MUSICAGE. John Cage

all around New York. It was the centenary of Whitman’s death in 1892 and Cage was delighted by the attention to his work, the way it was so much “in the air.” John Cage loved Walt Whitman, the Walt Whitman who wrote:

      All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,

      And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.⁴⁹

      NOTES

      1. A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), p. 21ff.

      2. See Theodor W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” in Notes to Literature, Volume One, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

      3. In acknowledgment of the suspect status of “we”: my use is not meant to be universal, or even global. It refers to “some of us”—an “us” that changes from one context to another.

      4. Excluding only a couple of side conversations between Bach and myself when Cage was preparing the food.

      5. The series, running from October to December, included seven selections: Alba-Reyes Spanish Dance Company, Paul Taylor Dance Company, Robert Joffrey Ballet Company, the New York City Ballet’s Edward Villella and Patricia McBride, Nala Najan, Classical Dances of India, Merce Cunninghan Dance Company with composers John Cage and David Tudor, and Alvin Ailey Dance Theater.

      6. A Year from Monday, p. 133.

      7. All Jung quotes are from The I Ching or Book of Changes, Richard Wilhelm translation rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes, Foreword by C. G. Jung, Preface to Third Edition by Hellmut Wilhelm, Bollingen Series XIX (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).

      8. I take Cage to be enacting the equivalent of Wittgenstein’s move from “picture” to “use” theories of meaning when he decided to “imitate Nature in her manner of operation.” See, for instance, A Year from Monday, p. 31.

      9. “When M. C. Richards asked me why I didn’t one day give a conventional informative lecture, adding that that would be the most shocking thing I could do, I said, ‘I don’t give these lectures to surprise people, but out of a need for poetry’ ” (Silence [Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961], p. x).

      10. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, and New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1957. Siu has since published many more volumes, including one on the I Ching, and has founded a new discipline which he calls “panetics”—the integrated study of the infliction and reduction of suffering.

      11. Silence, p. 68.

      12. A Year from Monday, p. 162.

      13. This was actually a chapter from his book The Tao of Science, reprinted in The World of Zen: An East-West Anthology, ed. Nancy Wilson Ross (New York: Vintage, 1960).

      14. If I remember correctly, one watch was set to Tokyo time, one to London, and the third to Eastern Standard.

      15. Published in Aerial 5 (1989).

      16. Langer’s aesthetic theories, widely influential mid-century, hold that the force of all art, including music, comes from symbolism and the expression of emotion.

      17. Actually, contrary to legend, Cage did occasionally turn the phone off in order not to be interrupted, but he preferred not to have to do this.

      18. Empty Words (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), p. 5. Emphasis mine.

      19. Cage took great pleasure in this quote from Values in a Universe of Chance (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1958), p. 107.

      20. There is a clear parallel to Wittgenstein’s interrogative modeling of “language games,” as well as to Fuller’s “World Game”—a computerized model he first called “Minni-Earth” to be used for regional planning—where the entire planet = the region. Interestingly, paradoxically, “utopia,” a word Thomas More invented circa 1516 to mean literally “no-place,” has become an adjectival category denoting very much “placed,” socially visionary, intentional communities that have been been a continuous part of history. Cage’s feeling about the necessity for utopian thinking is reflected in the title of one of Fuller’s books, Utopia or Oblivion.

      21. I-VI (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 177-78. Punctuation has been added to what was continuous, unpunctuated text in the original.

      22. For instance, in the foreword to A Year from Monday.

      23. Cage’s marriage to Xenia Kashevaroff Cage ended in the mid-’40s as his relationship with Merce Cunningham was developing into what would turn out to be a fifty-year personal and professional union. Cage was deeply troubled about the dissolution of his commitment to Xenia and the highly charged implications of moving between “socially regulated” sexual categories. Ultimately, he told me, he felt that sexuality, like all of life, was manifestly more complicated than a handful of (invidiously competitive) categories suggests. He therefore refused to subscribe to any of them. He simply did not believe that there was truth in labeling. This, in my opinion, is the reason for his silence on these matters, as much as his firm belief that personal privacy should be respected. During this time Cage was also deeply affected by the horrors of World War II. His attempts to express his feelings about all these things in his music (e.g., In the Name of the Holocaust, 1942; The Perilous Night, 1945) were being met with misunderstanding and ridicule.

      24. From “Forerunners of Modern Music,” Silence, p. 64.

      25. This is my observation; I’m not at all sure Cage would have described it this way.

      26. More also used the term “Eutopia” (good place) in a nominal dialectic with “no place.”

      27. D. W. Winnicott is helpful here with his distinction between imagination—the source of play: a testing of ideas in material interactions—and fantasy, which is mind withdrawn from world, unsullied and unassisted by material contingencies. See, for example, Winnicott’s Playing and Reality (New York: Methuen, 1984). Utopianism which is entirely textual can be seen as public thought experiment—another form of “play” with real consequences.

      28. In some ways reminiscent of anarcho-syndicalist ideas?

      29. I-VI, p. 2.

      30. Though I would substitute “spiritual” for “religious,” despite some vapid new-age connotations, because Cage preferred it. Religion for him meant institutions bound up with “the police” (see the last conversation in this book). Cage’s spirituality was as humorous and pragmatic as the Buddhist texts he studied for five decades. It was not an attempt to transcend everyday life, but to recognize the material and conceptual interconnectedness of all things, to act out of that recognition.

      31. Similarly, Duchamp’s work seen as attention to “ambient everyday objects,” regardless of his intentions (no doubt more complex than irony alone), can move us beyond irony as well.

      32. X (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), p. 117.

      33. See Figure 14, page 193 of this volume. This poem is written in a form that actually requires multiple readings, of which what follows is only one. See my essay, “Poethics of a Complex Realism,” in John Cage: Composed in America, eds. Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

      34. From “The Chinese Avant-garde,” New York Times Magazine, 19 December 1993.

      35. A status recently ascribed to Cage. George J. Leonard, in Into the Light of Things: The Art of the Commonplace from Wordsworth to John Cage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), argues that Cage can best be understood as a religious figure. There is a recent renewal of interest in Epicurus. Two new translations of Epicurean texts are available: Eugene O’Connor, ed. and trans., The Essential Epicurus (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1993), and Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson, ed. and trans., with introduction by D.S. Hutchinson, The Epicurus Reader