MUSICAGE. John Cage

letters of the strings are the vehicle of that oracle? What does that mean—source as oracle?

      JC: I don’t know … I try in general to use the chance operations—each number that I use, I try to have it do one thing rather than two things. And I don’t know if this has anything to do with your question, but I try to, try to get an event divided into all the different things that bring it into existence and then to ask as many questions as there are aspects of an event—to bring an event into being, hmm? So that one number won’t bring two parameters into being, but only one. That is toward a kind of confidence in the uniqueness of happenings, hmm? And then taking what happens. But slightly changing it through the breathing—placing of those apostrophes—and the accents. And of course the omission or inclusion of wing words. Very strong things happen when you minimize the wing words.

      JR: What do you mean?

      JC: What’s an example of that? (leafs through I-VI) I had the feeling, probably mistakenly, that I was learning how to do this, finally—you see—when it was almost done. (laughs) And you can see, through the shape, there are fewer words [toward the end of Lecture VI] and in some places it will be extremely that way. That was not taking any of the wing words, or very few of them. But again, not making a judgment about “we will have no wing words.” Here [earlier in VI] there are a lot of them.

      JR: When you say “not making a judgment” about it, what do you mean?

      JC: Well I could have elected—even through chance operations I could have elected—to minimize or maximize wing words. And I could have known when I was starting to write this that I had to have lots of wing words. But I wasn’t working that way. I was working by improvising and trying to find out what the words wanted, how they wanted to work. I was trying to do that.

      JR: So at this point you “found yourself” choosing fewer wing words?

      JC: See, this is quite beautiful.

      It just works beautifully! (laughs) And that kind of thing didn’t work here. In fact, the opposite kind of thing worked here,

      That works too. It’s a different kind of thing. And then there’s … I think at the beginning of this—the sixth lecture—I think toward the beginning I must have had that feeling that the mesostic didn’t need any wing words at all. I was moving here whenever I could toward [fewer]—and I couldn’t there on page 379, which has lots of wing words—but here’s one that has fewer.

      JR: Could you say why you think that happened, with any one of the narrower columns? Specific to what the words were?

      JC: I think the closest I can come is to say that when I read it, or when I voiced it, or breathed it, that the breath worked—without wing words some times, and with them other times.

      JR: Does this have anything to do with the sort of thing [Charles] Olson was involved with?

      JC: I’m unfortunately not sufficiently aware of his “projective verse.” For me it has to do with my notion of … of music, I guess. Where this becomes most musical is in these sections which get repeated, because it—and now I’m saying music in the most conventional sense, because Schoenberg said that music was repetition—repetition and variation. And he said variation is also repetition with some things changed and others not. And in IV, V, and VI—and we’re now in VI—there is, through chance operations, a section which gets repeated.

      JR: While you’re looking I’ll turn the tape.

      JC: … This one,

      and then the whole thing gets repeated, “as an apple tree …,” and then you know you’re in the world of music. (laughs) I mean if you didn’t know it to begin with, (laughter)

      JR: The theme-and-variations structure is so striking in this work. Have you done any non-linguistic, musical compositions that use a theme-and-variation structure since doing these? Is your purely musical composition influenced by your language compositions?

      JC: What I’ve done that relates to these and goes off, say to music, is—perhaps the best example is—using a source material, a source that I don’t understand at all as language. And it was a poem of Hesse which happened to be a favorite poem of the book publisher Siegfried Unseld. Do you know his name? Ulla Berkewicz, who is now married to him, asked me, for one of his birthdays, like fifty or sixty or something, to write—and he had asked me earlier—to write some music on one of Hesse’s poems. But I didn’t like the poem that he likes. And it was all right in German because I didn’t really understand it. But he loved it. It was his really favorite poem. So I gave it to the computer and I did this kind of material with it. Except, I put the whole poem of Hesse as the string down the middle. And I gave the string only itself as source material.²⁰ So that all that gets said in the lines is the same thing over and over and over again, hmm? In German. Not the same words, but it’s from the same poem. So, the poem loses itself by using itself, hmm?

      JR: It consumes itself in the form.

      JC: It consumes itself. (laughter) So I then made an arrangement through chance in which different people read. Any number could read. I put it all in stanzas and the stanzas were never say more than three or four lines. So in a single minute each reader could find one stanza and read it any time during the minute, hmm? Then in the next minute any other stanza, or two, as the case may be. And that was read to celebrate his birthday and of course he was delighted because these little fragments of his favorite poem kept cropping up, out of context, out of rhythm, everything—but making some kind of music, you see?

      JR: Was it beautiful in this new form?

      JC: I wasn’t there, but I’m told that it brought tears to his eyes.

      JR: I can imagine that for someone not familiar with the poem, so that it would invoke neither dismay nor nostalgia, it could be a beautiful piece.

      JC: It could be interesting, yes…. I’ve done that with a number of languages—Spanish, and German … and I’ve even done it with Japanese. Toru Takemitsu in particular asks me, or [that is] other people ask me to write about him, for one birthday, or for one reason, or another. And that’s how I originally used mesostics—in order to answer commissions like this with respect to birthdays and celebrations—and it enabled me to do something relevant without knowing what I was going to say, you know? And not having to fall back on clichés of sentimentality. So I have written even in Japanese by searching for characters that belong to someone’s name, and then searching for them in a text of his.

      JR: And you’ve done this search yourself, not using a computer?

      JC: Myself. Of course, having a kind of guide or assistant in the language. I didn’t have an assistant in the German language, nor do I when I do that with Duchamp’s work in French. I know more French so I can tell where my mistakes are. The big problem in the European languages is the presence in French and German of the sexes, whereas we don’t have that problem in English. But apparently the French and Germans are willing to give that problem up. I mean they’re not offended apparently by misuse. It doesn’t seem to disturb them anymore.

      JR: Huh! That’s—

      JC: Unexpected, isn’t it?

      JR: Unexpected, particularly for France.

      JC: But I think they see that it’s rather silly. That if barbershops are willing to have only one sex—

      JR: Then so can—

      JE: So can language, (laughs)

      JR: To return to the question of “oracle,” what does “oracle” mean in the sentence “The source text is used as an oracle”?

      JC: