John Cage (1912–1992)

For all its apparent simplicity John Cage's seminal 4'33' ('Four, Thirty-Three') continues to stimulate, provoke, enrage and delight audiences nearly 70 years after it was composed.

The premiere of the three-movement 4'33' was given by David Tudor on August 29, 1952, at Woodstock, New York as part of a recital of contemporary piano music. The audience saw him sit at the piano and, to mark the beginning of the piece, close the keyboard lid. Some time later he opened it briefly, to mark the end of the first movement. This process was repeated for the second and third movements. The piece had passed without a note being played--in fact without Tudor (or anyone else) having made any deliberate sound as part of the piece. Tudor timed the three movements with a stopwatch while turning the pages of the score.

They missed the point. There's no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn't know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began patterning the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out." John Cage speaking about the premiere of 4'33"

Several versions of the score for 4'33" exist, including:

The Kremen manuscript (1953): graphic, space-time notation, dedicated to Irwin Kremen The movements of the piece are rendered as space between long vertical lines; a tempo indication is provided (60), and at the end of each movement the time is indicated in minutes and seconds EP No. 6777a.

The so-called First Tacet Edition: a typewritten score, lists the three movements using Roman numbers, with the word "TACET" underneath each. A note by Cage describes the first performance and mentions that "the work may be performed by (any) instrumentalist or combination of instrumentalists and last any length of time."

This present edition is the so-called Second Tacet Edition: this is the same as the First Tacet Edition, except that it is printed in Cage's calligraphy, and the explanatory note mentions the Kremen manuscript.… (altro)

I do wonder what it might have felt like to have read these pieces at the time they were first published. Even though I did enjoy reading the book in general (and know that experiencing Cage's lectures in real life would have been far more engaging than reading their merely written recreations), every now and then, I got impatient with what felt like the schtickiness of Ram Dass' "Be Here Now"—which also probably would have come across differently had I read it at the time it was first published.… (altro)

review of
the Richard Kostelanetz edited John Cage, An Anthology
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - November 15-20, 2017

full version: "There's no pun on the last name "Cage" in this title.": https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/607353-there-s-no-pun-on-the-last-name-cage...

This is the 2nd edition of this bk. It was published in 1991. The 1st edition was published in 1970. I read the 1st edition sometime in the early to mid '70s. Now, over 40 yrs later, I've read the 2nd edition. The 1st John Cage record I got was "Variation IV - Volume II" in mid 1973. I would've been 19 at the time. I only bought 27 records that year & Cage's work was only on that one. It was an impressive beginning for me. The next Cage record I got was "Music for Keyboard 1935-1948" performed by Jeanne Kirstein. That was in the beginning of 1974, a year in which I purchased 64 records, 6 of which had Cage work on them:

Music for Keyboard 1935-1948:

"Two Pieces 1935" - 3:28
"Metamorphosis" (1938) - 16:10
"Bacchanale" (1938) - 9:10
"The Perilous Night (Winter 1943-44)" - 13:11
"Tossed as It Is Untroubled" (1943) - 2:28
"A Valentine Out of Season" (1944) - 4:12
"Root of an Unfocus" (1944) - 4:12
"Two Pieces 1946" - 12:18
"Prelude for Meditation" (1944) - 2:18
"Music for Marcel Duchamp" (1947) - 5:52
"Suite for Toy Piano" (1948) - 7:38
"Dream" (1948) 9:12

John Cage with David Tudor Presents Variations IV [Volume I] (1963)

Concerto for Prepared Piano & Orchestra (1951) - Yuji Takahashi: piano

Music Before Revolution:

"Credo in Us" (1942)
"Imaginary Landscape No. 1" (1939)

"Concerto for Piano and Orchestra" (1957/1958)
"Solo for Voice I" (1958)
"Solo for Voice II" (1960)
[simultaneously performed]

"Rozart Mix" (1965)

HPSCHD (1967-1969) - in collaboration w/ Lejaren Hiller

Three Dances (1944-1945) - performed by Michael Tilson Thomas & Ralph Grierson: prepared pianos

I don't recall whether I read this Cage Anthology before I got these records or after. After seems more likely but it's not listed in my list of books I read from September 1975 to August 1976 so it wdn't've been then & was probably earlier. Such details may be of little importance to most people but in the avant-garde where credit for innovation is determined by 'who-did-it-1st' such details can be very important.

For me, these were very heady times. I'd 1st learned of Cage when the teacher of my 9th grade music class told us about Cage's "4'33"", the so-called 'Silent Sonata'. I thought that was interesting. I was 20 at the beginning of 1974, 21 on September 4th of that yr, & probably lived at my mom's house most of the time with a few months spent in the basement of a friend's house.

I'd already discovered plenty of music that was important to by such folks as: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Soft Machine, The Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Ravi Shankar, Bonzo Dog Band, The Incredible String Band, Miles Davis, Dr. John, Van Dyke Parks, Berlioz, Eric Dolphy, Tim Buckley, The Fugs, Erik Satie, George Russell, &, soon thereafter, Harry Partch but it was Cage & Tudor's "Variations IV" that was probably the freshest for me.

Even though I had played (what I take for granted were mediocre) piano recitals as a child & had played folk & simple boogie-woogie & rock on 12-string acoustic guitar, piano, harmonica, & voice when I was 17 I wasn't really inclined to play steadily metered music. I listened to mostly rock'n'roll but I never felt like the type of personality to play that particular genre of forceful music.

But when I 1st heard "Variations IV" I realized that this was much more for me - or, at least, that's how I think of it from this time distance of 44.5 yrs. There was no steady beat, it was a pool of data to be sifted thru using one's own original methods & I found the results rewarding. I liked the density, I liked that it was generally w/o everything that was generally considered 'musical' in my previous experience. It was NEW, newer than rock'n'roll, it was uncompromising, it was definitely not mediocre.

In retrospect, what was then a long time, a mere 10.5 yrs later, I was performing my own "booed usic @ t he Telectropheremoanin'quinquennial" on & off stage at the Galaxy Ballroom in the Congress Hotel on January 24, 1984. (2 movies from this are online: "Telectropheremoanin'quinquennial" (a quasi-document of the full event: https://youtu.be/SSP1tJK3pjs ), & "booed usic @ t he Telectropheremoanin'quinquennial": https://archive.org/details/BooedUsic (just the booed usic portion of the evening)). Cage & Tudor's suit & tie performance in wch some talk of sex was incidental had morphed into my zipper pants event in wch sex was forefronted. The philosophy had changed dramatically but the (m)usic had similar modes of production. & it was slightly less than 10 yrs later that Cage was dead & I was participating in a tribute concert to him on October 10, 1993 (a very primitive movie from that called "Sound Cage" is here: https://youtu.be/MamQegRTPGQ ). Given that it's now 24 yrs later than that, that all seems so close together & now seems so far away.

ANYWAY, sometime around this time of hearing those recordings was when I 1st read John Cage, An Anthology. I think I must've read a public library copy b/c this was during a time when I was trying to keep my belongings sparse. Those were the days. They're also long gone. I don't really remember my reading this as having a profound affect on me but it seems like it must have. Rereading it (in this revised edition) I find much of what's described & addressed to still be the work of Cage's that I like the most. Still, I was reading & listening 'voraciously', as the cliché has it, at the time (& still am) so there was plenty other than Cage to take in.

Kostelanetz's "Addendum to [the] Preface" he wrote for the 1st edition on May 14, 1970, says this:

"Twenty Years later, it feels good to see this book back, in somewhat expanded and updated form. Though Cage has changed, my sense of him remains the same, which is to say that he is not just a composer but a master of other arts as well, beginning with poetry. What is missing from this book is a word I coined just after preparing the first edition — polyartist."

[..]

"This new edition now concludes with a greatly expanded catalogue of Cage's compositions, a bibliography of his books, a record of his major visual art projects and a fresh, longer list of recordings." - p xvi

Kostelanetz goes on to quote Duchamp in his addendum: "Everybody is making, not only artists, and maybe in coming centuries there will be the making without the noticing." (p xvii) Duchamp was rejecting "the idea of the artist as a superman" (quote from the same quote) & that's all well & good but I, personally, think that the notion of everyone's an artist leads to an uncritical mindlessness (as opposed to a mindfulness) in wch the ego still dominates but there aren't even any critical standards anymore w/ wch to substantiate anything. Cage's take is on p 12:

"Does this bother you—the assumption that anyone can be an artist, regardless of his skill?

"No. No, not at all. Not at all, That's a European question, you know, not an American question, this whole thing of hierarchy—of wanting to make the most the best. And it took us ages, relatively speaking, to get out of that European things. Many people are now out of it."

This whole business of distinguishing European thought from American thought doesn't interest me much now but I can see how it was important then. However, to me, it's not "this whole thing of hierarchy—of wanting to make the most the best". I'll give an example: if that's the way Cage felt, wd he rather have lived in East Berlin at the time where if he wanted a car for his (fictional) child he might have to apply for it when the baby was born & maybe the 20 yr old grown-up wd get some shit car after a 20 yr wait? B/c that's an instance where the society wdn't be making "the most the best". I don't think it's necessarily 'hierarchical' to prefer that the car runs reliably, that it gets good gas mileage, that it survives well in a crash, & that it can be gotten w/o waiting 20 yrs.

In other words, sure, everybody can make art, everybody can do brain surgery, everybody can choose mushrooms to eat - but Cage wd intervene, as one of his stories tells, if he thought the mushrooms picked might kill the person about to eat them. As such, in Cage's ill-thought-thru argument, Cage becomes part of a 'hierarchy', he becomes a skilled mycologist whose skill has value. People might counter-argue that art is not a life-or-death matter but that making cars & performing brain surgery or picking mushrooms are. I'm simply trying to make the point that any activity worth pursuing is worth pursuing mindfully if one is to take responsibility for the results & that embracing unskilled & skilled approaches as somehow 'equal' is an act in favor of mindlessness.

Kostelanetz, in the addendum, then quotes Stravinsky:

"Is it only that Mr. Cage does things that Europeans do not dare do and that he does them naturally and innocently, not as self-conscious stunts? Whatever the answers, no sleight of hand, no trap-doors, are ever discovered in his performances: in other words, no "tradition" at all, and not only no Bach and no Beethoven, but also no Schoenberg and no Webern either. This is impressive, and no wonder the man on your left keeps saying sehr interessant.—Igor Stranvinsky, in conversation with Robert Craft" - p xvii

Amazing. I don't see a yr attribution for that one but I'd love to know when that was sd. Craft was the conductor who brought us most of Schoenberg on record, all of Webern, & what was at the time all the available Varèse.

Kostelanetz knows his shit, as I've often sd, & he pulls material out of a hat that most people don't know exists. At the beginning of Chapter 1 he quotes something by a man named Edwin Morgan who I've never heard of. The quote begins:

"I have to say poetry and is that nothing and am I saying it I am and I have poetry to say and is that nothing saying it I am nothing and I have poetry to say and that is saying it" [..] "(1965) From The Second Life (Edinburgh University Press), copyright © 1968"

Because Kostelanetz is such a prolific & prominent writer he probably gets books like The Second Life sent to him for review or he's probably forever searching bookstores, as I am, for obscure things that fit his interests. The Second Life might not be that obscure since it was published by a university press but, still, I've never heard of it before so, thank you, Kostelanetz for exposing me to it.

SO, since we're talking innovations in writing here & since people who're mindful of such things are mindful of the dates when they're done (as noted above once already) I go into my personal library & get my copy of Brion Gysin's Brion Gysin Let The Mice In wch has similar permutational txts to see what the dates on those are. The bk itself was published in 1973 by the wonderful Something Else Press. "The Permutated Poems of Brion Gysin" were copyrighted 1960, 1963, & 1973. Given that the latter copyright date was presumably for Brion Gysin Let The Mice In, such poems as the one partially quoted below presumably preceded Morgan's:

I AM THAT I AM
AM I THAT I AM
I THAT AM I AM
THAT I AM I AM
AM THAT I I AM

&, then I might as well throw in some Gertrude Stein:

"I
Am
Pleased
Thoroughly
I
Am
Thoroughly
Pleased.
By.
It.
It is very likely."

- from "Study Nature" (1915), p 197, The Yale Gertrude Stein, edited by Richard Kostelanetz

That Stein is pretty damned precocious & there was a time when I wd've been very impressed by it but I'm currently in post-having-read-Stein's-The Making of Americans (see my review of that here: http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/42323-as-i-was-saying-the-making-of-american... ) -mode so I'm not so impressed anymore. For that matter, I never liked Gysin's permutation poems either. I even had a record by him on the important Hat Hut label called "Orgy Boys" that I found so boring that I got rid of it (unusual for me).

Kostelanetz had a conversation with Cage in 1966. There's probably plenty of things of interest for me in it, all of it probably, but I picked the following as the 1st thing to quote from:

"Do you watch that television often?

"Not right now, it's not working very well. But I generally go to sleep with it on, because it has a timing device so that the thing turns itself off. I use it as a lullaby.

"What do you watch?

"The old movies.

"Did you get a television early?

"I announced my desire to have a television set in my article on Rauschenberg [1961] where I say that we are not so interested in poetry as we are in getting a TV set. I didn't have one at that time; but, having written that, shortly I found myself in a discount house buying one." - p 7

I stopped watching TV when I was 16. That was 1969 or 1970. I've never thought that was a bad decision. I'm sure that if I'd continued to watch TV I wd've got less accomplished. It wasn't until the 1950s that TV started to become common in homes in the US. I grew up in a house that had a black & white TV. I don't remember our ever having a color one before I stopped watching. Since TV was the primary propaganda medium in the US it was what people like my parents consulted if they wanted to know 'what to think' about something. That, of course, & the 'news'papers.

I'm sure that to Cage TV represented the avant-garde of the life-changing technology of the future. It is pretty amazing that he did things like perform his "Water Walk" on TV on the popular TV show "I've got a Secret" in January, 1960 ( https://youtu.be/SSulycqZH-U ). As such, it's no wonder he wanted one. What I do wonder is how long it took him to realize that such a powerful tool wd inevitably be used primarily for brainwashing?

Cage was a pioneer of taking mediums sold as passive consumer items & turning them into tools for active play. I love his work where he has radios & turntables be instruments, works like "Imaginary Landscape No. 1" (1939), "Credo in Us" (1942), "Imaginary Landscape No. 4" (1951), "Radio Music" (1956), etc..

On the other hand, I'm currently reading Joel Sachs's biography of Henry Cowell & I found this passage to contribute to a more well-rounded perception of radio's cultural function:

"Henry's developing perception of radio's potential can be traced through his articles on music for the Encyclopedia Americana's annual supplements. In his review of the year 1927, he mentioned radio only briefly, merely observing that better musicians were being used. Only two years later, radio seemed to him one of the most important forces in the musical world, since its music programming had greatly improved. He blamed radio, however, for a chain of side-effects that made it more threatening than recording. His "informal" survey revealed that up to 80 percent of concerts had been eliminated due to competition from broadcasting. Fewer children studied music as parents decided that radios rendered playing an instrument unnecessary. Consumers bought radios rather than pianos, pushing three leading piano manufacturers—Chickering, Knabe, and Mason and Hamlin—into receivership. Publishers failed as sheet music sales plummeted. Phonographs without built-in radios languished on store shelves. Composers' incomes dropped as performance opportunities shrank. Henry lamented that listeners would forget (or never learn) the acoustical superiority of live performances. Furthermore, radio companies were uninterested in new music. In his survey of 1930, radio looked even more pernicious." - p 218

I've encountered similar complaints that DJs & Karaoke have dramatically cut into the use of musicians at weddings & made it very hard for musicians who'd previously depended on those for a living to survive. Of course, new music is still not very often played on the radio. There are all sorts of explanations for that, the most obvious of wch is that most people don't like new music - or so it appears. But just as consent is manufactured (in the Chomsky critique) so can taste be. It's my opinion that simple-minded culture is deliberately propagated to keep people uncritical of propaganda. But that's an oversimplistic statement.

It's fascinating to be able to read this with the hindsight of a person 47 yrs after the original publishing date of the 1st edition. Cage says this:

"I say, in the "Diary" I mentioned, that we have to see chaos and order as not opposed." - p 9

Now, the 1st 3 of these Diaries were printed in Cage's 1967 bk A Year from Monday & Part Three was printed in a Great Bear Pamphlet in the same yr. Since then, there's also been a multiple-CD release. At the time that John Cage, An Anthology was released how many people wd've been familiar w/ this work? I have both A Year from Monday & the Great Bear Pamphlet.

"True discipline is not learned in order to give it up, but rather in order to give oneself up. Now, most people never even learn what discipline is. It is precisely what the Lord meant when he said, give up your father and mother and follow me. It means give up the things closest to you. It means give yourself up, everything, and do what it is you are going to do. At that point, what have you given up? Your likes, your dislikes, etc." - p 13

I appear to have noted the above b/c it's about discipline - self-discipline being something I respect & often find lacking in most people. However, reading that bit now I just feel like taking some pot-shots at it: "It is precisely what the Lord meant when he said, give up your father and mother and follow me.": How cd Cage say something like that?! I mean the man was 53 or 54 at the time, he wasn't a teenager, hypothetically he wasn't braindead - but such an approach to discipline reeks of cult-like imposition of discipline to turn people into slavish zombies. If you "give yourself up" what's left? Why not just kill yourself entirely?! B/c until you do that you're not likely to give up your "likes, your dislikes, etc." I was probably annoyed by that statement when I 1st read the bk 42 yrs or so ago but now it just strikes me as point-blank stupid.

Cage does get into class somewhat, w/o explicitly addressing it:

"Look at the difference between my life as a composer and La Monte Young's life. He never lived without some kind of support. Look what I had—nothing but opposition until 1949 and 1950.

"What did you do before then?

"Oh, I did everything. I had jobs as an art director for a textile company, also washing dishes, washing walls, doing library research, accompanying dancers. Not until 1960 was I able to live as a musician, so to speak—lecturing and concerts and so on." - p 15… (altro)