Summary
American composer whose book Silence (1961) closes the musical arc of the forty-third essay of Reflections on Exile and Other Essays: with him sound and silence become interchangeable, against the authoritarianism of Wagner and Schönberg and Beethoven’s anxiety about sustaining music against enveloping silence (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.480-482).
Details
- Cage speaks ebulliently about freedom from “the concept of a fundamental tone” — the tonal system central to Beethoven, Wagner and Schönberg — welcoming an age of experimentation in which the production and organization of sound and silence, something and nothing, is open and limitlessly possible; his turning is toward nature, sound depending not on what is intended but on what is unintended: “In musical terms, any sounds may occur in any combination and in any continuity.” (quoted from Silence, PDF p.480).
- Through the 1940s and 1950s he experimented with prepared pianos, tape recordings, radio and natural sounds and with combinatorial techniques from jazz and zen to the Book of Changes and mathematics; 4’33 (the printed title closing with a double-quote mark) in some performances consisted of a pianist sitting absolutely silent at the piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, and a 1962 composition entitled o’o (as printed, the title closing with a double-quote mark) involved slicing vegetables, blending them and drinking the juice (PDF p.480-481).
- His notational innovations — graphics, mathematically derived series, randomly written pages to be used as performers saw fit (Concert for Piano and Orchestra, 1958) — virtually exploded the authority of the text (PDF p.481).
- Said spent a year with Cage in 1967-68, both Fellows at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Illinois: Cage, puckish and amusing, said he detested and could never listen to Mozart and Beethoven but was passionate about Satie and Varèse — Varèse having established that music’s nature “arises from an acceptance of all audible phenomena as material proper to music” (quoted, PDF p.481); that year Cage seemed as interested in collecting mushrooms as in music, and his performance filled a barn with eight or nine cows, fifteen tape recorders, a mime troupe and dozens of speakers (PDF p.481).
- His relationship with Boulez foundered on formal control: for Cage chance meant a free-wheeling indeterminacy cheerfully mixing nature, history and politics “with aesthetic and musical criteria”, for Boulez the aleatory upset stereotypes without ceding control of “the mechanism of total serialism” (Nattiez, PDF p.481-482).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Richard Wagner, Arnold Schönberg, Ludwig van Beethoven