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i
have something to say about Cage |
I
want to argue that we
should revere John Cage a little a less and engage with him a
little more. Like
Jacques Derrida, he comes to conclusions that create more
confusion than
clarity - though, on their journey, they generate much light. I
think we should
approach Cage as a provocateur, not a guru since we do him no
favours when we
treat his questions as if they were answers. Charisma
is not genius and
silence is not music; nor are random sounds - if they were, a
currently useful
term would be rendered meaningless. Cage understood this and
characterized his
calculated retreat from musical communication as a spiritual
rather than a
musical discipline. He made his case clearly, now we have to
decide what to
accept and what to resist. It
would be foolish to deny
that Cage was important – even indispensible – but in what
respect, and in what
aspect? That’s the question I attempt to tackle here.
I
HAVE ONE THING TO SAY
ABOUT CAGE AND I’M SAYING IT Speaking of psychotherapy Wittgenstein remarked that our troubles are
not buried in any particular spot but rather that no matter
where we dig we are
bound to unearth them. I was asked to give this paper very close to the conference date, while
I was in the middle of a concert series in America. I said I
wasn’t sure if I
had anything useful to say about John Cage, especially at
such short notice. Marek
suggested that perhaps I speak about Cage and
Plunderphonics. I said I didn’t
really think there was much of a connection. He said, ‘I’m
sure you’ll find
something’. So I dug down into Plunderphonics – and of
course I came up with
what it was I wanted to say about John Cage.
I In
2002,
I ran a year-long radio series called Out of the Blue
Radio for Resonance
FM in London. The idea was simple: each night between 11.30
and midnight, I’d
play an uninterrupted recording of what someone else was
hearing somewhere else
on the planet. For material I contacted friends around the
world and asked them
to make real-time recordings between 23:30 and 00:00 Greenwich
Mean Time. They
could be where they liked and do what they liked, but the
recordings had to be
continuous and unedited. Then they sent them to me, and I
played them[1]. Half
a
year into the series, ORTF in Vienna asked me if I’d make a
‘best of’
programme. Since that would have gone directly against the
spirit of the series
– which of course was based on the premiss that, framed, and
removed from their
normalising contexts, all sounds are interesting - I
said I’d make a
programme instead based on not choosing any of the
material. To that end,
I selected 30 of the recordings at random and extracted the
first minute from
the first and the second minute from the second - and so on –
finally linking
all the fragments together to play in a continuous stream. These
elements
must seem familiar: arbitrary but specified recording times;
taking the
sound exactly as it comes; randomised selection of extracts;
playing order
determined by chance operations… it sounds quite Cagean. Even
the use of environmental
sounds is apposite: Cage himself said:
‘If you want to know the truth of the matter, the music I
prefer, even to my
own or anybody else’s, is what we are hearing if we are just
quiet.[2]’ II In
1953,
with the assistance of Louis and Bebe Barron, Earle Brown,
Morton Feldman
and David Tudor, Cage made his first tape piece, Williams
Mix, for which
he used recordings that included ‘all
possible
environmental sounds’, edited together according to a
fantastic
and complicated physical matrix determined in advance by
chance procedures[3].
Like so much of Cage’s work Willams Mix was precise
and prescriptive as
to form but indeterminate as to content. In this case the
content was simply
various categories of sounds, many of them environmental. And
for Cage – and
certainly at that time – musak, juke boxes and
portable transistor
radios were all ubiquitous urban environmental sounds… The
term
was coined in 1985 by John Oswald to describe his meticulous
manipulations
of other people’s recordings, a procedure he had begun to
experiment with in
the late 1960s. Sometimes he restricted himself to a single
recording or, as he
said, a macrosample. A
classic
example might be his reworking of Dolly Parton’s recording of
Buck Ram’s The
Great Pretender,
something
of
a plunderphonic showcase, since it confines itself to a single
calculated
procedure – a progressive and calculated reduction in playback
speed – in order
to make a number of quite dramatic commentaries; firstly, on
the song itself -
half way through, Dolly audibly changes sex, opening the text
up to very
different interpretations; secondly, on the music – in which
background becomes
foreground as harmonies that are merely functional at normal
speeds take on a
whole new musical character; thirdly, on the nature of sound
recording itself, as
an unreliable witness and, finallly, on the way we listen.[4]
That’s a lot of birds with a single stone. Oswald
himself
set strict limits. In particular, he always worked reflexively, making the materials he used comment
on themselves, usually according to some metalinguistic
scheme. And his selection and treatments of recordings are
never
randomised, they are always highly crafted and serve at least
two critical
functions: firstly, they are culture-critical, since he always
makes his
samples comment either on themselves or on the cultural norms
within which they
operate - which is definitely unCagean – and secondly, they
are
medium-critical, that is to say they are always about
listening - which
is a little more Cagean[5].
That
said,
that there is no evidence that Cage knew anything about
Oswaldian plunderphonics.
He certainly never used the term. In fact, it’s likely he
would have
disapproved, as he did of improvisation, because it’s too human
a
process and too much tainted by intention.
However, he certainly produced works
that could be – and have been - claimed as early instances of
punderphonia. In
his 1952 Imaginary Landscape No.5, for instance, he
uses chance
operations to determine the durations and the order of a set
of 42 recordings –
preferably jazz records – which are to be selected by the
performers or the
producer. Similarly, in Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951), he calls for 12 radios to catch whatever is on air at
the time of the performance - much of which, inevitably, is
other people’s
finished work. And in 33 1/3, first performed in 1969 at the
University of
California, he arranged for 8 or 12 record players and 300 LPs
to be scattered around
in a large room - and then left the audience to get on with
it. The
first
point to make is that, intellectually and aesthetically these
works did
not intend to be plunderphonic, as such – and in spite
of his mighty
efforts to quell them, Cage, like the rest of us, couldn’t
help but have
intentions. The second is that they do prefigure a
philosophical adjustment
that underpins Oswald’s more explicit proposition, since Cage
assumes, though
he doesn’t say it, that in the modern world, recorded sounds
and broadcast
sounds are just another
feature of
the urban soundscape. Inasmuch as recorded music is
rained down on us from all
sides, it’s no different in any meaningful sense from birdsong
or traffic
noise. Here, Cage seems to want to equate technology with
nature, at least to
the extent that both of them sink indistinguishably into the
congeries of
sounds in which we are all involuntarily immersed. And since
these sounds use
us, so equally, he implies, we should be free to use them. In
this
reading, it is only our ability to aestheticise that
sets us apart
from ambient nature and brute technology. But Cage wants to
erase that
difference in order that ‘we
become the sounds
and the sounds
become us’;
in fact he hopes that everything might
finally be reduced to a kind of numinous creative flux that is
no longer meaningful
but simply there. ‘Sounds one hears’, Cage says, …
‘are music’.[6]
This is one of many reasons why it is generally believed
that Cage himself believed
that all sounds
are music.
I have found no
evidence that he ever said this in so many words, but
certainly he implied it, over
and over again and again. Perhaps
more
useful and more measured was his statement in the 1937 Credo
in
which he predicted that ‘electrical
instruments
… will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard...’[7]
But there’s the rub: What is it that makes a
purpose musical? That
is what Cage doesn’t say. What
he does say is, ’the
sound experience
I prefer to all others, is the experience of silence. And
this silence, almost
anywhere in the world today, is traffic. If you listen to
Beethoven, it’s
always the same, but if you listen to traffic, it’s always
different’.
This seems to say that traffic isn’t so much the same as
Beethoven, but more
interesting than Beethoven. Now I think Cage wants to be more
nuanced than that
but - like Stockhausen’s notorious comments after 9.11 - in
the soundbite world
in which we live such nuances are all too easily lost. With
the best will in
the world it is hard not to see this statement as either a
provocation, or
irresponsibly reductive.
III
Let’s
get
back to plunderphonics. When Cage, in the Credo, says
‘any and all sounds
that can be heard, ’
this of course must include recordings of other people’s
finished work. You
could argue that Imaginary Landscape No 5 is a
test-run of that
conclusion. The same understanding underpins plunderphonic
theory: all
recordings, it says, are raw materials, including those that
are already cooked
- a radical notion and, not surprisingly, one wholly rejected
by the music
industry and commercial copyright holders. Intellectually,
however, it’s perfectly
valid. In fact it’s rather attractive, since it’s both
rational analytically
and anarchic socially. And – the reason I mention it here - it
reinforces -
when it comes to our attitude toward those materials - the essential
Cagean divide between what is
human and what is not human; between intentionality
and letting the
chips fall where they
may. Oswald favours the former; he wants to confect;
Cage the latter, he
wants the sounds to be themselves. If we accept his
suggestion we will
also have to forego the idea of Art and replace it, at least
initially, with
the concept of aesthetic listening. But even that will
be just be a step
on the road for Cage because, eventually, what he wants is
that the ‘… sounds
should be just sounds….in order
that each sound may become the Buddha.’ (1959) That’s his agenda; that’s his final frontier. So
now
I come to the one thing I want to say about John Cage. This
common
understanding - so often repeated, that - after Cage - all
sound has
become music is a gaping door through which all of
Pandora’s mad troubles
have flown - and we really ought to close it. Music is
a perfectly good
term; it’s a discriminating, useful
term - even if we
constantly have to negotiate its precise meaning, which in any
case is
continually changing. Not least, it’s a useful term because it
orientates us in
a world of noise. I
can accept loose understandings, I can accept working
definitions:
Wittgenstein’s family resemblances make sense to me –
indeed I think in
such territories as this, hard definitions are merely
self-defeating, as
Jacques Derrida has repeatedly demonstrated. When everything
is music,
then the word ceases to have any meaning. It’s game over. We
achieve Nirvana and
there’s nothing else to say. Cage of course knew this. In a
different context
he expressed the problem himself with limpid clarity: ‘Classification’, he said
’ceases when it’s no longer possible to
establish oppositions’.[8] I want to add that all sound
is music is a perfect example of that error.
IV I
also want to say that music is a category that is already
spoken for and that
not all work with sound falls into it. In fact, music
works in a
completely different way from, for instance, soundscape or
sound art or radio
art, or for that matter, works generated using chance
procedures. Most of all,
I want to say that we urgently need a term – or terms – to
describe the many
new ways of organising sound that have emerged in the course
of the last
century, forms and practices that were brought into being by
the collapse of
tonality, the invention of sound recording, computers,
electrification, and the
acquisition of what Marshall McLuhan called a new electric
consciousness.
Sound
art,
sound installations, soundscapes, plunderphonics, hörspiel – none of these media engages in musical thinking. And none of them is a musical work. Critics are
right to say ‘That’s not music’, they just fail to understand
that the authors
are not trying to make music. Edgard Varese understood
this perfectly when
he said that music was just a subset of the broader category Sound. All music is sound, but all sound is not music. Varese, as we know,
preferred to describe what he did as organised sound.
V My own baseline is that music, in order to
be music, has to operate as an intentional sign. As a
communicative
medium, music belongs in an arbitrary but socially forged
system of
signification. And to be clear, when I say sign, I mean this
in the tripartite Piercean
and not the bipartite Sausaurrian sense: a sign as I
understand it is something
that means something
to someone
on a shared ground. In other
words, it is a quintessentially human transaction. By
systematically subverting
intention, and therefore what is essentially meaningful
and human, from
the construction of his listening objects, Cage deliberately
removes the
possibility of communication – that is to say, of using
patterns of sound in a
way that grows out of, and operates meaningfully on, a shared semantic ground.
So, by my understanding, that means that whatever it is
- it isn’t music.[9]
That’s not a criticism. It’s not a value
judgement. It’s just a necessary work of semantic maintenance.
VI Let’s look at the same question from another
perspective. It’s a common view today that Classical Art music
became
overheated, that it overemphasised the importance of the
composer as a genius
or messenger of truth and became a quasi-religious ritual,
reducing listeners
to the role of supplicants and worshippers - a paradigm that
an increasing body
of composers, especially in the 1960s and pre-eminently in
America, began
strongly to work against. Cage took the most radical position
of all, not so
much addressing the problem as simply reversing
its terms. Genius and self-expression - the
handing down of sublime
experience - was to be denied by means of the rigorous
interpolation of chance
procedures. That would ensure that composers, even if they
wanted to, would be
unable to shape the sound according to their will. Any meaning
then would have
to come from the listener, since the composer had
taken great pains to
say nothing.[10] Work
produced in this way is, of course, no longer communicating on
what Pierce
calls common ground, or within what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls
a language game.
And that means, by definition, that such work cannot operate
as a sign. And
therefore, by my lights, it is not music. This is not to say that Cage’s aleatoric
works can’t offer great listening experiences. They can. And
they certainly
function brilliantly as pedagogical interventions, not least
because in their
role as ingeniously designed experiments, they make some of
the problems music
faces today transparently clear. They can also just be good to
listen to. And, much
as Duchamp had done with his readymades - and on the same
ground - Cage makes
the heady and seductive proposition that everything can be
art. What I’m
suggesting is that we take this as a question, a
salutary pedagogical intervention,
not a dictat. And of course, that’s why I’m not discussing Cage’s music. When people ask me
if Twice Around the Earth
is music, I say, of course not….. but I crafted it, I
meant something by
it - and I think of it as art. And, as I pointed out at the
beginning, in many
respects, it is not so far, formally, from the procedures that
underlie Williams
mix: it uses a lot of random selection and
assembly-procedures, and uses
them precisely to make the point so often made by Cage, that
if you just listen
to sounds, they are
fascinating
in themselves. They wake you up to the world. That said, Twice
Around the
Earth is not philosophically Cagean. For a start I
heavily stacked the deck
by moving from recording to recording, and location to
location, quickly enough
to provide the listener with continuous stimulation - none of
the individual
fragments lasts more than about 50 seconds; then I was
meticulous about
deciding exactly where in each fragment to move to exactly
where in the next
fragment, as well as how to build the links - with fast or
slow cross-fades,
hard cuts, asymmetric cuts, and so on. In fact I made
aesthetic decisions all
the way through, with an imaginary listener in mind. In this
way, I broke all
the fundamental tenets of Cagean construction and aesthetics.
I was not
experimenting, and I was carefully and deliberately shaping
the listening
experience. So, while there is a family resemblance between Twice
Around the
Earth and the aleatoric method, the two in essence are
constitutionally and
philosophically different. On the other hand, neither method
produces music, and that’s something they have in
common. VII Which brings us back to my one thing.
Failure
to accept Cage’s questions and experiments as
questions and experiments
is standing in the way of our rethinking the terminology we
apply to the many
new and exciting forms of sound organisation that surround us
today. And this,
in turn, prevents us from rethinking our understanding of the
forms themselves[11]
What I am suggesting is that we all just have to stop talking about Cage - and a whole universe of other innovative and interesting soundworks - as music; and then think hard enough about them to see what they actually are. After that perhaps we’ll know what to call them. And, more importantly, our thinking will have changed and we’ll be able to see more clearly exactly what the problem is.
[1] This
programme and other offshoots of the
series have appeared on two CDs so far: Twice
around
the Earth, ReR Megacorp, ReR CC2, in 2002 and There and Back Again, ReR Megacorp ReRCC3, in 2006. [2] Conversing
with Cage, ed Kostelanetz, 1988. [3] It
took a year to assemble, lasted
4'15" and consisted of eight independent quarter-inch
tapes each projected
from its own speaker, with the eight speakers being then
distributed throughout
the performance space. It was premiered at the 25th Year Retrospective Concert Of The Music Of John Cage on May
15, 1958, and recorded by George Avakian who included it
in a three-LP set
released in 1994 to commemorate the concert. Cage
specified very similar
materials for this Fontana
Mix in
1958. [4] All of Oswald’s plunderphonic pieces work in this multi- layered way. [5] Oswald
himself
claimed that he was simply sharing his own idiosyncratically interactive way of listening. [And I note
that to answer the
question: why more Cagean? Would
mean recognising what a narrow range of
possibilities Cage’s music
actually explores.
[6]
John Cage. A Year From Monday
(p163), 1968 [7]
"The Future of Music: Credo"
(1937) delivered as a speech in Seattle. Published in
Silence, Wesleyan
University Press, 1961. [8] John Cage ‘Diary: how to
improve the world (you will only make matters worse)’,
1968 (revised)’ in ‘M:
Writings '67-72’, London, 1973. [9] Equally if the sounds are ‘just themselves’ they don’t stand for anything else and though they may signify to a listener, they are not part of a signifying system. [10] “The
emotions - love, mirth, the heroic,
wonder, tranquillity, fear, anger, sorrow, disgust - are
in the audience.”
Silence, 1961 [11]
The
artists and originators don’t need terminologies to
work, Kafka was Kafkaesque
without the need for any critical superstructure.
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