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John Cage
(1912- 1992)
John Cage is the figure most associated with chance in musical composition. From a humbling process in his musical education, Cage realized he had only modest skills in the discipline of harmony. Determined, he set out to continue “beating [his] head against that wall” (Kostelanetz p. 53) until he found a way to make his way in music. The ‘solution’ was a path to the most radical revolution ever achieved in any art.
If Arnold Schönberg presents the image of the most troubling modernist in art music of the first half of the 20th century, John Cage was the most unsettling and disruptive apostle of change in the last half of the 20th century. With the Greek iconoclast, Iannis Xenakis, Cage was one of the two personalities most responsible for directing composition away from the ‘total control’ mechanics enshrined by advocates of serialism (especially Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, both followers of the canon of Anton Webern).
John Cage has been enshrined as a philosopher who opened our minds and ears to a world of sounds to be heard and perceived as never before. Dieter Schnebel, a radical theologian and composer, advocated crumbling the edifice of music to its very foundations. His mission was incomplete. It took John Cage to complete it, along a path carefully planned to strip away every familiar element of musical composition (melody, harmony, phrase structure, form, etc.). Through his developments in, and use of, chance and Indeterminacy in composition, he was both music’s most dangerous threat, and its ultimate savior.
• His Life
John Milton Cage (Jr.) was the son of an inventor, John Milton Cage, Sr. He graduated as class valedictorian from Los Angeles High School in 1928. He studied at Pomona College in Claremont, California, for two years before dropping out. After preliminary lessons on piano with Fannie Dillon, he sailed to Paris (Spring 1930), where he studied piano with Lazarre Lévy and architecture with Goldfinger. While overseas he began to write poetry and music and to paint, three activities that were to stay with him throughout his life.
He returned to the US in autumn of 1931 and resumed composing, writing, and painting. He took odd jobs to support himself. These included work as a gardener, and lecturing to local housewives about modern painting and music. In 1933, he studied composition with Richard Buhlig. While studying, Cage developed a quasi-serial ordering that he incorporated into some of his early works. The patterns involve ordering a set of two 25-note ranges. This method was used in Cage’s Solo with Obbligato Accompaniment of Two Voices in Canon, and Six Short Inventions on the Subjects of the Solo (1933). He went to New York and studied harmony, contemporary music, and Oriental and folk music under Henry Cowell at New School for Social Research. Then, at Cowell’s urging, he studied harmony and composition under Adolph Weiss.
In 1934, Cage’s career took a major turn. He returned to California and studied counterpoint and analysis under Arnold Schönberg at University of Southern California. He was one of Schönberg’s best pupils and revealed a keen ability to extract many solutions to problems posed in the classes by Schönberg. However, Schönberg noticed a certain awkward sense in Cage’s contrapuntal skills, especially in regards to certain treatments of harmony. Reportedly, Schönberg commented to Cage that he had no feel for harmony and would have trouble becoming an effective composer (PAR Kostelanetz p. 53). Cage merely intensified his resolve (PAR Snyder p. 36).
• His Musical Life and philosophy
Cage began carefully studying the relationships between structure (“division of parts into a whole”), method (“note-to-note procedure”), and materials (“sounds and silences”) (Cage - Composition p. 18). This began his realization that these elements could be split into those relating to matters of the mind as opposed to form (“morphology of a continuity”) that is related to matters of the heart. Composition was the process integrating the “rational with the irrational” (especially structure and form). These philosophical concerns are detailed in his lecture ‘Composition as Process’ (1958) as part of a chronology of the evolution of his musical thought up to the composition of his Music of Changes for piano (1951) (PAR Cage Composition p. 18).
By making these refined distinctions, Cage was able to view composition from a completely different perspective from that approached by other composers. He was able to set about dissecting the compositional process altogether stepwise in successive works. That ultimately led to the abrogation of formal procedures altogether, through developments in the use of the I-Ching (Chinese Book of Changes), and ultimately, into Indeterminacy. Schönberg’s admonition led to an outcome that exemplifies the law of unintended consequences: Cage’s ultimate and systematic rupture of the compositional process!
The first step in the process became apparent from his work in 1937, as composer-accompanist for Bonnie Byrd’s classes in dance at the Cornish School. If Cage had modest talents in harmony, he had no lack of talent in rhythm. Piano pieces were constructed using charts with randomly selected numbers that identified certain formal junctures.............
• His Style
Cage’s stylistic evolution has been detailed already. The early period (1933-1941) is primarily pianistic with 12-tone controls. Later (1941-1951), percussion, metal, and the delicate noise-rich timbres of the prepared piano dominate. After that, what can one really say about ‘style’ in works that are generated beyond the realms of the composer’s imagination?
He exerted a profound influence on the art of our time. Besides those composers (ONCE composers and Sonic Arts Union composers) mentioned previously, other important composers benefited immensely from his example. These include the European radical apostles of extremes and disparities, Sylvano Bussotti, Mauricio Kagel, and Dieter Schnebel. Several other American composers’ works grew out of the seeds of Cagean aesthetics as well, including Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, La Monte Young, and David Tudor.
Although music has undergone a reaction against avant-gardism in general, and Cagean experimentalism in particular, it is safe to say that Cage succeeded in forcing audiences and composers alike to rethink their tools, methods and approach to music. By virtue of this rethinking, we avoid traps associated with unquestioning reliance on outworn traditional methods, and sloppy thought processes resulting from careless misuse of chance methods. These bestowments from this unrestrained genius alone are sufficient to make the future of music secure.
CHAPTER PREVIEW - CAGE
