MUSICAGE. John Cage

and edited by Cyril Bailey: Epicurus: The Extant Remains (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926). The stylistic variations among these translations are striking, and I have moved among them looking for the most pleasing translations for my purposes, but have used Bailey as my primary source. Epicurus has also reemerged as a figure of intense controversy in two books by broadly interdisciplinary classicists: Peter Green, Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), and Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

      36. John Cage, “An Autobiographical Statement,” in the box catalog, Rolywholyover

      A Circus (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1993), unpaginated. Gita Sarabhai brought Cage The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna during the time in the ’40s when he was so disturbed that he vowed if he could not find a reason for composing better than personal communication he would give it up. This led to the writings of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (e.g., The Transformation of Nature in Art), where Cage found what would be his lifelong working principle: “the responsibility of the artist is to imitate nature in her manner of operation.” Ibid. James Pritchett has an interesting discussion of the effects of these Eastern principles on Cage’s music in his The Music of John Cage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

      37. Epicurus, like Plato, mistrusted music, but then so did Cage—the power assumed and asserted, by certain kinds of music, to mold the emotions and shape the soul.

      38. In describing his new principles of composition in “The History of Experimental Music in the United States,” Cage says, “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.” Silence, p. 70.

      39. There are two Zen traditions: Rinzai, which cultivates the capacity for sudden enlightenment; Soto, which subscribes to a practice of gradual awakening.

      40. An etymology shared with French, Italian, Spanish, and German.

      41. From Japanese Life and Character in Senryu, ed. R. H. Blyth (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1960), p. 513. Senryu is the humorous Japanese literary form that comes from perceiving what in the West is separated into the comic and the tragic as inextricably intertwined. Blyth calls this “Senryu no Michi, the Way of Senryu.”

      42. Headnote to “Where are we going? And what are we doing?,” Silence, p. 195.

      43. See Benoit B. Mandelbrot’s The Fractal Geometry of Nature (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1983). Mandelbrot has developed the complex realist geometry of a broadly interdisciplinary thinker. He has taught in faculties of analytic and applied mathematics, economics, electrical engineering, and physiology at institutions such as University of Geneva, Ecole Polytechnique, Harvard, Yale, M.I.T., and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

      44. For a more detailed discussion of this proposal, see my “Poethics of a Complex Realism,” in John Cage: Composed in America.

      45. Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990), p. 410.

      46. “Experimental Music: Doctrine,” Silence, p. 14.

      47. At a weeklong festival and symposium on Cage’s work called John Cage at Stanford: Here Comes Everybody, in January 1992, seven months before his death.

      48. See Visual Art conversation, note 54.

      49. “Song of Myself, 6,” Leaves of Grass (Mount Vernon, N.Y.: Peter Pauper Press), p. 33.

      I

      WORDS

      My mesostic texts do not make ordinary sense. They make nonsense, which is taught as a serious subject in one of the Tokyo universities. If nonsense is found intolerable, think of my work as music, which is, Arnold Schoenberg used to say, a question of repetition and variation, variation itself being a form of repetition in which some things are changed and others not.

      —JOHN CAGE, from the preface to “Anarchy”

      Art Is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else

      John Cage

      A NOTE ON CAGE’S TEXT

      A substantial part of the first conversation in MUSICAGE is devoted to John Cage’s methods in composing this lecture-poem, but I’d like to make a couple of suggestions for the reader unfamiliar with his mesostic texts. (Texts structured along a string of capital letters running down their middle.) It may be helpful to think of this piece as a kind of linguistic fugue, a canonic and recombinatory interplay of three voices—that of Jasper Johns (from whose statements this text is composed), John Cage, and, of course, chance.

      The pleasure of the eye in reading Cage’s mesostics is both vertical and horizontal. The pleasure of the ear is one of resonances perhaps most clearly revealed in reading aloud. Cage had many ways of composing mesostic poetry. Here he used chance operations to locate “meso-strings” from Jasper Johns’ statements about art so that Johns’ silent voice (the strings cannot be heard when the poem is read aloud and are on the edge of invisibility on the page) is the force that fragments and reconfigures his own thoughts. For instance, Cage’s first variation on Johns’ statements is drawn together by A DEAD MAN TAKE A SKULL COVER IT WITH PAINT RUB IT AGAINST CANVAS SKULL AGAINST CANVAS. This String of letters becomes a vertical current gathering words into horizontal axes (what Cage called “wing words”) by means of the mesostic rules on pp. 57 and 61. Though the range of possible wing words is a function of chance, Cage chose their precise number, taking into account both breath and breadth—that is, both musical elements and possibilities for meaning. The result is a poem in which the interactions between chance and selection that are “Nature’s manner of operation” are formally foregrounded. Reading this text is an exercise in letting go of preconceptions about how words should relate to one another (syntax and grammar), clearing the way to notice novel semantic sense. The poem becomes more and more densely textured, more and more musical, as each section arrives in the wake and aftermath and echo of all that went before, as vertical and horizontal axes are in continual visual play, as the capitalized mesostic letters generate words within words.

      Cage devised a notation for facilitating the spoken performance of his mesostic poetry: “A space followed by an apostrophe indicates a new breath. Syllables that would not normally be accented but should be are printed in bold type.” (Introduction to I-VI [Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1990], p. 5) But he did not mean for this to constrain the readings of others. One can feel entirely free to play with the phrasing. The variable bonding of letters, words, and phrases adds more and more dimensions to each variation on the source text. There is a limitless proliferation of meanings. Think of Art Is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else as a score. Think of the reading you are about to do as an exploratory, performative act that is but one of many possible realizations. Cage’s mesostics are preceded by the Johns statements on which they are based.—JR These texts come from statements by Jasper Johns, taken from Mark Rosenthal’s Jasper Johns Work Since 1974 (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1988), which follow. They are not about Johns’ statements and because of the way they are written, other statements are produced.

      —JOHN CAGE, New York City, 1988

      Old art offers just as good a criticism of new art as new art offers of old.

      I don’t want my work to be an exposure of my feelings.

      Art is either a complaint or appeasement.

      The condition of a presence.

      The condition of being there.

      its own work

      its own

      its

      it

      its shape, color, weight, etc.

      it is not another (?)

      and