Silence. John Cage

him a philosopher, but this bypasses the more obvious point: that, unlike your average philosopher, he was a brilliant writer, with a distinctively elegant style and a comic delight in paradoxes. And, in fact, writing was what he wanted to do before he turned to music.

      And since people draw conclusions more intelligently from words than they do from music, it took this book to get Cage’s ideas noticed in the public world. Arriving as it did just at the onset of the 1960s, with a new generation eager for a new pace of living, it had a literary impact like an atom bomb. Silence has a reputation as the most influential book written by an American composer—do we need the word “American”?—and it is difficult to argue otherwise. Other such books, and we might mention Henry Cowell’s New Musical Resources, Charles Ives’s Essays before a Sonata, and Harry Partch’s Genesis of a Music, have encouraged several generations of composers and musicians to think differently. But Silence was different. It encouraged everyone to think differently.

      So before I run through the results of my latest rereading, let’s ask: Who was John Cage before he published Silence? And who was he afterward?

      We need only sketch the relevant details. There were two great turning points in Cage’s life: the change in his music in 1951, at age thirty-eight, and the change in his public career—brought about by this book—at age forty-nine. He was born September 5, 1912, in Los Angeles. His father was an inventor; you’ll read the famous story of his submarine in the book, and many other stories of growing up in Los Angeles. A precocious but unassertive child, at age twelve Cage devoted himself to playing the piano works of Edvard Grieg, partly because that composer broke the prohibition against parallel fifths, which Cage interpreted as a liberation. Cage graduated high school as valedictorian and briefly attended Pomona College, more attracted to religion and then literature at the time than to music. Rebelling against the curriculum, he left college after a year to take a parentally financed tour of Europe in 1930 and ’31. He studied Gothic architecture with Ernö Goldfinger (1902–87), while also taking piano lessons at the Paris Conservatoire. When Goldfinger mentioned that in order to become an architect one must devote one’s life to architecture, Cage took flight.

      Cage returned to Los Angeles just in time for the Depression. His early attempts at music he regarded as overly mathematical, and threw them away. He studied composition with Henry Cowell (1897–1965), the guru of everything avant-garde in music in 1930s America. Cowell, in turn, recommended that Cage work with Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), who had come to America in 1933 to escape the Nazis, and who was already world famous for pioneering both atonal music and the twelve-tone technique, which he had invented in 1921. Twelve-tone method, to which Cage refers frequently in Silence, starts with an ordering of the twelve notes of the musical scale and derives every pitch structure in the piece from some transposition of that row, or else from its backward or inverted form, with the intent of imposing a kind of super-unity on the piece—a unity that may not always be perceptible as such. After Schoenberg’s death, the musicologist Peter Yates informed Cage that Schoenberg had referred to him as his one interesting American student, but also called him “not a composer, but an inventor—of genius.” I am sick and tired of these words. They have been too often adduced to acknowledge Cage’s innovations while downplaying the quality of his wonderful music; still, Cage trumpeted the praise proudly, and bears the blame for its frequency of citation. However, when asked in 1950 to list his best American students, Schoenberg came up with twenty-eight names, Cage’s not among them, so I’ve come to consider this story a little dubious.¹

      Cage’s early career took the form of providing mostly percussion music for dance in the San Francisco and Seattle areas, where he made an important contact in the slightly younger composer Lou Harrison (1917–2003); it was Harrison who, in the stories, uttered the immortal line, “If you think I came to the loony bin to learn to play bridge, you’re crazy.” To write for unpitched percussion, Cage needed a new idea of structure, since all the traditional musical forms revolved around pitch and harmony. He arrived at “macro-microcosmic” rhythmic structure, sometimes called square-root structure, in which each phrase of a piece embodies the same rhythmic proportions as the entire piece. For instance, his First Construction in Metal (1939) is divided into sections with the proportions 4+3+2+3+4, which adds up to 16, so each of the 16 sections is also 16 measures divided 4+3+2+3+4. The more technical articles in Silence make frequent reference to this kind of structure, which he continued using even into his nonpercussion works of the 1950s.

      The earliest article in Silence, “The Future of Music: Credo,” is a talk delivered to a Seattle arts society in 1937 at the invitation of dancer Bonnie Bird, a Martha Graham protégée. Cage’s major innovation of the Seattle period was the prepared piano, an instrument he invented in 1940 by inserting screws, bolts, weather stripping, and other materials between the strings of a grand piano in order to turn it into a percussion instrument of indeterminate pitch. The bulk of his music of the 1940s, much of it quiet, lyrical, and even proto-minimalist, was written for this instrument, and it remains the most widely accepted part of his output. “Half intellectually and half sentimentally,” he recalls in the “Lecture on Nothing,” “when the war came along, I decided to use only quiet sounds. There seemed to me to be no truth, no good, in anything big in society. But quiet sounds were like loneliness, or love or friendship. Permanent, I thought, values, independent at least from Life, Time, and Coca-Cola” (p. 117).

      Cage continued to move wherever he was offered a job, and, following a 1941–42 season in Chicago, ended up in New York City at the invitation of Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim. The enterprising Cage convinced the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) to give him a concert venue. Guggenheim, however, had intended to have Cage’s percussion music at the opening of her new gallery, and when she learned of the MOMA show, she told Cage to leave her house. Cage wept at the reversal, and was comforted by the presence of the painter Marcel Duchamp; this is the incident referred to at the end of “On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work” (p. 107). Luckily, the dancer Jean Erdman offered him her apartment. Erdman was working with the pianist David Tudor, who became Cage’s tireless and most brilliant interpreter, and it was Erdman’s husband, the distinguished expert on world mythology Joseph Campbell, who introduced Cage to Asian art and philosophy, which came to inform so much of his musical outlook (though his interest in Zen had first been sparked by a 1936 lecture in Seattle by Nancy Wilson Ross, on “Dada and Zen Buddhism”).

      Campbell’s circle also included Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877–1947), curator of Indian art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, who gets credit for having introduced Indian art and its aesthetics to the Western world. It may be Coomaraswamy’s writings that introduced Cage to the fourteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart (1260–1328), to whom he refers often in the “Indeterminacy” lecture and elsewhere. Coomaraswamy championed Eckhart as being closer to Mahayana Buddhism than to conventional Christianity or modern philosophy, calling Eckhart’s sermons “an Upanisad of Europe.”² In the “Lecture on Something” Cage lists Eckhart among several Western authors (with R. H. Blyth, Joseph Campbell, and Alan Watts) from whom one can learn the principles of Zen if the Zen writings themselves seem too alien.

      In 1949 Cage gave the aforementioned “Lecture on Nothing” at the Artists’ Club in New York. “The Club,” as it was generally referred to, had been founded by the painter Robert Motherwell in 1948, and many of its regulars were caught up in the Zen craze. Visual artists Mark Tobey, Ad Reinhart, Franz Kline, David Smith, Philip Pavia, Motherwell, and others had been impressed by, and were in some cases imitating, Japanese calligraphy and Ukiyo-e paintings, the “floating world” genre of Japanese prints.³ Some of these people, at least, would have been in the audience for the “Lecture on Nothing” and also that on “Something” a year later. Poets and literary figures like Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder were Zen enthusiasts of the time as well, but among composers of his generation Cage seems virtually unique in this respect (for which reason he has had a tremendous impact awakening musicians to alternative and occult spirituality). His increasing interest led him to study with Diasetz Suzuki (1870–1966), a lay historian and philosopher who had an unparalleled impact on the understanding of Buddhism in the West. Cage, self-admittedly, had a faulty memory for dates, and his claims in various writings that he attended Suzuki’s