Confessions d'un Compositeur

by John Cage

C’est avec la plus totale sincérité que John Cage décrit ici le cheminement qui l’a conduit à devenir compositeur. L’éventail de ses références sont vertigineuses : les mouvements de la danse moderne, le jazz ou encore les rites des Indiens Navajo. Sans crier gare, il livre, de manière extrêmement limpide, une théorie de la musique tirée de son expérience. Pour Cage, la musique est « l’organisation par n’importe quel moyen de n’importe quel son ». Surtout, il replace son expérience personnelle dans l’histoire. On y apprend notamment que sa musique était diffusée à la radio durant la guerre pour démontrer que l’Amérique aimait l’Orient… Ces confessions fourmillent d’anecdotes édifiantes. John Cage se révèle ici, outre un « maître du hasard » à la manière de Duchamp, un immense pédagogue.

Genres: Music

49 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2013

About the author

John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, philosopher, poet, music theorist, artist, printmaker, and amateur mycologist and mushroom collector. A pioneer of chance music, electronic music and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.

Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33″, the three movements of which are performed without a single note being played. The content of the composition is meant to be perceived as the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed, rather than merely as four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence, and the piece became one of the most controversial compositions of the 20th century. Another famous creation of Cage's is the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by placing various objects in the strings), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces, the best known of which is Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).

His teachers included Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1933–35), both known for their radical innovations in music and coincidentally their shared love of mushrooms, but Cage's major influences lay in various Eastern cultures. Through his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, Cage came to the idea of chance-controlled music, which he started composing in 1951. The I Ching, an ancient Chinese classic text on changing events, became Cage's standard composition tool for the rest of his life. In a 1957 lecture, Experimental Music, he described music as "a purposeless play" which is "an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living".

Reviews

[Grig O']

First of all - this is a bilingual edition, so no, I'm not reading French yet, sadly.

Now, Cage wrote this essay in the early 50s, around when he was preparing to release his silent piece, which was arguably the largest tipping point in 20th century music.

Cage writes with heart, insight and clarity, and it's easy to see why his ideas caught on so well, at least in "serious music". Meanwhile, his enemies - fame, money, self-expression, and success - are alive and well in pop music and beyond. This is where Cage's ideas might still be highly revolutionary.

A couple of quotes, since this book was borrowed so this is as good a place as any to place some highlights:

"My feeling was that beauty yet remains in intimate situations; that it is quite hopeless to think and act impressively in public terms. This attitude is escapist, but I believe it is wise rather than foolish to escape from a bad situation. I now saw harmony, for which I had no natural feeling, as a device to make music impressive, loud and big, in order to enlarge audiences and increase box-office success"

Isn't that convenient, heh. There is a lesson here though - find your limitations and use them. And yeah go ahead and make up justifications for them - we all do that all the time, but with artists it seems to be a specialty.

"I allowed myself to indulge in the fantasy [...] to ban not only recordings, but radio, television, the newspapers, and Hollywood. We might then realize that phonographs and radios are not musical instruments, that what the critics write is not a musical matter but rather a literary matter, that it makes little difference if one of us likes one piece and another another; it is rather the age-old process of making and using music and our becoming more integrated as personalities through this making and using that is of real value."

Oh boy has THIS gotten worse in the last 60 years :)

Welp, you might think from these incendiary quotes that Cage is some crazy radical. And while he is that, he's also reasonable and laid-back. So if you like music and you get the chance, read this. It's 40 pages, what have you got to lose?

[Alisa Cupcakeland]

I really enjoy reading John Cage, I think he has a very modern understanding of music and it's role in society and it's simply fascinating to read. I did not know about Cage's interest in Jung's ideas, and how he applied them into the field of music.

Even though he complains about the field of aesthetics, I think his essays are in a big part a discussion on aesthetics and the sensible characteristics of music. But overall, they are a demonstration of how involved Cage is with music, and in particular, with sound and it's organization.

[Blaisecendras]

très chouette !!

[Ben]

a little book I look forward to rereading. this time with a sheaf of manuscript paper and a sharp pencil.