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John Cage: An Anthology
For years he was dismissed as an eccentric exponent of arbitrary noise punctuated by silence. Now, however, John Cage is universally acknowledged as the most influential composer of his generation. Cage's activities as composer, graphic artist, poet, teacher, critic and—not least—writer are explored in this collection of readings by and about this avant-garde pioneer, covering his most innovative period, 1933–1970. The main concern of John Cage: An Anthology is, of course, music: here composers and critics such as Virgil Thompson, Henry Cowell, Edward Downes, and Michael Zwerin analyze Cage's contribution to sound; Cage comments on his own works, such as Sonatas and Interludes, Cartridge Music , and Williams Mix ; and the editor, Richard Kostelanetz, also includes Cage's groundbreaking essay, ”Future of Music: Credo” and his perceptive remarks about composers from Satie and Webern to Stockhausen, But this anthology by no means neglects the other aspects of Cage's creativity. Cage writes fondly here of his collaboration with Merce Cunningham, the space-time avant-garde dancer and choreographer; Barbara Rose and Dore Ashton review Cage's influence on the contemporary art scene; his poetry is both represented herein and analyzed by Kostelanetz; and his teaching is remembered vividly by his students. Including a newly updated bibliography, discography, and catalog of compositions, as well as more than sixty illustrations, this collection is invaluable not only for students, teachers, and scholars, but for all who take a lively interest in the growth of the avant-garde in the twentieth century.
- GenresMusicNonfiction
237 pages, Paperback
First published March 21, 1991
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About the author
John Cage
250 books221 followersJohn 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".
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".
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November 20, 2017
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/...
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/4... ) -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
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/...
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/4... ) -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
September 5, 2018
John Cage , on his birthday September 5
Sounds, silences, and their structure in time; John Cage hit the reset button at the historical apex of musical theory, inverting its organizing principles to create randomness, composition by chance, and a chaos of sounds. A disciple of Schoenberg with the iconoclastic vision of Picasso, he sought to hear in a new way; his music is the equivalent of the Dadaist collage in art and the cut up method of literature as practiced by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs.
John Cage sought escape from the prison of Time; he was a revolutionary and liberator, his music created as experiments in destructuring our ideas about music, and his performances were anarchic social events of dance and music which were the first Happenings and became a touchstone of the counterculture. His invented percussion instruments and prepared piano innovations created new sounds and paved the way to the modern keyboard and sound engineering, just as his compositional innovations opened a door to ambient music.
Silence: Lectures and Writings, the book I had listed as a context reading for my high school forensics students since I created the program, first of a five book series including A Year from Monday, M, Empty Words and X . These comprise his early theoretical and critical studies, in which he forges a new way of composing and understanding music.
John Cage: an Anthology would be a good place to start for anyone today who is beginning a study of music, thereafter reading Composition in Retrospect, Every Day is a Good Day, For the Birds: John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles, and Musicage: Cage Muses on Words * Art * Music.
His recorded discography includes The Barton Workshop plays John Cage, which is wonderful as are all Barton Workshop albums, the Zen and Indian inspired Sonatas and Interludes and String Quartet in Four Parts, The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, one of many works which set to music Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Music of Changes, among his first works using the I Ching to compose by random chance, Cheap Imitation, his homage to Satie for piano, the anarchic Number Pieces, and the five Europeras. Then we have the bizarre coordinates grid notation of Variations 1, Concert for Piano and Orchestra, and Fontana Mix, intractable graphic puzzles for the musicians to solve while playing.
Here's a link to a YouTube playlist:
https://youtu.be/UPzxqhNQpkE?list=PLV...
Sounds, silences, and their structure in time; John Cage hit the reset button at the historical apex of musical theory, inverting its organizing principles to create randomness, composition by chance, and a chaos of sounds. A disciple of Schoenberg with the iconoclastic vision of Picasso, he sought to hear in a new way; his music is the equivalent of the Dadaist collage in art and the cut up method of literature as practiced by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs.
John Cage sought escape from the prison of Time; he was a revolutionary and liberator, his music created as experiments in destructuring our ideas about music, and his performances were anarchic social events of dance and music which were the first Happenings and became a touchstone of the counterculture. His invented percussion instruments and prepared piano innovations created new sounds and paved the way to the modern keyboard and sound engineering, just as his compositional innovations opened a door to ambient music.
Silence: Lectures and Writings, the book I had listed as a context reading for my high school forensics students since I created the program, first of a five book series including A Year from Monday, M, Empty Words and X . These comprise his early theoretical and critical studies, in which he forges a new way of composing and understanding music.
John Cage: an Anthology would be a good place to start for anyone today who is beginning a study of music, thereafter reading Composition in Retrospect, Every Day is a Good Day, For the Birds: John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles, and Musicage: Cage Muses on Words * Art * Music.
His recorded discography includes The Barton Workshop plays John Cage, which is wonderful as are all Barton Workshop albums, the Zen and Indian inspired Sonatas and Interludes and String Quartet in Four Parts, The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, one of many works which set to music Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Music of Changes, among his first works using the I Ching to compose by random chance, Cheap Imitation, his homage to Satie for piano, the anarchic Number Pieces, and the five Europeras. Then we have the bizarre coordinates grid notation of Variations 1, Concert for Piano and Orchestra, and Fontana Mix, intractable graphic puzzles for the musicians to solve while playing.
Here's a link to a YouTube playlist:
https://youtu.be/UPzxqhNQpkE?list=PLV...
June 8, 2012
Got about half-way through before returning it to the library. This is a compilation of various articles by or about Cage. Some good facts to look up as a reference.
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