lines of the culture industry chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, The sociological theory that the loss of the support of objectively established religion, the dissolution of the last remnants of precapitalism, together with technological and social differentiation or specialization, have led to cultural chaos is disproved every day; for culture now impresses the same stamp on everything. Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part.46

That repetition encompasses more than the identical return of the self-same was one of the lessons Cage credited Arnold Schoenberg with teaching him. “Everything,” Cage recalls Schoenberg saying, “is repetition. A variation, that is, is a repetition, some things changed and others not.”47 In this, Cage could have agreed with Adorno, who noted, “In serial music this dialectic is taken to extremes. Absolutely nothing may be repeated and, as the derivative of One thing, absolutely everything is repetition.”48 Where Cage would not have agreed was when Adorno concluded that “The task of informal music would be to rethink this dialectic and incorporate it into its own organizational structure.”49

118

Experimentations

Cage did not view atonal serialism as presenting a viable alternative by which to structure a contemporary music: as he stated, for the project of constructing a wholly new music, “The twelve-tone row offers bricks but no plan.”50 With this, Cage distanced himself from Schoenberg, and thus from Adorno as well; because, for Cage, the problematic of repetition and variation in serial music was ultimately no different from that of harmonic structure: serialism replaced counterpoint, but both presumed an underlying model to which they implicitly referred.51 Cage stated repeatedly that the evolution of harmony, including the questioning and disintegration it experienced under atonality, was integrally linked to the development of Western commercialism.52 If, as Adorno emphasized, life in commodity culture becomes objectively more repetitive and conformist, society’s connection to harmony, as Cage viewed it, must nonetheless be understood through the manner in which that conformity is subjectively lived as individualism. With the development of capitalism came the replacement of actual differences by a system of “accidental differentiation” and “pseudo-individualization.”53 While the individual’s desire for difference is catered to by means of the “personalization” of products, this personalization only distinguishes mass-produced objects from one another by means of minute distinctions, such as those of color and available accessories. By substituting for actual difference only so many declensions from an a priori model or type, the extent and range of difference is effectively circumscribed, even if that model is purely ideal and inductively produced by the unfolding of the series. Apparent opposition to the series is defined as merely a negative relation to the series as such, in just the same way, as Cage pointed out, that atonality is forced to evade the presence of tonal harmony.54 Far from being opposed to it, serial differentiation is the necessary alibi of social conformity.55 Looking back from his standpoint in the mid-twentieth century, Cage saw the advent of harmonic music and the dynamic of repetition and variation as reproducing (if not preceding) as culture the same logic of model and series that would come to pervade society with the commodity form.56 But, while the system of serial differentiation ideologically accommodates people into the realm of commodity production, the traditional musical work, according to Cage, operates as ideological at still another level. Because the variations of the series are inevitably related through the intermediary of a harmonic structure to the role of an existential author, the individual subject is placed firmly at the center of the system. “The thing that’s so offensive about the series,” Cage

The Architecture of Silence

119

explained, “is the notion that it is the principle from which all happenings flow (it would be perfectly acceptable for a series to enter into a field situation). But the prediction of series equals harmony equals mind of man (unchanged, used as obstacle, not as fluent component open at both ends)!”57 By apparently replacing an individual at the center of the socioeconomic system, the traditional musical work functions to relieve, if only temporarily, the anxieties experienced by the subject decentered by the developments of capitalism. “Masterpieces and geniuses go together,” Cage observed, “and when by running from one to the other we make life safer than it actually is we’re apt never to know the dangers of contemporary music.”58 With this, we have returned to Cage’s argument with Le Corbusier. For the Modulor—as proportional harmonizer of the world’s buildings and merchandise—was presented by Le Corbusier as no less than the ur-model of multinational capitalism. “[T]he ‘Modulor’ would,” he dreamt, “one day claim to be the means of unification for manufactured articles in all countries.”59 Far from representing a procedural innovation, Le Corbusier’s Modulor acted to increase the efficiency of commodity production precisely by centralizing and intensifying capitalism’s dynamic of model and series (Figure 3.11). By adopting the Modulor as standard, or so Le Corbusier advanced, one would be

Figure 3.11  Le Corbusier, Table from The Modulor showing possible combinations of harmonious proportions, 1948.

120

Experimentations

able to derive from it a variety of proportional schemes that would fulfill every individual’s desire. “Ingenuity and good taste will make use of them at will,” Le Corbusier said, “finding arrangements to satisfy every temperament and every fancy, and to meet every purely rational need.”60 It was Le Corbusier’s complicity with the logic of capitalism that motivated Cage’s subtle but perceptive criticism: “Don’t tell me it’s a question of mass production,” he wrote in “Rhythm Etc.” “Is it not rather that they want to establish, if not the rules of the game, at least what it is that one uses to play with when he starts playing?”61 Thus, Le Corbusier’s analogy to music turns out not to have been so farfetched after all, for his project aimed to fulfill exactly the same role that traditional harmonic music had come to play: responding to the anxiety caused by the decentering of the individual by the system of mass production. It was for this reason that Le Corbusier continually railed against the arbitrariness of industrial standards, and it motivated his repeated claim that the Modulor was superior because it was “based upon the human scale.”62 By now we can understand how Cage could have viewed Le Corbusier’s system as tyrannical. For were a single person actually able to dictate the form and extent of the allowable variations of commodity production, he would indeed be a tyrant, personally delineating the range and scope of subjective as well as objective differentiation.63 We may now also be able to understand why, in “Rhythm Etc.,” Cage would have posited his home at Gatehill as antithetical to Le Corbusier’s project. For it may be argued that Cage viewed the Gatehill community as an instantiation of his aesthetic principles. The siting of the Williams-Cage House, at a tangent to a hillside in the midst of a huge expanse of woodland, is important, because a certain notion of nature, understood as an immeasurably complex realm of unregulated differentiation, ultimately served as the paradigm and justification of Cagean aesthetics.64 Such a proximity to nature was integral to Cage’s understanding of Mies as well; for in Cage’s descriptions, Mies’s glass buildings reflect clouds, trees, or grass, but never images of the city.65 However, while Cage viewed through one wall of his apartment the undeveloped, forested hillside, through the other he saw the proto-urban configuration of the neighboring houses. There, around the pebbled clearing of the upper square, was manifest the logic of prefabrication and mass production that Paul Williams had incorporated into his thoroughly modern, post-Bauhaus style buildings (Figure 3.12). Looking out from Cage’s apartment, these two views were not juxtaposed to form opposed pairs such

The Architecture of Silence

121

Figure 3.12 Interior view of John Cage apartment in Williams-Cage House with Merce Cunningham, 1956.

as nature/culture, rural/urban, or freedom/regulation.66 Instead, the natural expanse that surrounds the settlement relativizes the realm of serial difference marked out by the buildings, situating them within the wider field of what Cage saw as nature’s more radical sense of differentiation. Yet even this formulation is not exact, for the settlement is not simply surrounded by nature; it is infiltrated and interpenetrated by it as well. No window in the upper square fails to reflect the surrounding trees and hillside, and from within the buildings each glance readily traverses the interior to arrive at views of the outlying natural realm. This dynamic occurs nowhere so much as in Cage’s apartment, where the high proportion of glass causes the interior and exterior to interpenetrate almost completely. Furthermore, by designing the entire western wall to slide off the facade of the building into the adjacent frame, Williams literally opened the structure up to nature, and in the process transformed a glass wall à la Mies van der Rohe into the Large Glass of Marcel Duchamp. Freed of any attachment to the interior of the building, the wall becomes a mechanism of pure exteriority, mimetically dissolving into the environment via the interrelated play of transparency and reflection. A paradigm of critical distance such as that posed by Frankfurt School aesthetics ultimately presupposes a relatively autonomous subject who will

122

Experimentations

realize the structure of capitalist society once it has been presented without obscuring transformations. In the Cagean paradigm, on the other hand, given the lack of any possible autonomous or semi-autonomous space of critical distanciation, the subjective transformation takes place on the level of perception rather than cognition.67 Pace Adorno, Cagean enlightenment had nothing to do with the ascription of metaphysical powers, but was defined instead as the achievement of a mode of perception in which attention was unfocused and the attachment to transcendent models and the limited play of repetition and variation they engendered could be undermined. To this end, the goal of Cage’s oppositional aesthetic was not to understand the regulatory structures at the base of the social formation, but rather to forget them.68 Through the amnesic removal of the overarching model, a reorientation of perception toward the experience of differentiation would serve as a means of opposing the serialized logic of the commodity. As Cage explained to Daniel Charles, In contemporary civilization where everything is standardized and where everything is repeated, the whole point is to forget in the space between an object and its duplication. If we didn’t have this power of forgetfulness, if art today didn’t help us to forget, we would be submerged, drowned under those avalanches of rigorously identical objects.69

Only after this form of enlightenment had been achieved could Cage return to the city and view it and its inhabitants without disgust. “We go into a crowd,” he explained, with a sharp awareness of the idiosyncrasies of each person in it, even if they’re marching, and we along with them. We see, to put it coldly, differences between two things that are the same. This enables us to go anywhere alone or with others and any ordinarily too large number of others. We could take a vacation in a hotel on Times Square.70

That Cage’s oppositional aesthetic is not predicated on a relative autonomy from the phenomena to be critiqued problematizes the Frankfurt School ideal of Oedipally mature individuals who somehow hold their own against the dictates of consumer culture.71 For Cage, the cognitive capacities of consciousness and the controlling force of the ego act to inhibit the experience of differentiation; the mind plays the role of a model from which only a limited series of ideas about the world can be derived. In contrast, Cage’s differential perception, in which the last vestiges of a monadic humanism

The Architecture of Silence

123

have been abolished, leads to the possibility of what, as we saw in Chapter 2, Cage termed “experimental” actions. Freed of “mental images of what would happen,” an experimental action, “the outcome of which is not foreseen,” is not circumscribed by the inherent teleology of serialized and conformist modes of behavior.72 It is through the experimental pursuit of the non-identical that Cage’s project reveals itself as an anti-ideological one, meant to evade the situation Adorno described as “[t]he totality of mass culture [which] culminates in the demand that no one can be any different from itself.”73 In a manner analogous to that in which his scores employed space to undermine musical continuity, Cage described experimental actions as a function of spatial separation. In the article, “Composition as Process II: Indeterminacy” of 1958, Cage explained, There is the possibility when people are crowded together that they will act like sheep rather than nobly. That is why separation in space is spoken of as facilitating independent action on the part of each performer. Sounds will then arise from actions, which will then arise from their own centers rather than as motor or psychological effects of other actions and sounds in the environment.74

If, in the above description, Cage’s musicians no longer resemble the regimented automatons of the culture industry, neither do they approximate the autonomous, centered subjects of classical thinking. Instead, just as the music they perform breaks free of the limitations of “European harmony,” Cage’s musicians attain liberation from society’s ideologically pre-modeled norms of consciousness and behavior, but only through the complete immersion into a radically multiplicitous perception of the world, a turning of the “mind in the direction of no matter what eventuality.”75 Interestingly, at the end of “Composition as Process II,” Cage once again turned explicitly to the topic of architecture, noting that for the successful performance of such experimental music, “[t]he conventional architecture is often not suitable.” Rather, he proposed, “What is required perhaps is an architecture like that of Mies van der Rohe’s School of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology.”76 * Cage’s project does recall the goals of the historical avant-garde: to reformulate perception as a means of anticipating life beyond the boundaries of commodity

124

Experimentations

capitalism. However, rather than being limited to a merely ineffectual revival of dada, Cage’s neo-avant-garde project marks a reformulation of avant-garde aesthetics in light of the historical circumstances of the era following World War II. In the face of a revolutionary hope of proletarian mass subjectivity falsely realized as the debilitating norms of a bourgeois mass culture, Cage attempted to actualize an anticipatory form of existence that would be the prerequisite for a new form of sociability, a perception of difference intended to destabilize the overriding social logic of repetition by interpenetrating, infiltrating, burrowing under and hollowing out that logic until it simply fell apart under the strain. Only then could the anarchic society of which Cage dreamt become a reality. Although this aim would motivate virtually all of Cage’s subsequent work, the means by which he would pursue it changed radically in the 1960s. In many ways, the article “Rhythm Etc.” marked the end of the period I have been describing and the beginning of that transition. By 1961, Cage had already begun to reformulate his ideas of space, structure, and transparency.77 Like the project of the historical avant-garde—like all avant-garde projects so far—Cage’s neo-avant-garde project would ultimately fail in its most revolutionary ambitions, in part because he did not see that capital did not share Le Corbusier’s anxiety at the dissolution of the model or standard, but would itself embrace an ever more differentiated mode of commodity production. A radical increase in differentiation alone would not be able to counteract the new forms of decentralized power that emerged within more recent stages of capitalist society.78 Yet Cage, so perceptive on other counts, seems largely to have ignored such developments, and he kept his optimistic faith in an architecture of glass long after it would appear to be outdated. In “Overpopulation and Art,” a piece he was writing at the time of his death in 1992, Cage could still state:   we live in glass hOuses         our Vitric surroundings       transparEnt           Reflective       Putting images       Outside       in sPace of what’s inside             oUr homes everything’s as muLtiplied       As we are79

The Architecture of Silence

125

Notes Gyorgy Kepes, ed., Module, Proportion, Symmetry, Rhythm (New York: George Braziller, 1966), book jacket. Cage tells the story of being commissioned by Kepes in the introduction to “Rhythm Etc.” (1962), in A Year from Monday (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 120. 2 Cage, “Rhythm Etc.,” 124. 3 “Harmony, so-called, is a forced abstract vertical relation which blots out the spontaneous transmitting nature of each of the sounds forced into it. It is artificial and unrealistic”; John Cage, “45' for a Speaker” (1954), in Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 152. Cage discusses “rhythmic structures” throughout his writings; see, for example, John Cage, “Defense of Satie” (1948), in John Cage: An Anthology, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Da Capo, 1970), 77–84; and John Cage, “Lecture on Nothing” (1950), in Silence, 109–126. See also James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Paul Griffiths, Cage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 7–20. 4 Le Corbusier, Modulor I and II, trans. Peter de Francia and Anna Bostok (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948/1955), 37. 5 Cage, “Rhythm Etc.,” 125–126. 6 Le Corbusier, quoted in Cage, “Rhythm Etc.,” 126 (ellipses and emphasis in original). 7 Cage, “Rhythm Etc.,” 126. 8 Le Corbusier, Modulor, 54. 9 Cage, “Rhythm Etc.,” 126. 10 Mary Emma Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 177. Information on the life of Paul Williams was confirmed in conversations with Vera B. Williams. 11 Cage states, “Living next door to an amateur architect who was deeply impressed by Le Corbusier, it dawned on me that the words might have come from Le Corbusier’s book, The Modulor. I ran next door, picked up the book, opened it” (Cage, “Rhythm Etc.,” 120). That Cage was referring to Paul Williams was confirmed by Vera Williams in conversation, March 27, 1996. 12 Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College, 156; and Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors (New York: Penguin, 1968), 121–122. The communal aspects of Black Mountain College are most extensively examined in Martin Duberman, Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972). 13 Cage, “Rhythm Etc.,” 126. 14 John Cage, “Juilliard Lecture” (1952), in A Year from Monday, 102. 1

126

Experimentations

15 John Cage, “Experimental Music” (1957), in Silence, 7–8. 16 On Cage’s engagement with László Moholy-Nagy’s The New Vision, see Chapter 1. 17 In order to include the work of his friend, the sculptor Richard Lippold, Cage had to fudge Moholy-Nagy’s definition of space somewhat, for Moholy-Nagy strictly differentiated architectural and sculptural space. In his evaluation of Lippold’s constructivist sculptures, Cage would seem to have been following Moholy-Nagy’s consideration of the Eiffel Tower, which remained sculpture, although it occupied the “border line between architecture and sculpture”; László Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision and Abstract of an Artist, trans. Daphne M. Hoffman, 4th rev. ed. (New York: George Wittenborn, Inc., 1947), 61. 18 Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision, 62. It should be noted that Moholy-Nagy directly mentions Mies van der Rohe, among others, in the sentence in which this figure is referenced. 19 Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision, 63–64. For more on Cage’s reception of this passage, see Branden W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-AvantGarde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 25–71. 20 Cage, “Rhythm Etc.,” 128. 21 K. Michael Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 192. See also, K. Michael Hays, “Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form,” Perspecta 21 (1984): 14–29; and K. Michael Hays, “Odysseus and the Oarsmen, or, Mies’s Abstraction Once Again,” in The Presence of Mies, ed. Detlef Mertins (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), 235–248. 22 Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject, 192. 23 “Mies’s achievement was to open up a clearing of implacable silence in the chaos of the nervous metropolis; this clearing is a radical critique, not only of the established spatial order of the city and the established logic of classical composition, but also of the inhabiting nervenleben. It is the extreme depth of silence in this clearing— silence as an architectural form all its own—that is the architectural meaning of this project”; Hays, “Critical Architecture,” 22. Hays further states that “the Barcelona Pavilion tears a cleft in the continuous surface of reality,” in “Critical Architecture,” 25. On Mies’s silence, see also Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 148; and Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, Modern Architecture (New York: Abrams, 1979), 151–157, 335–342. 24 Cage, “Rhythm Etc.,” 128. 25 Theodor W. Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle” (1961), in Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1992), 301–302, 307. See also, Theodor W. Adorno, “Avant-Garde,” in Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1976), 180–181. On the necessity of critical distance, see Theodor W. Adorno, “Music and New Music” (1960), in

The Architecture of Silence

26 27

28 29

30 31 32 33

34 35

36 37

38

127

Quasi una fantasia, 256–257, 265. See also Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 50 : “For the (relative) freedom of art vis-à-vis the praxis of life is at the same time the condition that must be fulfilled if there is to be a critical cognition of reality. An art no longer distinct from the praxis of life but wholly absorbed in it will lose the capacity to criticize it, along with its distance.” On Cage’s goal of “let[ting] sounds be just sounds,” see, for example, John Cage, “History of Experimental Music in the United States” (1959), in Silence, 70. Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” 287. Theodor W. Adorno, “Letters to Walter Benjamin” (November 10, 1938), in Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor (London: Verso, 1977), 129. Robert HullotKentor has commented on the connection between Adorno’s late writings on music and his debate with Benjamin in the 1930s; Robert Hullot-Kentor, “Popular Music and Adorno’s ‘The Aging of the New Music,’ ” Telos 77 (Fall 1988): 90–94. Adorno, “Letters to Walter Benjamin” (March 18, 1936), in Aesthetics and Politics, 124. On the relation of Adorno’s critique of Benjamin to his subsequent critique of the place of subjectivity under culture industry, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics (New York: The Free Press, 1977), 171. Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” 283. Ibid., 314–316. Adorno’s critique approaches that in Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde. Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” 316. John Cage, “Preface to Indeterminacy” (1959), in John Cage: Writer, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight Editions, 1993), 79. Cage will repeat, with only slight alterations, this and the following statement in the preface to Silence, xi. Cage, “Preface to Indeterminacy,” 79. “Implicit here, it seems to me, are principles familiar from modern painting and architecture: collage and space. What makes this action like Dada are the underlying philosophical views and the collagelike actions. But what makes this action unlike Dada is the space in it. For it is the space and emptiness that is finally urgently necessary at this point in history”; Cage, “History of Experimental Music in the United States,” 69–70. John Cage, quoted in Moira and William Roth, “John Cage on Marcel Duchamp,” Art in America 61, no. 6 (November–December, 1973): 78. For analysis of Cage’s scores, see Pritchett, The Music of John Cage, 92–95 and 134–137. Music for Carillon (Graph) No. 1, written in October 1952, was revisited for publication in 1961, the year Cage wrote “Rhythm Etc.” As Cage stated, “All this can be summed up by saying each aspect of sound (frequency, amplitude, timbre, duration) is to be seen as a continuum, not as a series of discrete steps favored by conventions (Occidental or Oriental)”; Cage, “History of Experimental Music in the United States,” 70–71.

128

Experimentations

39 Visual tropes, such as Cage’s analogy of structure to an empty glass, can be found in “Lecture on Nothing,” in addition to the statement, “But Life without structure is unseen. Pure life expresses itself within and through structure”; Cage, “Lecture on Nothing,” 113. 40 This mode of listening is discussed throughout Cage’s writings. See, for example, John Cage, “Composition as Process II: Indeterminacy” (1958), in Silence, 35–40. 41 Cage, “Juilliard Lecture,” 99. As with many of Cage’s pieces from the early 1950s, the implications of Music for Carillon No. 1 go beyond its concrete realization. By designating the instrument, Cage limited (in a manner he would soon realize was unnecessary) the possibilities of the piece to the sounds that could be played on a carillon. Nevertheless, in the above analysis I have purposely emphasized the implications inherent in the score. On Music for Carillon No. 1, see also, You Nakai, “How to Imitate Nature in Her Manner of Operation: Between What John Cage Did and What He Said He Did,” Perspectives of New Music 52, no. 3 (Autumn 2014): 146–147. 42 Cage, “45' for a Speaker,” 161. 43 The classification of aggregates can be found in Cage, “45' for a Speaker,” 163. 44 Cage’s aversion to Times Square can be inferred from his statement, “Nevertheless, I do go to town now and then and I do pass through Times Square, with which for many years I was unable to make my peace. With the help, however, of some American paintings, Bob Rauschenberg’s particularly, I can pass through Times Square without disgust”; Cage, “Letter to Paul Henry Lang” (1956), in John Cage: An Anthology, 118. 45 For Cage’s aversion to repetition in modern society, see “Defense of Satie,” 79; John Cage, “Composition as Process I: Changes,” in Silence, 21; and Chapter 1. 46 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1972), 120. 47 John Cage, “Mosaic” (1965), in A Year from Monday, 48. Cage expressly juxtaposes Schoenberg’s idea of repetition with his own idea of differentiation by reference to the differences between leaves on a tree in Conversing with Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight Editions, 1987), 222. 48 Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” 284 note 7. 49 Ibid. 50 John Cage, “Forerunners of Modern Music” (1949), in Silence, 64 note 8. 51 Cage, “Forerunners of Modern Music,” 63 note 7. 52 See Chapter 1. 53 For a discussion of “accidental differentiation” and “pseudo-individualization” as they apply to commodities and commodified music, see Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” (1938), in

The Architecture of Silence

54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63

64

65

129

The Culture Industry, ed. J.M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 35, and Theodor W. Adorno, with the assistance of George Simpson, “On Popular Music” (1941), in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 444–446. Jean Baudrillard analyzed commercial culture in terms of the interplay of “model” and “series” in a manner that resonates perhaps more closely with Cage’s position in “Rhythm Etc.” in Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London: Sage Publications, 1998). John Cage, “A Composer’s Confessions” (1948), in John Cage: Writer, 31. Adorno, “On Popular Music,” 444. See also, Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1996), 141. On the anticipatory function of music, see Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). John Cage, “Seriously Comma” (1966), in A Year from Monday, 28. John Cage, “Composition as Process III: Communication” (1958), in Silence, 46. By contrast, contemporary music was understood by Cage to fill the role of “bumping into things, knocking others over and in general adding to the disorder that characterizes life (if it is opposed to art) rather than adding to the order and stabilized truth, beauty, and power that characterize a masterpiece (if it is opposed to life)” (46). See also, Cage, “Mosaic,” 44: “We’re chucking this idea too (even though Schoenberg had it): that music enables one to live in a dream world removed from the situation one is actually in.” Le Corbusier, Modulor, 56. Ibid., 90. Cage, “Rhythm Etc.,” 123. Le Corbusier, Modulor, 113 and passim. “The social inflexibility,” Cage noted, “follows from the initial conception of proportion”; Cage, “Rhythm Etc.,” 126. Cage’s reading of Le Corbusier’s text would have been encouraged by lines such as, “music rules all things, it dominates; or, more precisely, harmony does that. Harmony, reigning over all things, regulating all the things of our lives, is the spontaneous, indefatigable and tenacious quest of man animated by a single force: the sense of the divine, and pursuing one aim: to make a paradise on earth” (Le Corbusier, Modulor, 74). This reading of nature runs throughout Cage’s writings; see, for instance, Cage, “Letter to Paul Henry Lang,” 117–118; Cage, “Experimental Music,” 9–10; and Pritchett, The Music of John Cage, 147. For a critical reading of Cage’s notion of nature, see Benjamin Piekut, “Chance and Certainty: John Cage’s Politics of Nature,” Cultural Critique 84 (Spring 2013): 134–163. In this, Cage is again close to Moholy-Nagy, who postulated that the “white house with great glass windows” in the quotation from The New Vision cited above would dissolve into nature.

130

Experimentations

66 On Cage’s opinion that “there is no need to cautiously proceed in dualistic terms,” see Cage, “Composition as Process III: Communication,” 47. 67 On the shift from cognition to perception, see John Cage, “Experimental Music: Doctrine” (1955), in Silence, 15; and “Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?” (1961), in Silence, 204–205. For a provocative discussion of cognition and perception potentially applicable to Cage’s thinking, see Paolo Virno, “The Ambivalence of Disenchantment,” trans. Michael Turits, in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 30–32. 68 This was articulated in a note by Duchamp which Cage would come to quote often, “to reach the Impossibility of sufficient visual memory to transfer from one like object to another the memory imprint”; John Cage, “Jasper Johns: Stories and Ideas” (1964), in A Year from Monday, 79. For the complete Duchamp passage, see The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo, 1973), 31: To lose the possibility of [Identifying] recognizing 2 similar objects—2 colors, 2 laces, 2 hats, 2 forms whatsoever to reach the Impossibility of sufficient visual memory to transfer from one like object to another the memory imprint. —Same possibility with sounds; with brain facts. 69 John Cage and Daniel Charles, For the Birds (New York: Marion Boyars, 1981), 80. See also, John Cage, “Questions,” Perspecta 11 (1967): 71. 70 Cage, “Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?” 238–239. It should be noted that Cage did eventually move from Stony Point back to Manhattan. 71 Theodor W. Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” in The Culture Industry, 85–92. 72 Cage, “History of Experimental Music in the United States,” 69; and Cage, “Experimental Music: Doctrine,” 15. 73 Theodor W. Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture,” in The Culture Industry, 79. See also, Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 123 and 127. 74 Cage, “Composition as Process II: Indeterminacy,” 39. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., 40. 77 This, Cage explained by yet another architectural metaphor: “The thing that was irrelevant to the structures we formerly made, and this was what kept us breathing, was what took place within them. Their emptiness we took for what it was—a place where anything could happen. That was one of the reasons we were able when circumstances became inviting (changes in consciousness, etc.) to go outside, where breathing is child’s play: no walls, not even glass ones which, though we could see

The Architecture of Silence

131

through them, killed the birds while they were flying” (Cage, “Rhythm Etc.,” 122). On the changes in Cage’s aesthetic in the 1960s, see Pritchett, The Music of John Cage, 138–161; and Nakai, “How to Imitate Nature in Her Manner of Operation,” 150–152. 78 Gilles Deleuze, “Control and Becoming” and “Postscript on Control Societies,” in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 169–182. 79 John Cage, “Overpopulation and Art,” in John Cage: Composed in America, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 16–17.

4

Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity

Chance comes in here to give us the unknown. —John Cage to Pierre Boulez, January 17, 1950 Within the legacy of John Cage, no single concept looms as large as that of chance. Yet, despite having been invoked regularly by art historians for almost half a century, Cage’s ideas about chance have remained surprisingly little explored within the discipline. Indeed, with rare exception, art historians tend to downplay Cage’s exploration of chance as a revival of pre-war dadaism, a quietistic embrace of irrationality, or the source of an unacknowledged conflict between the composer’s endorsement of chance operations and the highly rigorous means by which he implemented them. Ironically, it is the very lack of specificity with which the concept of chance has been approached that allows for its broad, if somewhat indiscriminate, citation within art historical literature on happenings and Fluxus, since nearly every artist working in these areas engaged with chance in some manner or another. Whether laudatory or dismissive, such generalizations contrast markedly not only with the specificity of Cagean chance operations, but also with the myriad ways in which artists received them, particularly those who found themselves in Cage’s courses on “Composition” and “Experimental Composition” offered at the New School for Social Research between the fall of 1956 and the summer of 1960.1 In 1961, Allan Kaprow, former Cage student and the most well-known practitioner of happenings, would describe “the involvement in chance” as neither the most important nor as the most widespread of the qualities informing the new genre of artistic performance, but rather as the “most problematical.”2 Kaprow’s choice of adjective is apt, given the range within which Cage’s pupils adopted, adapted, developed, and/or rejected the composer’s teachings with regard to chance and indeterminacy. Although Kaprow, for instance, derived much from his introduction to Cage, he largely rejected the strictness with

134

Experimentations

which Cage implemented chance operations in favor of intuition and an understanding of the abstract expressionist legacy akin to its almost existentialist reception by art critic Harold Rosenberg.3 Aspects of Kaprow’s resistance to the Cagean paradigm can be traced as far back as 1958, when he explained that “the freest, most spontaneous and (to this writer) most enjoyable” approach he had yet adopted in the development of his happenings was “just begin[ning] to imagine things, writing down his parts as he goes along until he decides to stop.” Reciting (and then rejecting) Cage’s already established critique of any such intuitive and improvisational procedure, Kaprow continued, “when one is left to intuition the risk is great that one becomes too dependent on ‘inspiration’ (an extremely unreliable mistress) and so falls into the trap of coming up constantly with clichés and habits. But then, sometimes one is lucky … .”4 As I’ve outlined in the introduction to this book, by 1966 Kaprow came largely to reject Cage’s engagement with chance operations in favor of an approach he called “Change,” predicated on “the following of intuition and wisdom” and “dependent upon human experience.”5 Like Kaprow, fellow New School classmates and future happeners Al Hansen and Dick Higgins would adhere to something of an existential vision of authorial risk, taking a Rosenberg-like conception of action painting into what could be called action music or action theater. Hansen, for instance, embraced the anarchic side of Cage’s project, which he also took in a partially anti-Cagean direction of improvisation within chaotic and collaborative pieces like his Hall Street Happening (1961; which inadvertently involved a performer’s falling through a skylight).6 Higgins credited Cage’s course with providing “a sense of general activity and a taste for my own direction, to which previously my own skepticism had been very unkind,” an observation not unlike that made by Cage’s longtime artistic colleague, Robert Rauschenberg, who called Cage “the only one who gave me permission to continue my own thoughts.”7 Higgins, however, declared himself at odds with much of Cage’s perspective. Moving in his own direction, Higgins transformed Cage’s interest in chance—which, in French, as Higgins pointed out, is “hasard”—into the notion of hazard or, more precisely, danger, which he explored in numerous compositions such as Danger Music #17 (1962), the score for which reads simply, “Scream! Scream! Scream! Scream! Scream! Scream!”8 According to Higgins, neither he nor Hansen had much patience for the more detailed articles about chance operations and indeterminacy Cage explicated within the course. “Once or twice,” he noted,

Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity

135

Cage read a theoretical article … the short theoretical statements from trans/ formation 2, and a (then) unpublished article by Christian Wolff on the relations of time and sound. Some of us, particularly Hansen and myself, couldn’t for the life of us imagine why Cage was interested in those things. They seemed so abstract, compared with the very concrete observations that Cage favored in connection with the pieces played in class, and so terribly old-fashioned in their implications. Mostly they read like legal contracts.9

Among Higgins’s classmates, evidently only George Brecht, who had previously written a treatise entitled Chance-Imagery, shared Cage’s more theoretical leanings: The usual format of our sessions would be that, before the class began, Cage and George Brecht would get into a conversation, usually about “spiritual virtuosity,” instead of the virtuosity of technique, physique, etc. This would continue as the people arrived, then gradually expand, until the subject matter became hard to follow.

According to Higgins, Brecht and Cage conversed at length and in intricate detail about the implications of their aesthetic research. “Only George Brecht,” Higgins continued, seemed to share Cage’s fascination with the various theories of impersonality, anonymity and the life of pieces outside of their perceivers, makers, or anyone else. For the rest of us, the main thing was the realization of the possibilities, which made it easier to use smaller scales and a greater gamut of possibilities than our previous experience would have led us to expect.10

Despite the fact that Cage’s students received and resisted his teachings in a variety of ways, it is not correct to conclude, as some have, that Cage’s ideas had little impact or that the import of his class was primarily that of providing an opportunity for self-directed exploration (Figure 4.1).11 Even while necessarily developing in their own directions, Cage’s students adopted a number of distinctly Cagean categories and concepts. Both Hansen and Kaprow, for instance, would later echo Cage’s notion of “experimental actions” as the pursuit and engagement with the unforeseen.12 And, even while rejecting Cage’s pursuit of impersonality, Higgins, as we have seen, would adopt and develop an idea of “transparency” very close to that of Cage, in which the structure of an artwork or performance allowed for incorporation of external, environmental events.13

136

Experimentations

Figure 4.1 George Brecht, Drip Music, 1959–62. Performed by Dick Higgins at Fluxus-Musik og Anti Music det Instrumentale Teater, Nokolai Kirke, Copenhagen, Denmark, November 25, 1962.

While understanding the different ways in which Cage’s teachings were received is important for assessing the composer’s impact within the visual arts, equally so is comprehending the degree to which his own aesthetic transformed over the course of the decade. Indeed, according to Cage, it

Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity

137

was partially on account of the fact that his “musical thought was changing” that he decided to begin teaching at the New School.14 Although it would not be possible even to begin to address the full range of Cage’s artistic reception, even on the subject of chance operations alone, it will nonetheless be worthwhile, as a necessary first step, to approach with some specificity the development of Cage’s techniques of employing chance up through the years in which his New School courses were offered. The results—drawn in part from musicology and in part from heretofore unexamined sources and resonances in the philosophy of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze—will take us far from a simple notion of chance to a much more complex and sophisticated engagement with indeterminacy and multiplicity. From there we will return to the classroom to investigate further what there was to learn at the New School from John Cage. * By the time Cage offered his first New School course, he had been associated with chance operations for half a decade. Music of Changes, Cage’s first manifesto presentation of chance, was completed in 1951 and debuted at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York on New Year’s Day, 1952. Prior to that moment, Cage’s references to chance were somewhat occasional. In “Forerunners of Modern Music” of 1949, Cage mentioned the way in which using “radios as instruments” would deliver the continuity of sound production over to “accident.”15 Around the same time, Cage incorporated field recordings from Alexander Calder’s workshop into his soundtrack for the film Works of Calder (1949–50), explaining to Pierre Boulez that “No synchronizing was attempted and what the final result is is rather due to a chance that was admired.”16 Previously, in compositions such as Double Music (1941), in which Cage and Lou Harrison wrote out their parts independently and then combined them, without alteration, into the final piece, Cage courted a different type of chance, one arising from the simultaneous performance of independent work (a procedure that Cage would continue to pursue throughout many years of collaborations with dancer Merce Cunningham). Although the inspiration behind Double Music came from Cage’s interest in the anonymity of collective production, associated with Gothic architecture and embraced in the early Bauhaus, the method of combining two entirely separate creative endeavors resembled the surrealist parlor game cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse) in which a drawing or poem is composed by different individuals unaware of each others’ efforts.17

138

Experimentations

A few years later, Cage, Harrison, Henry Cowell, and Virgil Thomson would explicitly take up the surrealist method in the twenty Party Pieces they wrote together in the mid-1940s.18 Surprisingly absent from Cage’s earliest research is anything akin to the technique used by Marcel Duchamp in Erratum Musical (1913), in which vocal parts to be performed by Duchamp and his sisters Yvonne and Magdeleine were “composed” by picking notes at random out of a hat. When sung by all three voices at once, Duchamp’s libretto, a short dictionary definition of the verb “to print,” sounded as a chaotic and cacophonous “harmony” (Figure 4.2). Duchamp’s method recalls the recipe for dadaist poetry in Tristan Tzara’s “Manifesto on feeble love and bitter love,” in which a newspaper page is cut up and its words drawn at random from a bag. “The poem,” Tzara noted wryly, “will be like you.”19 Cage apparently became aware of the musical precedents in Duchamp’s oeuvre only once he had begun his own investigation of chance operations—to which Duchamp responded laconically, “I suppose I was fifty years ahead of my time.”20 Despite a superficial similarity, however, Cage soon recognized that his compositions had far surpassed those of Duchamp in the complexity of the processes used.21 The intricacy of Cage’s compositional procedures was evident in Music of Changes (Figure 4.3). After having decided upon the work’s overall temporal structure, Cage divided the composition’s remaining elements into twentysix charts: eight for sounds (half of each chart reserved for silence), eight for amplitudes or dynamics, eight for durations, one for tempi, and one for superposition (“how many events are happening at once during a given structural space”).22 Each chart was configured in eight columns and eight rows (those containing silences or no change in value [e.g., in tempo] generally not represented) so as to conform to the sixty-four-cell chart of hexagrams in the I Ching, the Chinese “Book of Changes,” a copy of which Christian Wolff had given Cage in late 1950 or early 1951. Following the I Ching’s method of divining hexagrams by tossing three coins six times, Cage could locate the corresponding places on each grid and thereby define the necessary elements for each and every acoustical event within the final composition. As documented by the invaluable work of James Pritchett and David Bernstein, the compositional procedure of Music of Changes was both time-consuming and labor-intensive, every sound being the product of consulting multiple charts.23 Neither Cage’s use of charts nor his employment of the I Ching began with Music of Changes. As noted in Chapter 1, both had been pioneered in the

Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity

139

Figure 4.2  Marcel Duchamp, Erratum Musical, 1913. Parts for Yvonne and Magdeleine.

140

Experimentations

Figure 4.3  John Cage, Music of Changes, 1951.

Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity

141

Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1950–51).24 In it, Cage staged an opposition between the piano, which began the first movement intuitively and improvisationally composed, and the orchestra. In contrast with the first movement’s piano part, freely composed in the manner of Cage’s prepared piano works of the 1940s, the orchestra part derived from a fourteencolumn by sixteen-row chart on which all sonorities were specifically notated. Each of the sixteen rows was weighted toward a particular instrument: row 1, flute; row 2, oboe; row 3, clarinet, and so on, down through the various types of percussion: metal, wood, friction, and a miscellaneous section that Cage described as “characterized by mechanical means, e.g., the radio.”25 The fourteen columns in each row contained different sounds or sound aggregates, each weighted according to the instrument dominating the row. Unlike Music of Changes, each sound within the concerto, no matter how simple or complex, was invariant and predefined. As Cage explained to Boulez: “Each sound is minutely described in the chart: e.g. a particular tone, sul pont on the 2nd string of the first vn. [violin] with a particular flute tone and, for example a wood block.”26 For the orchestral part of the first movement, Cage derived the sequence in which the sounds would occur by making vertical and horizontal moves on the chart: beginning with the sound represented in one of the cells, subsequent sounds were selected by following a simple sequence such as moving down two cells and then over three.27 In composing the concerto’s second movement, Cage retained the chart for the orchestra and added a second chart of equally detailed sonorities for the prepared piano. In this case, however, Cage determined the sequence of the sounds by a different, although equally impersonal, method that involved tracing a series of concentric circles and squares on graph paper. For the third and final movement, Cage employed a single chart in which he combined sounds to be made by the piano, sounds to be made by the orchestra, and a number of new sound aggregates to be made by both piano and orchestra together, thus representing their ultimate unification within a single, impersonal compositional procedure.28 As when composing the orchestra’s part of the first movement, Cage selected the sounds by means of simple two-part vertical and horizontal moves on the chart. It was here that Cage first employed the I Ching. Although the chart of piano and orchestra sounds for the third movement consisted of the same sixteen rows and fourteen columns he had used earlier, Cage produced two additional charts, in the eight-by-eight configuration of the I Ching, which contained arrays of simple moves interspersed with empty cells representing

142

Experimentations

silences. Cage then tossed coins to obtain the hexagrams by which to read these additional charts in order to determine the moves to be made on the one containing sounds. Since the charts Cage used in composing Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra included already complete and precisely notated sound complexes, composition essentially consisted in using chance operations to determine the sequencing of the sounds. Thus, to a certain extent, the Concerto is a linear equivalent of the charts that, at any given moment, represent the totality of available sounds.29 In this respect, Cage’s procedure had not advanced all that far beyond Duchamp’s or Tzara’s random drawing of materials out of a hat or bag.30 In Music of Changes, by contrast, Cage’s separation of the sound’s various components into multiple charts—one containing sonorities, one containing durations, and one containing dynamics—allowed him to surpass the limitations of compositional preconception not merely in the sequencing of the sounds, but in their very identity. More than simply arranged according to the laws of chance, each defining parameter of every acoustical event within Music of Changes was determined by chance operations. Such an apparently small shift from one to multiple charts introduced two important changes in Cage’s aesthetic. The first concerns the understanding of the pool of sounds from which his composition would draw. In place of a closed set of predetermined sounds, Cage would conceive of sound as a limitless and differentiated “sound-space” or “field.” The second change concerns the manner in which sounds are understood to move from this sound-space into the composition and, from there, into the arenas of performance and audition. Both transformations will ultimately prove important for understanding the full implications of Cage’s engagement with chance. * The first transformation in Cage’s compositional practice hinges on the fact that, whereas the Concerto was largely equivalent to a diachronic realization of its charts, which represented (at any given moment) the totality of the work’s materials in synchronic fashion,31 Music of Changes derived from the coming into existence of sounds that did not preexist, as such, within the charts at all. In Music of Changes, the chance-driven manipulation of different components of each sound—the transformation of the components of the sound chart by the durations and dynamics of the others—altered the sounds originally given into ones the composer could not foresee. As Pritchett has demonstrated, the

Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity

143

original, “natural” readings of the elements Cage placed within the sound charts were mutated in unexpected ways by the chance determination of durations and dynamics.32 Thus, although the ultimate state of each sound could be precisely determined and notated within the score, the totality of acoustic possibilities drawn upon in Music of Changes was no longer preconceived. Composition thus entered the realm of “experimentation” and became an activity without foreseen or predetermined result. Music of Changes, however, represented only a preliminary step in transforming Cage’s conception of the pool of potential sounds. The sound charts with which he began contained sound complexes that were intentionally created, and chance-determined manipulations of duration and dynamics only pushed them a relatively short distance into the unknown. In order to begin with materials that were not preconceived, Cage developed the “point-drawing” technique initiated in the score for Music for Carillon (Graph) No. 1 (1952), developed throughout such series as Music for Piano (1956), and elaborated in magisterial fashion in Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–58), before serving as the basis of scores using transparencies such as Fontana Mix (1958), Variations I (1958), and Variations II (1961) (Figures 4.4 and 4.5). In pointdrawing scores, Cage simply and immediately notated dots on a sheet of paper by, for instance, marking a number of imperfections found on the sheet within a given amount of time.33 These points could then be translated into sounds by establishing different means of mapping by which their frequency, amplitude, timbre, duration, and “morphology” (attack and decay characteristics) could be determined independently of the composer’s preconceptions. No longer beginning in the mind of the composer, the composition now drew its materials from the entirety of an acoustical “field.” “The reason I am presently working with imperfections in paper is this,” Cage noted in 1954: “I am thus able to designate certain aspects of sound as though they were in a field, which of course they are.”34 Cage’s conception of sound as existing within a field was precipitated by his interest in technology. In Cage’s estimation, the capabilities of, for instance, magnetic tape allowed for the possibility not only of reproducing any sound but, through various means of manipulation, producing every possible sound. Sound thereby became conceivable as a continuous expanse without gap, division, or lacuna (a fact that helped ally it with the equally technologically driven architectural vision of Buckminster Fuller explored in Chapter 2). As Cage explained in “Experimental Music,”

144

Experimentations

Figure 4.4  John Cage, Music for Piano 69–84 (#73), 1956. Musical habits include scales, modes, theories of counterpoint and harmony, and the study of the timbres, singly and in combination of a limited number of sound-producing mechanisms. In mathematical terms these all concern discrete steps. They resemble walking—in the case of pitches, on steppingstones twelve in number. This cautious stepping is not characteristic of the possibilities

Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity

145

Figure 4.5  John Cage, Concert for Piano and Orchestra: Piano Solo, 1957–58. of magnetic tape, which is revealing to us that musical action or existence can occur at any point or along any line or curve or what have you in total soundspace; that we are, in fact, technically equipped to transform our contemporary awareness of nature’s manner of operation into art.35

Although continuous and unlimited, the “total sound-space” implied in Cage’s “field situation” was, as previously discussed, not homogeneous.36 Any movement or transformation in coordinates equaled a transformation in acoustic identity. Once again describing the effects of magnetic tape, Cage stated, The situation made available by these means is essentially a total soundspace, the limits of which are ear-determined only, the position of a particular sound in this space being the result of five determinants: frequency or pitch, amplitude or loudness, overtone structure or timbre, duration, and morphology (how the sound begins, goes on, and dies away). By the alteration of any one of these determinants, the position of the sound in sound-space changes.37

Continuous, but also heterogeneous, Cage’s total sound-space is what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would call a “smooth space”; all points are reachable, but none are identical.38 As we have seen, Cage began to conceive of his

146

Experimentations

compositions as “exploring a field” that was “limitless and without qualitative differentiation but with multiplicity of differences.”39 * Cage’s use of the term “multiplicity” in describing the heterogeneous and unlimited space of all sound would not seem to have been purely occasional. It had come up earlier within the context of his correspondence with Boulez about Music of Changes. Whereas Cage had contended that his earlier use of the chart technique had brought him “closer to a ‘chance’ or if you like to an un-aesthetic choice,” the full development of the multiple-chart procedure within Music of Changes opened onto a different paradigm: “when I send you the Changes I shall also send you the charts I used,” he wrote to Boulez in the summer of 1951. “As I see it, the problem is to understand thoroughly all the qualities that act to produce multiplicity.”40 The term “multiplicity” would have been particularly significant for Cage at the time, for the year 1951 most likely marked his initial reception of vitalist French philosopher of multiplicity, Henri Bergson. Although the majority of Cage literature rightly focuses on the importance of his reception of Indian and East Asian philosophies, as related through such figures as Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and Daisetz T. Suzuki, the relatively little researched link between Cage and Bergson opens up new aspects of the composer’s thinking. As I have argued elsewhere, Cage’s mature understanding of silence as formulated in that year can be related to (if it did not, in fact, derive from) Bergson’s critique of non-being as expressed in Creative Evolution.41 According to Bergson, what an individual conceived as the absence of an object was, in actuality, merely the finding of another object that he or she did not seek.42 Similarly, after an experience within an anechoic chamber—in which Cage heard, not silence, but the noises made by his circulatory and nervous systems—Cage would come to define silence, not as the complete absence of sounds, but rather as the absence only of intentional sounds and the presence of other sounds not sought, that is, unintended. From such a perspective, as Cage would put it, “There is no such thing as silence.”43 Where Cage quoted Bergson most explicitly, however, was on the notion of disorder. As he stated, for instance, in a lecture delivered at Dartmouth College in 1955, “Magnetic tape reveals to ears … that things are in this life in a state of togetherness that is a real cause for joy, that their disorder, if so it appears to us, is simply (as Bergson has said) an order we had not been looking for.”44 Bergson’s

Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity

147

critique of disorder was also found in Creative Evolution and proceeded in the same manner as his critique of nonbeing. As alluded to in Cage’s paraphrase, Bergson considered disorder to be a pseudo-idea that arose on account of the disappointment of an individual who, searching for one kind of order, finds another. “When I enter a room and pronounce it to be ‘in disorder,’ what do I mean?” queried Bergson: The position of each object is explained by the automatic movements of the person who has slept in the room, or by the efficient causes, whatever they may be, that have caused each article of furniture, clothing, etc., to be where it is: the order, in the second sense of the word, is perfect. But it is order of the first kind that I am expecting, the order that a methodical person consciously puts into his life, the willed order and not the automatic: so I call the absence of this order “disorder.” At bottom, all there is that is real, perceived and even conceived, in this absence of one of the two kinds of order, is the presence of the other. But the second is indifferent to me, I am interested only in the first, and I express the presence of the second as a function of the first, instead of expressing it, so to speak, as a function of itself, by saying it is disorder.45

If one type of order was that expressed in scientific, geometric, mechanistic, and/or mathematical laws (an order predicated on suppressing lived duration), the second was a “vital” one that existed within duration’s continual flow and was “essentially creation.”46 To each type of order corresponded a certain type of multiplicity. One form was proper to discontinuous, numerical multiplicities, the other to continuous, virtual multiplicities, those integrally related to the creative transformations of lived duration.47 According to Bergson (in a connection that would not have gone unnoted by Cage), the idea of chance as a form of disorder was prompted by the confusion of an individual who failed to grasp the difference between these two types of order. “[I]n reality,” wrote Bergson, “chance merely objectifies the state of mind of one who, expecting one of the two kinds of order, finds himself confronted with the other. Chance and disorder are therefore necessarily conceived as relative.”48 Like Bergson, Cage sought to think in a non-“anthropocentric” manner, to grasp the “[l]ife” that, as he explained to Paul Henry Lang, “goes on very well without me”—an order of existence that surpasses the limitations of the human mind and the procedures of dialectical thinking that Cage saw as derived from it.49 It was for this reason that he mobilized the idea of multiplicity (as a complex interaction that was in line with the actual, ontological existence of sound) against an idea of relationships as generally understood and grasped

148

Experimentations

by the human mind. Relationships were seen as inherently limited, essentially dualistic, and therefore reductive in comparison with the multiplicity Cage was attempting to access. Drawing upon Suzuki, Cage explained, From a non-dualistic point of view, each thing and each being is seen at the center, and these centers are in a state of interpenetration and non-obstruction. From a dualistic point of view, on the other hand, each thing and each being is not seen: relationships are seen and interferences are seen. To avoid undesired interferences and to make one’s intentions clear, a dualistic point of view requires a careful integration of the opposites.50

In this, we can begin to see that Cage’s repeated insistence on the unknowablility of life, nature, or existence opened onto more than simply mysticism. With an understanding of ontology (including, but not limited to, “sound-space”) as an infinite expanse of interconnections in a state of continuous mobility and temporally accumulating growth (as it was also conceived by Bergson), totality was no longer properly cognizable as such.51 Yet, Cage’s descriptions of existence as a “limitless” field filled with an ungraspable “multiplicity of differences” did not mean that nothing could be understood, only that existence in its totality could not be. Sound being no longer a limited and previsible totality as in the charts of the Concerto, individual sounds were to be drawn from a complex, unpredictable, and unlimited totality. And as opposed to Music of Changes, which drew its initial components from a set of pregiven notated sonorities, the field of all sound was properly unknowable for it existed only within a virtual state. This was the “change in our heads” Cage would mention in relation to conceiving of existence as a “field phenomenon.” “And about this field,” Cage contended, “nothing can be said. And yet one goes on talking, in order to make this clear”—“our business has changed from judgment to awareness.”52 * If the first important change to arise from the multiple-chart technique utilized in Music of Changes concerned Cage’s understanding of the limitless field within which all sounds existed, the second impacted his conception of the manner in which those sounds traveled from this pool of all potential sound—from the continuous multiplicity that is the total sound-space—to the level of the composition itself. Previously, in Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra, the relationship of the sounds in the composition to their prior

Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity

149

existence in the compositional charts was one of identity. In both states, the sound itself was effectively unchanged. In Music of Changes, by contrast, the use of multiple charts began to indicate a relationship between the composition’s sounds and the material from which they were drawn that was not one of identity, but one of difference. The distinction that Cage will come to make is fundamental, and in order to describe it we will have to be precise. It is from Deleuze—whose own study of Bergson began at the same historical moment as Cage’s—that we will be able to derive the needed analytical tools.53 First, we will have to introduce a terminological distinction, for, as pointed out by Deleuze, there is in Bergson’s thought an important difference between possibilities and virtualities.54 Like disorder and non-being, the idea of the possible is for Bergson a false idea, a projection from reality backward into a supposedly prior state. Possibilities are considered to be knowable, preexisting their realization already endowed with their proper form. There is, then, no difference between a possible action and a real action apart from the fact that a real action has come to pass and a merely possible action has not, or has not yet. Virtualities, by contrast, are of a different order altogether: they do not preexist their coming into being in an already constituted form. The virtual exists in a state of potentiality and is, as such, properly unknowable. Whereas possibilities relate to static, pre-formed, closed systems (being, in fact, backward projections from an existent reality), virtualities are part of ongoing systems, “vital” and “creative” systems that are infinitely evolving and temporally accumulating. The virtual, therefore, cannot be fully conceived until it is created. In order to describe the manner in which Bergsonian virtualities come into being, Deleuze provides a second terminological distinction: whereas possibilities are realized, virtualities are actualized. Here the distinction is equally fundamental. The relationship of possibilities to their realization is characterized by identity and limitation. A possibility that is realized is the same as it was in its prior state of possibility; it is identical to its previous state, only it now seemingly has reality added to it. In relation to the totality of possibilities available at any given time the one that is realized is derived according to a process of limitation, having been selected from out of all the others that are not, or are not yet, realized. Such is the relationship of the notes in Duchamp’s Erratum Musical to the hatful from which they were drawn or of the notes in Cage’s Concerto for Prepared Piano to the charts in which they were found. The role of chance is limited to

150

Experimentations

that of selecting from among the set of possible elements available at any one given time that one element that is, at a particular moment, to be realized. Actualization, by contrast, takes place specifically with regard to continuous multiplicities of the kind proper to Cage’s conception of sound. Actualization is the manner in which one part or aspect of such a continuous multiplicity comes into existence. In that a part (e.g., a sound) derives from the multiplicity as a whole, the multiplicity can be said to divide, but such a division, Deleuze explains, is neither a simple partition nor merely a subtraction of part from whole, but rather a procedure of differentiation in kind. The resulting entity is not recognizable as either a discrete section or a particular aspect of the original multiplicity (which is, in any case, durationally changing), but is an actualization that is, with relation to its previous state, new. Deleuze explains, For, in order to be actualized, the virtual cannot proceed by elimination or limitation, but must create its own lines of actualization in positive acts. The reason for this is simple: While the real is in the image and likeness of the possible that it realizes, the action, on the other hand[,] does not resemble the virtuality that it embodies. It is difference that is primary in the process of actualization—the difference between the virtual from which we begin and the actuals at which we arrive, and also the difference between the complementary lines according to which actualization takes place. In short, the characteristic of virtuality is to exist in such a way that it is actualized by being differentiated and is forced to differentiate itself, to create its lines of differentiation in order to be actualized.55

Actualization is thus the manner in which a positive form of differentiation operates, one in which difference is not based on negation but on creation and is therefore a positive force.56 It relates to a form of difference understood to be central and internal, a form in which the virtual multiplicity in its movement of actualization differs first and foremost from itself. Although all of the distinctions enumerated above—between possibilities and virtualities, realization and actualization, and discrete and continuous multiplicities—can be found in Creative Evolution, they are nowhere as clearly defined in Bergson’s prose as in Deleuze’s analysis of it, a situation obscured further by the English translation.57 For this reason, perhaps, Cage uses the terms “possible” and “potential” (the translator’s preferred English term for “virtuel”) almost interchangeably. Nevertheless, it is clear from the context of Cage’s statements that Cagean possibilities and potentialities are by and large equivalent to Bergsonian virtualities as more strictly defined by Deleuze and

Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity

151

as they line up on the side of actualization, continuous multiplicity, and the unforeseen nature of experimental actions. As Cage wrote about his score, Variations I, “In this situation, the universe within which the action is to take place is not preconceived. Furthermore, as we know, sounds are events in a field of possibilities, not only at the discrete points conventions have favored.”58 By 1958, Cage consistently described his compositional processes in terms of actualization. As he noted, for instance, in “Composition as Process I: Changes,” “With tape and music-synthesizers, action with the overtone structure of sounds can be less a matter of taste and more thoroughly an action in a field of possibilities.”59 More significantly, Cage’s compositional practice followed the general lines of actualization. This was evident as early as 1952, in Cage’s discussion of the superposition chart in Music of Changes, where a sound was considered to exist in a virtual state (was, in Cage’s terms, “possibly audible”), and was only “actually audible” within certain conditions determined by coin tosses according with the I Ching. As he described the process in the journal trans/formation (the article he later read to his New School class), Each one of the events (1 to 8) is worked from the beginning to the end of the composition. For instance, the 8th one is present from beginning to end but may sound only during a structural space that has been defined by a toss (for Superpositions) of 57 to 64 [in the I-Ching]. It is then not only present but possibly audible. It becomes actually audible if a sound is tossed (rather than a silence) and if the duration tossed is of a length that does not carry the sound beyond the structural space open to it.60

The multiple-chart technique of Music of Changes, wherein individual musical events arise out of the combination of different charts and are not fully contained within any one of them, also begins to hint at the process of actualization. Actualization, however, was more clearly implemented in the point-drawing scores wherein sound was engaged or related to as a field. As Cage describes the process in “45' for a Speaker,” To determine the number of imperfections in a given space, coins are tossed. That number of spots is then potentially active. Subsequent tosses determine which are actually active. Tables are arranged referring to tempi, the number of superimpositions, that is to say number of things that can go on at once, sounds & silences, durations, loudnesses, accents.61

152

Experimentations

Shortly afterward, Cage associates his point-drawing technique both with the notion of chance and with the more particularly Bergsonian notions of life, duration, and virtuality (“potentiality”): I am talking & contemporary music is changing. Like life it changes. If it were not changing it would be dead. That is why chance enters for me so largely into my means which are skillful. It is at the point of potentiality … I am working now to work without charts, without any support in total space.62

For Cage, sound ontologically is a virtual multiplicity, and in this state it is unified, it is one (a total sound-space), although heterogeneous and unbounded. Composition consists in devising ways of translating the spot on the paper (a potential or virtual sound) into an actual sound by determining—through the use of chance operations and/or varying degrees of indeterminacy—all components necessary to provide the identity of the sonic event. It is through the application of these procedures that the point comes into being as a sound. In this way, the continuous multiplicity that is the totality of all sound is divided, but the sounds thereby produced are not previously located or foreseen. To recall Cage’s quip about the point-drawing technique, “Spots are spots and skill’s needed to turn them to the point of practicality.”63 * With Music of Changes, Cage had succeeded in enacting a process of actualization (to however limited a degree) only with regard to the level of composition. If, for the composer, the situation was one of having access to an unprecedented realm of sound (if not yet entirely a total sound-space), the performer was still faced with a more or less conventionally notated score (however complex or innovative). As Cage described the situation, That the Music of Changes was composed by means of chance operations identifies the composer with no matter what eventuality. But that its notation is in all respects determinate does not permit the performer any such identification: his work is specifically laid out before him. He is therefore not able to perform from his own center but must identify himself insofar as possible with the center of the work as written.64

From this perspective, Music of Changes falls squarely within the most compromising terms of Theodor Adorno’s critique of advanced music. By effectively subtracting him- or herself from the composition, the composer

Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity

153

delivers performers over to a fixed and entirely objective contingency that lords over them, effectively placing them in a position of submission before it as before a social situation equally objectively and impersonally controlled.65 Levying this very charge against himself, in an exemplary moment of self-criticism, Cage explained, The Music of Changes is an object more inhuman than human, since chance operations brought it into being. The fact that these things that constitute it, though only sounds, have come together to control a human being, the performer, gives the work the alarming aspect of a Frankenstein monster. This situation is of course characteristic of Western music, the masterpieces of which are its most frightening examples, which when concerned with humane communication only move over from Frankenstein monster to Dictator.66

For the audience, too, there was little difference between Music of Changes and any intentionally composed work. Although Cage’s compositional process eliminated any a priori message, it did not interrupt the communicative process seen to operate between composer or performer and audience. On account of the fixity of its score, the Music of Changes could not escape a posteriori projections and analyses: it was just as open to the recovery or imputation of meanings as tarot cards or cups of tea leaves.67 Although, in Music of Changes, Cage concentrated exclusively on composition, he succeeded on that level in gaining insights that led to the realization of his “failure” within the realms of performance and audience reception. Seeking to move beyond the determinate score of Music of Changes, Cage pursued indeterminacy, developing the means by which a single point or note could be read in a variety—eventually an unlimited variety—of ways. Hence, the majority of Cage’s point-drawing scores (and, later, those using transparencies) take the form of compositional puzzles for which the “answers”—that is, the actual notes to be played—are variable or even unlimited in scope and, at the outset, unknown to either composer or performer. In this sense, the score comes into existence as a result of the performer’s “actualization”; prior to that moment it exists only in a state of virtuality. As Cage explained in the lecture, “Experimental Music,” “The total field of possibilities [read ‘virtualities’] may be roughly divided and the actual sounds within these divisions may be indicated as to number but left to the performer or to the splicer to choose.”68

154

Experimentations

Only with this final step of introducing indeterminacy into his scores, it could be argued, did Cage succeed in the task he set for himself “to understand thoroughly all the qualities that act to produce multiplicity.” For in order for a composition to be a multiplicity it is not enough that it derive from an unlimited space of all sound or that it engage with chance operations. For a composition to be a multiplicity, it must not be reproduced or realized but actualized; it must proceed to performance not by means of identity, representation, or resemblance—from out of a limited and preestablished set of materials—but via an act of creation. A composition acts to produce a multiplicity because, and only if, it exists as a virtuality with relation to the stage of performance that succeeds it. In this, the performer partially loses his or her subservient position as the composer’s representative to take on a greater share in the role of individual creator, and the performance loses its role as a representation of the score to become a process of actualized differentiation.69 The same is true of the relationship between performance and audience reception. In the first place, performance becomes indeterminate of audition on account of its potential unrepeatability. The same piece at different times and performed by different performers (each of whom has, presumably, actualized the score for him- or herself) gives rise quite literally to distinct acoustical experiences, and this indeterminacy is augmented by Cage’s explicitly allowing for the possibility of multiple compositions of his being performed simultaneously.70 In addition, the “transparency” of Cage’s compositions, their openness to the inclusion of ambient and unintended noises, further differentiates each performance according to the acoustical circumstances encountered in the particular time and place of presentation. (This, Brecht noted quite specifically: “Ambient sound penetrates the intended, is ‘included’ in the music. It is relevant to the situation in which the music arises/relevant to the music, which is ever situational.”)71 Moreover, the music’s being free of any traditionally expressive or communicative message, the audience’s act of interpretation (as the hermeneutic uncovering of meaning) gives way to what Cage called “sensitivic responsiveness” or “response ability”: a form of reception that arises from, but is not determined by, the performance, a reception that is as constitutively dependent on each audience member as on the composer or performer.72 For the audience of one of Cage’s pieces, the performance is a virtuality, it is a virtual multiplicity, and the same is true of the composition with

Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity

155

relation to the performance and of sound or ontology with relation to the composition. The passage or movement from one activity to the other is one of actualization, a process of differentiation from one layer to the next that is a process of individuation. Acoustical aggregates are actualized in the process of composing to form small, virtual systems by which the composition functions as a multiplicity.73 These, in turn, are actualized into specific acoustical events in performance, forming in their interaction with other sounds (both performed and ambient) a multiplicity with relation to the audience. Finally, the audience—by means of the interaction of sounds with the individual’s unique emotional and cognitive responses—actualizes an experience that is individual. Cage advocated promoting such an individualized reception by dispersing performers and/or loudspeakers around and about the audience (an avenue first explored in Cage’s happening-like Theatre Event #1 [1952] at Black Mountain College). Such acoustical distribution fragmented the performed sound, rendering what is heard by each audience member different from the experience of others located at different positions throughout the hall. In this way, the unique proximity of each listener to the various points of sound production physically renders performance indeterminate of any one, unique, collective experience of hearing. Cage explained, Rehearsals have shown that this new music, whether for tape or for instruments, is more clearly heard when the several loud-speakers or performers are separated in space rather than grouped closely together. For this music is not concerned with harmoniousness as generally understood, where the quality of harmony results from a blending of several elements. Here we are concerned with the coexistence of dissimilars, and the central points where fusion occurs are many: the ears of the listeners wherever they are.74

In this context, immediately following the above quote, Cage once again referenced Bergson’s discussion of disorder: “This disharmony, to paraphrase Bergson’s statement about disorder, is simply a harmony to which many are unaccustomed.”75 Cage’s process of moving via differentiation through the processes of composition, performance, and audition figures as an almost analytical model of Bergson’s ontological vision and is one of the ways that Cage’s music could be seen to imitate nature in its “manner of operation.” From the level of the universe as a whole to that of human society to that of the smallest of microorganisms,

156

Experimentations

nature was described by Bergson as in a state of ongoing fluctuation between the two poles of individuation and association: So, among the dissociated individuals, one life goes on moving: everywhere the tendency to individualize is opposed and at the same time completed by an antagonistic and complementary tendency to associate, as if the manifold unity of life, drawn in the direction of multiplicity, made so much the more effort to withdraw itself on to itself. A part is no sooner detached than it tends to reunite itself, if not to all the rest, at least to what is nearest to it. Hence, throughout the whole realm of life, a balancing between individuation and association.76

In Cage’s compositions, the same dual process is at work, as, for instance, individual notes are actualized from the virtual totality that is all sound to then find themselves associated with others to form a virtual multiplicity with regard to performance, and then again from the process of performance to the situation of hearing. Such a dual movement of individuation and association (what Cage would call, following Suzuki, “unimpededness and interpenetration”) was seen by Bergson as essential. “The evolution of life in the double direction of individuality and association has therefore nothing accidental about it,” he declared: “it is due to the very nature of life.”77 We are now in a better position to understand what is meant by Cage when he famously defined the purpose of writing music as “an affirmation of life—not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.”78 The answer has nothing to do with the presentism of which Cage has often been accused, the quietistic endorsement of a purely mimetic relationship between the composition and the actually existing state of society. Rather, the relationship of the work of art to the ontological state of being—the relationship, in other words, of art to life as put forward by Cage—is one of indeterminacy in this sense: sounds (and, as we shall see shortly, other aspects of existence as well) come into existence through a process of differentiation as they pass from a state of virtuality to one of actualization. * We have found ourselves, it would seem, in rather unfamiliar art historical territory, quite a ways from any simple notions of chance or vague relations

Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity

157

between “art” and “life.” Yet, if we turn back to what Cage taught in his New School composition courses, we find specific ideas drawn from his most advanced aesthetic researches of the time. These are most clearly located in the work of George Brecht, both because of the unique access Brecht’s course notebooks afford to Cage’s teaching and because, as Dick Higgins indicated, Brecht seemed to follow the intricacies of Cage’s aesthetic much more closely than his other classmates. According to Brecht’s notes, the first idea Cage communicated to his 1958 summer class was that of the five “dimensions” of sound and their “trend toward Continuity.” As Cage had explained in “Experimental Music” a year earlier, frequency, duration, amplitude, timbre, and morphology had all effectively become fields rather than discrete elements: thus, a “frequency field,” as Brecht noted, rather than “definite tones”; a “duration field,” in place of notations of “1/8th, 1/16th, 1/32, etc.”; an “overtone field,” instead of traditional “orchestration”; and so on.79 Importantly, Cage’s understanding of sounds as existing within a field had long extended to the idea that they interacted not only with all other sounds but with all facets of existence. As Cage explained in 1955 in “Experimental Music: Doctrine,” Urgent, unique, uninformed about history and theory, beyond the imagination, central to a sphere without surface, its [a sound’s] becoming is unimpeded, energetically broadcast. There is no escape from its action. It does not exist as one of a series of discrete steps, but as transmission in all directions from the field’s center. It is inextricably synchronous with all other, sounds, non-sounds, which latter, received by other sets than the ear, operate in the same manner.80

From such a perspective, Cage’s idea of the “field” extended into the multisensory, multimedia, and multidisciplinary realm he termed “theater”: Relevant action is theatrical (music [imaginary separation of hearing from the other senses] does not exist), inclusive and intentionally purposeless. Theatre is continually becoming that it is becoming; each human being is at the best point for reception. Relevant response (getting up in the morning and discovering oneself musician) (action, art) can be made with any number (including none [none and number, like silence and music, are unreal]) of sounds.81

One year earlier, in “45' for a Speaker,” Cage had specifically invoked the relation of sound and vision, writing, “Music is an oversimplification of the situation we actually are in. An ear alone is not a being; music is one part of theatre. ‘Focus’ is what aspects one’s noticing. Theatre is all the various things going on at the same

158

Experimentations

time. I have noticed that music is liveliest for me when listening for instance doesn’t distract me from seeing.”82 Anticipating the partial conjunction of his own discipline with that of most of his New School students, Cage noted further, “it is theatre and music disappears entirely into the realm of art where it knows it belongs.”83 Although by no means deriving exclusively from Cage’s example, the genres of happenings and Fluxus drew greatly upon Cage’s extension of composition to include the visual as well as the audible, objects and environments as well as sounds. Kaprow’s first happenings, Brecht’s early experiments with light, and Hansen, Higgins, and Larry Poons’s founding of the Audio Visual Group can all be understood as developments of Cagean “theater.”84 In 1960, even as Kaprow had become the happening’s official spokesperson, the genre was received as indelibly linked to Cage’s New School classroom and its practitioners identified as his students.85 As late as 1961, a year after Cage had stopped teaching, Brecht could still be found working through Cage’s theatrical paradigm. In the draft of an article proposed for the nascent publication, Fluxus, Brecht wrote, Composers, performers and auditors of music permit sound-experiences by arranging situations having sound as an aspect. But there are other than sound-situations. But the theater is well lit. Situations can be of interest in any dimension. Now consider music admitting ambient sound, for example, that of John Cage, Christian Wolff. Why shut my eyes? And if my eyes are open, why a “sound-situation?” Why mention sound at all. There are things to see. I have to cough; the seat creaks; and I can feel the vibration. Since there is no distraction, why choose sound as the common aspect?86

Working within the context of Cage’s class, Brecht engaged not only with general ideas, but with specific compositional procedures. Hence one finds Brecht, in what seems one of his first “homework” assignments, proposing an extension of Cage’s point-drawing scores: (1) A piece of wood, about 1 foot square, is painted white, and while still wet is placed outdoors (e.g., in the woods). After it is dry, each speck represents a sound. (2) An “interpretive matrix” (ruled areas, lines, etc. on acetate, over a frame) is placed over this piece of wood, to allow transformation into sound.87

Here, Brecht can be seen extending Cage’s point-drawing technique in a more painterly and object-oriented direction while literalizing Cage’s relationship to nature.

Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity

159

Brecht’s notes indicate that Cage invoked Bergson’s discussion of disorder on the first day of the summer 1959 class.88 Bergsonian ideas of virtuality and actualization seem already to have been introduced into the course the year before, likely through Cage’s discussions of his own work and the article from trans/formation. Although appearing in several places, such concerns seem to have become a particular focus for Brecht toward the end of October in the context of his thinking through the conditions of “an aural-visual event.”89 As part of Brecht’s effort to expand Cagean principles into a more explicitly audiovisual register, he lists optical analogues for Cage’s five-part analysis of the components of a sound. The frequency of acoustical phenomena proves analogous to the wavelength of light, while timbre becomes “spectral distribution.” The attributes of amplitude, duration, and morphology Brecht judged equally applicable to both auditory and visual events and hence left unchanged. Once having defined his materials’ characteristics, Brecht states the general “Problem”: “To construct situations in which it is made possible for light and sound events of any desired characteristics (frequency/wave-length, amplitude/brightness, duration, timbre/spectral distribution, morphology) to occur at any points in space and time.” It is in subsequently contemplating “the nature of the unity of space and time which occurs in such situations” that Brecht will have recourse to the framework of actualization: If each micro-event (lighting of a light, sounding of a sound-source) is capable of occurring in only one point of space (e.g. by the static placement of a speaker, or light bulb), then this space “discreteness” is analogous to a time discreteness, wherein micro-events would only be capable of occurring at certain points in time. Of course, a “program” actually does constrain events to occur at certain points in time. We must, perhaps, differentiate “potentiality” and “actuality.” Universe of possibilities. Embodiment. The above paragraph shows confusion of these two [upward arrow] ideas.90

Almost immediately, on the basis of this insight, Brecht reformulates his thinking about audiovisual events concisely and according to the notion of actualization from an unlimited universe of virtualities (though, like Cage, he uses the term “possible”): “The event (micro), made actual, is one chosen from a universe of all possible {lights/sounds} from all possible space points.”91 The transformation that arises within Brecht’s thinking at this point is twofold and follows the same contours as Cage’s had undergone when developing

160

Experimentations

his chance operations in the direction of actualization: the first concerns the definition of the pool from which events might derive; the second, the manner in which such events move from that pool into the domains of performance and perception. Like Cage, Brecht would soon come to conceive of events as being drawn, not from discrete sets of terms, but from an infinitely extensive universe of virtualities. Seeking to describe the “General Nature of a Performance,” Brecht would write in November 1958, “The overall event (performance) is a selection of space-time events having specific qualities, drawn from a universe in which all possible space-time events, having all possible qualities, were available.” Although, like Cage, Brecht again utilizes the term “possible,” the unlimited totality to which he refers indicates that “virtual” would apply. Accordingly, and immediately afterward, Brecht invokes the notion of actualization: In practice, the universe of possibilities is as follows: All points in space within a specific room (say 1” module) are available for “activation,” by sounds or lights of any given qualities.92

Brecht’s reconception of what may be called the “ontology of the event” represents a fundamental transformation in his thinking about chance. Formerly, in Chance-Imagery, he had conceived chance not as actualizing a virtuality, but as the realization of a limited and predetermined set of possibilities (in the strict, Bergsonian sense of the term). This, Brecht explained precisely: It is sometimes possible to specify only the universe of possible characteristics which a chance event may have. For example, a toss of a normal die will be expected to give a number from one to six. Any particular face will be expected to turn up in about one-sixth of a great many throws. But the outcome of any one toss remains unknown until the throw has been made. It is often useful to keep in mind this “universe of possible results,” even when that universe is hypothetical, for this clarifies for us the nature of our chance event as a selection from a limited universe.93

The transformation in Brecht’s thinking (the “change in his head,” as Cage might say) that takes place with the reconceptualization of chance in the direction of actualization would be important for Brecht’s aesthetic development. Almost immediately, he likened the conception of an unlimited, virtual totality to sources in traditional Asian philosophy (an affinity he and Cage also shared) and to contemporary scientific conceptions of relativity and quantum mechanics, ideas he thought to develop in an article variously

Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity

161

titled “Relativity in the Work of John Cage,” “Space, Time, and Causality in the Work of John Cage,” “The Structure of a New Aesthetic,” or “John Cage and the Modern World-View: Space, Time and Causality.”94 Drawing from (and, in part, contributing to) Cage’s developing polemic against European serialism and certain works by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Boulez, Brecht underscored the distinction between their “closed systems” and the “open systems” that Cage pursued.95 In seeking to implement these transformations, Brecht proposed a switchboard for lights and sounds that operated with a series of controls and that reacted differently to high and low frequencies (in essence, a series of bandpass filters): One sound (hi or lo freq.) can go to any speaker (whether or not it sounds on that spkr.), or to any light (whether or not it can/has sufficient energy to/light that light). Also, a flux of hi/med/lo sounds on tape going to a hi-freq. spkr., will sound only a hi-freq. etc.96

Brecht worked on this proposal for some time, eventually sketching a sort of control box for indeterminacy, which he eventually abandoned on account of its complexity (“No desire to become an electrician”).97 To a not insignificant degree, however, Brecht’s box was to automate Cage’s process of actualization as found, for instance, in the superimposition charts of Music of Changes. Every light or speaker attached to Brecht’s switchboard was in a state of virtual or potential activity, in the sense that it could be activated or lit, at any moment. Any particular light or speaker would be actually active, however, would light or emit a sound, only upon receipt of appropriate frequency stimuli. In other cases, energy would be passing through (would be, from the perceiver’s point of view virtually there), but would not be actually perceivable.98 The second important transformation to Brecht’s aesthetic outlook to take place after his exposure to Cagean aesthetics involves the role of the individual subject—composer, performer, or listener (perceiver)—within the actualization process. Early on in Cage’s class, Brecht noted the tripartite division between composer, performer, and listener, importantly understanding that each stage in the process of composition, performance, and perception could be the locus of “sound-structuring,” as when, in the case of listening, the spatialization of acoustical stimuli rendered the individual the structuring center of the multiplicity of acoustical events.99 Brecht would think through the various relations between

162

Experimentations

composer, performer, and listener in great detail, eventually extending his focus to five different tiers with the addition of “notation” and “sound” and graphing the results in an elegant pentagrammic chart (Figure 4.6).100 Brecht’s considerations encompass all possible relations—from the most determined (“playing magnetic tape”) to the most indeterminate. However, within his discussions of indeterminate and/or environmental music, the process of actualization, as it operated from one stage to another, is evident. As Brecht wrote, for example, in draft notes for yet another proposed article (on “Situational Music”), In performing this new music (with much compositional indeterminacy) the performer confirms his own nature, in exactly the way the composer, in composition, confirmed his. The “virtu” of virtuosity must now mean behavior out of ones [sic] life-experience; it cannot be delimited toward physical skill. The listener responding to this sound out of his own experience, adds a new element to the system: composer/notation/performer/sound/listener, and, for himself, defines the sound as music. For the virtuoso listener all sound may be music.101

Here, we recognize the subject of virtuosity that so impressed (and baffled) Higgins from Brecht’s pre-class conversations with Cage. The “virtuoso listener”

Figure 4.6 George Brecht, chart of relations between composer, listener, sound, performer, and notation, from Notebook [III], April 1959–August 1959.

Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity

163

is one who is able to actualize the virtual multiplicity that is the field of all sounds—performed and environmental, sound and so-called silence—within which he or she finds him- or herself situated (Figure 4.7). By this time, Brecht was no longer solely within Cage’s orbit (though he would continue to grapple with the composer’s work and example for years). In addition to his prior interest in dada and the work of Jackson Pollock, he had encountered the work of British experimental composer Cornelius Cardew, who pushed him to understand perception as constituted by the individual’s internal, visceral “environment” as much as by his or her physical surrounds (“is the food in our stomachs a part of the ‘ambient situation’ ”).102 And, as Julia Robinson has demonstrated elsewhere in detail, Brecht’s thinking had also

Figure 4.7  George Brecht (“virtuoso listener”) in John Cage’s classroom at the New School for Social Research, August 5, 1959.

164

Experimentations

been profoundly transformed by exposure, in another New School course, to German philosopher Ernst Cassirer’s ideas about symbolic form.103 With works such as Time Table Event (1961)—which entailed no composition, as such, but considered all occurrences within a given time period (chosen at random from a commuter schedule) as part of the event—Brecht situated himself closer, perhaps, to the position of the virtuoso listener than to that of the multiplicitous composer that Cage largely still occupied (4'33" notwithstanding). Yet, it is not enough to contend that Brecht simply went his own way, or merely derived inspiration or encouragement from Cage. Rather, like his West Coast counterpart, La Monte Young, Brecht only came into his own by working through the implications of Cage’s aesthetic in its most advanced form. Only then was Brecht prepared to transform his artistic focus from the “structure of nature”—which, in part by following Cage, he had come to see as infinitely changing and, hence, properly unknowable—to the individual’s “structure of experience,” the point at which the totality of events would be actualized.104

Notes 1

2 3

4

The most detailed listing of Cage’s New School courses is found in Rebecca Y. Kim, “The Formalization of Indeterminacy in 1958: John Cage and Experimental Composition at the New School,” in John Cage, October Files 12, ed. Julia Robinson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 144–145. A less detailed list, with errors in the semesters of summer and fall, 1958, appeared in Bruce Altschuler, “The Cage Class,” in FluxAttitudes, ed. Cornelia Lauf and Susan Hapgood (Buffalo, NY: Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, 1991), 21–22 note 2. Allan Kaprow, “Happenings in the New York Scene” (1961), in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 19. Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters” (1952), in The Tradition of the New (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 23–39. Kaprow’s interest in abstract expressionism is, of course, manifest in “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” (1958), in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, 1–9; more identifiably Rosenbergian language appears in Allan Kaprow, “Experimental Art” (1966), in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, 66–80. Allan Kaprow, “One Chapter from ‘The Principles of Modern Art,’ ” It Is 4 (1958): 52 (ellipses in original). On Cage’s critique of inspiration, see, for example, John Cage, “45' for a Speaker” (1954), in Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 170. On the problematic nature of Cage’s opposition to improvisation, see George E. Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological

Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity

5

6

7 8

9

10 11 12

13

165

Perspectives,” Black Music Research Journal 16, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 91–122; and George E. Lewis, “Afterword to ‘Improvised Music after 1950’: The Changing Same,” in The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 163–172 (Lewis’s first essay also appears in that volume, 131–162). Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments, and Happenings (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1966), 175. Kaprow’s move away from Cage is discussed in Jeff Kelley, Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 20–46. Al Hansen’s attraction to Cage’s sense of anarchy is mentioned in Dick Higgins, “Postface,” in Jefferson’s Birthday/Postface (New York: Something Else, 1964), 49, 51. The notion of anarchy would also be mentioned by Kaprow in notes to “A Program of Happenings? Events! & Situations? Directed by Al Hansen, an eclectic” (May 2, 1960), repr. in George Brecht, Notebook V (March 1960–November 1960), ed. Hermann Braun (Cologne: Walther König, 1997), 88. On Hansen’s Hall Street Happening, see Al Hansen, A Primer of Happenings and Time/Space Art (New York: Something Else Press, 1965), 11–20. Higgins, “Postface,” 50–51; Barbara Rose, An Interview with Robert Rauschenberg (New York: Vintage Books, 1987), 34. Dick Higgins, “Boredom and Danger” (1966), in A Dialectic of Centuries: Notes towards a Theory of the New Arts, 2nd. ed. (New York: Printed Editions, 1978), 48–49. Kaprow not dissimilarly links chance to “risk and fear” in “Happenings in the New York Scene,” 19. Higgins’s Danger Music #17 recalls Tristan Tzara’s “Roar,” in Robert Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc., 1951), 96; Tzara’s “poem” was included as part of Hansen’s Hall Street Happening; see Hansen, A Primer, 18–19. Dick Higgins, “On Cage’s Classes” (1970), in John Cage: An Anthology, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Da Capo, 1970), 123 (ellipses in original). The statements Higgins seems to be referencing appeared in trans/formation 1, no. 3 (1952). Higgins, “On Cage’s Classes,” 122–124. Altschuler, “The Cage Class,” 17–23. On Cage’s notion of experimentation, see, for instance, John Cage, “Experimental Music: Doctrine” (1955), in Silence, 13. For adaptations of the idea, see Kaprow, “Experimental Art,” esp. 68–69; and Hansen, A Primer, 109: “My goal now is to involve the ideas of all my favorite people—Artaud and John Cage and Ray Johnson—in a total theater project in which things which weren’t possible before will be done.” Dick Higgins, “Blank Images” (1970), in A Dialectic of Centuries, 78. See also Higgins, “Postface,” 35, where he rightly notes the relation of transparency to the

166

14 15

16

17

18

19 20

21

22 23

24

Experimentations work of Marcel Duchamp. On transparency in Cage’s work and its reception or rejection by visual artists, see Introduction and Chapter 3. John Cage, “The New School,” in Kostelanetz, ed., John Cage: An Anthology, 119. John Cage, “Forerunners of Modern Music” (1949), in Silence, 62. In comments on this chapter, David Patterson has stressed the importance of live radio as a means of introducing chance-determined sounds into such compositions of Cage’s as Credo in US (1942) and even earlier. John Cage, Letter to Pierre Boulez, May 22, 1951, in Jean-Jacques Nattiez, ed., The Boulez-Cage Correspondence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 93. The epigraph to this chapter also refers to Cage’s soundtrack to Works of Calder and can be found in John Cage, Letter to Pierre Boulez, January 17, [1950], in Nattiez, ed., 48. Boulez notes the resemblance of Double Music to cadavre exquis in Nattiez, ed., 29. George Brecht invoked cadavre exquis in regard to Cage’s “Music for Four Pianos,” eighty-four independent compositions (many composed via methods involving chance, although Brecht does not mention it), which could be played in any combination by as many as four pianists at once; George Brecht, Chance-Imagery (1957; New York: Something Else Press, 1965), 11. These works, as Leta Miller notes, were originally titled “Sonorous or Exquisite Corpses”; Leta E. Miller, “Cage’s Collaborations,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, ed. David Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 154. Tristan Tzara, “Manifesto on feeble love and bitter love” (1916–20), in Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets, 92. Moira and William Roth, “John Cage on Marcel Duchamp,” Art in America 61, no. 6 (November–December 1973): 74; quoted in Richard Kostelanetz, ed., Conversing with Cage (New York: Limelight Editions, 1994), 219. Roth, “John Cage on Marcel Duchamp,” 74–75; quoted in Kostelanetz, ed., Conversing with Cage, 219–220. At some point, Cage came to own a more complex and lesser-known of Duchamp’s chance compositions, La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires même. Erratum Musical (1913); provenance given in Anne D’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1973), 264. John Cage, “Composition: To Describe the Process of Composition Used in Music of Changes and Imaginary Landscape No. 4,” in Silence, 58. James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 78–88; and David W. Bernstein, “Cage and High Modernism,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, 203–209. See Pritchett, The Music of John Cage, 60–78; and Bernstein, “Cage and High Modernism,” 193–203. Additional detail is provided in James Pritchett, “From Choice to Chance: John Cage’s Concerto for Prepared Piano,” Perspectives of New Music 26, no. 1 (Winter 1988): 50–81; and James William Pritchett, “The

Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity

167

Development of Chance Techniques in the Music of John Cage, 1950–1956,” Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University, Department of Music, 1988. My thanks to Rebecca Kim for the last two references. 25 John Cage, Letter to Pierre Boulez, May 22, 1951, in Nattiez, ed., 93. 26 Ibid. 27 Cage wrote to Boulez, “I then made moves on this chart of a ‘thematic nature’ but, as you may easily see, with an ‘athematic’ result. This entire first movement uses only 2 moves, e.g. down 2, over 3, up 4, etc.” (Cage, Letter to Pierre Boulez, May 22, 1951, in Nattiez, ed., 93). According to Bernstein, most moves were two-part, one on the vertical axis and one on the horizontal axis; Bernstein, “Cage and High Modernism,” 195. 28 As noted by Pritchett, however, Cage subjectively modified such aspects as phrasing and rhythm; Pritchett, The Music of John Cage, 63. 29 As Pritchett notes, “The sounds of the concerto are both independent (in the way they occur in time) and simultaneous (in the way they exist in the chart)”; Pritchett, The Music of John Cage, 75. Importantly, Cage introduced means of retiring and replacing sounds within the chart technique of Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra. Nevertheless, at any given moment, the charts were static and complete. See Cage’s comments to Boulez in Nattiez, ed., 94. 30 The Concerto profoundly altered Cage’s notion of musical continuity; nonetheless, he employed several means by which to produce transpositions, symmetry, and other correspondences. See Bernstein, “Cage and High Modernism”, 195–196, 202–203. 31 The exception being the first movement’s piano part, which was composed without charts. 32 Pritchett, The Music of John Cage, 82–83. 33 In Music for Carillon No. 1, Cage used a stencil made from crumpled paper to determine the placement of the dots. In scores using transparencies, he used randomly arrayed dots printed on paper or moveable transparencies. 34 Cage, “45' for a Speaker,” 157. On the point-drawing technique, see Pritchett, The Music of John Cage, 92 ff. 35 John Cage, “Experimental Music” (1957), in Silence, 9. 36 The term “field situation” appears in John Cage, “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) 1967,” in A Year from Monday (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 157. On the heterogeneity of Cage’s soundspace, see Chapter 2. 37 Cage, “Experimental Music,” 9. 38 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 371. 39 John Cage, “Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?” (1961), in Silence, 204–205.

168

Experimentations

40 John Cage, Letter to Pierre Boulez, December 18, 1950, in Nattiez, ed., 78; and John Cage, Letter to Pierre Boulez, Summer 1951, in Nattiez, ed., 110. Pritchett transcribes the word “qualities,” apparently erroneously, as “quantities” (Pritchett, The Music of John Cage, 96, 137). 41 See Branden W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-AvantGarde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 47–56. Cage uses the term “multiplicity” as early as 1948, although in a seemingly different context; John Cage, “A Composer’s Confessions” (1948), in John Cage: Writer, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight Editions, 1993), 41. 42 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1911), 273. 43 Cage, “45' for a Speaker,” 191. 44 John Cage, “Dartmouth Spring '55,” folder 10, box 12, John Cage Papers, Collection 1000–72, Special Collections and Archives, Olin Library, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT; cited in Rebecca Y. Kim, “In No Uncertain Musical Terms: The Cultural Politics of John Cage’s Indeterminacy,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, Department of Music, 2008, 221. Kim also mentions Earle Brown’s citation of Bergson, 97. 45 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 232–233. 46 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 230. Around 1954, Cage began to echo Bergson’s notion of duration as, not an abstract or mechanical expanse of time, but a subjectively lived temporality in relation to the world around: “Time … is what we and sounds happen in. Whether early or late: in it. It is not a question of counting” (Cage, “45' for a Speaker,” 151). 47 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 38–40. On the different types of multiplicity, see Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 37–41. 48 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 234. 49 John Cage, “Letter to Paul Henry Lang” (1956), in Kostelanetz, ed., John Cage: An Anthology, 117–118. Cage explicitly opposes the “natural” and “anthropomorphic” points of view in Cage, “On Film” (1956), in Kostelanetz, ed., John Cage: An Anthology, 115. For Bergson’s critique of dialectics, see, for example, Creative Evolution, 238. Cage is, as a thinker, like Bergson in Deleuze’s description of him: not one “who ascribes [to] a properly human wisdom and equilibrium,” but one who attempts “[t]o open us up to the inhuman and the superhuman (durations which are inferior or superior to our own), to go beyond the human condition” (Deleuze, Bergsonism, 28). 50 John Cage, “Composition as Process II: Indeterminacy” (1958), in Silence, 38. 51 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 45–47. 52 Cage, “Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?” 199, 205–206. The idea of transcending the intellect is fundamental for Bergson; see, for example, Creative Evolution, 163–164.

Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity

169

53 Deleuze’s first article on Bergson, “Bergson’s Conception of Difference” was initially presented as a lecture in 1954. Gilles Deleuze, “Bergson’s Conception of Difference,” in The New Bergson, ed. John Mullarkey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 42–65; lecture date given in Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 2. 54 Deleuze, Bergsonism, 42–43, 96–98. 55 Ibid., 97. 56 Ibid., 103. 57 See, for instance, Bergson, Creative Evolution, 179, 181, 196–197, and 257–258. For a typical example of the English translation, see: “But the body which is to perform [exercera] this action, the body which marks out upon matter the design of its eventual actions [ses actions virtuelles] even before they are actual [avant d’accomplir des actions réelles] … ” Bergson, Creative Evolution, 12; original French terms within square brackets, Henri Bergson, L’évolution créatrice (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), 12. 58 John Cage, “Composition as Process I: Changes” (1958), in Silence, 28. 59 Ibid., 31. 60 Morton Feldman, Pierre Boulez, John Cage, and Christian Wolff, “4 Musicians at Work,” trans/formation 1, no. 3 (1952): 172; repr. as “Statements by Morton Feldman, John Cage and Christian Wolff,” in Nattiez, ed., 107; and as Cage, “Composition: To Describe the Process of Composition Used in Music of Changes and Imaginary Landscape No. 4,” 59. 61 Cage, “45' for a Speaker,” 159. 62 Ibid., 181. 63 Ibid., 161. Although unaware of Cage’s relation to Bergson, Pritchett’s description of Notation Y from the piano part of Concert for Piano and Orchestra well illustrates the process of actualization through differentiation (Pritchett, The Music of John Cage, 119). 64 Cage, “Composition as Process II: Indeterminacy,” 36. 65 See Adorno’s criticism, although directed against advanced serialist technique, of the moment “when the subject, whose freedom is the precondition of all advanced art, is driven out; when a violent and external totality, hardly different from political totalitarianism, acquires the reins of power”; Theodor W. Adorno, “The Aging of the New Music” (1955), in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of Califorina Press, 2002), 196. Adorno later credited Cage’s music with acting as “a protest against the dogged complicity of music with the domination of nature”; Theodor W. Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” in Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern Music (London: Verso, 1994), 315. 66 Cage, “Composition as Process II: Indeterminacy,” 36.

170

Experimentations

67 See Adorno’s criticism that “Cage, and doubtless many of his disciples, content themselves with abstract negation in seances with overtones of [Rudolf] Steiner, eurythmics and healthy-living sects” (Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” 315). 68 Cage, “Experimental Music,” 11. 69 For Cage, such a critique of representation was explicitly political and in line with his developing anarchism. See, for instance, Cage’s invocation of the police in “History of Experimental Music in the United States” (1959), in Silence, 72. 70 In order to make the variability of indeterminate works clear, Cage and David Tudor would sometimes perform multiple versions (actualizations) of the same score within a single concert. 71 George Brecht, Notebook III (April 1959–August 1959), ed. Dieter Daniels (Cologne: Walther König, 1991), 125. 72 Cage, “45' for a Speaker,” 174; and “Experimental Music,” 10. Brandon LaBelle has described the manner in which Cage’s music reconfigures listening particularly nicely: By seeking to strip away the representational nature of sound … sound is potently dislodged to float along a chain of reference, as a “signifying” agent within a musical event, outside the narratives of musical argument. This signifying of sound over its signification (and ultimate decipherability) makes possible a shift in listening by which individual imagination is mobilized, for listening reaches not for correct meaning but for its potential. Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (New York: Continuum, 2006), 17. 73 “Given a number of actually active points, they are an aggregate, a constellation, they can move about among themselves and it becomes necessary to classify the kinds of aggregates, say constant and again intermittent”; Cage, “45' for a Speaker,” 163. 74 Cage, “Experimental Music,” 12. 75 Ibid. 76 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 258–259. Bergson is discussing life as a virtual, continuous multiplicity. 77 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 261. On “unimpededness and interpenetration,” see, for instance, Cage, “Composition as Process III: Communication” (1958), in Silence, 46–47. 78 Cage, “Experimental Music,” 12. 79 George Brecht, Notebook I (June–September 1958), ed. Dieter Daniels (Cologne: Walther König, 1991), 3 (dated June 24, 1958).

Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity 80 81 82 83

171

Cage, “Experimental Music: Doctrine,” 14. Ibid. (all insertions in original). Cage, “45' for a Speaker,” 149. Ibid., 189. Cage’s invocation of “theater” was doubtlessly related to his reception of Antonin Artaud, whose work he studied in 1951–52. See Cage’s comments in his letter to Boulez, May 22, 1951, in Nattiez, ed., 96. 84 The Audio Visual Group is mentioned in Joseph Jacobs, “Crashing New York à la John Cage,” in Off Limits: Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde, 1957–1963, ed. Joan Marter (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 73. On the notion of Cagean “theater,” see Branden W. Joseph, “The Tower and the Line: Toward a Genealogy of Minimalism,” Grey Room 27 (Spring 2007): 58–81; and (a reworking of some of the same material) Branden W. Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (New York: Zone Books, 2008), esp. 81–84. 85 Diane De Bonneval, “New School’s ‘Happenings’ Proves to be ‘Hellzapoppin’— Beatnik Style,” New York World-Telegram and Sun, May 3, 1960, repr. in Brecht, Notebook V (March 1960–November 1960), 89. 86 George Brecht, Notebook VII (June 1961–September 1962), ed. Hermann Braun (Cologne: Walther König, 2005), 115. Much in this passage was struck through by Brecht. 87 Brecht, Notebook I, 24. Cage’s Music for Carillon No. 5 (1967) would later use the grain of a piece of plywood to determine pitches. My thanks to David Patterson for this connection. 88 George Brecht, Notebook III (October 1958–April 1959), ed. Dieter Daniels (Cologne: Walther König, 1991), 57 (citation dated June 22, 1959). Although Brecht gives no indication of ever having consulted Bergson’s writings directly, he could still declare to Cage over six months later that “The order-disorder distinctions is of great interest to me right now”; George Brecht, Notebook IV (September 1959–March 1960), ed. Hermann Braun (Cologne: Walther König, 1997), 168 (citation dated January 27, 1960). 89 Brecht, Notebook II, 33 (dated October 24, 1958). 90 Ibid., 35–36 (dated October 26, 1958). 91 Ibid., 36. 92 Ibid., 41 (dated November 4, 1958). 93 Brecht, Chance-Imagery, 2. 94 Brecht, Notebook II, 64–66. 95 Brecht, Notebook III, 118 (dated July 21, 1959). On Cage’s engagement with European multiple serialists, see Amy C. Beal, New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 78–130; and Kim, “In No

172

Experimentations

Uncertain Musical Terms,” 128–207; partly published as Kim, “The Formalization of Indeterminacy in 1958.” Kim provides a detailed reading of what Cage may have derived from his New School students, particularly Brecht, at this time. 96 Brecht, Notebook II, 43 (dated November 6, 1958). 97 Ibid., 95 (dated June 14, 1959) and note to 15 and 19. 98 Brecht well understood the relationship of difference, or non-resemblance, between score and performance that occurred in a situation of actualization: “the score, or program, has no necessary correspondence to the light-sound event” (Ibid., 24 [dated October 14, 1958]). 99 Brecht, Notebook III, 115. Brecht notes the tripartite situation of composer, performance, and perception in Notebook II, 23 (dated October 10, 1958). Brecht notes the “Implications of the Spatial Arrangement of Sound-Sources” in ibid., 9 (dated October 4, 1958). 100 Brecht, Notebook III, 126–127. 101 Ibid., 123. 102 Ibid., 128. It is my speculation that Brecht moves toward this observation under the influence of Cardew. Brecht references Cornelius Cardew’s essay “re pulling listener’s teeth” in Notebook III, 114. Cardew’s article, as made clear by Brecht’s reference on 117, is Cornelius Cardew, “The Unity of Musical Space,” New Departures 1 (Summer 1959): 53–56. Some years later, Brecht would participate with Cardew in events around the Scratch Orchestra in London. 103 Julia E. Robinson, “From Abstraction to Model: In the Event of George Brecht and the Conceptual Turn in Art of the 1960s,” Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, Department of Art History and Archaeology, 2008. 104 Brecht, Notebook II, 107 (dated January 21, 1958).

5

HPSCHD—Ghost or Monster?

HPSCHD—the multifaceted multimedia performance created by John Cage and Lejaren Hiller with the use of the ILLIAC II supercomputer and first staged at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on May 16, 1969— marks the culmination of the most experimental and challenging phase of Cage’s career (Figure 5.1). As aptly noted by fellow composer Ben Johnston, Cage’s subsequent production largely ceased to “break new ground but rather buil[t] upon his earlier work in a most solid and impressive way.”1 At the same time, and as part of the same development, HPSCHD would stand as the apotheosis of Cage’s long-running pursuit of the most advanced technologies or, at the very least, of his doing so on such an ambitious scale. As Cage himself remarked to Stephen Husarik in 1980, “The experience of making HPSCHD was so time and energy consuming that I have since steered clear of institutions and the use of comparable technology.”2 Created over the course of a particularly eventful two years, which spanned the heightened political events of 1968, HPSCHD also developed alongside Cage’s increasingly explicit reflections on social and political topics, as evinced in the content and tenor of the writings in his books A Year from Monday and M.3 Situated at the intersection of a number of aesthetic, technological, and political factors, HPSCHD thus proves to occupy a particularly telling moment within Cage’s overall artistic trajectory, one in which a variety of important contradictions and limitations of the Cagean project, particularly those concerning its political ambitions, come into view. * HPSCHD would prove to be by far the largest and most intricate of the happening-type performances with which Cage would be involved. The Illinois audience would have been prepared for it by Cage’s first Musicircus, a virtually unscored event or festival, held at the Urbana-Champaign Stock Pavilion on November 17, 1967, in which a variety of musicians were invited to play

174

Experimentations

Figure 5.1  HPSCHD Event Poster, 1969.

whatever they chose within a series of overlapping, chance-determined time brackets.4 HPSCHD, held two years later at the University of Illinois Assembly Hall, similarly allowed the audience (estimated at some seven thousand people) to circulate freely amid a willfully chaotic performance that consisted of seven

HPSCHD—Ghost or Monster?

175

amplified harpsichord soloists and fifty-two amplified tape recorders.5 On multiple semitransparent screens that completely encircled the auditorium, a battery of a dozen movie projectors and eighty-four slide projectors beamed images around the arena (Figure 5.2). Additionally, posters were displayed,

Figure 5.2 John Cage and Lejaren Hiller inspecting the projection screens for HPSCHD, 1969.

176

Experimentations

popcorn and candied apples were available, and silkscreen facilities created souvenir T-shirts on the spot. In preparing the music, Cage and Hiller devised 208 separate tapes that used a computerized adaptation of the I Ching to investigate microtonal divisions of the octave: For the HPSCHD program, Cage and Hiller, partly for acoustical reasons and partly for reasons dictated by available memory space in the IBM computer they used, divided the octave in all ways from 5 to 56. For each of these mathematically obtained pitches they gave a field of sharping or flatting by any of sixty-four ICHING determined degrees. This results in a potential reservoir for HPSCHD of approximately 885,000 pitches.6

As Cage declared about the meticulous sonic fragmentation, “This breaks the scale into such small components that at times the listener cannot detect tone differences.”7 Aside from Solo I, which was a transcription within the conventional twelve-tone scale of the same type of computer music generated for the tapes, all seven harpsichord solos used historical musical examples as material. Composers whose work was appropriated included Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Gottschalk, Busoni, and earlier work by both Cage and Hiller. With the exception of Solo VII (which “instructs the performer to play any Mozart composition or any piece the other soloists happen to be playing”),8 these materials were submitted to computerized chance operations based on the I Ching as well as, at Hiller’s suggestion, a “Musical Dice Game” attributed to Mozart (Musikalisches Würfelspiel [K. 294d]).9 As head of the University of Illinois electronic music studio (the second in the country after that at Columbia University), Hiller—who had transferred to the school of music from a professorship in the department of chemistry in 1958—had invited Cage to be in residence and to propose two pieces that could be realized with the help of the computer facilities.10 At the time, the ILLIAC II was an exceptionally powerful piece of equipment. Its predecessor, the ILLIAC I, was the first computer of its size owned by a university. It had been constructed, upon the suggestion of John von Neumann, from designs prepared at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, then overseen by J. Robert Oppenheimer, and was identical to the ORDVAC, housed at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.11 The University of Illinois ILLIAC I had the equivalent of a 5.12K random access memory and a magnetic drum storage unit that held an additional 64K.12 Construction on

HPSCHD—Ghost or Monster?

177

the ILLIAC II began in 1960, supported in part by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, and it was completed for use by the summer of 1963. Able to engage in parallel processing, the ILLIAC II was some 125 times faster than the ILLIAC I and, with the completion of its first expansion unit, boasted 53K of memory, eventually expanded by the addition of several peripherals (Figure 5.3).13

Figure 5.3  ILLIAC II computer, University of Illinois, ca. 1958.

178

Experimentations

Before collaborating with Cage, Hiller had composed the pioneering and infamous computer composition The Illiac Suite (1957, with fellow chemist Leonard M. Isaacson, later retitled Quartet No. 4 for Strings, “The Illiac Suite”) as well as Computer Cantata (1963), Machine Music for Piano, Percussion, and Tape (1964), and several other non-computer-assisted pieces. Since Cage did not know how to program and was disinclined to learn, that portion of the task fell solely upon Hiller, who reused many of the subroutines he and others had developed for earlier compositions. Although he had previously derided Cage’s use of the I Ching as “an absurdly inefficient and pointless way to produce random numbers,” Hiller’s first task would be to code the ICHING subroutine to emulate the Chinese “Book of Changes,” a task that (perhaps in inadvertent illustration of his previous opinion) alone took six weeks to write and effectively debug.14 In their work on The Illiac Suite with the ILLIAC I, Hiller and Isaacson had utilized another (somewhat more efficient) aleatory system known as the Monte Carlo Method, in which random numbers (values that could be assigned to musical notes) were generated and then subsequently tested for adherence to various precoded rules and criteria by which they were deemed acceptable or not.15 This had been the procedure—viable only with the processing capacities of a computer—that Hiller had previously used to model “flexible long-chain polymer molecules” of rubber and plastic at the University of Illinois Chemistry Department.16 In a manner that would prove almost directly opposite that of Cage—who as early as 1956 declared his aesthetic aim as “not to bring order out of chaos”17—the Monte Carlo method restricts the chaos of purely random number generation so that order will appear and chance will be held within aesthetically pleasing boundaries. In explaining and justifying their approach, Hiller and Isaacson had recourse to G.D. Birkhoff ’s “theory of aesthetic measure,” in which aesthetic measure (M) is equal to the ratio of the realized degree of underlying order (O) over that of perceived complexity (C), such that M=O/C, with the value of C always being > 0.18 Hiller’s compositions often contained explicit, demonstrative illustrations of Claude Shannon’s information theory, moving—as in “Experiment Two” of The Illiac Suite—from the maximum information (and entropy) of “random white-note music” (analogous to white noise) toward increasing, and increasingly perceptible, redundancy (i.e., maximum order).19 In HPSCHD, this process was largely reversed, as Cage’s original conception proved

HPSCHD—Ghost or Monster?

179

distinctly opposite Hiller’s customary aesthetic. As Cage explained at the time to Larry Austin: The original idea came from a notion I had about Mozart’s music and how it differed from Bach’s music. In the case of Bach, if one looked at a few measures and at the different voices, they would all be observing more or less the same scalar movement; that is, each voice would be using the same scale. Whereas, in the case of Mozart, if one looked at just a small amount of his music, one would see the chromatic scale, the diatonic scale, and a use of chords melodically, like a scale, but made up of larger steps. I thought to extend this “moving-awayfrom-unity” and “moving-toward-multiplicity” and, taking advantage of the computer facility, to multiply the details of the tones and durations of a piece of music.20

Cage and Hiller’s aesthetics would not, however, prove entirely disparate. Neither was ever satisfied with the pure white noise of equiprobable acoustical occurrences. Hiller only ever presented such a situation as one pole (the maximum of entropy/information) against which various degrees of order were to be contrasted, whereas Cage regarded equal probabilistic distributions to be no less anthropocentric (and thereby antithetical to his anti-subjective aesthetic) than direct compositional control.21 Both Cage and Hiller, in their different ways, sought to inflect statistical equanimity for more varied and unpredictable results: Cage in order to achieve the more complex continuity of “no continuity” that he found in the random events of nature; Hiller, to produce various degrees of continuity, whether in the regulation of four-part Cantus Firmus implemented in “Experiment One” of The Illiac Suite or in the statistical dependency sequences of the “Markov-chain music” developed in “Experiment Four.”22 Ultimately, however, despite the two composers finding plenty of common aesthetic ground, the Illinois supercomputer proved ill suited to Cage’s project, since for all practical intents and purposes it could be used only to produce linear continuities (simple musical lines, though in unusual microtonal octave divisions) and not the multiplicitous constellations or assemblages he had envisioned: “Rather than having a line of sounds which would go from one sound to the next, one could have a series of sounds which would overlap in various ways,” Cage insisted. “But to accomplish this means going forward in the program and then going backward and then going on, etc. This would bring about complexities in programming which, in our present circumstances in this

180

Experimentations

particular piece, seem excessive.”23 In the interview with Austin, Cage attempted to put the situation in a positive light, explaining that “the large amount of time and painstaking work that goes into making a subroutine operable” would ultimately and necessarily lead to a form of communal production, “so that a routine, once constructed, is like an accomplishment on the part of society rather than on the part of a single individual.”24 Yet, when pressed by Johnston with regard to remarks made previously off the record, Cage had to admit that the aesthetic character he sought for HPSCHD would be accomplished despite, rather than because of, the nature of the computer and its programs, “go[ing] against” the computer’s “whole mode of operation.”25 As Cage explained to Austin and Johnston: [T]he overlapping that will take place in this piece will be the natural overlapping of one tape on another—of different things on one another. But the things which are overlapping one another do not themselves have overlaps within them. And yet it is this fact of sounds overlapping that was, in the case of fine harpsichord playing, productive of a musical experience. What is productive of a mechanical experience is the absence of overlapping—of a sound ending when the next one begins, etc. To bring about that action of overlapping in the case of the computer is no doubt possible, but it would take a great deal more programming than we have given, and we have given a great deal.26

Ultimately, in order to achieve the “musical” experience that Cage wanted, the mechanical nature of the computer had to be overcome via to the same realtime indeterminate “multitracking” of different tape recorders that Cage had previously used, for instance, in the Rozart Mix of 1965.27 * Despite an interest on Hiller’s part in theater (including the Theater of the Absurd), the staging of HPSCHD was clearly most indebted to Cage, carrying on from events such as the Lincoln Center performance of Variations V (July 23, 1965), which involved musical performances by Cage, David Tudor, James Tenney, and others; visuals by Nam June Paik and Stan VanDerBeek; and technological assistance by Billy Klüver and Max Matthews (designer of Bell Labs’ Music series of sound-synthesis programs, a more sophisticated rival of the Music IX–“Music Machine” system developed at the University of Illinois).28 Seeing the microtonal investigations of the tape music within HPSCHD as

HPSCHD—Ghost or Monster?

181

analogous to the microscopic realm, Cage decided that the visual materials should be “telescopic,” that is, involved in the depiction of outer space.29 The film projections, supervised by Ronald Nameth, included Georges Méliès’s early animation A Trip to the Moon (1902), footage provided by NASA, documentaries, and the computer-graphic films of John Whitney. The bulk of the 6,800 still images were provided by NASA, the Mount Wilson Observatory, the Palomar Observatory, and the Alder Planetarium, combined with some 1,600 additional hand-painted slides (submitted to chance determinations with regard to color and composition) and some from other sources. The entire slide collection was then divided among the eighty-four projectors in a manner that was as carefully randomized as the tape music, providing each machine with enough visual material that there would be no repeated imagery during the entire event. In HPSCHD, historical musical styles and appropriated visual imagery were utilized as source material for the overall audiovisual collage. Rather than being the result of subjective, compositional formation, the end product was forged, as much as possible, by removing or undermining any constructive activity. For each of the performance’s many components, the continuity, or part-to-part relation, was rigorously subjected to chance operations (within the limitations imposed by available computer memory), all aspects then coming together in an indeterminate, overlapping fashion within the final work. HPSCHD’s ambition was to figure no less than the totality of existence, from the microscopic realm (microtonal music) through to the macroscopic (outer space visuals), with the audience and participants situated in between. Likewise, the harpsichord solos largely related to the past (from Mozart to the immediately preceding period of Cage and Hiller), while the visuals pointed toward the future of computerization and space travel, the present being implicitly understood as the moment of the performance itself. The totality figured by HPSCHD, however, was clearly not characterized by a coherent overall organization, but rather a chaotic co-presence of different sounds and images, a “postmodern” environment in which the relations forged between one component and another were entirely contingent.30 As artist and filmmaker Anthony McCall recalled of HPSCHD’s restaging at the Roundhouse in London as part of the International Carnival of Experimental Sound (ICES) on August 13, 1972: I remember standing at the very center of the circle, finding the place where all the different pieces being played merged into one, rapturous cacophony. Then,

182

Experimentations

as I moved toward a particular harpsichord, the sound of that instrument rose, as those behind me, or to the side, diminished. One became a kind of mobile mixer, creating one’s own musical experience.31

The output sheets of the computer program KNOBS, included within the original Nonesuch recording of HPSCHD (which was released before the debut of the actual performance), provided home listeners with the opportunity to replicate such differentiated audible results by randomly “scoring” the manipulation of volume, balance, and tone controls on their hi-fi (Figure 5.4).32 * Although Cage had been interested in questions of theater since as early as 1952, with his untitled Black Mountain College event (subsequently titled, Theatre Event #1), the 1960s saw him increasingly embracing a theatrical direction. Although this was certainly an intrinsic development—Cage having written in 1957, “Where do we go from here? Towards theatre. That art more than music resembles nature”33—it would also seem to have been

Figure 5.4  John Cage and Lejaren Hiller, Program (KNOBS) for the Listener, from Cage and Hiller, HPSCHD LP, 1969.

HPSCHD—Ghost or Monster?

183

motivated, at least in part, by the expansion of his aesthetic undertaken by younger colleagues, many of whom attended Cage’s courses at the New School for Social Research from 1956 to 1960. In their work, Cage’s project was pushed in a more explicitly audiovisual direction, represented, on the one hand, by the word scores of La Monte Young, George Brecht, and Fluxus more generally (many of which could be realized as an acoustical event, a theatrical performance, and/or a static collection of objects) and, on the other, by happenings, pioneered by Allan Kaprow in 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959) and soon followed by Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolee Schneemann, Robert Whitman, and others. Of the two impulses, the more proximate, especially concerning the development of HPSCHD, was undoubtedly the happening—not only on account of its greater visibility and its continuation of Cage’s interest in multiplicity (as opposed to the word score’s general emphasis on simplicity, even imperceptibility), but also on account of certain political problems Cage came to regard as inherent in Kaprow’s work. As noted in the Introduction, Cage’s acknowledgment of the latter came to a head in 1965 when, in an interview for the Tulane Drama Review issue devoted to happenings, he criticized his former student in an uncharacteristically direct manner. Although Cage felt that happenings were “the only theatre worth its salt,”34 he nonetheless complained that he “did not like to be told, in the 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, to move from one room to another. Though I don’t actively engage in politics I do as an artist have some awareness of art’s political content, and it doesn’t include policemen.”35 Kaprow would not be the only practitioner of the newfound art form that Cage singled out. The following summer, Cage explained to Richard Kostelanetz that while he enjoyed certain aspects of Claes Oldenburg’s Moveyhouse (1965), he nonetheless criticized its requirement to occupy the aisles rather than the seats. “[I]t was a police situation,” he declared. “It was politically bad—telling people not to sit down.”36 Immediately afterward, however, Cage returned to the critique of his former student: “That was my objection to the Kaprow—being told to move from one room to the other.”37 While perhaps overly vehement, Cage’s response was not without basis. For indeed the audience of Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts was more tightly controlled than even that of a traditional concert. Instructions distributed at the start of the performance stipulated that one could move only at appointed intervals, these being signaled in a particularly Pavlovian manner by the ringing

184

Experimentations

of a bell. Individual card sets distributed to audience members instructed them as to where they were to be seated and move, the officious tone of the instructions continuing to the end: “There will be no applause after each set. You may applaud after the sixth set if you wish, although there will be no ‘curtain call.’ ”38 The intensity of Cage’s reaction to such directives—and the terminology of police repression he used to voice them—reflected his increasingly explicit identification with the anarchist political position he had first voiced in 1960.39 Cage had been working through the political implications of his own production for some time, which, on one level, involved the progressive elimination of overt directions to performers or audience. As he explained in a passage from “History of Experimental Music in the United States,” partially quoted in Chapter 2, Giving up control so that sounds can be sounds (they are not men: they are sounds) means for instance: the conductor of an orchestra is no longer a policeman. Simply an indicator of time—not in beats—like a chronometer. He has his own part. Actually he is not necessary if all the players have some other way of knowing what time it is and how that time is changing.40

Ultimately, Cage held that the relinquishing of control would be possible only once the desire to communicate representational images, messages, or feelings was relinquished, “so that sounds can be sounds,” and he sought to extend such independence to the actions within happenings.41 “If someone makes a Happening,” he complained in 1965, “very often it is an individual expressing an idea or a feeling, and he makes a kind of scenario or plan for the Happening, which will express this idea which he has.”42 According to Cage, such an approach not only reduced happenings to merely a sloppy form of traditional theater,43 but invoked the same type of power relations as the more overt forms of audience direction against which he reacted so strongly. Cage saw artistic expression, art’s representational function, as establishing a hierarchical power relation between the artist and the spectator who, in the act of reception or interpretation, was effectively made subservient to the artist’s will. “What do we like?” he asked in 1961; “We do not like to be pushed around emotionally or to have impressive constructions of relationships push us.”44 From his perspective, as Cage made clear, a happening should be “nonintentional” and “unstructured” in order not to impose any particular type of idea or reception upon the audience.45 Cage’s own theater pieces were thus intended to be “experimental” in the sense of creating unforeseen possibilities

HPSCHD—Ghost or Monster?

185

of action and thereby provoking perceptual and ultimately subjective transformation.46 “Now if one has the feelings of open awareness and of utter curiosity, and if he wants to make a Happening,” Cage stated, then he will make a situation that is extremely complex, in order that something may happen—not that what happens will be something that he had in his mind, but that it will precisely be something that he did not have in mind … A Happening should be like a net to catch fish the nature of which one does not know.47

* Cage and Hiller’s HPSCHD—like Cage’s even more anarchic and unstructured first Musicircus—was clearly orchestrated, in part, to avoid the types of criticism Cage had leveled against Kaprow. Cage described HPSCHD as: a political art which is not about politics but political itself. As an anarchist, I aim to get rid of politics. I would prefer to drop the question of power … Only by looking out the back window, as [Marshall] McLuhan says, do we concern ourselves with power. If we look forward, we see cooperation and things being made possible, to make the world work so that any kind of living can take place.48

Yet if it was on the level of politics that Cage sought to differentiate himself from Kaprow and others, it would also be on a political level that the limitations of his own aesthetic practice would be most clearly illustrated. Of those artworks that were to serve as exemplary instances of anarchic social or political conditions, theater and happenings held for Cage an important role: not only were they closer than music to “life”—their interaction of hearing and seeing being “the only thing that comes near what it is”49—but they were, according to Cage, particularly “public” occasions. As he explained in 1965, “The two public senses are seeing and hearing; the senses of taste, touch, and odor are more proper to intimate, non-public, situations.”50 This contention (which was potentially another swipe at Kaprow, who explicitly sought to extend the Cagean paradigm, in part, by incorporating the senses of taste, touch, and smell) was ultimately predicated on Cage’s understanding of the importance of keeping affects and emotions individual, as a means to avoid the types of contention that would give rise to the exercise of power. “Another thing we’re doing,” he declared, is leaving the things that are in us in us. We are leaving our emotions where they are in each one of us. One of us is not trying to put his emotions into

186

Experimentations

someone else. That way you “rouse rabbles”; it seems on the surface humane, but it animalizes, and we’re not doing it. The cool other thing we are also not doing: that is, making constructions of relationships that are observed by us [that is, by composers]. That faculty of observing relationships we are also leaving in us, not putting the observation of one into the other who, it goes without saying, see [sic] things from his own point of view which is different from another’s.51

Further along in the same text, Cage continued writing about the communication of “ideas and feelings”: By keeping things in that are in and letting those things that are out stay out, a paradox takes place: it becomes a simple matter to make an identification with someone or something. But this is virtually impossible in terms of ideas and feelings. Purposeless play there is unBodhisattvic and only leads to a conflagration, a more or less catastrophic social situation, public or private, that has brought down on our heads the arm of the law (it was such employment of feelings and ideas letting them go out that brings about naturally the consequence of police and don’t do this and the entire web of rules). But what we are doing is in our ways of art to breathe again in our lives anarchistically.52

For Cage, the individualized type of reception instantiated in a work such as HPSCHD—that aspect of each person being his or her own audiovisual “mixing board”—did not lead to a secluded or isolated individuality, cut off from all forms of interpersonal communication. Instead, HPSCHD was to model an anarchic public sphere, where people came together and communicated their (inherently different) experiences without exerting power over one another in the form of identification.53 “Would it be accurate to say then that we are all off in separate corners engaged in our special concerns? No. It is more to the point to talk about the field itself, which is that it is and enables us all to be doing the same thing so differently.”54 HPSCHD was thus intended to invert the dictates of a totally administered society. Rather than instill a type of self-reproducing conformity (the function of what Louis Althusser called ideological state apparati), Cage’s happening was to be a site of continually transforming individuality, where social interaction leads not to reproduction but to further levels of individual transformation.55 As he explained to Daniel Charles, What I hope for is the ability of seeing anything whatsoever arise. No matter what, that is, everything, and not such and such a thing in particular. The problem is that something occurs. But the law governing that something is

HPSCHD—Ghost or Monster?

187

not yet there. Now, if there were a tendency that controlled the appearance of one particular thing as opposed to some other thing, then that tendency—as a statistical tendency—would not itself be immobile. It would not be a law. It would be in a state of mutation which would prohibit describing it as a law. If you are in that state of mutation, you are situated in change and immersed in process. While, if you are dealing with a statistic, then you return to the world of objects, and the presence of emotions as linked to those objects can again come to constrain us.56

It is easy to discern in Cage’s words his long-standing reticence to discuss issues of his own sexuality. “Keeping things in that are in” is as obvious an invocation of the closet as one is likely to find anywhere in Cage’s writings and, as such, it goes to the very heart of his aesthetico-political project. Cage’s discussion of the public–private distinction within the theatrical genre of happenings, however, brought him up against a related and equally inherent problematic. By seeking to evacuate affect, emotion, desire, and any other irrational or ego-motivated aspects of human behavior, Cage removed from the underlying political model upon which his aesthetic was predicated all elements of contention a priori. In so doing, he not only relied on an ultimately unrealistic situation, one that puts to the side all aspects of the irrational, including desire, by which individuals are motivated to enter the political arena, but also effectively (and explicitly) sought to eliminate the dimension of the political altogether as a realm of antagonism and conflict.57 * This aspect of the Cagean program would be highlighted by experimental composer (and former Cage acolyte) Cornelius Cardew, whose critique of Cage was launched in the months leading up to HPSCHD’s London premiere. In May 1972, in the BBC publication The Listener, Cardew published “John Cage—Ghost or Monster?” which must have been as unexpected and unwelcome to Cage as Cage’s criticism of Kaprow had been to the latter seven years before.58 (Cardew himself later confirmed that “the attack … had the advantage of surprise.”)59 Although unsympathetic to the whole of Cage’s production as it had developed since the early 1950s, Cardew proved especially critical of the first Musicircus and HPSCHD. While ostensibly claiming indignation at Cage’s appropriation and dismantling of the proletarian entertainment that was the traditional circus—“a many-sided spectacle and entertainment for the people”—Cardew’s real issue seems to have been the freedom that Cage’s anarchic happening-like spectacles

188

Experimentations

explicitly pursued.60 While fascism was the politically inhumane “monster” of Cardew’s title, anarchism was its political “ghost,” simply related by him to “myth, madness, magic and mysticism.”61 Lurking behind Cardew’s accusation of purposeless bourgeois liberties, however, was a more precise understanding of the manner in which Cage’s happenings eliminated antagonism, particularly that of class against class. Hence Cardew’s lauding of the necessity of a collective violence that true liberation required, one that he saw expressed in Cage’s “tough” percussion pieces of the thirties and forties.62 Cardew’s criticism of Cage’s more permissive environmental and theatrical performances of the sixties was accompanied by a defense of those orchestra members of the New York Philharmonic who, in what Cardew regarded as an act of Luddism for the electronic age, rebelled against Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis (1961–62) and destroyed the contact microphones necessary for its realization: The performance was a shambles, and many of the musicians took advantage of the confusion to abuse the electronic equipment to such a degree that Christian Wolff (usually an even-tempered man) felt compelled to rush in among them to protest against the extensive “damage to property.” Cage lamented afterwards to the effect that his music provided freedom—freedom to be noble, not to run amok. I find it impossible to deplore the action of those orchestral musicians. It probably wasn’t exactly a “principled stand” that they took, but they gave spontaneous expression to the sharply antagonistic relationship between the avant-garde composer, with all his electronic gadgetry, and the working musician. There are many aspects to this contradiction, but beneath it all is class struggle.63

A few months later, Cardew took the opportunity to place himself in a similar position. After agreeing to perform one of the seven harpsichord solos at the London staging of HPSCHD (accepting payment to do so, thereby making him a wage laborer in relation to the composers), Cardew set about, according to Cage, undermining or sabotaging the event.64 * In addition to the suppression of antagonism and conflict, there is another, literally more evident, manner in which HPSCHD’s political limitations were revealed. As opposed to the Musicircus, which remained entirely open-ended, potentially unlimited in scope, and fully indeterminate of the composer’s intentions, HPSCHD restored the representational function that Cage had

HPSCHD—Ghost or Monster?

189

banished from his work for over a decade. Although HPSCHD’s visual imagery was submitted to the same type of chance procedures as the music, the overall outer-space theme retained a clear utopian signification. Thus, while every spectator’s visual experience within the overwhelming audiovisual event differed, it could do so only within certain bounds: out of the multitude of presented images, the theme of the progress and desirability of space exploration emerged clearly. As Husarik noted, “It was … advertised with straightforward, technographic posters to an audience that respected technology (the U.S. would land a man on the moon in less than two months).”65 Cage’s own attitude toward the technology included and represented was clear. He was to a large extent a postmodern futurist, or a futurist for the third machine age, whose interests already in the 1940s were electronics and, later, recording technologies, computers, and miniaturization. In his overall aesthetic project of ripping up and unfounding traditional aesthetic structures and relationships, such technologies had always played a central role, from his early dreams of “compact technological boxes, inside which all audible sounds, including noise, would be ready to come forth at the command of the composer,” to his ongoing interests in magnetic recording technology, which “introduces the unknown with such sharp clarity that anyone has the opportunity of having his habits blown away like dust.”66 The ILLIAC II was merely the latest in a long line of technological devices to promise (and disappoint in providing) access to the entire virtual spectrum of sonic occurrences.67 As the 1960s progressed, Cage’s attitude toward technology was transferred to the U.S. space program, which figured for him as the première example of a social embrace of the aesthetic (as opposed to military or utilitarian) use of technology. As he explained toward the end of 1966, he regarded the space program as akin to a work of art: you find people speaking for instance of the present space program … as being comparable to art; there are many parallels between that program and art … the great difference is that it takes many people to do it whereas we associate with art the solitude of an individual.   … they’re artistic in the sense that they have [from] some mundane point of view a certain uselessness that we have always associated with art.68

The idea of the space program as a technologically advanced and collaborative form of artistic activity was shared by many in Cage’s circle, particularly Rauschenberg. Indeed, Rauschenberg’s optimism with regard to the space

190

Experimentations

program was as or more evident than Cage’s, manifesting itself in a series of prints and paintings, particularly in the Stoned Moon prints produced in 1969–70 to celebrate the launchings at Cape Canaveral (Figure 5.5).69 To describe this work for Studio International, Rauschenberg created a collage paean to techno-optimism, pitting the hope of Apollo 11—“Lifting pulling everyone’s spirits with it”—against “Memories of war. Instant aggression. Military affluence.”70 In Rauschenberg and Klüver’s performance festival, “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering,” which took place at the New York Armory in October 1966, artists and engineers had already been brought together in an attempt to technify art and humanize technology in a sort of mini-space program to develop and expand technological ideas unrelated, in the participants’ minds, to warfare. (As such, it was in line with the famous dictum of Cage’s friend Buckminster Fuller about turning “weaponry into livingry.”) It was there that Cage realized Variations VII (1966), one of the works that most clearly prefigured HPSCHD’s development (Figure 5.6). By decade’s end, even the normally reticent Jasper Johns found himself caught up in the optimistic moment, creating a large-scale encaustic version of Fuller’s Dymaxion map for the 1967 Montreal World’s Fair. HPSCHD’s overtly utopian aspects were augmented by the contributions of Ronald Nameth and Illinois graphic artist Calvin Sumsion. Nameth’s invocation of outer space, and the larger context in which it was presented, verged on New Age philosophy. As he explained to Husarik, In making the selection of the films, we decided to use films of “outer space” in contrast to the music’s introspection into microtones. These films not only revealed outer space, as we know it scientifically, but also revealed space from a metaphysical viewpoint—and showed mankind’s conception and experience of space subjectively and intuitively. There were films on Stonehenge and other ancient sites from around the world, which revealed the earth’s long-standing contact with the universe.71

Sumsion, in addition to submitting technical illustrations culled from encyclopedias to aleatory procedures based on the I Ching, silkscreened smocks and T-shirts with astrological figures of the zodiac in DayGlo colors.72 The late-sixties represented the high point of Cage’s techno-optimism. Based on Fuller’s contention that “the world was one world now” and thus analogous to an individual, and finding reinforcement in Marshall McLuhan’s similarly holistic understanding of the earth as a “global village” and the electronic

HPSCHD—Ghost or Monster?

Figure 5.5  Robert Rauschenberg, Sky Garden (Stoned Moon Series), 1969.

191

192

Experimentations

Figure 5.6 John Cage, performing Variations VII at “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering,” 1966.

HPSCHD—Ghost or Monster?

193

datasphere as an externalization of the human nervous system, Cage became convinced that aesthetic ideas developed for the individual listener or viewer could be directly extended to the social realm.73 In Fuller and McLuhan, Cage also found an optimistic understanding of the transformative, a-(or anti-) political but nonetheless progressive social role to be played by technology. Following their lead, Cage pitched technology as a neutral and autonomous development, one opposed to the divisive, sectarian interests of nation-state political structures and competing economic interests. While the latter were understood as irrational and limiting, divisive forces that held back beneficial developments in favor of monetary gain for the reigning few, technology was judged opposed to private property and alienated human labor—an inherently international force that, at least in its utopian figuration, would alleviate work and provide abundance for all.74 Indeed, given his outright elimination of political contention (including strikes, marches, protests, and petitions) as a means of enabling social progress,75 Cage almost necessarily had to cling to technology as a motor force if his outlook was to retain any progressive valence, a fact which helps explain his long-standing and unwavering adherence to the technocratic principles of Fuller and McLuhan. * No matter how naive it may appear in retrospect, Cage’s dogged optimism toward technological and economic developments does not adequately explain his restoration of the representational function within HPSCHD. Cage had harshly criticized other composers for practicing just such relative indeterminacy in the 1950s and, as we have seen, extended that critique to the creators of happenings in the following decade. Why, then, would he revert to such determination, however loose, in the context of his largest and most ambitious multimedia production? Why, that is, despite his anarchist critique of representation and long-held position that artists’ ideas and opinions were best kept outside their works, would Cage represent to the audience of HPSCHD “good,” space-age technology as the figuration of what they should desire? Ironically, the answer seems to lie at least partly within the political philosophy of anarchism itself. As has been argued by Todd May, traditional anarchist theory finds itself in an antinomous position with regard to the question of power, which it conceives of solely in terms of hierarchical domination.76 Cage’s characterization of power in such terms had been voiced as early as 1939, when

194

Experimentations

he described “the cumbersome, top-heavy structure of musical prohibitions.”77 Such power structures were, as once suggested, the devil in Cage’s world,78 and like the devil they took many forms: not only divisive political and economic structures, but also harmony, determinate composition, symphony conductors, game rules, the grammar and syntax that regulated language, and, not least, the directives imposed upon the audience by certain happenings. By 1974, Cage had expanded his thinking to include the debilitating effects of institutions such as schools, armies, mental hospitals, and retirement communities.79 As Cage came to insist in no uncertain terms, his “activity [was] anti-institutional.”80 Yet, despite expanding his characterization of its range and scope, Cage continued to understand the operations of power primarily in terms of top-down, hierarchical forms of imposed domination. To that extent, and seemingly outside of any comprehension of power’s other modes and guises (including immanent ones), Cage could declare himself forthrightly “opposed to any power.”81 At the onset of the 1960s, Cage defined the proper role of the arts as “[o]fferings beyond the law within the limits of practicality.”82 Artworks following this example were to serve as exemplary instances of a social existence equally situated beyond the realm of authoritarian imposition. By means of work such as HPSCHD, people were to be convinced to ignore the dictates of political institutions, and the latter would, according to Cage’s optimistic (and partially Fuller-inspired) prognosis, “simply fade out of the picture.”83 As Cage declared in 1968, The change, the revolution that we want will not deprive us of our individuality. This must be increased and intensified. What we want is a change in the means by which we live. At present the controls are coercive, controls having to do with politics and economics, and not at all to do with this intense personalism and individuality which we know we need … . And the hope is that the present coercive and bureaucratic powers of our society will dwindle, wither, and fall away.84

As May indicates, however, even the most optimistic of anarchist theorists would never regard power as entirely eradicable. Thus, as he puts it, “the central political question” of anarchism becomes “When is the exercise of power legitimate, and when is it not?”85 Whether or not this is true of all branches of anarchist theory, it would become the question that Cage found himself faced with as the sixties came to a close. In a story about visiting an aging anarchist to obtain a copy of James J. Martin’s Men Against the State, Cage related the

HPSCHD—Ghost or Monster?

195

dilemma exactly: “After [the man’s two adopted children] went out to play, he told me what trouble he’d had in deciding finally to draw this line: No jumping up and down on the beds.”86 Whether by following the inherent trajectory of his own thought or by looking to traditional anarchist philosophy for guidance, Cage had been led to the inevitability of reintroducing the type of intentional, normative political criteria his experimental aesthetic had so long sought to undermine. Following the examples set by McLuhan and Fuller, Cage ultimately decided that it would be legitimate to draw this line: the power of technology must be used for good and in this capacity could be imposed on other people. As he explained in the “Afterword” to A Year from Monday, “What we have to do, then, is not to say Yes or to say No, but simply to go straight on illiterately, updating the way of life Meister Eckhart proposed (just following the general outlines of the Christian life, ‘not wondering am I right or doing something wrong’), following, that is, the general outlines of Buckminster Fuller’s comprehensive design science.”87 It was just such an idea that, in the final instance, Cage and Hiller presented to HPSCHD’s audience. If, in HPSCHD, this position was relayed in a relatively indeterminate manner, it had been more clearly revealed in the lesser-known “Jewish Happening” presented at the Tempel Beth El synagogue in Spring Valley, New York, on July 23, 1967. There—in the midst of singers, dancers, performed and electronic music, films, slides, and light projections—Cage’s role was strikingly and evidently deterministic. Standing above and before the audience, he read a “sermon” drawn from the writings of McLuhan and Fuller. Although a reporter covering the event recalled that “The words were often confused,” he nonetheless understood, “something about Republicans and Democrats and private power versus public power, why communications were invented, and references to Marshall McLuhan … Mr. Cage, dark-suited and looking every inch the minister, repeated his message, ‘We are faced with the choice: Utopia or oblivion,’ and asked, which road shall we take?”88 This aspect of the failing or inherent limitation of HPSCHD’s aestheticopolitical project, its return to a represented message to which the audience should adhere, forms a symmetrical pair with that noted earlier concerning the a priori prohibition of antagonism or conflict: the surreptitious imposition of authoritarian power under the guise of a seemingly neutral technocracy coincides with, and forms the necessary complement to, the preliminary act of excluding passions from the participatory arena or public sphere.

196

Experimentations

Coda By 1972, the antinomous situation in Cage’s work with regard to the exercise of power would reach an acute point. Cage had long been frustrated by the inability or unwillingness of musicians to perform his work in the spirit in which it was offered. He had been struck by this as early as the Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–58). During rehearsals, Cage worked with each performer to find out what they, individually, were capable of performing on their instruments and then submitted these possibilities to chance operations in order to create a situation in which their actions would remain their own but be reconfigured in ways not previously foreseen, thereby opening up new aesthetic vistas and capabilities. In concert, however, Cage felt that the piece had been sabotaged, the musicians creating a situation that was, in the composer’s words, “foolish and unprofessional.”89 On one level, Cage’s problem was artistic, as he was unable to premiere his work before an audience in a manner he judged successful. Yet Cage also realized that the problems he encountered opened more broadly onto the social realm. As he explained in 1958 (in the terms that Cardew would later criticize), I must find a way to let people be free without their becoming foolish. So that their freedom will make them noble. How will I do this? That is the question. Question or not (that is to say, whether what I will do will answer the situation), my problems have become social rather than musical.90

In the following years, Cage’s problems with orchestral performers would recur in what he felt to be ever more forceful and destructive ways, culminating in the disastrous premiere of Atlas Eclipticalis.91 In 1972, Cage would finally propose a solution, one with a clear political dimension derived from the example of Mao Tse-tung. Cage had been introduced to Maoist thought by Norman O. Brown in the fall of 1971, when Brown suggested that he stop reading The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul and pick up E.L. Wheelwright and Bruce McFarlane’s The Chinese Road to Socialism.92 Cage noted Mao’s early study of anarchist thought and also found connections between the Chinese leader’s ideas and those of Fuller.93 He admired sentiments he found in Mao with regard to devising an original solution for the country’s situation, the ethos of mutual support, and an idea of holistic self-transformation that recalled, to his mind, László MoholyNagy’s Bauhaus-era ideas about the “whole man” that he had admired since

HPSCHD—Ghost or Monster?

197

the thirties.94 At the same time, Cage acknowledged that “the history of the Chinese Revolution is a history of violence,” one that had gone as far as political assassination—a fact that makes it all the more astonishing that Cage seemed to have found the authoritarian side of Mao’s thought equally admirable.95 He cited with approval an ominous remark by Chairman Mao: “What should our policy be towards non-Marxist ideas? As far as unmistakable counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs of the socialist cause are concerned, the matter is easy: we simply deprive them of their freedom of speech.”96 It was to this precedent that Cage made reference when drafting his “Minimum Rehearsal Requirement” for the orchestral version of Cheap Imitation (1972). Having found the initial performance sabotaged by members of the orchestra, not so much by antagonism as by complete indifference and a lack of attentive practice, Cage responded by putting his foot down, as had the anarchist with his children, and drafting the following requirement: Not less than two weeks before a projected performance each musician shall be given his part. During the first week he will learn the melody, at least those phrases of it in which he participates. He is to learn, among other matters, to play double sharps and double flats without writing in simpler “equivalent” notes. During the second week there will be an orchestral rehearsal on each day, each rehearsal lasting one and one-half hours. If, at any time, it appears that any member of the orchestra does not know his part, he is to be dismissed … 97

At the time, Cage was still pursuing Musicircus-like events, seeking a means of creating performances entirely free of the division of performer and audience and without the need of rehearsals of any kind. Yet, with regard to the orchestra musicians in Cheap Imitation, Cage’s aesthetic had come full circle to embrace a position that was more explicitly authoritarian than that for which he had previously criticized Kaprow. Ironically, however, Cage had come to reach such an incongruous situation not by abandoning or compromising his anarchist principles (as is still often maintained), but rather by attempting to remain true to them, following their contradictions and antinomies through to the end. Despite years of trying, Cage was never able to adequately answer the question of how to make free individuals noble rather than foolish. After nearly fifteen years of frustration, and looking to the example of Mao, Cage decided that it was legitimate to draw yet another line: power may be used to salvage and further an anarchic aesthetic revolution.

198

Experimentations

Notes Ben Johnston, “A.S.U.C. Keynote Address,” Perspectives of New Music 26, no.1 (Winter 1988): 238. 2 John Cage, quoted in Stephen Husarik, “John Cage and LeJaren Hiller: HPSCHD, 1969,” American Music 1, no. 2 (Summer 1983): 15. 3 John Cage, A Year from Monday (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967); and John Cage, M: Writings '67–'72 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973). 4 Husarik, “John Cage and LeJaren Hiller,” 4–5; and William Fetterman, John Cage’s Theatre Pieces: Notations and Performances (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996), 138–139. 5 Husarik, “John Cage and LeJaren Hiller,” 19. Husarik’s article provides the most complete documentation and reconstruction of HPSCHD, and my discussion of the performance’s components is indebted to it throughout. Further discussion and documentation is provided in Fetterman, John Cage’s Theatre Pieces, 139–142, with an appendix reproducing the journal notes of Frances Ott Allen, who attended the inaugural performance, 253–255. A number of good images, along with a highly inaccurate description, of the event can be found in Tape Recording 17, no. 1 (January–February, 1970): 36–40. More recently, a comprehensive analysis of HPSCHD, which approaches the imbrication of Cage’s aesthetics and politics from the perspective of a possible relation to the legacy of Richard Wagner, has been provided by Sara Heimbecker, “HPSCHD, Gesamtkunstwerk, and Utopia,” American Music 26, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 474–498. 6 “Decade of Computer Music Study Culminating in HPSCHD,” The ChampaignUrbana Courier, May 15, 1969, 8, quoted in Husarik, “John Cage and LeJaren Hiller,” 10. ICHING is the computer subroutine programmed by Hiller to emulate the operations of the I Ching, or Book of Changes. The IBM computer to which the article refers is one of the peripherals of the ILLIAC II. 7 Quoted in Fetterman, John Cage’s Theatre Pieces, 140. 8 Husarik, “John Cage and LeJaren Hiller,” 9–10. 9 Lejaren Hiller had previously discussed Mozart’s Würfelspiel in relation to (a somewhat inaccurate and simplified reading of) Cage’s work in Lejaren A. Hiller, Jr. and Leonard M. Isaacson, Experimental Music: Composition with an Electronic Computer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 54. 10 For an overview of Lejaren Hiller’s life and work, as well as information on the computer and electronic music facilities at the University of Illinois, see James Matthew Bohn, The Music of American Composer Lejaren Hiller and an Examination of His Early Works Involving Technology, Studies in the History and Interpretation of Music, vol. 101 (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2004). 1

HPSCHD—Ghost or Monster?

199

11 Bohn, The Music of American Composer Lejaren Hiller, 35–38. 12 Ibid., 38. 13 Ibid., 103–104. 14 Hiller and Isaacson, Experimental Music, 53. The time it took to program ICHING is recounted by Cage in Larry Austin, “An Interview with John Cage and Lejaren Hiller,” Computer Music Journal 16, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 19. Austin’s interview was originally published as Larry Austin, “John Cage and Lejaren Hiller, HPSCHD,” Source—Music of the Avant-Garde 2, no. 2 (whole no. 4) (July 1968): 11–19. 15 Hiller and Isaacson, Experimental Music, 68–78. 16 Ibid., 72. Hiller published several papers on this method in the Journal of Chemical Physics, listed in ibid. 17 John Cage, “In This Day … ” (1956), in Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 95. 18 Hiller and Isaacson, Experimental Music, 51. 19 Ibid., 109–110. In keeping with The Illiac Suite’s scientific character, Hiller and Isaacson labeled its four sections, or movements, as “Experiment One” through “Experiment Four.” 20 Austin, “An Interview with John Cage and LeJaren Hiller,” 16. In Experimental Music, Hiller and Isaacson, relying heavily on Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music, largely define the logic of musical composition as bringing order out of chaos, which almost entirely contrasted with Cage’s aesthetic of the time, though it did coincide with Cage’s pre-chance (i.e., pre-1951) ideas and writings. Hiller would later write works that demonstrated the progression from order to disorder in, for example, the central movement of his An Avalanche for Pitchman, Prima Donna, Player Piano, Percussionist, and Pre-Recorded Playback of 1968 (Bohn, The Music of American Composer Lejaren Hiller, 122–123). 21 Cage wrote about Earle Brown’s Indices (1954), “Had bias not been introduced in the use of the tables of random numbers, the sounds would have been not just sounds but elements acting according to scientific theories of probability, elements acting in relationship due to the equal distribution of each one of those present— elements, that is to say, under the control of man.” John Cage, “Composition as Process II: Indeterminacy” (1958), in Silence, 37. 22 John Cage, “Lecture on Nothing” (1950), in Silence, 132; Hiller and Isaacson, Experimental Music, 92–93, 131–151. 23 Austin, “An Interview with John Cage and LeJaren Hiller,” 20. 24 Ibid., 19. As we have seen in Chapter 1, such communal compositional production had long been a dream of Cage’s, expressed as far back as the early thirties. See, for instance, John Cage, “Counterpoint” (1934), in Writings about John Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 15–17.

200

Experimentations

25 Johnston, in Austin, “An Interview with John Cage and LeJaren Hiller,” 20. 26 Ibid. 27 On the Rozart Mix, see Fetterman, John Cage’s Theatre Pieces, 130–133. 28 Fetterman, John Cage’s Theatre Pieces, 128–129. On the development of the Music IX program and “Music Machine” adaptation of the CSX-1 computer, primarily by Hiller’s colleague J. L. Divibiss, and the relation of Max Matthews’s work to that of Divibiss and Hiller, see Bohn, The Music of American Composer Lejaren Hiller, 86–102. 29 Details on materials and performance recounted in this section derive from Husarik, “John Cage and LeJaren Hiller,” 12–15 and passim. 30 HPSCHD can thus be regarded as an important moment in the development of that type of “schizophrenic” postmodernism famously described by Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). Heimbecker relates HPSCHD to postmodern critiques of narrative by Roland Barthes and Jean-François Lyotard, 483–484. 31 Anthony McCall, “Line Describing a Cone and Related Films,” October 103 (Winter 2003): 60. 32 Austin, “An Interview with John Cage and LeJaren Hiller,” 21 and 24. 33 John Cage, “Experimental Music” (1957), in Silence, 12 34 Cage, in Richard Kostelanetz, The Theatre of Mixed Means (New York: RK Editions, 1980), 53. 35 Cage, in Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner, “An Interview with John Cage,” Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2 (T30) (Winter 1965): 69. 36 Cage, in Kostelanetz, Theatre of Mixed Means, 56. 37 Ibid. 38 Instructions for 18 Happenings in 6 Parts reproduced in Barbara Haskell, Blam! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism, and Performance, 1958–1964 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1984), 32. 39 John Cage, “Form is a Language” (1960), in John Cage: An Anthology, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Da Capo, 1970), 135. 40 John Cage, “History of Experimental Music in the United States” (1959), in Silence, 72. 41 On the initiation of Cage’s critique of representation, see Branden W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 25–71. 42 John Cage, Conversing with Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight Editions, 1994), 112. 43 See Cage’s comments in ibid. 44 John Cage, “Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?” (1961), in Silence, 224–225. 45 Kirby and Schechner, “An Interview with John Cage,” 57.

HPSCHD—Ghost or Monster?

201

46 On “experimental” actions, see, for instance, Cage, “Experimental Music: Doctrine” (1955), in Silence, 13. 47 Cage, Conversing with Cage, 113. Statement dates from 1965. 48 Cage, quoted in Alfred Kazin, “Whatever Happened to Criticism?” The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association 5, Papers of the Midwest Modern Language Association, no. 2 (1972): 19. 49 Cage, “45' for a Speaker” (1954), in Silence, 189. 50 Kirby and Schechner, “An Interview with John Cage,” 50. 51 Cage, “Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?” 250–251. 52 Ibid., 252–254. 53 See Cage’s comments in ibid.: “We can of course converse (and do) and we say: ‘Stand where I stand and look over there and see what I see’ ” (251–252). 54 Ibid., 205–206. 55 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–186. That something akin to Cage’s ideal of continual subjective transformation would be taken up as a new form of oppression within what has been termed “the new spirit of capitalism” is another story; see Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 2005). 56 John Cage and Daniel Charles, For the Birds (New York: Marion Boyars, 1981), 147. See, however, the audience’s critical reaction to this point of Cage’s, 56–58. 57 Cage can thus be seen to be effecting the same cordoning action as in the liberal political theory of Jürgen Habermas or John Rawls, both of whom would exclude irrational, emotional, and overly self-interested aspects of discourse from the public sphere: Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1989); John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). For a critique of this aspect of liberal political theory and a discussion of the “political” in terms relating to antagonism, see Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993). On the fact that the “public sphere” modeled by HPSCHD was not equally open to all audiences, particularly on the basis of race, see Heimbecker, “HPSCHD, Gesamtkunstwerk, and Utopia.” 58 Cornelius Cardew, “John Cage—Ghost or Monster?” The Listener, May 4, 1972; repr. in Leonardo Music Journal 8 (1998): 3–4. Cardew’s attack on Cage was subsequently, and most famously, included in a revised form in his polemical book, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism (London: Latimer New Dimensions, 1974), 34–40. 59 Cornelius Cardew, “Criticising Cage and Stockhausen” [excerpt from Stockhausen Serves Imperialism] in Cornelius Cardew: A Reader, ed. Edwin Prévost (Essex: Copula, 2006), 155.

202

Experimentations

60 Cardew, “John Cage,” 3. 61 Ibid. Both charges were related to Cardew’s turn toward Maoism. 62 Cardew, “John Cage,” 3. There is also a thinly veiled and barely reflected-upon Oedipal dimension to Cardew’s polemic: Cage, whom Cardew describes as “a father figure to a number of rebellious movements in the arts”—charged like James Dean’s character’s father in Rebel without a Cause (1955) with being overly permissive and insufficiently strong—provokes his children into insurrection against him. 63 Cardew, “John Cage,” 4. Cardew’s mention of Cage’s discussion of freedom and nobility seems actually to have stemmed from a comment made by Cage in 1958 about the Concert for Piano and Orchestra, published in John Cage, “Indeterminacy,” Die Reihe 5 (1961): 118; repr. in English in Cage, “How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run” (1967), in A Year from Monday, 136. On the New York performance of Atlas Eclipticalis, see Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 20–64. 64 Steve Sweeney Turner, “John Cage’s Practical Utopias: John Cage in Conversation with Steve Sweeney Turner,” The Musical Times 131, no. 1771 (September 1990): 470. 65 Husarik, “John Cage and LeJaren Hiller,” 18. 66 Cage, “For More New Sounds” (1942), in John Cage: An Anthology, 65; and Cage, “Experimental Music: Doctrine,” 16. 67 This dream, as F. Richard Moore has noted, goes back at least as far as Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis of 1624; F. Richard Moore, “Dreams of Computer Music: Then and Now,” Computer Music Journal 20, no. 1 (1996): 25–41. 68 John Cage, “John Cage on Architecture,” Connection: Visual Arts at Harvard 4, no. 1 (Winter 1967): 14 (punctuation added). 69 Rauschenberg’s series of prints related to the space program are discussed in Robert Mattison, Robert Rauschenberg: Breaking Boundaries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). For an account of Rauschenberg’s earlier interactions with technology (and happenings), see Joseph, Random Order, 209–285. 70 Robert Rauschenberg, “A Collage ‘Comment’ by Robert Rauschenberg on His Latest Suite of Prints,” Studio International 178, no. 917 (December 1969): 246–247. 71 Husarik, “John Cage and LeJaren Hiller,” 14. Nameth also sought to portray “the history of man from his primitive beginnings up to modern times” (14), a type of vague evolution theme also common to New Age aesthetics and developed further in Nameth’s Tantric Journey (1975, with music by Terry Riley). 72 Husarik, “John Cage and LeJaren Hiller,” 12. 73 Cage, “Foreword,” in A Year from Monday, ix. 74 See, for example, John Cage, “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) 1965,” in A Year from Monday, 3–20; and Turner, “John

HPSCHD—Ghost or Monster?

203

Cage’s Practical Utopias,” 470. The utopian role played by technology in Cage’s work was diagnosed early by Heinz-Klaus Metzger; see Heinz-Klaus Metzger, “John Cage, or Liberated Music” (1959), trans. Ian Pepper, October 82 (Autumn 1997): 58. 75 See, for instance, Cage’s comments on May 1968 in Paris in “These Days” (1968), in John Cage: An Anthology, 179; and Conversing with Cage, 274. 76 Todd May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). 77 John Cage, “Goal: New Music, New Dance” (1939), in Silence, 87. 78 C.H. Waddington, Biology and the History of the Future (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1972), 35. 79 See, for instance, John Cage, “The Future of Music” (1974), in Empty Words (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), 180. 80 Cage, Conversing with Cage, 274. See also Cage’s statement from 1982: “I don’t know what the adjective is—pure and simple [anarchist], or philosophical, or what; but I don’t like government! And I don’t like institutions! And I don’t have any confidence in even good institutions. I won’t even support something like the Wilderness Society, and I love mushrooms, the forests, and all that. But I hate what those institutions are doing to them” (Conversing with Cage, 277). 81 Jean-Yves Bosseur, John Cage (Paris: Minerve, 1993), 146. In actuality, Cage did have a knowledge of discipline, as power inhering within the individual rather than imposed hierarchically upon him or her, but he saw this primarily as a type of selfregulatory, anti-authoritarian force, opposed to impositions of sovereign power and necessary for the individual “nobility” needed for anarchy’s practical realization. In describing Cage’s composition series Music for Piano (1952–56), Martin Iddon provides a good description of the kind of internalized discipline that allowed David Tudor to deliver what the composer considered successful realizations. By this period, Iddon writes, “Tudor had learned how to realize Cage scores—even if he had not been aware that this was what he was learning to do—through the process of working on the earlier pieces. Though Cage might have been controlling the sounds he had left undetermined only from a distance, and without necessarily meaning to, the specific route that he and Tudor had taken to reach these realizations meant that Cage’s control over the language available to Tudor was still near enough absolute”; Martin Iddon, John Cage and David Tudor: Correspondence on Interpretation and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 55. That Julius Eastman, in his 1975 realization of Song Books (1970), contravened precisely this type of internalized discipline is arguably what provoked Cage’s overtly “disciplining” response; see Ryan Dohoney, “John Cage, Julius Eastman, and the Homosexual Ego,” in Tomorrow Is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies, ed. Benjamin Piekut (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 39–62.

204

Experimentations

82 Cage, “Where Do We Go from Here?” (1963), in A Year from Monday, 92. 83 Cage, “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) 1965,” 13. 84 Stan Brakhage, John Cage, Jonas Mekas, and Stan VanDerBeek, Cinema Now, ed. Hector Currie and Michael Porte, Perspectives on American Underground Film, vol. 1 (Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati, 1968), 20. 85 May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, 61. 86 John Cage, “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) Continued 1966,” in A Year from Monday, 59. David Revill states that the anarchist in question was Martin himself; David Revill, The Roaring Silence: John Cage, a Life (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992), 240; Rob Haskins reports that “Martin was one of Cage’s neighbours at Stony Point”; Rob Haskins, John Cage (London: Reaktion, 2012), 163 note 7. 87 Cage, “Afterword,” in A Year from Monday, 164. 88 Richard F. Shepard, “John Cage Holds a Jewish Happening,” The New York Times, July 24, 1967, 21. Although the headline attributes the event to Cage, Shepard’s reporting indicates that the event may have been overseen by Ken Dewey. For the ideas possibly drawn upon by Cage, see the later collection, Buckminster Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity (London: Allen Lane, 1970). 89 Cage, “How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run,” 136. 90 Ibid. 91 For Cage’s comments on that event, see Conversing with Cage, 114. 92 Cage, “Foreword,” in M, xi. 93 Ibid., xii–xiii. On this connection and its political implications, see Michael Nyman, “Review: Cage/Cardew,” Tempo, new series 107 (December 1973): 32–38; and David W. Patterson, “ ‘Political’ or ‘Social’? John Cage and the Remolding of Mao Tse-Tung,” in Cage and Consequences, ed. Julia H. Schröder and Volker Straebel (Hofheim am Taunus: Wolke Verlag, 2012), 51–65. 94 John Cage, “Reflections of a Progressive Composer on a Damaged Society,” October 82 (Fall 1997): 78–79. 95 Cage, “Foreword,” in M, xii. See Cage’s comment: “I had become numb from the social habit (practiced indiscriminately in the U.S.A., only politically in China) of getting rid of people, even killing them when feasible” (ibid. xi). Patterson has also commented on how Cage was pushed toward an uncharacteristic consideration of violence by Maoist thought; Patterson, “ ‘Political’ or ‘Social,’ ” 62–63. 96 Cage, “Foreword,” in M, xv. 97 Ibid. (emphasis added, ellipses in original).

Index Note: Works by authors are listed under their names; page references with letters ‘f ’ and ‘n’ refer to figures and notes. Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland 176 abstract expressionism 3–4, 5, 134, 164 n.3 abstraction 16, 25, 83, 87, 89, 90, 96 abstract painting 36, 58, 59f “accidental differentiation” 118, 128 n.53 action music/action theater 134, 145 action painting 23, 134 actualization, Cage’s concept of 7, 150–1, 152, 153, 155, 156, 159–60, 161, 162, 169 n.63, 170 n.70, 172 n.98 Adorno, Theodor 78 n.139, 87, 88, 90, 109, 117 critique of Cage 111–12, 117–18, 122, 123, 169 n.65, 170 n.67 “Vers une musique informelle” 111 writings on music 127 n.27, 152, 169 n.65 African-Americans, exclusion of 9, 51 Alder Planetarium 181 alienation 23, 55, 111 Allen, Frances Ott 198 n.5 Althusser, Louis 186 amplitude 115, 127 n.38, 138, 143, 145, 157, 159 anarchism 8, 16, 21, 24, 26, 49, 53, 69, 90, 96, 124, 134, 165 n.6, 170 n.69, 184–8, 193–7, 203 nn.80–1, 204 n.86 antagonism 11, 108–9, 156, 187, 188, 195, 197, 201 n.57 Antheil, George 40, 45, 48 Cage’s critique of 44–5, 48, 55, 66, 67 “Music Tomorrow” 48, 75 n.59 anti-authoritarian 103, 203 n.81 anti-commercialism 58 anti-modernism 62, 77 n.111 anti-war performance 16, 21 Apollo 11 190 architectural space 106–7, 126 n.17

architecture 6, 27, 38 architectural metaphor 82, 85, 88, 105, 111, 130–1 n.77 Cage on 103, 105–6, 123, 124 Fuller’s vision 81–97, 143 Gothic 53, 137 Miesian 7, 11–12, 106, 107–11, 108f, 109f, 117, 123, 126 n.23 modern 7, 11–12, 12f, 13f, 101–31 Moholy-Nagy’s definition of architectural space 106–7, 126 n.17 Schwitters’s Merz Column 108–9, 110f of silence 101–31 Arp, Hans 50 art avant-garde 43 contemporary 10, 31 n.44 effectiveness of 50, 66 as experimentation 23, 24, 29–30 n.25, 75 n.70 forms 44, 49, 69, 183 and “life” 3, 112, 127 n.25, 129 n.58, 156–7 Medieval/Gothic 51, 55, 69 modern 45, 47 nature and 145, 148, 182 of noise 40 political content 183 representational function of 184, 188–9, 193 role of, defined by Cage 194 sound 10 value of 24 Western 55 work of 35, 49, 65, 72 n.38, 156, 189 Artaud, Antonin 24, 33 n.89, 165 n.12, 171 n.83 art history 5–11, 30 n.28, 54, 133, 156

206

Index

Asia 63, 82 Asian art and aesthetics 54, 55, 64, 146, 160 atonality 48, 66–7, 78 n.139, 118 audience African-American, exclusion of 9 engagement 14, 17 happenings’ impositions on 3, 14, 28 n.7 harmony and 55–6 and musician relationship 41–2 performance and audience reception 45, 55, 81, 153–5, 183–4, 189, 193–7, 201 nn.56–7 Audio Visual Group 158, 171 n.84 Austin, Larry 179, 180, 199 n.14, 199 n.20 authoritarianism 24, 52, 102, 194, 195, 197 avant-garde aesthetics 35–79, 112, 124 avant-garde movements 6, 79, 112 Babbitt, Milton 5 Bach 179 Bacon, Francis 202 n.67 Ball, Hugo 50 “Fragments from a Dada Diary” 50 Ballet Mécanique 45, 48 baroque 55 Barthes, Roland 200 n.30 Bartók, Béla 43 Bauhaus 35, 38, 70 n.13, 120–1, 121f, 137, 196–7 post- 120 BBC 187 Beethoven 44, 54, 55, 66, 67, 78 n.138, 81, 176 Bell Labs 15, 180 Benjamin, Walter 43–4 Adorno’s critique of 111, 127 n.27, 127 n.29, 127 n.31 “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, The” 43, 72–3 n.38 Bergson, Henri 137 and Cage’s ideas 146–9, 169 n.63 Creative Evolution 146, 147, 150 Deleuze’s analysis of 149–51, 168 n.49, 169 n.53 disorder and non-being 146–7, 149, 155, 159 nature described by 155–6

notions of 146–52, 155–6, 159–60, 168 n.46, 168 n.52, 170 n.76, 171 n.88 Berlin, Germany 109f Bernstein, David 138, 167 n.27 Birkhoff, G.D. theory of aesthetic measure 178 Black Mountain College 53, 81, 103, 125 n.12, 155, 182 Black Mountain College Event. See Cage, John, musical works, Theatre Event #1 Bloch, Ernst 88 Blom, Ina 30 n.28 boredom 72 Born, Georgina 28 n.19 Boulez, Pierre 98 n.42, 133, 137, 141, 146, 161, 166 n.17, 167 n.27, 171 n.83 Brecht, George 154, 157, 158–64, 171 nn.86–8, 172 n.95, 172 n.102, 172 nn.98–9, 183 articles on Cage 160–1 Chance-Imagery 135, 160 chart of relations from Notebook III 161–2, 162f Drip Music 136f General Nature of a Performance 160 relations between composer, performer, and listener 161–2, 162f “Situational Music” 162 switchboard 161 Time Table Event 164 transformation and aesthetic development 160–4 “virtuoso listener” 162–3, 163f Breton, André 50 Breuer, Marcel 103 Broadway, New York 36, 37f Brown, Barclay 72 n.17 Brown, Earle 168 n.44 Indices 199 n.21 Brown, Norman O. 196 Bruckner 55 Buchloh, Benjamin H.D. 28 n.14 Buddhism. See Zen Buddhism Bürger, Peter Theory of the Avant-Garde 10, 127 n.31 Busoni 176

Index Cage, John interviews Kirby and Schechner 2–3, 5, 21, 29 n.21 musical works 4ʹ33˝ 3, 68, 106, 112, 164 26ʹ1.1499˝ for a String Player 9 Atlas Eclipticalis 9, 188, 196, 202 n.63 Cheap Imitation 197 Concert for Piano and Orchestra 89, 89f, 143, 145f, 169 n.63, 196, 202 n.63 Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra 68–9, 141–2, 148–9, 167 nn.29–30 Credo in US 166 n.15 Double Music (with Harrison) 50–1, 137, 166 n.17 First Construction (in Metal) 44, 46f, 54 Fontana Mix 143 HPSCHD 5, 9, 173–204, 174f, 175f, 182f Imaginary Landscape No. 1 71 n.14, 71 n.17 Imaginary Landscape No. 4 68 Music for Carillon (Graph) No. 1 113–15, 114f, 127 n.37, 128 n.41, 143, 167 n.33, 171 n.87 Music for Piano 143, 203 n.81 Music for Piano 69–84 (#73) 144f Musicircus 173, 185, 187, 188, 197 Music of Changes 15–16, 69, 137, 138, 140f, 141, 142–3, 146, 148–9, 151, 152–3, 161 Party Pieces (with Harrison, Cowell, and Thomson) 138 Rozart Mix 180 Song Books 9, 10 String Quartet in Four Parts 68 Theatre Event #1 3, 155 Theatre Piece 3, 12f, 182 Variations I 115, 143, 151 Variations II 115–16, 116f, 143 Variations V 180 Variations VII 190, 192f Works of Calder 137, 166 n.16

207

photographs of 2f, 6f, 91f, 121f, 175f, 192f writings and lectures “45' for a Speaker” 115, 128 n.43, 151, 157 “Afterword to A Year from Monday” 195 “Composer’s Confessions, A” 56, 57, 60, 65, 66, 68 “Composition as Process I: Changes” 151 “Composition as Process II: Indeterminacy” 33 n.87, 123 “Counterpoint” 38, 51 “Defense of Satie” 53–4, 57, 60, 64, 65, 66, 68, 81–2 “East in the West, The” 55, 66 “Experimental Music” 23, 106, 143–5, 153, 157 “Experimental Music: Doctrine” 23, 157 “Forerunners of Modern Music” 137 “Future of Music: Credo, The” 40, 41, 42, 49, 50, 66, 71 n.17, 74 n.57 “Goal: New Music, New Dance” 47 “History of Experimental Music in the United States” 23, 82, 184 “Jewish Happening” 195 “Juilliard Lecture” 105–6, 115 “Lecture on Nothing” 58, 128 n.39 “Lecture on Something” 75 n.70, 82 “Listening to Music” 41–3, 44, 49, 65 M 173 “Minimum Rehearsal Requirement” 197 “Overpopulation and Art” 124 “Preface to Indeterminacy” 112 “Rhythm Etc.” 101, 103, 105, 107, 111, 120, 124, 125 n.1, 127 n.37, 129 n.53 “Satie Controversy” 77 n.100 Silence 5 “South Winds in Chicago” 52 Year from Monday, A 173, 195 Calder, Alexander 137 California 36, 45, 117

208

Index

Campbell, Joseph 76 n.87 Cape Canaveral 190 capitalism 33 n.89, 56, 57, 60, 67, 86, 92, 93, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 124, 201 n.55 Cardew, Cornelius Brecht and 163, 172 n.102 critique of Cage 187–8, 196, 201 n.58, 202 nn.62–3 “John Cage—Ghost or Monster?” 187–8 and Maoism 202 n.61 Carter, Ron 34 n.93 Cassirer, Ernst 164 cello 52 censors 9, 42 chance, Cage’s concept of 3, 7, 10, 17, 23, 69, 81, 94, 113, 114, 133–8, 142–3, 146, 149–50, 152–4, 156–7, 160, 165 n.8, 166 n.15, 166 n.17, 174, 176, 178, 181, 189, 196, 199 n.20 and disorder 147 vs. change 11, 14, 134 chance theater 3 Charles, Daniel 27, 33 n.87, 35, 122, 186 “Musique et An-Archie” 25–6 charts, Cage’s use of compositional 68, 138, 141–3, 146, 148–9, 151–2, 161, 167 n.27, 167 n.29, 167 n.31 Chavez, Carlos 73 n.38 Cherry Lane Theater, New York 137 Chicago 106, 107 New Bauhaus 58 China 204 n.95 Chinese Revolution 197 Chopin 176 choreography 17 Christianity 64, 195 city, the architecture 101–31 Cage’s aversion to 117, 120, 122 Cage’s characterization of 35–79 Moholy-Nagy’s depiction of 38–40, 39f Tobey’s paintings of 35–8, 37f, 42, 44, 58, 59f collage 5, 7, 43, 49, 127 n.35, 181, 190 Columbia University, New York 176

commercial culture 117, 129 n.53 commercialism 36, 55–8, 67, 86, 118 commodification 6, 57, 128 n.53 communism 62, 77–8 n.114 computerization 95 computer music 173–204 conformance 52, 68 “conjunction and juxtaposition” 17, 19 contemporary music 10, 38, 106, 118, 119, 129 n.58, 152 Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. 54–5, 56, 60, 62, 64, 76 n.87, 77 n.111, 146 Copenhagen, Denmark 136f Copland, Aaron 5 Cornish School 35, 71 n.15 counterpoint 118, 144 counterrevolution 47 Cowell, Henry 5, 40, 70 n.6, 71 n.14, 71 n.16, 75 n.58 Party Pieces (with Cage, Harrison, and Thomson) 138 critical distance 111, 121–2, 126 n.25 culture industry 56, 111, 117, 123, 127 n.29 Cunningham, Merce 6f, 17, 53, 81, 121, 137 dada/dadaism 3, 7, 35, 43, 47, 49–50, 75 n.67, 78 n.122, 110, 112, 117, 124, 127 n.35, 133, 138, 163 Dartmouth College 146 Dean, James 202 n.62 decentralization 84, 85, 124 de Kooning, Elaine 81 Delany, Samuel 29 n.20 Deleuze, Gilles Anti-Oedipus (with Guattari) 24 “Bergson’s Conception of Difference” 169 n.53 and capitalism 93 on control societies 95, 99 n.55 and experimentation 24, 25, 26–7, 90 Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (with Guattari) 26 notion of smooth space 90, 98–9 n.42, 145 study of Bergson 149–50, 168 n.49, 169 n.53 What Is Philosophy? (with Guattari) 81

Index Denmark 136f de Sade, Marquis 21 desire, Libido 24, 26 Dessau Bauhaus 45, 107 DEW (Distant Early Warning) Line 94 Dewey, Ken 204 n.88 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno) 117 dialectics 48–9, 90, 110, 111, 117, 147, 168 n.49 Díaz, Eva 10 Dillon’s Bar, New York 6f “disinterestedness,” Cage’s idea of 16, 57–8, 68–9 Divibiss, J. L. 200 n.28 division of labor 60, 67 Dohoney, Ryan 9, 29 n.23 Duberman, Martin 125 n.12 Duchamp, Magdeleine 138, 139f Duchamp, Marcel (pseud. Rrose Sélavy) 5, 7, 28 n.14, 73 n.46, 130 n.68, 142, 166 n.13, 166 n.21 Bottle Dryer 112 Erratum Musical 138, 139f, 149, 166 n.21 Large Glass, The 7, 106, 112, 113f, 121 legacy 7 Duchamp, Yvonne 138, 139f Duhamel, Georges 43 duration, concept of 115, 127 n.38, 142–3, 145, 147, 150, 151–2, 157, 159, 168 n.46, 168 n.49, 179 dynamics 138, 142, 143 Eastman, Julius 9, 10, 203 n.81 Eckhart, Meister 195 Eiffel Tower 126 n.17 Eisenhower, Letty 3 electrical instruments 40, 44 electronic music/equipment 73 n.38, 173–204 Ellul, Jacques Technological Society, The 196 emancipation 47, 82, 83, 85, 87, 88, 92, 95, 96, 97 enlightenment 82, 90, 96, 122 Erdman, Jean 76 n.87 Europe/European 8, 10, 15, 35, 45, 46, 50, 63, 75 n.58, 82, 123, 161, 171 n.95

209

existentialism 23, 118, 134 experimental action 23, 90, 123, 135, 151 experimental art 23, 24, 29–30 n.25, 75 n.70 experimental music 9, 29–30 n.25, 88, 123 experimentation, Cage’s concept of 82, 90–2, 99 n.42, 143, 165 n.12 adopted by Deleuze and Guattari 24, 26, 81, 90 and interpretation 24 and psychology 26 expressionism 3, 5, 10, 14, 21–2, 33 n.89, 51, 55, 56, 57, 65, 84, 184, 188 expressive genius 56 fascism 55, 62, 76 n.79, 78 n.114, 188 Feininger, Lux 107 feminist movement 15 Ferrara, Jackie 15 feudalism 85, 92, 93 field, concept of 41, 89, 101, 142, 143, 145–6, 148, 151, 153, 157, 163 field situation 119, 145, 167 n.36 film 43, 117, 137, 181, 190, 195 first wave Cage studies 8 Fluxus 2, 11, 15, 133, 158, 183 Fluxus 158 Fluxus-Musik og Anti Music det Instrumentale Teater, Nokolai Kirke, Copenhagen, Denmark 136f Flynt, Henry 5, 7 Ford, Henry 83 form, Cage’s concept of 38, 51, 54, 114 formalism 7, 21, 50, 103, 107 Foster, Hal 10 fragmentation 38, 48, 49, 51, 53, 56, 64, 65, 66, 67, 110, 176 Frankfurt School 121–2 frequency 71 n.17, 115, 127 n.38, 143, 145, 157, 159, 161 frequency hopping 76 n.92 Freud, Sigmund 64, 66, 67, 78 n.131 Fuller, Anne Hewlett 84 Fuller, Buckminster 81–99, 94f, 143, 190, 193, 194, 195, 196 4D proposals 82–4, 84f, 86 Cloud Nines 83, 83f

210

Index

counterutopia 87–8 Dymaxion map 190 Dymaxion model 90 fight for acceptance of his ideas 85–7 Game of Life, The 86 geodesic domes 81, 83, 84, 94, 94f Geoscope 86 housing 83, 86 influence on Cage 88–97 Minni-Earth 86 model of decentralization 84–5 Nine Chains to the Moon 86 notion of airborne movement 82–3, 86, 88, 90–3 omni-directional transport 84 Tensegrity structures 81 transportation 84 Utopia and Oblivion 86 vision of the future 87–8, 92 World Game, The 86 futurism 3, 35, 45, 48 Gatehill Cooperative Community, Williams-Cage House, New York 103, 104f, 105, 105f, 120–1, 121f Gentry, Philip 9 Germany 109f Giedion, Sigfried 39 Gilbert, Stuart 62–3 “Creator Is Not a Public Servant, The” 62–3 Giles, Bill 6f globalization 92 Goehr, Lydia 30 n.28, 33 n.84, 34 n.93 Gothic. See medieval art Gottschalk 176 Grizzard, George 5 Gropius, Walter 107 Grubbs, David 30 n.25 Guattari, Félix 24 Anti-Oedipus (with Deleuze) 24 and capitalism 93 on control societies 95, 99 n.55 and experimentation 24, 25, 26–7, 90 Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (with Deleuze) 26

notion of smooth space 90, 98 n.42, 145 What Is Philosophy? (with Deleuze) 81 Habermas, Jürgen 201 n.57 Hansen, Al 134–5, 158 Hall Street Happening 134, 165 n.8 happenings 1–4, 5, 11, 14–15, 28 n.7, 119, 133, 134, 155, 158, 173, 183–5, 186, 187–8, 193, 194, 202 n.69 harmony/harmonic Cage’s argument with Le Corbusier 101–3, 119–20, 119f, 129 n.63 Cage’s rejection of 54–7, 66–7, 88, 101, 111, 114, 118, 125 n.3, 194 and commercialism 55–6, 57, 67, 118 composition 51, 54 disintegration 66–7, 118 and Le Corbusier’s Modulor 101–3, 102f, 119–20, 119f, 129 n.63 limitations 88, 123 Russolo’s view 41, 71–2 n.17 structure 51, 54, 55, 57, 66, 101, 114, 116, 118 and tonality 66, 118 Harrison, Lou Double Music (with Cage) 50–1, 137 Party Pieces (with Cage, Cowell, and Thomson) 138 Harvard School of Architecture 103 Harvard University 45 Haskins, Rob 204 n.86 Hausmann, Raoul 50, 75 n.67 Hays, K. Michael 107–9, 111, 126 n.23 Heimbecker, Sara 9, 200 n.30 Hendricks, Bici 15 Hicks, Michael 70 n.6 Higgins, Dick 11, 134–5, 136f, 157, 158, 162, 165 n.6, 165 n.9 Danger Music #17 134 “Postface” 165–6 n.13 Hiller, Lejaren 5, 9, 173, 175f, 176, 198 nn.9–10, 199 n.16, 200 n.28 Avalanche for Pitchman, Prima Donna, Player Piano, Percussionist, and Pre-Recorded Playback, An 199 n.20

Index collaboration with Cage in HPSCHD 173, 175f, 176, 178–81, 182f, 185, 195, 198 n.9 Computer Cantata 178 Experimental Music (with Isaacson) 199 n.20 Illiac Suite, The/Quartet No. 4 for Strings (with Isaacson) 178–9, 199 n.19 Machine Music for Piano, Percussion, and Tape 178 Hindemith, Paul 52, 66, 67 Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra 52–3, 68 Hollywood 55, 56 homosexuality 9, 45, 187 Horkheimer, Max 117 Huang-Po Doctrine of Universal Mind 57, 77 n.99 Huelsenbeck, Richard 50 Hullot-Kentor, Robert 127 n.27 Husarik, Stephen 173, 189, 190, 198 n.5, 200 n.29 Huxley, Aldous 87 I Ching 11, 68–9, 138, 141, 151, 176, 178, 190, 198 n.6 ICHING (computer program) 176, 178, 198 n.6, 199 n.14 Iddon, Martin 203 n.81 idealism 87, 89, 92, 95 ideology 41, 47, 86, 87, 90, 111, 118, 123, 186 ILLIAC I 176, 177, 178 ILLIAC II 173, 176–7, 177f, 189, 198 n.6 Illinois 107, 108f, 173, 179, 190 Illinois Institute of Technology 123 impersonality 68, 135, 141, 153 improvisation 9, 29 n.21, 34 n.93, 51, 141 anti-Cagean 134, 164 n.4 indeterminacy 7, 9, 24, 25, 26, 29 n.21, 81, 90, 114, 133, 134, 137, 152, 153–4, 155, 156, 161, 162, 170 n.70, 180, 181, 188, 193, 195 index 7 Indian art and aesthetics 54, 146 individuality/individuation 16, 51, 52, 53, 54, 62, 63, 68, 155, 186, 194 and association 156

211

industrialization 56, 60, 64, 92, 93 industrial revolution 60 Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey 176 International Carnival of Experimental Sound (ICES), Roundhouse, London 181–2 interpenetration 90, 107, 111, 148 concept of 16 and displacement 1–34 unimpededness and 15–16, 19, 23, 24, 33 n.89, 156 Isaacson, Leonard M. 178 Experimental Music (with Hiller) 199 n.20 Illiac Suite, The/Quartet No. 4 for Strings (with Hiller) 178–9, 199 n.19 isolation 7, 16, 52, 65, 71 n.17, 186 Ives, Charles 65 Jameson, Fredric 200 n.30 Johns, Jasper 5, 6f, 96, 190 Johnson, Ray 165 n.12 Johnston, Ben 173, 180 Jolas, Eugene 47, 50 on art’s effectiveness 50 “Literature and the New Man” 51, 61–2, 64, 65 “Notes” 62 “Notes on Reality” 48 “Psychology and Poetry” (trans.) 65 “Super-Occident” 47–8, 63–4 Jones, Caroline A. 9, 29 n.23 Joseph Jarman Quartet 9 Joyce, James 46, 47 Finnegans Wake 47 Judson Dance Theater 15, 17, 19 Jung, Carl 64–5 “Psychology and Poetry” 65 Kafka, Franz 26, 33 n.89 Kahn, Douglas 10 Kaprow, Allan 18 Happenings in 6 Parts 1–2, 1f, 3, 183–4 Assemblage, Environments, and Happenings 11–12, 32 n.74

212

Index

and Cage, differing conceptions 11–14, 133–4 Cage’s criticism of 183–5, 187, 193, 197 cave plan for Eat 13f Courtyard, The 3, 4f, 23 “Experimental Art” 23, 164 n.3, 165 n.12 Kashevaroff, Xenia 53, 76 n.87 Katz, Jonathan D. 9, 28 n.14, 29 nn.23–4 Kepes, Gyorgy 101, 125 n.1 Module, Proportion, Symmetry, Rhythm 101 Vision and Value 101 Kim, Rebecca Y. 9, 164 n.1, 167 n.24, 168 n.44, 172 n.95 Kim-Cohen, Seth 10 kinetic energy 18, 19 kinetic theater 15, 19 Kirby, Michael 2–3, 5, 14, 21, 29 n.21 Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology 3 “New Theatre, The” 2 Klüver, Billy 15, 180 “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering” (performance festival with Rauschenberg) 190 KNOBS 182, 182f Kostelanetz, Richard 183 Kotz, Liz 10 Kuhn, Laura 99 n.56 LaBelle, Brandon 10, 170 n.72 Lamarr, Hedy 55, 76 n.92 Lang, Paul Henry 147 Latin-America 63 Le Corbusier 105, 124, 125 n.11 Modulor, The 101–3, 119–20, 119f, 129 n.63 Leonard, George J. 70 n.4 Levinas, Emmanuel 33 n.87 Lewis, George E. 9, 29 n.21, 29 n.23, 34 n.93, 165 n.4 Lewis, Wyndham 75 n.69 liberal political theory 201 n.57 Lincoln Center, New York 180 Lippold, Richard 106, 126 n.17 Listener, The 187 London 14, 172 n.102, 187, 188 Los Angeles 70 n.6 loudness 145, 151

Luddism 188 Lyotard, Jean-François 78 n.131, 200 n.30 MacLow, Jackson Marrying Maiden, The 3 magnetic tape 88, 143, 145, 146, 162, 189 Mahler 55 Manhattan 130 n.70 Maoism 8, 196, 202 n.61, 204 n.95 Mao Tse-tung 196–7 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 76 n.79 Markov-chain music 179 Martin, James J. 204 n.86 Men Against the State 194–5 Marx, Karl 93 Maryland 176 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 103 materialism 56, 57, 90 Matthews, Max 180, 200 n.28 Maxfield, Richard 5 May, Todd 193, 194 McCall, Anthony 181 McCarthy, Joseph 9, 29 n.24 McFarlane, Bruce Chinese Road to Socialism, The (with Wheelwright) 196 McLuhan, Marshall 1, 2, 3, 185, 190–1, 193, 195 mechanization 64, 77 n.114 medieval art 38, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 64, 69, 137 Méliès, Georges Trip to the Moon, A 181 metaphors 16, 19, 23, 42, 82, 85, 88, 105, 111, 130 n.77 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 7, 11, 121, 126 n.18, 126 n.23 Cage vs. Hays’s understanding of 106–12, 117, 120 Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois 107, 108f, 111 Glass Skyscraper model, Berlin, Germany 109f School of Architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology 123 militarism 52–3 military power and technology 92, 93–5, 189, 190

Index Miller, Leta 166 n.18 Mills College 38, 70 n.11 miniaturization 189 modern art 45, 47 modernism/modernity 38, 45, 49, 57, 61, 103, 107, 117 modernization 37, 38, 40, 47–8, 88 modern music 38, 43, 44, 45, 47 Modern Music 55 Modulor, the 101–2, 102f, 119, 120 Moholy-Nagy, László 38–9, 44, 45, 51, 60–2, 64, 70 nn.11–12, 77 n.109 Bauhaus-era ideas 196–7 New Bauhaus 58 New Vision, The/Von Material zu Architektur 38–9, 60, 61f, 70 n.13, 106–7, 126 n.18, 129 n.65 Street Drain 38, 39f montage 7, 43, 49–50, 110 Monte Carlo Method 178 Montreal World’s Fair, 1967 190 Moore, F. Richard 202 n.67 Moorman, Charlotte 9, 15 Moreska, Anna 6f morphology 88, 143, 145, 157, 159 Morris, Robert 7, 28 n.15 Moten, Fred 29 n.20 Mouffe, Chantal 92–3, 95, 201 n.57 Mount Wilson Observatory 181 Mozart 53, 176, 181 Musikalisches Würfelspiel 176, 198 n.9 multimedia 5, 16, 157, 173, 193 multiplicity, Cage’s concept of 7, 24–5, 33 n.80, 65, 81, 89, 90, 95, 123, 137, 146–8, 150–2, 154–6, 161, 163–4, 168 n.41, 168 n.47, 170 n.76, 179, 183 multisensory 21 157 Museum of Modern Art, New York 45 music advanced 152 anticipatory function of 129 n.56 art and 10, 27, 29–30 n.25, 45, 50, 54, 77 n.106 Cage’s purpose of writing 51, 156 commodified 128 n.53 computer 173–204 contemporary 38, 106, 118, 119, 129 n.58, 152

213

electronic 176, 195, 198 n.10 environmental 115, 162, 163 future of 47–8, 71 n.17 harmonic 111, 118, 120, 129 n.63, 155 history 10 limitations/prohibitions of 47, 88, 96, 194 and mathematics 102, 144, 147, 176 modern 38, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47 musical habits 144 musical structure 42, 54, 57, 66–7, 69, 95, 96, 115, 194 new 106, 118, 155, 162 noise 40–5, 40f, 47, 49, 53, 54, 57, 71–2 n.17, 88 percussion 35, 40, 43–4, 47–8, 49, 71 n.17, 73 n.40, 141, 188 Russolo’s myth of 41 serial 117–18 and society 51–2, 56 sound and 142, 143, 148–9, 151, 157, 158, 162 theater and 3, 134, 157–8, 183, 188 therapeutic function of 35–79 traditional 41–2, 43, 44, 101, 115, 118–19 transcendental 41 Western 42, 153 musical instruments 49, 56 Music IX—“Music Machine” 180, 200 n.28 musicology/musicologists 6, 8, 9, 10, 14, 25, 137 Mussolini 53 mysticism 50, 64, 75 n.67, 148, 188 Nameth, Ronald 181, 190, 202 n.71 Tantric Journey 202 n.71 neo-avant-garde 6–7, 10, 105, 124 neo-classicism 36, 38, 51, 52, 55, 56, 67 neurosis 60, 62, 64–5, 66, 68 New Age philosophy/aesthetics 190, 202 n.71 New Bauhaus 58 New Jersey 176 New School for Social Research, Cage’s courses at 3, 5, 133–5, 137, 151, 157–64, 163f, 164 n.1, 183 “new theatre” 3

214

Index

New York 6, 14, 15, 17, 36, 58, 60, 70 n.6, 103, 137, 195, 202 n.63 New York Armory 190 New York Philharmonic 9, 188 “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering” 190, 192f noise ambient 25, 106, 154, 155, 158 nonmusical 88 sound and 25, 33 n.87, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44–5, 47, 49, 53, 54, 57, 72 n.17, 88, 106, 115, 154, 189 white 178, 179 non-knowledge 25, 33 n.87 notes, musical 111, 138, 149, 153, 156, 178, 197 nothingness, Cage’s concept of 82 objective synthesis 24, 33 n.80, 33 n.89 Oldenburg, Claes 11, 14, 183 Moveyhouse 183 opera 53, 55 Oppenheimer, J. Robert 176 orchestra 9, 52, 67, 68, 82, 141, 157, 184, 185, 188, 196, 197 order-disorder distinctions 146–7, 149, 155, 159, 171 n.88, 199 n.20 ORDVAC 176 organicism 11, 14, 49–50, 63, 69 Orient, the 57, 66, 82 Oriental art 55, 98 n.41, 127 n.38 outer space, depiction of 181, 189, 190 overtones 145, 151, 157, 170 n.67 Paik, Nam June 180 painting 5, 70 n.12, 96, 127 n.35, 128 n.44, 190 abstract 36, 58, 59f action 23, 134 Palomar Observatory 181 Paris, France 14, 38, 45, 75 n.59 Patterson, David W. 32 n.67, 74 n.46, 76 n.87, 166 n.15, 171 n.87, 204 n.93, 204 n.95 Paul, Elliot 47, 75 n.59 perceptual estrangement 7, 38, 41, 70 n.12, 72 n.27 percussion music 35, 40, 43–4, 47–8, 49, 71 n.17, 73 n.40, 141, 188

Perloff, Marjorie 30 n.28 personalization 118, 194 photomontage 43, 49–50 phrasing 17, 167 n.28 Piatti, Ugo 40f pictorial nominalism 7 Piekut, Benjamin 8–9, 10, 29 n.25, 32 n.60, 129 n.64 Experimentalism Otherwise 8–9 pitch 144, 145, 171 n.87, 176 and time 114, 115 Plano, Illinois 107, 108f point-drawing technique 115, 143, 151–2, 153, 158, 167 n.34 “police,” Cage’s concept of 3, 14, 23, 28 n.7, 170 n.69, 183, 184, 186 political force 85 political ideals, Cage’s 7–8, 14, 16, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 29 n.24, 51, 62, 69, 170 n.69 Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking of 26 Fuller’s view 85–7, 92–3, 95–6 in HPSCHD 173, 183–9, 193–7, 198 n.5, 201 n.57 Pollock, Jackson 163 Poons, Larry 158 possibilities 54, 57, 61, 88, 89, 95, 128 n.41, 135, 143–5, 149–51, 153, 159, 160, 184–5, 196 postmodernism 96–7, 181, 189, 200 n.30 Post-Renaissance Western art 55 post-structuralism 27 potentiality 149, 150, 152 vs. actuality 159 power Cage’s understanding of 97, 185–6, 193–4, 196, 197, 203 n.81 Deleuze’s view of 99 n.55 dynamics 19 exercise of 185–6, 194–6 Fuller’s concept of 85–7, 92–6 hierarchies of 19, 26, 184, 193–4 relations 16, 22–3, 184 structures 27, 194 precision optics 7 Princeton, New Jersey 176 Pritchett, James 68, 89, 138, 142–3, 167 nn.28–9, 168 n.40, 169 n.63 pseudo-individualization 118, 128 n.53 psychoanalysis 26, 33 n.89, 60, 64, 65, 66

Index radio, Cage’s application of 68, 137, 141, 166 n.15 Rauschenberg, Robert 5, 6f, 77 n.103, 128 n.44, 134, 183, 189–90, 202 n.69 “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering” (performance festival with Klüver) 190, 192f Sky Garden 191f Stoned Moon Series 190, 191f, 202 n.69 Rawls, John 201 n.57 readymade 7, 112, 117 recording technologies 71 n.17, 137, 175, 180, 182, 189 rehearsals 17, 20, 22, 23, 155, 196, 197 Reich, Wilhelm 22, 32 n.67 relative autonomy 110, 111, 122, 127 n.25 relativity 87, 160–1 Renaissance 54–5 Post- 55 repetition and variation 117–18, 122, 124, 128 n.45, 128 n.47 representation, Cage’s critique of 154, 170 n.69, 170 n.72, 184, 188–9, 193, 200 n.41 Revill, David 204 n.86 rhythm 47, 48, 50, 54, 57, 101, 125 n.3, 167 n.28 rhythmic structure. See under structure Richards, Judith Olch 31 n.42 Riley, Terry 202 n.71 Robinson, Julia 10, 163 Robinson, Suzanne 75 n.58 romanticism 50, 72 n.27, 75 n.66 Rosenberg, Harold 23, 134, 164 n.3 Roundhouse, London 181 Russolo, Luigi 40–1, 40f, 42, 44, 48, 49, 53 Art of Noises, The 40, 49, 71 n.14, 71 nn.16–17 “noise instruments” 40f, 71–2 n.17 Sacre du Printemps 48 Sadao, Shoji 83f Sample, Don 45 Satie, Erik 54, 77 n.100, 81 Ruse of Medusa, The 81 Schaeffer, Pierre 25, 33 n.82

215

Schechner, Richard 2, 3, 5, 14, 21 Schneemann, Carolee 27, 31–2 nn.43–61, 183 and Cage, differing conceptions 14–23, 27, 31 nn.43–4 Lateral Splay 19, 20 Meat Joy 14, 16–17, 18f rehearsals and performances 17, 20, 22–3 Snows 16, 19, 20f, 31 n.56 “Unsent Letter to Allan Kaprow” 14–15, 23 Schneider, Alan 5 Schoenberg, Arnold 48, 51–2, 66–7, 70 n.6, 78 n.131, 78 n.139, 117, 118, 128 n.47, 129 n.58 Schumann 176 Schwitters, Kurt 50 Merz Column 108–9, 110f Scratch Orchestra, London 172 n.102 Seattle 35, 36, 40, 41, 58, 70 n.12 second wave Cage studies 8–9, 10 self-alteration. See subjective transformation sensory interactions 21–2, 157 serialism 51, 53, 66, 67, 118–19, 123, 161, 169 n.65, 171 n.95 Serling, Rod 88 Shannon, Claude information theory 178 Shepard, Richard F. 204 n.88 shock effects 43, 44 Sibelius 55 silence, Cage’s concept of 7, 9, 23, 24, 25, 26, 48, 54, 82, 106, 111–12, 146, 151, 157, 163 smooth space, notion of 90, 98 n.42, 145 social cohesion/social fragmentation, Cage’s concerns of 36–8, 49, 51–6, 59–60, 62–7 Société française de Philosophie 25 sonata 42 Sontag, Susan 28 n.7 sound ambient 25, 106, 154, 155, 158 Cage’s idea of 41, 54, 143, 150, 157–8 determinants of 115, 127 n.38, 138, 142–3, 145, 151, 157, 159 “dimensions” of 157

216

Index

field phenomenon 41, 89, 101, 142, 143, 145–6, 148, 151, 153, 157, 163 and noise 25, 33 n.87, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44–5, 47, 49, 53, 54, 57, 72 n.17, 88, 106, 115, 154, 189 sonic 114, 115, 152, 176, 189 -structuring 161–2 sound-space 88, 95, 96, 142, 145–6, 148, 152, 167 n.36 South Asian philosophy 64–5 space architectural vs. sculptural 106–7, 126 n.17 Cage’s concept of 7, 17, 41, 65, 82, 88–91, 95–6, 106, 112, 115 Fuller’s concept 85, 88–9, 93–7 Moholy-Nagy’s definition of 106–7, 126 n.17 structural 138, 151 technology and exploration 189–90, 193, 202 n.69 and time 15–16, 65, 106, 159–61 spirituality 50, 55, 56, 58, 60, 62, 64, 73, 135 standardization 62–3, 85, 87, 122 Stein, Gertrude 46, 47 Steiner, Rudolf 170 n.67 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 5, 161 Stony Point, New York 103, 130 n.70, 204 n.86 Stravinsky, Igor 55 Poetics of Music 199 n.20 structure 16, 24–6, 38, 42, 48, 50–1, 66, 69, 99 n.42 Cage’s concept of 95–6, 115, 117, 124, 128 n.39 despotic 93, 95, 96 harmonic 54, 55, 57, 66–7, 101, 114, 116, 118 musical 42, 66, 69, 95, 114, 118 neo-classical 51, 67 overtone 145, 151 rhythmic 54, 57, 101, 125 n.3 Tensegrity 81 time 54, 106, 138 top-heavy 47, 96, 194 transparent 115–16, 124, 135 Studio International 190

subjective transformation 15, 122, 185, 201 n.55 suicide 23 Sumsion, Calvin 190 Supine Dome 81 surrealism 3, 47, 50, 64, 78 n.122, 137–8 surveillance 95 Suzuki, Daisetz T. 15, 146, 148, 156 symbolism 3, 23, 24, 25, 32 n.74, 92, 164 symphony 43, 55, 194 Tafuri, Manfredo 111 tape music 180–1 technology 43–4, 48, 57, 73 n.38, 87, 92, 93, 95, 117, 143, 173–204 Tempel Beth El synagogue, Spring Valley, New York 195 tempo 99, 138, 151 Tenney, James 15, 180 Tensegrity 81 texture 89, 96, 103 Theater of the Absurd 180 theater Cagean concept of 14, 21, 157–8, 171 nn.83–4, 180, 182, 184–5 chance 3 and music 3, 134, 157–8, 182, 183, 188 new 3 performance 183, 187, 188 therapeutic function, of music 35–79 Thomson, Virgil 75 n.58 Party Pieces (with Cage, Harrison, and Cowell) 138 timbre 115, 127 n.38, 143, 144, 145, 157, 159 time divisions of 54 lengths 48, 54, 101 pitch and 114, 115 and sound 135 and space 15–16, 65, 106, 159–61 -structures 54, 106, 138 Time magazine 44 “Composing for Cash” 56 Times Square, New York 117, 122, 128 n.44 Tobey, Mark Broadway 36, 37f Crystallization 58, 59f

Index pedagogical walk with Cage 35–6, 38, 44, 58, 70 n.12 tonality 66, 72 n.17, 118 Tone Roads 15 traditionalism 36 transcendence 41, 87, 90, 97, 122 trans/formation journal 135, 151, 159, 165 n.9 transition magazine 36, 45–51, 60–5, 73 n.46, 74 n.48, 75 n.69, 77 n.114 “Revolution of the Word Proclamation, The” 47 transparency, Cage’s concept of 7, 11–12, 14, 23, 87, 106, 107, 111, 112, 115, 116, 121, 124, 135, 143, 153, 154, 165–6 n.13, 167 n.33 transvestism 7 tropes 23, 105, 128 n.39 Tudor, David 170 n.70, 180, 203 n.81 Tulane Drama Review 1, 3, 5, 7, 14, 183 Twilight Zone, The 88, 97 Tzara, Tristan 50, 138, 142 “Roar” 165 n.8 ultramodernism 40 “unimpededness and interpenetration” 15–16, 19, 23, 24, 33 n.89, 156 United States avant-garde 35–6, 45–6 collectivistic era 62 commercialism 36, 58, 117 happenings 15 homosexuality 9 McCarthyite 9, 29 n.24, 53 NASA 181 paintings 128 n.44 U.S. Atomic Energy Commission 177 U.S. Marine Corps 94f U.S. space program 189–90, 202 n.69 universalism 38, 51, 53–5, 61, 62, 64, 85, 86, 87, 89, 92, 93, 95 University of Illinois 9, 173–6 Assembly Hall 174–5 Chemistry Department 178 ILLIAC I and II 176–7, 177f Music IX—“Music Machine” 180

217

utopia, concept of 49, 52, 53, 63, 64, 68–9, 81, 86, 87–8, 189, 190, 193, 203 n.74 VanDerBeek, Stan 180 Vanel, Hervé 28 n.7 Varèse, Edgard 40, 71 n.16, 75 n.58 verticalism 36, 47, 50, 62 Virilio, Paul 95, 99 n.55 L’Insécurité du territoire 93 virtualities 149, 150–2, 153, 154–5, 156, 159, 160 visual arts 5, 6, 14, 27, 50, 136, 166 n.13 von Neumann, John 176 Wagner, Richard 198 n.5 Watts, Alan 5 Webern, Anton 54, 65, 112 Weiss, Adolph 36, 70 n.6 Western culture, decline of 54–5, 56, 57, 61–2 Western Europe 8, 10, 15 Wheelwright, E.L. Chinese Road to Socialism, The (with McFarlane) 196 Whitman, Robert 183 Whitney, John 181 Willard Gallery 58 Williams, Barry Michael 71 n.14 Williams, Paul 103, 120–1, 125 nn.10–11 Williams, Vera 103, 125 nn.10–11 Williams, William Carlos 44, 73 n.42 “George Antheil and the Canteline Critics” 44–5, 48 Williams-Cage House 103–5, 104f, 105f, 120–1, 121f Wolff, Christian 135, 138, 158, 188 women, as objects 19, 22 World War II 7, 10, 67, 124 Wright, Frank Lloyd 11 Yates, Peter 71 n.14, 78 n.138 Young, La Monte 164, 183 Zen Buddhism 5, 15, 33 n.89, 82, 111, 112