JOHN CAGE: SOUND, SILENCE, SYNCHRONICITY
Craig E. Stephenson
To Austin Clarkson, musicologist, Jungian thinker, explorer of creativity in depth, with thanks for the loan of the tuning fork.
INTRODUCTION
The English poet, W. H. Auden, having taken up American citizenship in 1946, lived a good portion of the second half of his life in New York. In addition to writing poetry, Auden wrote hundreds of essays, reviews, introductions, and lectures. He also composed opera libretti. In an essay entitled “Some Reflections on Music and Opera,” published in the Partisan Review in January-February 1952, Auden asks:
What is music about? What, as Plato would say, does it ‘imitate’? Choice. A succession of two musical notes is an act of choice, the first causes the second not in the scientific sense of making it occur necessarily, but in the historical sense of provoking it, of providing it with a motive for occurring. A successful melody is a self-determined history; it is freely what it intends to be, yet is a meaningful whole, not an arbitrary succession of notes.[1]
At the same time that Auden was writing these reflections, and not far from Auden’s flat in Greenwich Village, John Cage was composing Music of Changes. On January 1, 1952 at Judith Malina and Julian Beck’s Cherry Lane Theater, pianist David Tudor performed this new work for the first time.
If we group Auden and Cage together not only in time and space (New York City, 1952, although I can find no evidence that they ever met) but also in aesthetics (both working their post-war ways out of Romanticism and Modernism), and if we take up Auden’s hypothesis that music imitates choice, then we’ll see just how provocative it was for Cage to hand the choices to chance. Cage might rewrite Auden’s last sentence to read: ”My composition, Music of Changes, is a chance-determined history; it is freely what it intends to be (rather than merely what I as composer intend it to be), yet it is a meaningful whole, not an arbitrary succession of notes.”
Whether or not a particular succession of notes becomes ”successful“ depends very much on its listeners. Cage worked very hard to highlight the role of listeners. As much as he composed, he educated and provoked, preaching a radicalized receptivity to sound.
Historically, Jung’s psychology plays a small part in Cage’s oeuvre because Jung’s books and forewords to two books on Eastern religions influenced Cage’s artistic process. And so perhaps we can employ a Jungian perspective as one way to understand and evaluate Cage’s aesthetic stance, as one way to approach listening to what Auden would call the ”meaningful whole” of Cage’s work as he explores sound, silence and synchronicity.
PART 1: MUSIC OF CHANGES (1951)
John Cage was born in 1912 in Los Angeles. His father John Milton Cage, Senior was a scientific inventor. His mother Lucretia had worked as church pianist and journalist. Cage studied piano from the age of eight. One biographer describes Cage the child as smart, sensitive, and precociously inventive.[2] As an adolescent, he excelled at oratory, at graduation he was class valedictorian, and although pious he was less interested in his preacher grandfather’s Methodist tradition and more fascinated by the neighborhood Catholic Church’s theatricality. After high school, Cage took a two-year stint in Europe to study music and architecture. He returned to the United States at the time of the Great Depression. He studied with the musical pioneer and pedagogue Henry Cowell and, on his recommendation, went to New York in 1934, where he survived on as little as twenty dollars a month, sleeping on a cot, and washing the walls of the Brooklyn YWCA so that he could study with the modernist composer Adolph Weiss.
From 1935-37, Cage returned to Los Angeles to study with Arnold Schoenberg, the Austrian composer, famous for atonal music and his twelve-tone technique (and who had escaped the Nazis in 1933). Cage described his relationship with Schoenberg as creatively oppositional. Schoenberg goaded his students, saying “My purpose in teaching you is to make it impossible for you to write music,” and Cage responded creatively to this provocation: “When he said that, I revolted, not against him, but against what he said. I determined then and there, more than ever before, to write music.”[3] And Cage also defined himself against Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system. With a fierce thinking logic, Schoenberg was arguing that in order to avoid privileging any one musical tone as dominant, all twelve tones in a row must be used before any could be repeated. Artists such as Kandinsky regarded the resulting dissonances as liberating music from neoclassicism, as releasing a spirituality inherent in art that had been trapped by conventional artistic schemas, thereby inspiring political and spiritual transformation in Western collective consciousness. But, as critic Kay Larson points out, as much as Schoenberg’s work was historically audacious and liberating, his twelve-tone row is itself a closed system.[4] So Cage experienced Schoenberg both as a formidable instructor and an important opponent against whom he had to define his own values:
When Schoenberg asked me whether I would devote my life to music, I said, ”Of course.” After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, ”In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.“ I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, ”In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.’’[5]
Cage composed and performed percussion music, while employed at the Cornish School in Seattle and Mills College in San Francisco. Most of his compositions during the 1940s, commissioned for dance performances, were lyrical and minimalist and written for the prepared piano. Cage inserted screws, bolts, and other materials between the strings, transforming the piano into a percussion ensemble instrument under the control of a single player. Already he was defining music as the organizing of sound.
In the early 1940s, Cage moved to New York City at the invitation of art collector Peggy Guggenheim and her husband, the Surrealist painter Max Ernst (another recent immigrant escaped from arrest by the Gestapo in France). Cage stayed with them for a few weeks and then ended up for two months at the Greenwich Village apartment of dancer Jean Erdman and her husband Joseph Campbell. Cage composed for Erdman’s dance performances, partly in exchange for his accommodation; for example, he describes Ophelia, 1946 as “a piece of dramatic character having a phraseology corresponding to that of the dance of Jean Erdman for which it was composed.”[6] Campbell was publishing a book on Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake in 1944 (a book that Cage returned to with his Roaratorio in 1979) and would soon publish The Hero with a Thousand Faces (in 1949). Cage worked on an opera (on the myth of Andromeda) with a libretto by Campbell, but the project was never completed. Erdman and Merce Cunningham, both dancers in Martha Graham’s company, were working to free themselves from the narrative structures of her dance works. Graham was in Jungian analysis with Francis Wickes for many years and had grounded her art in Greek and American mythologies and framed her choreographic technique in a tension of opposites (physically, in the opposing movements of pelvic contracting and releasing). With Cunningham, Cage worked against psychoanalytic knowing and the privileging of meaning in the arts as much as against structural harmony.
In 1951, at age thirty-eight, rather than continuing to bang his head reactively in opposition to Schoenberg, Cage found a different approach. He was teaching Christian Wolff, a young musician and composer, who had come to America in 1941 at the age of seven. Christian’s parents had fled Nazi Germany; he had been born and raised in Nice, and the family escaped internment as enemy aliens during the Vichy regime. Cage, recalling his days as a penniless student and Schoenberg teaching him for free, took on Christian without pay. Christian’s parents, Kurt Wolff and Helen Mosel Wolff had been important publishers in Germany, and once settled in New York in 1942 they set up the publishing house, Pantheon Books, and eventually were invited to work on the Bollingen series. In 1951, having finished high school and preparing to leave on a reward trip to Europe, Christian, wishing to repay Cage, gave his teacher a copy of the newly published Bollingen edition of The I Ching or The Book of Changes, the Richard Wilhelm translation into German, the German rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes, with the foreword by Jung.[7] Following Jung’s example, Cage began consulting the oracle for problems in his everyday life. But he also found the chart of the hexagrams in the appendices corresponded to his charts for composing, and so he methodically employed the oracle to generate numbers with which to determine pitch, duration, dynamics, and other aspects of composition, in order to create a music totally independent of his own tastes and preferences.
Cage began a new work, completed in four parts (May 16, August 2, October 18, December 13, 1951). He used the I Ching to determine the disposition of musical materials, to remove himself from the results and severe any connection between his personal tastes and his music. To select a sound, a duration, he would toss the coins, locate the number of its hexagram in the I Ching, then find the corresponding position on his charts. Every moment in his Music of Changes combined a chance-selected sound, including silences, time length, and loudness: “It is thus possible to make a musical composition the continuity of which is free from individual taste and memory (psychology) and also of the literature and ‘traditions’ of art.” Cage was looking for a way to exclude artistic intention and ego from his composing. He invited chance rather than taste and individual invention to make the choices, leading towards an acceptance of sounds in their individuality, without the intrusion of a constraining will. In other words, as Cage stated, the charts gave him a first indication of the possibility of saying nothing.[8]
But these investigations were not nihilistic. For one thing, the scores are exquisitely designed, replete with invented notational images inked by hand. Neither were the performances improvisational. As pianist Herbert Henck explains, the demands on the pianist were extreme: “The category of chance only plays a part at the moment of composition, but not at the moment of interpretation during the performance. The performer has to adhere strictly to a text of almost unprecedented exactness of notation.”[9] Fortunately for Cage, the exceptionally talented pianist David Tudor accompanied him through the process of composing of Music of Changes, learning to play it as Cage composed it.
PART TWO: 4’33” (1952)
Cage identified Aldous Huxley’s 1945 book The Perennial Philosophy, with its fifteenth chapter entitled ”Silence,” as the source that first led him to Zen Buddhism.[10] He also mentioned an earlier influence, a 1936 lecture by Nancy Wilson Ross on “Dada and Zen Buddhism” during his time in Seattle.[11] In 1948, Cage read Jung’s The Integration of the Personality (edited and translated by Stanley Dell) and found Jung’s equivocal language useful for expressing an idea in a way that was valid both psychologically and spiritually.[12] From Jung, Cage formulated the notion that music could bring together the conscious and the unconscious and promote psychological wholeness: “I began to read Jung on the integration of the personality. There are two principal parts of each personality: the conscious mind and the unconscious, and these are split and dispersed, in most of us, in countless ways and directions. The function of music, like that of any other healthy occupation, is to help to bring those separate parts back together again. 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. This only happens if, in the presence of music, one does not allow oneself to fall into laziness or distraction… Neuroses act to stop and block. To be able to compose signifies the overcoming of these obstacles.”[13]
A year later, in 1949, in the newly reprinted edition of Suzuki’s An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, Cage would have read Jung’s foreword (it was originally published as a foreword to the 1939 German edition but appeared in 1949 in English for the first time), although I’ve found no biography or essay that specifically mentions him reading this. Then, in 1951 Cage read Jung’s foreword to the I Ching.
Around this time, Cage spoke of his intent “to compose a piece of uninterrupted silence and sell it to [the] Muzak Co. It will be 3 or 4 1/2 minutes long, those being the standard length of ‘canned’ music – and its title will be Silent Prayer. It will open with a single idea which I will attempt to make as seductive as the color and shape and fragrance of a flower. The ending will approach imperceptibility.”[14]
Cage was attending the classes of D. T. Suzuki at Columbia University. Suzuki had arrived in New York in 1950, settling there for six years, and lectured at Columbia, probably in March 1951. He was not a Zen master but a philosophical scholar of Zen who lectured internationally and published over thirty volumes. Suzuki was a cultural bridge-builder, comparing the sayings of Zen masters to the sermons of Meister Eckhart (his Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist would be published in 1957) and the American transcendentalists. And in his Essays in Buddhism: Third Series, Suzuki translates a dialogue and uses the word Unconscious (capitalized) as a way to describe Zen-mind: “The Unconscious is not describable as either existent or non-existent.”[15] Likewise, describing the Flower Garland Sutra, Suzuki writes: “The sutras… are direct expressions of spiritual experiences; they contain intuitions gained by digging deeply into the abyss of the Unconscious, and they make no pretension of presenting these intuitions through the mediumship of the intellect.”[16]
Cage would have found Jung highlighting precisely this bridging aspect of Suzuki’s work, even if Jung’s foreword came from the other direction (Jung’s interest in Zen being most clearly expressed in his exchange of letters with Suzuki in 1933). Cage could read Jung drawing analogies between Meister Eckhart, Suzuki, and his own psychology:
Satori corresponds in the Christian sphere to an experience of religious transformation… the mystic experience, which differs from other types (of religious experience) in that its preliminary stages consist in ”letting oneself go,” in ”emptying oneself of images and ideas,” as opposed to those religious experiences which, like the exercises of Ignatius Loyola, are based on the practice of envisaging sacred images. In this latter class I would include transformation through faith and prayer and through collective experience in Protestantism, since a very definite expectation plays the decisive role here, and not by any means ”emptiness” or ”freeness.” The characteristically Eckhartian assertion that ”God is Nothingness” may well be incompatible in principle with the contemplation of the Passion, with faith and collective expectations. Thus the correspondence between satori and Western experience is limited to those few Christian mystics whose paradoxical statements skirt the edge of heterodoxy or actually overstep it. As we know it was this that drew down on Meister Eckhart’s writings the condemnation of the Church. If Buddhism were a “Church” in our sense of the word, she would undoubtedly find Zen an insufferable nuisance. The reason for this is the extreme individualism of its methods, and also the iconoclastic attitude of many of the Masters.[17]
Cage did not take up Zen as a practice but stated that he came to approach his composing with Zen in mind. Already in the 1940s, he was describing composition in Jungian terms as an activity of integrating opposites, the rational and the irrational.[18] Cage told Suzuki that he would not practise zazen (i.e., sitting meditation), deciding “not to give up the writing of music and discipline my ego by sitting cross-legged but to find a means of writing music as strict with respect to my ego as sitting cross-legged.”[19] Composing indeterminantly, sidestepping his composer ego’s intentions by using the I Ching, exercising the discipline of throwing the three coins hundreds of time each day and submitting his musical creativity to the oracle, were his deliberate first steps in this direction.
The next step is famous. On August 29 1952, eight months after the premiere of Music of Changes, the first performance of John Cage’s 4’33” took place at the Maverick Concert Hall, an open-air theatre near Woodstock, New York. David Tudor sat down at the piano on the slightly elevated stage, opened the score before him, turned the pages, and kept time strictly with a stopwatch, closing the keyboard lid over the keys three times as he began each of the three movements of a composition in sonata form and raising the lid again at the end of the movements, timed at 30 seconds, two minutes 23 seconds, and one minute 40 seconds respectively (as determined by the I Ching).
4’33” was the second last piece in a benefit concert program of avant-garde music by the New York School of composers, Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, and Cage, as well as the French composer Pierre Boulez and Cage’s first music teacher, Henry Cowell, all performed by David Tudor. For example, Henry Cowell’s The Banshee, the final work of the evening, consisted entirely of noises derived from scraping the piano strings. But historically, it was the performance of 4’33” that polarized the audience’s responses. It became a turning point in Cage’s life as well as in the history of twentieth-century music. As early as 1948, Cage had spoken of his intention to compose his “Silent Prayer.” What, then, were the elements that pushed that intuitive statement of intent towards its realization four years later?
One element was Erik Satie, the French musician associated with the Dada movement, who became extremely important to Cage. Dada was the anti-art art movement that originated in Zurich in 1916. Rejecting bourgeois European culture that had plunged the world into war, the Dada artists dove into a nihilistic world of nonsensical art and plunged their audiences into chaos, randomness and contradiction. (Jung said Dada was too idiotic to be called schizophrenic.[20]) In Satie’s own time, Debussy and Ravel proclaimed him a Dadaesque precursor of modern music, and Cocteau praised him for finding in each new composition, a renunciation. (Satie also composed for prepared piano before Cage, pieces of paper slid between strings to produce a straw-like wispy sonority.[21]) In July 1948, seeking to champion Satie’s music when it was still dismissed as lightweight and idiosyncratic, Cage organized a Satie festival at Black Mountain College. In his lectures, Cage argued that, whereas Beethoven defined the parts of a composition by harmony, Satie defined them by time length:
If you consider that sound is characterized by its pitch, its loudness, its timbre, and its duration, and that silence, which is the opposite and, therefore, the necessary partner of sound, is characterized only by its duration, you will be drawn to the conclusion that of the four characteristics of the material of music, duration, that is, time length, is the most fundamental. Silence cannot be heard in terms of pitch or harmony: it is heard in terms of time length. It took a Satie … to rediscover this musical truth, which, by means of musicology, we learn was evident to some musicians in our Middle Ages, and to all musicians at all times… in the Orient. There can be no right making of music that does not structure itself from the very roots of sound and silence—lengths of time.[22]
The point being, that no composer can structure harmonically for silence, but Cage could see that Satie structured his music for silence by composing instead from time lengths. Sparking much controversy, Cage’s lectures were followed with a playful staging of Satie’s one-act Dada comedy The Ruse of Medusa (a copy of which Cage had stumbled upon in the New York Public Library), cast with Buckminster Fuller as Medusa and Merce Cunningham as a monkey.
At this time, Cage’s music itself was moving towards the theatrical, in that he was becoming interested as much in the relationship between performers and audiences as in composing. Anthropologist Victor Turner describes how attending a theatre performance or concert, like church-going, is for the most part a liminal experience: one emerges from the demarcated space and ritual time back into the profane with the collective cultural imaginaire re-affirmed. But Turner also identifies liminoid possibilities in theatrical performance, insofar as cultural standards may be religiously repeated and yet, at the same time, performatively subverted.[23] Cage worked with Julian Beck and Judith Malina and the Living Theatre company in their experiments inspired by Antonin Artaud’s manifesto in The Theatre and Its Double. It’s not surprising, then, to find Cage experimenting with the roles of performer and audience, even reversing the roles in 4’33”, so that the performer takes up the silent role, and the audience ”acts” by listening differently, at the very least by becoming conscious, perhaps even critical, of its shared expectation that the performance should reaffirm a common belief.
How did the audience at the outdoor Maverick Concert Hall respond to the reversing of roles that night, as David Tudor closed and opened the keyboard lid three times? In the end, we know many members responded angrily, but it would be interesting to know, what happened during the performance? It has been suggested, for instance, that 4’33” put an artistic frame around American environmental sounds, creating a moment—à la Marcel Duchamp—for the audience to listen to how the American environment sounded. This is not so far-fetched. Cage was very fond of Thoreau and could have aligned his Silent Prayer composition easily with the mandate of the American transcendentalists who argued that, in order to paint a native landscape that did not look like Europe, one had to start over, grounding oneself in a North American aesthetic. In order to compose or listen to music that did not sound like Europe, one had to begin again by listening to where one was. The audience in the outdoor hall that evening found itself in the midst of a New England soundscape:
And when one reads the Zen texts attentively, one cannot escape the impression that, however bizarre, satori is a natural occurrence, something so very simple, even, that one fails to see the wood for the trees, and in attempting to explain it invariably says the very thing that throws others into the greatest confusion…When the Master asks, ”Do you hear the murmuring of the brook?” he obviously means something quite different from ordinary “hearing.”[24]
This isn’t Cage, it’s Jung writing about Suzuki who draws analogies between Zen and American transcendentalism.
But there are more possible layers of significance to 4’33”. A few months before the first performance, as a resident teacher at Black Mountain College, Cage produced a multi-media musical event entitled Theater Piece No. 1, grounded in Artaud’s aesthetic argument that all the elements of theatre can be viewed independently: sound, movement, music, lights, words may all operate equally, with no one element, such as text, dominant over the others. In Theater Piece No. 1, Cage had his performers playing in precise chance-determined lengths of time, within a mise-en-scène of all-white paintings by Robert Rauschenberg, suspended at various angles. It was a carefully timed and structured example of indeterminacy, a pre-sixties Happening: Cage reading Meister Eckhart from a ladder, Rauschenberg playing Edith Piaf records, Cunningham and his dancers moving through the four audience spaces, and Tudor playing the piano. Again, Theater Piece No. 1 was not improvisational, it was the simultaneous presentation of these independent elements in a space in such a way that the audience could synthesize them, could experience synchronistic moments emerging from the surface chaos, feel the sudden aligning of resonances and perhaps even of meaning. In “Lecture on Nothing,” Cage describes this kind of open-ended receptivity: “As we go along / (who knows) / an i-dea may occur in this / talk. I have no idea / whether one will / or not. / If one does / let it. Re /gard it as something / seen / momentarily, / as / though / from a window / while traveling.”[25]
We know Theater Piece No. 1 was not merely a Dada performance (in Jung’s understanding of Dada as idiotic) because Cage was framing these compositions in Zen language. And in a letter, the young Rauschenberg described his 1951 white paintings employed in the mise-en-scène as numinous, using words steeped in a religious connotation:
They are large white (1 white as 1 God) canvases organized and selected with the experience of time and presented with the innocence of a virgin. Dealing with the suspense, excitement and body of an organic silence, the restriction and freedom of absence, the plastic fullness of nothing, the point a circle begins and ends. They are a natural response to the current pressures of the faithless and a promoter of intuitional optimism.[26]
For Cage, these paintings were a revelation: he stated explicitly that they gave him the courage to compose 4’33’. He wrote: “To Whom It May Concern: The white paintings came first; my silent piece came later.”[27]
So, the first performance of 4’33” evoked a space not only for the natural surround but also for its inherent numinosity. Around the same time as Theater Piece No. 1 (1951/1952), Cage visited one of two anechoic chambers at Harvard University. The room was insulated with acoustically absorptive material to eliminate echoes and outside noise. Once alone inside, he heard two sounds, one high and one low. He asked the sound engineer about these. The engineer, not at all surprised, identified the high sound as Cage’s nervous system operating, the low as his blood circulating. Cage reports his conclusion in his “Lecture on Something:” “No silence exists that is not pregnant with sound.”[28] And from this conclusion, Cage’s mind began to leap forward, to consider the implications if silence was not the opposite of sound:
I had honestly and naively thought that some actual silence existed. So I had not really thought about the question of silence. I had not really put silence to the test. I had never looked into its impossibility. So when I went into that sound-proof room, I really expected to hear nothing. With no idea of what nothing could sound like. The instant I heard myself producing two sounds, my blood circulating and my nervous system in operation, I was stupefied.[29]
After this experience, Cage stopped schematizing sound and silence as a pair of opposites. He would describe their relationship differently: silence is to sound as zen-mind or Unconscious or Jungian self is to ego. The one is the ground for the other; it subsumes and surpasses the other.
This accumulation of philosophical, artistic and personal forces moved Cage in one direction, the composition and performance of 4’33”. It was not an ironic prank, even though it may have been designed to be paradoxical, to subvert rationality—by composing silence. Musicologist and composer Kyle Gann, who has brilliantly catalogued all these vectors converging in Cage’s life and more, in his book, No Such Thing As Silence, wonders if Cage was attempting to trigger in the audience a right-brain experience with which he was familiar as a composer.[30] But Gann’s idea overlooks the fact that David Tudor performed explicitly the marking of the passage of time with a stop-watch and the turning of pages. It would perhaps be more correct to say that Cage was attempting to trigger a whole-brain experience, or what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990) calls ”flow,“ directing awareness in order to experience consciously the mind in optimal connectedness.[31]
Of course, there also exists the possibility in Cage’s intention for something shadowy, in his case perhaps pious and preachy from his Methodist grandfather that may have secretly delighted in pushing his audience’s faces into the silence, into Nothingness. This could also account for some of the anger sparked that night in the Maverick Concert Hall.
But one final anecdote sheds light and lightness on this piece that Cage considered the most important of his oeuvre. It is a personal memory that Cage recalled at age 70 (and it’s my favorite story from this research on Cage at this moment in my life). In 1940, the music section of the Works Projects Administration (a make-work program first instituted by F.D. Roosevelt in 1935) would not admit Cage as a musician because he played percussion instruments; that is to say, some bureaucrat decided that a percussionist is not really a musician. Cage was eventually reclassified as a recreation leader and could only be employed by the WPA recreation department. His first assignment was to go to the hospital in San Francisco and entertain the children of the visitors, but he was not allowed to make any sounds doing this, for fear of disturbing the patients. So he organized games for the children that involved moving around rooms and counting, creating silent rhythms in time-space.[32] This reminds us to keep in mind Cage’s playful inventiveness.
PART THREE: SILENCE (1961)
At age forty-nine, Cage’s life changed dramatically with the publication of a collection of his lectures and writings, entitled Silence. John Rockwell of the New York Times has described the book as “the most influential conduit of Oriental thought and religious ideas into the artistic vanguard—not just in music but in dance, art and poetry as well.”[33]
PART FOUR: 0’00” (4’33” No. 2, 1962)
Cage’s composition 0’0” consists entirely of the following instructions:
Solo to be performed in any way by anyone. In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action. Four stipulations: The piece may be performed with any interruptions and will focus on ”fulfilling in whole or part an obligation to others.” No two performances may repeat the same action, nor may they create a ”musical” composition. And there should be no emphasis on ”the situation (electronic, musical, theatrical).”[34]
Cage composed 0’00” while touring Japan for the first time. He visited Suzuki and then wrote his composition to zero. Previously Cage had worked to free up composition, but the demands on the performer were extreme, 4’33” being indeterminate in its composition but determinate for the performer. Now 0’00”became indeterminate in both. Cage wrote:
Though no two performances of the Music of Changes will be identical…two performances will resemble one another closely… The function of the performer in the case of the Music of Changes is that of a contractor who, following an architect’s blueprint, constructs a building. 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. 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 its alarming aspect of a Frankenstein monster.[35]
Clearly, by 1962 the composer of Music of Changes had moved on. The problem was that performers needed to value the responsibilities begat from the freedom being offered by Cage as composer. The 1991 production of Europeras 1 & 2 at the Zurich Opera was a scandalous case in point. The performance led Cage to write an angry letter of protest, accusing the musicians of causing deliberately its failure. Musicologist and Jungian scholar Austin Clarkson evaluates that performance and its aftermath in his article, “The Intent of the Musical Moment: Cage and the Transpersonal.”[36] He observes that experiential music was not in the Zurich musicians’ repertoire, and Cage had not understood the challenges he was placing on them. Clarkson argues that if the orchestra had consisted all of David Tudors, then the performance could have constellated in the moment a kind of collective satori for the musicians and audience together. Clarkson knew Tudor personally and attests: “Tudor’s phenomenal powers as an executant and his devotion in realizing and performing indeterminate scores are legendary. What marked Tudor’s approach, aside from his musical gifts, was his openness to the transpersonal.” And when Clarkson asked Tudor how he thought the Zurich performance could have been improved, Tudor replied: “It would have been better if they were more fully aware that they are all individuals.”[37] Clarkson concludes that, for Cage, the individual musician is not egoistic, willful and ethically uncommitted to the enterprise. The individual musician’s actions arise not only from the ego but also from the guiding center of the personality, the source of ethical impulses that link the individual to society. Cage put this more succinctly: “Everything I have composed since 1952 was written for David Tudor.”[38]
Cage’s 0’00” defined a music of actions that do not have predictable outcomes. Clarkson emphasizes the challenge implicit in its directions: “If the musical content were reduced to a minimum and the outcome stripped of expectations, the performer would be open to the spontaneous flow of the imagination, and performing music would be a creative rather than a re-creative act.”[39] Taking up this challenge, Clarkson worked with music students at Canada’s York University, helping them perform creatively rather than recreatively, presentationally rather than representationally. He notes that if the schema was too loose, the musician had too much freedom and the imagination was not sufficiently engaged. If the schema was too tightly controlled, the response was not spontaneous enough, and the musical imagination had too little scope. For Clarkson, the fear on the part of academics and performers that experimental music seeks the destruction of composed music can be assuaged when presentational and representational states are understood as complementary.
Cage wasn’t interested in improvisation if, like free association, it leads merely to the cathartic re-expression of habitual patterns. Neither was Cage’s creative pragmatism conceptualist. On performing Satie’s Vexations, a fifty-two beat motif to be repeated 840 times, Cage wrote:
In the middle of those eighteen hours of performance, our lives changed. We were dumbfounded, because something was happening which we had not considered and which we were a thousand miles away from being able to foresee. So, if I apply this observation to conceptual art, it seems to me that the difficulty with this type of art, if I understand it correctly, is that it obliges us to imagine that we know something BEFORE that something has happened. That is difficult, since the experience itself is always different from what you thought about it. And it seems to me that the experiences each person can have, that everyone is capable of appreciating, are precisely those experiences that contribute to changing us and, particularly, to changing our preconceptions.[40]
Performed as conceptualist art, 4’33” would render silence merely banal. Performed as a presentational and liminoid work that deconcentrates attention in an attempt to change preconceptions, 4’33” is understandably Cage’s most important work and fundamental to his entire oeuvre. David Tudor argued that it can be one of the most intense listening experiences one can have.
CONCLUSIONS
Cage opens Silence with a provocation, a manifesto on music (written for Judith Malina and Julian Beck and the Living Theater): “Nothing is accomplished by writing a piece of music.”[41] His Greenwich Village neighbor Auden wrote: “Poetry makes nothing happen.”[42] In response to Schoenberg, Cage went looking for freedom from harmony, to sensitize listeners to the spirituality inherent in noise, to sound as the primary sensation.
Cage the provocateur of the avant-garde New York movement of the early fifties, in the context of that time, made a space for sounds to be heard which were not harmonious, not musical in the conventional sense, certainly not expected. In doing so, he pointed to the reality that sound is continuous but often unnoticed, under-appreciated. Reading Cage as he reads Jung, confirms what Clarkson so astutely identifies as the transpersonal context to his composing.
The neuroscientist and musician Seth Horowitz argues that in the evolution of vertebrates, there are no deaf animals. All animals with backbones hear (although there are plenty of blind animals or animals with a limited sense of smell or touch), and hearing is the most universal of all senses:
Vision is a relatively fast-acting sense that works slightly faster than our conscious recognition of what we see. Smell and taste are slowpokes, working over the course of seconds or more. Touch, a mechanosensory sense, can work quickly (as in light touch) or slowly (as in pain), but only over a restricted range. By contrast, animals and humans can detect and respond to changes in sounds that occur in less than a millionth of a second and to the content of complex sounds over the course of hours. Any detectable vibration represents information, to be used or ignored. And in that simple concept lies the entire realm of sound and mind.[43]
Thinking back to Cage’s experience of hearing his neural synapses and blood vessels operating in the Harvard anechoic chamber, I’m sure he would be intrigued to learn from Horowitz that at the top of spectrum of sound is the 9,192,631,770 cycles per second of an energized cesium-133 atom, and at the bottom of the spectrum is the sound of black holes, characterized not by silence but a B flat 57 octaves below middle C.
NOTES
[1] W. H. Auden, “Some Reflections on Music and Opera,” Partisan Review, January-February 1952, in The Complete Works of W. H. Auden, Prose, Volume 3, 1949-1955, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 296.
[2] Kenneth Silverman, Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (Evanston Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2010), p. 5.
[3] Kay Larson, Where The Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists (New York: Penguin, 2012), p. 55.
[4] Ibid., p. 57.
[5] John Cage, “Indeterminacy,” in Silence (1961, Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), p. 261.
[6] Cage, “Ophelia,” 1946, in Piano Works 1935-48, Piano Solo (London: C. F. Peters Corporation, Henmar Press, 1977), pp. 36-48.
[7] Richard Wilhelm, trans., The I Ching or Book of Changes, Bollingen Series XIX, Cary F. Baynes, trans., German to English (1950, Princeton, Princeton University Press: 1950/1981).
[8] Cage, “Composition: To Describe the Process of Composition Used in Music of Changes and Imaginary Landscape,” in Silence, pp. 57-60.
[9] Herbert Henck, “Notes,” in John Cage, Music of Changes (1951), Herbert Henck, Piano (Wergo Records, CD 1982/1988), p. 13.
[10] Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage (1988, New York: Limelight Editions, 1988/1994), p. 254.
[11] David W. Patterson, “Cage and Asia: History and Sources,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, ed. David Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 43. See also Kyle Gann, No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), p. xiii.
[12] Cage, “A Composer’s Confessions,” Address before the National Inter-Collegiate Arts Conference, Vassar College, 1948, in Musicworks, vol. 52, Spring 1992, pp. 6-15. See also Craig Stephenson, “Reading Jung’s Equivocal Language,” in Possession: Jung’s Comparative Anatomy of the Psyche (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 99-120.
[13] Cage, “A Composer’s Confessions,” in Musicworks, pp. 6-15.
[14] Larson, Where The Heart Beats, p. 139.
[15] Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism: Third Series, ed. Christmas Humphreys (1953, New York: Samuel Weiser, 1953/1971), pp. 35-37.
[16] Ibid., p. 22.
[17] C. G. Jung, “Foreword to Suzuki’s Introduction to Zen Buddhism” (1939), in Psychology and Religion: West and East, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, eds. Sir Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler, William McGuire, trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), Vol. 11, §§ 893-894. Hereafter reference to Jung’s Collected Works follows by chapter title, volume number, and paragraph number.
[18] Larson, Where The Heart Beats, p. 356.
[19] Cage, “Tokyo Lecture and Three Mesostics,” Perspectives of New Music, vol. 26, no. 1, Winter 1988, p. 7. See also Gann, No Such Thing, p. 138.
[20] Jung, “The Role of the Unconscious” (1918), CW 10, §44.
[21] Nicolas Southon, “Erik Satie,” in Erik Satie: Avant-dernières pensées, Harmonia Mundi S.A., CD 2009, pp. 19-20.
[22] Cage, “Defence Defense of Satie,” in ed. Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage (New York: Limelight Editions, 1988), pp. 81-2, in Gann, No Such Thing as Silence, p. 80. See also Cage, “Erik Satie,” in Silence, pp. 76-82.
[23] Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), p. 33.
[24] Jung, “Foreword to Suzuki’s Introduction to Zen Buddhism” (1939), CW 11, §§ 884, 891.
[25] Cage, “Lecture on Nothing,” in Silence, p. 110.
[26] Robert Rauschenberg, “Letter to Betty Parsons, 18 October 1951,” in Larson, Where The Heart Beats, p. 234.
[27] Cage, “On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work,” in Silence, p. 98.
[28] Cage, “Lecture on Something,” in Silence, p. 135.
[29] Cage, For the Birds, ed. Daniel Charles (Boston: Boyars, 1981), pp. 115-116.
[30] Kyle Gann, “No Escape from Heaven: John Cage as Father Figure,” in The Cambridge Campanion to John Cage, ed. David Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 242-260.
[31] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper, 1990).
[32] Cage, “After Antiquity,” in Kyle Gann, No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 59.
[33] John Rockwell, “Classical View: Cage Merely an Inventor? Not a Chance,” The New York Times, August 23, 1992.
[34] Larson, Where the Heart Beats, pp. 377-383.
[35] Cage, “Composition as Process: II. Indeterminacy,” in Silence, p. 36.
[36] Austin Clarkson, “The Intent of the Musical Moment: Cage and the Transpersonal,” in Writings Through John Cage’s Music, Poetry and Art, eds. David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001), pp. 62-112.
[37] Ibid., p. 74.
[38] Cage, For the Birds, p. 120.
[39] Clarkson, “The Intent of the Musical Moment,” p. 66.
[40] Cage, For the Birds, pp. 153-154.
[41] Cage, Silence (1961, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), p. xxxii.
[42] W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” in Another Time (New York: Random House, 1940).
[43] Seth Horowitz, The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 4.