Silence. John Cage

that will allow us to go on listening to music as we have before, only with “the feet a little off the ground”? The Roshi beamed beatifically at the third-rate Italian aria, but what if it had been a superbly played Beethoven symphony? Or a piece by Stockhausen? And how should we feel about Bach?

      Part of what keeps us all coming back to Silence, I suspect, is the impossibility of answering these questions, within the outlines of Cage’s text, in a way that rings true for everyone, or even consistently for oneself. Another part is that by firing these conundrums, Cage blasted through the thick layers of accreted ice that had accumulated around the classical music tradition, and gave us all space to breathe again. All those precepts learned in music schools needed no longer to be taken for granted. Cage was no philosopher. He didn’t outline for us what to think, or how. But with these startling propositions so difficult to parse unequivocally, he freed us to think for ourselves. Begin to follow him, and even if you can’t follow everywhere he goes, you find yourself somewhere different from where you started out.

      I will step outside the scope of the text enough to remark that Cage, whom I knew from 1974 on, though never well, was an extraordinary person. Richard Fleming, a philosopher who has written and taught much about Cage (and also Leonard Bernstein), tells a story about Cage in his book Evil and Silence. Once in Cage’s apartment building a fire alarm malfunctioned, beeped intermittently all night, and kept everyone awake. Everyone except Cage, that is, who told Fleming that “I remained in bed, listened carefully to its pattern, and worked it into my thoughts and dreams; and I slept very well.”¹⁵ Personally, I have tried, at Cage’s urging, to enjoy a baby crying at a concert, not letting it ruin a piece of modern music; so far I’ve failed. But that’s why I keep coming back to Cage, because I keep thinking that if I could evolve or relax a little more, I could enjoy babies crying and fire alarms ringing, and feel as comfortable with the universe as he always seemed to be. He thought his way out of the twentieth century’s artistic neuroses and discovered a more vibrant, less uptight world that we didn’t realize was there. Silence is the traveler’s guide to that world. Every visit to it lifts the feet a little more off the ground.

      Now, if you will now permit me, I will do for you what I wish someone had done for me in 1971, namely, introduce you to the more celebrated names in Cage’s Indeterminacy stories.

      Xenia née Kashevaroff, of course, was Cage’s wife from 1935 to 1945, also a bookbinder and artist.

      Sonya Sekula (1918–63) was a Swiss artist who moved to New York City in 1936 and became associated with the surrealists and abstract expressionists. Plagued by psychotic breakdowns, she moved back to Zurich and hanged herself in her studio there at age forty-five. Though she is all but forgotten today, her paintings are well worth seeking out.

      Morris Graves (1910–2001) was a mystic and Zen enthusiast who lived in the Seattle area and painted, mostly pictures of birds. He met Cage by attending one of his percussion concerts and creating such a disturbance that he was thrown out. It was to him and the painter Mark Tobey that Cage unveiled the prepared piano.

      Richard Lippold (1915–2002) was a sculptor who made delicate, weblike sculptures from wire in complex geometric patterns. He lived in the same New York apartment house with Cage in the 1950s, and they collaborated on a film about Lippold’s The Sun.

      Lois Long (1918–2005) was a textile designer and artist who collaborated with Cage on two books, The Mushroom Book (1972) and Mud Book: How to Make Pies and Cakes (1983). Her detailed drawings of mushrooms are exquisite.

      Vera Williams (b. 1927) was, and is, an author and illustrator of children’s books who graduated from Black Mountain College in 1949. Her architect husband Paul Williams designed the glass house Cage lived in, in Stony Point.

      M. C. Richards (1916–99) was a writer, poet, and potter who taught at Black Mountain College and participated with Cage in the first Happening.

      Minna Lederman Daniel (1896–1995) was a cofounder of the important League of Composers in the 1920s, and from 1924 to 1946 the editor of the journal Modern Music, for which Cage wrote briefly. He considered her his best critic.

      Dorothy Norman (1905–97) was a photographer and lover of the photographer Alfred Stieglitz; also his first biographer.

      Giuseppe Santomaso (1907–90) was a Venetian painter who cofounded the progressive Italian art group Fronte Nuovo delle Arti.

      Guy Nearing (1890–1986) was a horticulturalist, writer, poet, landscape painter, and chess master; also the author of The Lichen Book.

      Maurice Grosser (1903–86) was a landscape painter who lived in Manhattan and devised the scenarios for the operas of Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein.

      Betty Isaacs (1894–1971) was a sculptor from New Zealand and friend of Duchamp.

      Patsy Lynch Wood (Patsy Davenport at the time), who asked the question about Bach, was a student at Black Mountain College who participated in Cage’s Erik Satie festival there. She went on to become a music educator, specializing in early music and Hildegard of Bingen.

      And I believe “labyrinths in whack” refers to the parts of your inner ear working correctly, or at least not out of whack. I puzzled over that one for decades.

      To read this fabulous book is to think about it the rest of your life. Enjoy.

       Notes

      1. Michael Hicks, “John Cage’s Studies with Schoenberg,” American Music 8, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 113–14.

      2. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Transformation of Nature in Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934).

      3. Helen Westgeest, Zen in the Fifties: Interaction in Art between East and West (Waanders Uitgevers: Museum voor Moderne Kunst, 1997), 61 and following.

      4. David Patterson, “Cage and Asia: History and Sources,” in David Nicholls, ed., The Cambridge Companion to John Cage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 53–54.

      5. David Revill, The Roaring Silence (New York: Arcade, 1992), 108.

      6. Richard Kostelanetz, “Conversation with John Cage,” in Kostelanetz, ed., John Cage (New York: Praeger, 1970), 17.

      7. Kenneth Silverman, Begin Again (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 176; latter statistic from Wesleyan University Press.

      8. John Adams, Hallelujah Junction (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008), 56.

      9. Cage, letter to Richard Winslow, December 9, 1959.

      10. Paul Wienpahl, “On the Meaninglessness of Philosophical Questions,” Philosophy East and West 15, no. 2 (April 1965): 138.

      11. See, for instance, Ashley’s indignant liner notes to Superior Seven and Tract (New World Records 80460).

      12. Cage, A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 97.

      13. “Meister Eckhart,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/meister-eckhart/#6, accessed February 1, 2011.

      14. Martin Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” in Existence and Being (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1949), 347–48.

      15. Richard Fleming, Evil and Silence (Boulder: Paradigm, 2010), 104.

FOREWORD

      For over twenty years I have been writing articles and giving lectures. Many of them have been unusual in form—this is especially true of the lectures—because I have employed in them means of composing analogous to my composing means in the field of music. My intention has been, often, to say what I had to say in a way that would exemplify it; that would, conceivably, permit the listener to experience what I had to say rather than just hear about it. This means that, being as I am engaged in a variety