Laugh­ing John Cage

It’s not news that John Cage’s think­ing about the process and aes­thet­ics of com­po­si­tion was influ­enced in impor­tant ways by ideas and val­ues from East­ern reli­gions. Nor was that in itself new – Cage was one of sev­eral impor­tant Amer­i­can musi­cians, writ­ers and visual artist (Lou Har­ri­son, Allan Gins­berg, Robert Rauschen­berg) who, in the mid-twentieth cen­tury, found new ways of think­ing about their art in the philoso­phies and sto­ries of belief sys­tems from India to Indone­sia, and in that they were join­ing a tra­di­tion that included Debussy, Whistler and Ives (via Transcendentalism).

Where oth­ers found kin­ship in sym­pa­thetic val­ues or the rev­e­la­tion of a pre­cise state­ment of con­cepts that had so far been inchoate urges in their mind, Cage was no dif­fer­ent. He had expe­ri­enced an early epiphany read­ing Luigi Russolo’s “The Art of Noises,” dis­cov­er­ing the seri­ous­ness and simpil­icty of Russolo’s con­vic­tion that noise – or sound – not pitch was the fun­da­men­tal mate­r­ial of music. This was an affir­ma­tion of Cage’s own inter­est and strength as a com­poser, which was in rhythm, plac­ing and struc­tur­ing musi­cal events in time. He was upfront that he had no feel­ing for har­mony, which until the 1920s had been the fun­da­men­tal means of struc­tur­ing musi­cal com­po­si­tions. He was drawn to Arnold Schoen­berg because of the older musician’s 12-tone sys­tem, which seemed to promise a release from har­mony. It was ulti­mately a poor match between stu­dent and teacher. Schoen­berg, despite the new­ness of his method, was ded­i­cated to pre­serv­ing the forms and struc­tures of clas­si­cal music, espe­cially as exem­pli­fied by his beloved Brahms, and so was intensely inter­ested in pitch. Cage real­ized that he was inter­ested in sound, all sound and all sounds.

But, how to make music like that? The imme­di­ate answer was to com­pose for per­cus­sion instru­ments, most of which (since any­thing that can be struck is a per­cus­sion instru­ment) have no set pitch. If Cage had done noth­ing beyond this, he would still be one of the most impor­tant com­posers, one who devel­oped per­cus­sion music as a genre. To our good for­tune, he didn’t stop there, and an inter­est­ing ques­tion about his music was why he con­tin­ued to seek a way to work with pitched instru­ments that would sat­isfy his aes­thetic and per­sonal val­ues. Per­cus­sion and elec­tronic instru­ments from radios and phono­graphs to mag­netic tape and oscil­la­tors would all pro­duce sounds free from the con­text of har­mony, all of which could be orga­nized in time.

This is where it’s impor­tant to do some­thing that, in prac­tice, is usu­ally dif­fi­cult, which is to con­sider Cage as a per­son rather than as an his­tor­i­cal fig­ure, that is, to not con­sider his work so much as his expe­ri­ence of liv­ing. That’s what biog­ra­phy is for, and that’s why biog­ra­phy can be so dif­fi­cult – beyond telling inter­est­ing sto­ries – to do well. Cage’s story is that along with being a com­poser he was a musi­cian, decent enough at per­cus­sion and espe­cially the piano, who had to earn money so he could pay for the basic neces­si­ties of life. He accom­pa­nied dance classes, his hands pressed the keys and he kept time and pro­vided struc­ture. The line from that to the large amount of piano music he wrote is a straight and short one. We don’t have to know how he felt about play­ing the piano to see the evi­dence of its impor­tance in his work. So, with the key­board as his instru­ment, he cre­ated the prac­tice of prepar­ing the innards with small objects, in order to turn pitch into sound. It’s a small step from there to think­ing of, and accept­ing, pitch as the same as any other sound, and work­ing with it freely.

A short step, but a vast con­cep­tual chasm. Cage found the means to cross it through the works of the East, espe­cially “The Gospel of Sri Ramakr­ishna” and through lec­tures by D.T. Suzuki – who pop­u­lar­ized Zen for the Beats – which he was pas­sion­ate about. Their com­ple­men­tary world views helped him con­nect his per­sonal value that all sounds were equal to the real­iza­tion that he could find the means to main­tain that value while mak­ing music for the range of tra­di­tional instru­ments. The means to com­bine con­cept and process was another ur-text of East­ern wis­dom, the work that is Cage’s Rosetta Stone, the “I Ching.”

It became an answer for him, and it also pushed his think­ing into a spe­cific direc­tion. One of the most well-known aspects of his mature work is his use of chance pro­ce­dures to deter­mine the ele­ments of his pieces, but what lies under­neath that is exactly how the chance pro­ce­dure works. Using the “I Ching” does not start with throw­ing coins and deter­min­ing the con­fig­u­ra­tion of a hexa­gram, it starts by ask­ing a ques­tion. This is a key to Cage, who turned away from the per­sonal expres­sion he found through the his­tory of West­ern clas­si­cal music up to his time, some­thing he thought of as both a series of answers and total­i­tar­ian fash­ion of dic­tat­ing instruc­tions from one’s ego to the lis­tener, and towards ques­tion­ing every­thing, includ­ing every­thing he did, all his pre­vi­ous assump­tions about how and why to do it, and ulti­mately to try and remove him­self as much as pos­si­ble from the com­po­si­tional process. Cage is one of the unique fig­ures in human his­tory, a com­poser of excep­tional skill and craft, an uncom­monly rig­or­ous philoso­pher, an artist of dis­ci­pline. He was also unique in that he turned his val­ues into tech­nique, the idea of spir­i­tual prac­tice into musi­cal composition.

There is a para­dox at the core of his work, one that makes him an imper­fect exem­plar of the appli­ca­tion of Zen prin­ci­ples. While he devel­oped ever more rig­or­ous means to remove his ego from the com­po­si­tional process – and his means required exhaust­ing amounts of dis­ci­plined time and energy to exe­cute, so much so that in the rel­a­tive scheme of the cre­ative arts, he is one of the more heroic fig­ures – he con­tin­ued to imag­ine and cre­ate ever-more pieces (rea­sons, in a sense) through which to con­vey his ego­less process to audi­ences. The cre­ative artist is not a monk, there is an inher­ent pyschological/spiritual/social drive to present an aspect of one­self to the pub­lic, espe­cially so in music, which is fun­da­men­tally a social activ­ity. The ego must be strong and must thrive. Beyond the con­sid­er­able aes­thetic and intel­lec­tual beauty of his body of work, Cage’s music is philo­soph­i­cally beau­ti­ful. He didn’t cheat, espe­cially because he would know it was a cheat bet­ter than any­one. As he told the poet Joan Retal­lack:

Peo­ple fre­quently ask me if I’m faith­ful to the answers [from the I Ching], or if I change them because I want to. When I find myself at that point, in the posi­tion of someoe who would change some­thing – at that point I don’t change it. It’s for that rea­son that I have said that instead of self-expression, I’m involved in self-alteration.

He had the bril­liance to cre­ate sys­tems of self-alteration, and the dis­ci­pline to fol­low them through. Art has a nec­es­sary moral and eth­i­cal com­po­nent, in that a cre­ative work has its own val­ues and one key crit­i­cal mea­sure of it is how well it adheres to those val­ues. In this, Cage is the great­est of all eth­i­cal and moral artists. In the best Cage per­for­mances – and like any other com­poser there are proper and improper ways to play his music – this comes through with a pow­er­ful psy­cho­log­i­cal and emo­tional effect.

At a great recital of some of his solo piano pieces per­formed by Taka Kigawa, I was struck by how the music seemed to be con­fronting me morally and eth­i­cally, offer­ing an exam­ple that left me unset­tled by an invol­un­tary self-laceration over my own moral and eth­i­cal fail­ings, and also com­forted to know that it is pos­si­ble to be the way one wishes one­self to be. This is the Cage of later mas­ter­pieces like the Etudes Aus­trales, from which Kigawa played num­bers I, II and IV from the first book, but also ear­lier, more con­ven­tional works like the Suite for Toy Piano and the quiet romance of “In a Land­scape.” Kigawa, so dif­fer­ent from the vastly over­rated Mar­garet Leng Tan, seemed to dis­cover and reveal the philo­soph­i­cal heart of Cage that the com­poser per­haps did not know was in him dur­ing his youth. Because in some ways it wasn’t.

The advan­tage that art has over artists is that it eas­ily rep­re­sents their ide­al­ized states, the pure expres­sion of that which they value the most. Lis­ten to Miles Davis play­ing “I Thought About You,” and you would think he was the most tender-hearted, warm per­son in the world. Lis­ten to The Free­man Etudes and you would think Cage was the most dis­in­ter­ested per­son. But he wasn’t, he lived in his body and mind and soul. He tended toward the self-indulgent in his per­sonal rela­tion­ships for quite a long time, caus­ing con­fu­sion and pain in oth­ers. His com­po­si­tional break­through, his way to aes­thetic free­dom was also an easy way to ratio­nal­ize the destruc­tion of his mar­riage to Xenia Kashe­varoff and tak­ing up with Merce Cun­ning­ham (yet seem­ingly with­out the will­ing­ness to acknowl­edge his homo­sex­u­al­ity). The music and mar­riage formed a bit of a cri­sis, though the depths are hard to judge. Kay Lar­son, in her new book “Where The Heart Beats, John Cage, Zen Bud­dhism and the Inner Life of Artists,” sees them not only as directly related but also pow­er­ful enough to drive Cage to the edge of mad­ness. How you feel about that idea, which makes Cage like the young Werther, will most likely deter­mine how you would feel about her book.

Lar­son is a long-time art critic, as of 1994 a con­vert to Zen Bud­dhism, and on its face her topic is both inter­est­ing and reward­ing. The book is nei­ther. What it really is is a work of pro­pa­ganda for Zen Bud­dhism. Cage is a tough sub­ject for biog­ra­phers because he wrote so well and clearly about him­self and his work, but he’s also decep­tively easy because of the vast record of his music and life, which include not just a seem­ingly end­less series of inter­views but appear­ances on tele­vi­sion (includ­ing game shows). It’s easy to find things about him, much harder to add some­thing new and make sense of every­thing. His most recent biog­ra­pher, Ken­neth Sil­ver­man, did an admirable job of that in his book “Begin Again,” which wove together the essen­tial details of his life, with­out judge­ment, with an under­stand­ing of the means and mean­ing of his work. Lar­son faces a sim­i­lar prob­lem and walks her­self directly into a trap, which is that though Cage learned impor­tant things from Zen, he him­self was not a prac­tic­ing, nor even a believ­ing, Bud­dhist. But Lar­son is, and tries to force the issue, spend­ing a lot of time like this:

As Cage began to drift away from the Indi­ans, he could have picked up Ala Watt’s “The Spirit of Zen” (1936) … he could have also found “A Bud­dhist Bible” … in June 1949 Cage could have peered into Suzki’s “Intro­duc­tion to Zen Buddhism …“

He could also have read Thoreau and Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake,” books which would have an endur­ing influ­ence on his think­ing and that would pro­duce mate­r­ial for many impor­tant pieces … and he actu­ally did.

Lar­son comes to Cage via art and artists, and Cage had a remark­able set of friends and col­leagues in his life, includ­ing Rauschen­berg, Nam Jun Paik and Yoko Ono. Rauschen­berg him­self fell under the sway of Zen for a time, as she points out, and she also draws the net fur­ther to cap­ture Ker­ouac and Gins­burg, seem­ingly to develop the con­text that Cage lived in a zeit­geist that was heav­ily per­me­ated with East­ern thought. Per­haps he was, but her shal­low name-dropping and schematic lay­out come nowhere close to prov­ing that point. She also suf­fers from a lack of under­stand­ing of music in gen­eral and Cage’s in par­tic­u­lar. Her best writ­ing and think­ing (though her ideas are arguable) comes when she expresses her thoughts about visual arts, but when she turns to music, any sense of con­fi­dence and knowl­edge leaves the page, and we are left with frag­mented opin­ions from second-hand sources like Anthony Tom­masini and James Pritch­ett. We know what her eyes see but we have almost no idea what her ears hear, except when she reveals her breath­less, fraught inter­pre­ta­tions of early piano pieces like Four Walls.

Cage inad­ver­tently did his admir­ers a dis­ser­vice with “4’33.” That piece, vitally impor­tant, is a com­bi­na­tion of exper­i­ment and man­i­festo, it’s impor­tant as an idea and, after the first per­for­mance, incon­se­quen­tial as an event. It only had to hap­pen once. Lar­son has clearly gone to see many per­for­mances, and is enthralled by each, but misses the point. Cage is offer­ing a les­son about how to think and hear, and going to ‘see’ a ‘per­for­mance’ is not only mean­ing­less, but replaces the com­poser and his ideas with the false image of a guru. It is idol­a­try, and seems incom­pat­i­ble with Zen val­ues and prac­tice. It also makes it hard for here to hear so much of Cage’s work. There is one incon­se­quen­tial men­tion of Pauline Oliv­eros and noth­ing at all about the composer’s sur­ren­der and happy return to har­mony in extra­or­di­nary late works like Apart­ment House 1776. Also miss­ing in any exam­i­na­tion of the star chart pieces, the Song­books, the Eur­op­eras, so much impor­tant and won­der­ful music. Instead, there is gos­sipy, repet­i­tive details of his per­sonal life, all pressed into push­ing Cage towards a cri­sis that only Zen could resolve. If there was such a cri­sis, Zen did help resolve it, but so did so many other ele­ments, espe­cially musi­cal ones. Cage may have had no feel­ing for har­mony, but he loved the works of Webern, a mas­ter of atonal har­mony and struc­ture, and had an impor­tant rela­tion­ship to Boulez, who him­self was work­ing hard at cre­at­ing sys­tems to deter­mine every aspect of a musi­cal pieces, though with­out chance operations.

Along with a dull, flac­cid struc­ture the writ­ing is wan. Lar­son uses the pas­sive voice in a way that seems to seek to develop a feel­ing or por­ten­tous­ness but instead leaves most every line and para­graph dis­si­pated. There is a lot of psycho-sexual analy­sis that seems inap­pro­pri­ate to the theme. There is ten­den­tious spec­u­la­tion, like imag­ing Cage read­ing Suzuki’s “First Series” and ask­ing “how could he not instantly turn the page?” There is truly noth­ing at all on the inner life of artists, and there are sen­tences like this: “The heart-issues that Cage had never resolved were now beat­ing like the undead on the locked doors of his awareness.”

Per­haps the true mea­sure and qual­ity of great­ness in Cage is that his life and work ignore such think­ing, let­ting it pass like the breeze. The best art doesn’t offer answers, it asks prob­ing, fas­ci­nat­ing ques­tions. It is anti­thet­i­cal to this value to think that one thing is the answer to all things in Cage, when his achieve­ment lies on a spec­trum that, in matu­rity, begins with toss­ing coins and con­tin­ues to ques­tion after ques­tion after ques­tion, leav­ing us to explore what answers might lie inside ourselves.