MUSICAGE. John Cage

published in Aerial 6/7 in 1991. Because of the pleasure we found in doing it, Cage and I talked at the time about the possibility of taping more conversations, but it didn’t really seem practical in the absence of a specific occasion. When we had both heard from a number of readers of the Aerial issue that the format—combining an example of Cage’s work with a detailed exploration of it—had been helpful in understanding his motives and methods (some said they felt they had really understood his use of chance operations for the first time), we thought that doing a conversation book in this way might be warranted after all. We decided to structure it with sections devoted to recent work in each of the three major areas of Cage’s interest—language, visual arts, and music. My sense of a need for this was strong. Over the years it had become apparent to me that, except among the circle of Cage devotees and scholars, there was an almost inverse relation between Cage’s increasing fame and the degree of understanding of his work. Fame, which is of course based largely on the abbreviated codes of media images, had led in many cases to misleading caricatures.

      Thus, the conversations in this book, starting with the one published in Aerial 6/7, came to be taped over a period of three years in John Cage’s art- and plant-filled loft in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. We worked at the round wooden table where he composed, just a few feet away from a bank of large windows overlooking (and overhearing) 18th Street and 6th Avenue. This was the same table at which Cage and Merce Cunningham and their frequent guests ate, steps away from the open kitchen where something delicious was often cooking, not far from the phone that rang unmediated by an answering machine with calls from all over the world.¹⁷ Given this setting, a busy intersection of the domestic and global, the everyday pragmatic and sensual, the aesthetic, the philosophical, and the spiritual—all in the complex and humorous intermingling that was Cage’s preferred form of life—it’s probably not surprising that our conversations ranged widely: from the portentous question of whether the beans were burning—while checking, we decided that cooks smell time—to detailed discussions of philosophy, poetics, visual aesthetics, and of course music practice and theory. Cage’s musical principle of “anarchic harmony,” the result of a particular discipline of attention to time expanded by chance and design to accommodate dense and surprising interrelationships, was entirely manifest in Cage’s living-working arrangements both at home in New York City and in his working travels around the world—in Europe, Japan, and Latin America. This was the remarkable integrity of a poethics of everyday life and work where forms of art and the art of life interpenetrate within a coherent framework of values.

      For Cage the role of the composer was always multiple and paradoxical: to compose music, of course; but also to compose language, visual materials, a space in which to live and work that was both socially responsive and set apart—a kind of oasis in the midst of our consumer- and mass-media-dominated culture—almost as though “the revolution” had occurred. He was delighted to learn and to share alternatives to what he saw as destructive cultural habits. But, though Cage in many ways enjoyed being a public figure, his extraordinary accessibility was the other side of a very private person who longed for invisibility, for a mode of being in the world where ego disappears, leaving no trace. In the middle of enormous responsibilities and a fame about which he certainly felt ambivalence, within quite consciously constructed brackets and parentheses of time and space, Cage made getting lost a way of life. He often said, “When I’m not working I sometimes think I know something. When I’m working I discover that I don’t know anything at all.” This discovery always pleased him. It came from the fact that each project was in some way a radical quest to make it new, for himself as well as for anyone else who would be involved with his work, to genuinely not know where the processes he had set in motion would lead. This was not in order to produce the market value of an “original” commodity, but to move into a zone of unintelligibility, the only place where the possibility of discovery lies, where the future is not at the outset already a thing of the past.

      Because the charged field of the paradoxical was Cage’s preferred territory, I think it’s important to try to distinguish paradox from contradiction. Paradox operates outside the internal consistency of any given set of rules. It is evidence of complexity. Evidence that the conditions of life will always exceed the capacity of a unitary systematic effort to contain or entirely explain them. A state of affairs described in the mathematical world by Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Contradiction takes place within closed systems, unified and coherent sets of interlocking definitions and laws. While contradiction leads to logical gridlock, shutting the system down and sending us back to ferret out our mistake, paradox reveals insufficiencies of limiting systems in a complex world, catapulting us out of system into a new realm of possibilities. A paradox, such as Cage’s “silence is ambient sound,” opens up new frontiers on the edge of unintelligibility (silence), full of crosscurrents of fresh air—multidirectional and from many (sound) sources. It breaches and enriches definitions of music. So also, when Cage used the word “beautiful” as highest honorific and dismissive pejorative, was he contradicting himself? Or was this an indicator of a more complex situation? The cult of beauty has degraded art with its preestablished criteria, encouraging nostalgia and imitation. An encounter with beauty can be a process that awakens one’s whole being. Both of these statements appear to be true. That such divergent experiences of “the beautiful” involve use of the same term signals not contradiction but complication, perhaps even paradox—a situation which demands something more than either/or ways of thinking: The degree to which our desire to possess beauty leads us to imitate its image rather than its processes may (paradoxically?) make experiences of beauty harder to come by within the fluid circumstances of everyday life.

      To compose is simply “to put together.” Cage is often thought to have most notably pulled coherent traditions apart in order to create room for chance, apertures for silence. His notoriety, as with all avant-garde artists, has been one of dismantling. This view comes from perspectives which lie outside the locus of his constructive activities. The substance of avant-garde work is often hard to perceive because, at least initially, the absence of the familiar is more palpable than the strange presence of what is actually there. New forms in fact not only seem disturbingly wrenched out of contexts that have given old forms their meaning, but can appear to be violently abstracted from “content” itself—empty. It is not until they begin to attain familiarity, to acquire context, that they seem miraculously to fill up with their own substance. Certainly this experience of alarming absence is most likely to occur when one is unfamiliar with the “other” traditions—East and West—that form the contexts and moving principles of Cage’s compositions.

      This work brings material and experience together in a mode of enactment rather than “aboutness.” Patterns of sound and silence, chance and design startlingly reveal their utterly intermingled contingency, not as idea, but as initiating experience to be undergone by composer and audience equally involved in the making of meaning. Cage’s lifelong project was one of dislodging cultural authoritarianism (and gridlock), inviting surprising conjunctions within carefully delimited frameworks and processes. (I think it’s not really a paradox, though it’s something we tend to forget, that we experience freedom only within structuring contexts.) He hoped the sense of possibility this engendered would be helpful, specifically within the tradition of the art form, but also more generally within the society. He once said with great passion—responding to a goading inquiry about skeptical and hostile reactions to his work (as though Cage himself wanted his music to be inaccessible) — “Everything I do is available for use in the society.” For Cage, like Wittgenstein, meaning was determined by use, not by intention—at least not by intention seen as a picture in the artist’s mind to be faithfully replicated in the object or event. Cage wanted his art to introduce us to the pleasures of nature and everyday life undistorted by domineering ego. His motive, like John Dewey’s, was fundamentally environmental: if creature and environment become separated, both die. Almost all of Cage’s work, if actively engaged within the terms its structures suggest, directs audience attention to the ambient context in which it takes its time and place. Engaging with it is enacting a very particular form of life, one of attentive conversation—turning toward, turning with. Cage took his work—an invitation to the aesthetic pleasures of everyday life—to be no more, no less than a contribution to the global conversation among those who care about the future of the planet. But,