Three Thousand Seven Hundred Forty-Seven Words about John Cage

Three Thousand Seven Hundred Forty-Seven Words about John CageAuthor(s): Edward MorrisSource: Notes, Second Series, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Mar., 1967), pp. 468-476Published by: Music Library AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/895075 .

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THREE THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED FORTY- SEVEN WORDS ABOUT JOHN CAGE

By EDWARD MORRIS

John Cage tells good stories. I like the pointless ones best, but the jokes are nice, too. There are 117 stories or large fragments of stories in Silence, as I count.

One afternoon at Cornell Bill Holmes was playing the flute, Bill Austin the piano, and John Hsu the viola da gamba. They were reading a piece by Christian Wolff. Christian Wolff had composed the piece but he had never heard it. In each part of the piece the game was to be played accord-

ing to a new set of rules. There was a good deal of silence. John Hsu looked more and more like a man consumed by a desire to play the viola da gamba. In the last section of the piece he suddenly played a beautiful five-note melodic figure, like something you might hear in Marin Marais, all crafted and modeled. Chris Wolff was there. With his customary gentle- ness he said, "Sorry, that's wrong. You may play any five notes, but each one must have a different color."

One Thursday Ernest Sanders was in Barnes Hall, at Cornell, giving a lecture on Musical Structures in the French Gothic. He said that the vernacular motet-writers who came after Perotin had used refined arith- metical or numerological models in composing their tunes. Naturally enough, they thought of 12 as a sacred number. After the lecture, John Hsu said "Boy, that analysis reminds me of the serial composers." The

analysis reminded me of the way John Cage opposes the strictness of numbered time to the looseness of talk, when he composes a lecture. John Cage believes that one need no longer be "concerned with tonality or

atonality, Schoenberg or Stravinsky (the twelve tones or the twelve

expressed as seven plus five)." [68-9] Counting is possessing. John Cage measures from zero, watching a stopwatch. Satie, too, is a free measurer.

The author is Associate Professor of French literature at Cornell University. His words constitute a review of: Silence. Lectures and Writings by John Cage. Cambridge, Mass., and London: M.I.T. Press [1966]. [xii, 276 p., paperback; $2.95. A reprinting of the original edition (Wesleyan University Press, 1961)]. Otherwise unspecified numbers in square brackets are page- references.

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"Satie despised art. He was going nowhere. The artist counts: 7,8,9, etc. Satie appears at unpredictable points springing always from zero: 112, 2, 49, no etc. The absence of transition is characteristic." [78-9] The next

day it was Friday.

"Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we're living." [95] It follows that "The highest purpose is to have no

purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature in her manner of

operation." [155] Such a high aesthetic of course makes extreme demands of selflessness, askesis, acceptance: "Some people may now be indignant and insist on saying that they control life. They are the same ones who insist on controlling and judging art." [131] For them, "no life: Hamlet, fear, guilt, concern, responsibility." [132] One such person, much concerned with Hamlet: Mallarm6. Light-years out beyond the divergence of their ethical purposes he and Cage meet again, talking turkey: UN COUP DE DES JAMAIS N'ABOLIRA LE HASARD [Oeuvres com- pletes, Paris, 1945, pp. 457-77].

One day I was listening to John Cage's record Indeterminacy (1959) but as I had to use a listening-room with headsets I found that even when the "Loudness" was turned down very soft the tape- and prepared-piano- noises and especially the whistles hurt my ears. Many of the stories were difficult to understand because I remembered them almost verbatim from Silence. (John Cage suggests in Silence that recordings are an abomina- tion. "The reason they've no music in Texas is because they have recordings in Texas." [126]) Just then, taking Silence in hand, I noticed that in telling the story of Dr. Heyman and the hottest day of the year John Cage said "Just the other day I went to the dentist" instead of "One day I went to the dentist." Was that because 1961 was two years away from 1959? Telling the long story of David Tudor and the spilled Oriental spices in one minute, according to plan, wasn't easy, and John Cage said "plastic containers of spices" instead of "containers of spices." Perhaps his eye had skipped to the beginning of the next sentence: "Plastic bags of dried beans." He said "All these things were mixed together" where he should have said "mixed with each other," and that rather altered the following construction, "and with the excelsior." In the story about Schoenberg and principles, John Cage, whose usual diction is impeccable Standard American, had pronounced "s'lution," but only at the first of the four occurrences of the word. I wondered whether flawless execution of

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the ninety one-minute determinate stories composing Indeterminacy were

possible, even leaving musical distractions out of account. Certainly it was curious and exciting that the record had eternalized the contingent or willful alterations and the random imperfections of this one reading. (John Cage composes pieces where the number of sounds is determined by the number of imperfections in the paper he's composing on.) It would take many hours of close listening to find them all.

It was Sunday. John Hsu and Bill Austin were in Barnes Hall. They were playing a concert. After playing some brilliant and demanding pieces by Marin Marais, John Hsu paused, stood up, took up his viola da gamba in his left hand, walked downstage, and talked to the audience. He said that the next piece, a suite by Antoine Forqueray, had most likely not been performed in public for more than two hundred years. It could wait five more minutes. (Is Forqueray New Music?) He told a story about Marais who was said to play the viol as sweetly as an angel, while Forqueray played with the fury of the Devil himself. The Marais pieces were from a collection of do-it-yourself suites in the Bibliotheque Na- tionale: the performer chooses any one of the several Preludes Marais provides, follows it with any one of the Allemandes, next chooses and adds a Sarabande, and so on. (Is Marais Experimental Music? "I no longer object to the word 'experimental.' I use it in fact to describe all the music that especially interests me and to which I am devoted." [7]) The first Rigaudon of the Forqueray suite, "Le Carillon de Passy," has a supple, shifty, ambiguous meter, and the ornaments play around with about as many notes as in a gamelan piece. As far as I could hear, John Hsu played them all. (Is giving up Forqueray easy for an American? For a Chinese American? "Giving up Beethoven, the emotional climaxes and all, is fairly simple for an American...Jazz is equivalent to Bach [steady beat, de- pendable motor]...Giving up Bach, jazz, and order is difficult." [262-3]) John Hsu and Bill Austin (who teaches Beethoven and jazz) played the Forqueray with mastery, as though they thought it was a masterpiece. ("WE TEMPORARILY SEPARATE THINGS FROM LIFE [FROM CHANGING]... WHEN WE SEPARATE MUSIC FROM LIFE WHAT WE GET IS ART [A COMPENDIUM OF MASTERPIECES]... THAT SEPARATION...PROTECTS US FROM LIVING." [44]) The music kept changing; nobody heard the ambient noise; the people in Barnes Hall looked alive, like people unprotected from irritation and wonder. They strained to enjoy all the notes. Then the Forqueray ended: it stopped happening and became a masterpiece which had been artfully played. The people applauded. Which event were they applauding?

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One evening about 1953 there were some people sitting in the Richard Winslows' sitting room in Middletown. It was after a concert by the New Music Quartet. The people were entertaining themselves by drink- ing beer and talking. Broadus Earle was telling a story about the recording of the Cage quartet. One of the players had been unsure about the expression to be given to a certain phrase. He asked John Cage. John Cage hesitated. Then, picking up an object from the table, he said, "You see this ashtray? Play it like that."

(ZERO) "It will not be easy...for Europe to give up being Europe. It will, nevertheless, and must: for the world is one world now." [75] John Cage has known Schoenberg and Varese, Stockhausen and Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, among others. He consults the I-Ching and its chance, Chinese operations to determine the form, content, and duration of his composi- tions and lectures. For all his cosmopolitan breadth he is very American. "We are, as Gertrude Stein said, the oldest country in the twentieth century." [73] Gracefully he takes place among such empirical rough-and- readies as H. D. Thoreau, Buckminster Fuller, Benjamin Whorf, Charles Ives. Or apparently more civilized types like Charles Pierce, who wrote in 1892: "By thus admitting pure spontaneity or life as a character of the universe, acting always and everywhere though restrained within narrow bounds by law, producing infinitesimal departures from law continually, and great ones with infinite infrequency, I account for all the variety and diversity of the universe..." [Values in a Universe of Chance, Garden City, N. Y., 1958, p. 175]. (THREE) "Noises, too, had been dis-criminated against; and being American, having been trained to be sentimental, I fought for noises. I liked being on the side of the underdog. I got police permission to play sirens." [117] Cage is for Europeans the most fruitful and the most unsettling of American presences. Listen to Pierre Boulez talking about him. (Don't bother, though, to read the smug and provin- cially Parisian reviews accorded Merce Cunningham by journals like Le Nouvel Observateur. Do read what Jean-Francois Revel, a Parisian man of the World, wrote in L'Oeil [juillet-aout 1964, p.7] about Rauschen- berg, when Rauschenberg, amidst a furor of cultural xenophobia on all sides and especially the American, won the grand prize at the Venice Biennale.) "My humor resembles that of Cromwell. I also owe much to Christopher Columbus, because the American spirit has occasionally tapped me on the shoulder, and I have been delighted to feel its ironically glacial bite" [that old American Erik Satie, apud W. W. Austin, Music in the Twentieth Century, New York, 1966, p. 158]. (FIVE) It is pleasant

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to read John Cage, preoccupied with "the present need for discontinuity," [83] sometimes writing smooth, continuous exposition: "History of Ex- perimental Music in the United States" [67-75]. Bill Austin writes, i

propos of the continuous history of experimental music in the one world, and of Debussy, "The abyss is the freedom from all habits of musical thought, social and personal-a theoretical freedom to choose anything from the infinite realms of possible tonal and rhythmic relations among sounds" [op.cit., p.33]. Silence is, among other things, a good manifesto. All good manifestoes, by being doctrinaire and extremist, light up a constant of artistic experience: brinksmanship. "Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating." [3] "Which is more musical, a truck

passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?" [41] Even in the world of Louis XIV, there was La Fontaine, who went to the edge of the gulf of spoken language, and listened. (EIGHT) In fact, though, Cage is above doctrine. He is always talking ad hoc and, like a craftsman, addressing himself to the material at hand. Whether he be asking thirty- two questions, or forty-four more ["Communication," 41, 42] or composing a speech of five parts in the proportion 7,6,14,7, each line composed in four measures to be read with "the rubato which one uses in everyday speech" ["Lecture on Nothing," 109 sq.], or composing another where each line requires one second for reading ["Changes," 18-34], or just reasoning or telling stories, Cage makes English dance. One part of Silence, about dance, is called "Grace and Clarity." "Grace is not here used to mean prettiness; it is used to mean the play with and against the clarity of the rhythmic structure." [91-2] That says it. Whatever John Cage may say, and I think he would know how to say anything, it seems unfortunately not possible for him to escape his destiny, which is to be an artist. A funny, respectful, polite, supersensitive, noble one, at that.

One Monday afternoon this year three musicians gave a very much alive concert of new music for flute, for piano, for flute and piano, and for flute, piano, and percussion. Two pieces were Klavierstiicke II and III (1954) by Stockhausen. The last three pieces were Three Improvisations for Flute, Piano, and Percussion (1963) by Joscelyn Godwin. Joscelyn Godwin was one of the three musicians. In the Improvisations, when the notes are fixed, the rhythm is to be improvised, or the time-values; or vice-versa; or the flute may play given notes while piano and percussion make themselves up as they go. Cues and signals are exchanged. It all sounds fine. At the end a listener shouted "Bravo." Bill Austin said he was pretty sure

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this was the first time Stockhausen had been played in public concert at Cornell.

Another Sunday Stanley Weiner was playing the violin in Barnes Hall. He

began playing his own Caprice in C minor, "In Hommage to Joseph Szigeti." There were not very many notes and they were very sweet and rich. In the parking lot somebody several times revved up an asthmatic

Harley Davidson with no muffler, hoping it would live, not die. Stanley Weiner held a few more notes. Then he stopped playing, dropped his violin to his side, and turned to the audience with a sweet, broad, funny smile. Stanley Weiner is a large man, an American who lives in Brussels. I think he must like jokes. And noises. The Harley Davidson lived. Stan-

ley Weiner started the piece again, from the beginning.

One afternoon in Barnes Hall, about the time Pierre Boulez was making arrangements for the Paris production of Wozzeck, Pierre Boulez gave a fine lecture on poetry and music. He told how he had gone about fitting music to a sonnet by Mallarm6. With craftsmanship he told how he liked to see instruments theatrically placed on a stage, and where the conductor should be and how much or how little power the conductor should have to conduct, that is, to determine the acts of the instrumentalists. The Barnes Hall stage is very wide. Pierre Boulez walked all over it. On the stage there were a pickup and amplifier, some loudspeakers, and a grand piano with the lid up. Pierre Boulez made only one deliberate noise that wasn't talking: at one point he walked to the piano and played a loud, low tone-cluster.

In an introductory course on French Literature in which I teach, I find, in dealing, under pressure of time, with rich, cumbersome books like Pantagruel or Du c6td de chez Swann, that the most lively and rewarding classes are the ones which I begin by asking a student, chosen at random, to slip a finger into the book, any old place, without looking. He (she) then reads out the sentence which has offered itself, and we spend the rest of the hour attempting to explain that sentence and its insertion into paragraph, page, chapter, book, life work, French literature, history. I have learned that we never fail, in the course of that attempt, to ex- plicitate most of the stylistic and humane questions raised by Rabelais or Proust. In Antiquity and the Middle Ages analogous chance-consultations

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of Homer and Vergil (sortes virgilianae) were used to predict the turn of events; Rabelais gives a string of famous instances in Tiers Livre, X. Of course, one must not over-use such a gimmick, lest its entertainment value diminish.

One evening I listened a few times to the recording of John Cage's String Quartet (1950). The building was overheated and I listened with the windows opened wide. There was not much ambient noise: just the tire-hum and air-swish of passing American cars and the exhaust of some

accelerating sportscars and motorcycles, the slamming of a few car doors, and, once, a backfire. I liked the quartet very much; its simplicity and its

repeated figures and its dissonances and harmonies seemed graceful and

appealing. Someone had written on the staved blackboard some musical

examples which I couldn't properly understand. The dust and static

electricity on the vinyl record provided the quartet with a continuing accompaniment of soft, pleasant crackling. The quartet and the car-sounds and the surface noise happened at the same time. The New Music Quartet played very artfully and expressively (though of course without vibrato), modeling phrases and sequences and climaxes. Had their beautiful playing displeased John Cage as he supervised the recording? John Cage suggests in Silence that recordings and music are mutually annihilating. [125] "Remove the records from Texas and someone will learn to sing." [126]

A review being at best an occasional piece, and this one, indeed, rather particularly gratuitous, since as a student of sixteenth-century French literature I have nothing very responsible to say about John Cage, I have tried to bring the form and the content of this article into line with the letter and spirit of what I take to be the occasion. I began by writing a few paragraphs more or less haphazard. To find the eventual form I then began studying the aesthetic and numerical properties of the invoice sent with the review copy of Silence. The invoice is a horizontal oblong of white paper about 123/8 by 35 inches, divided into three unequal sections by perforations, the product, as one is informed, of the Data Design & Products Co. Basic standard information is printed in blue and red letter-press type of various faces and sizes; the stylized monogram of the M.I.T. Press appears three times, in olive; the particulars of this shipment have been typed in, in "data-processing" capitals in smudgy gray, automatically. The expression "THE M.I.T. PRESS" appears four times,

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thrice printed in blue (where it seems to read THEM. I. T. PRESS), once

machine-typed; the expression "M.I.T. PRESS," once. There is a row of twenty machine-typed asterisks which partly obscures the printed ex-

pression "PACKING SLIP." Thirty-six integral numbers (quantities, serial numbers, dates, street numbers, Zip codes, telephone numbers, etc., plus a few mysterious, Orphic ciphers without apparent meaning) stand printed or typed on the invoice; one, "384" at the top left, has been amputated of a third of its height by faulty cutting; at its third occurrence, the invoice number, 168848, has misprinted as 108848. Zero appears nineteen times, seventeen times as a cipher, once as the first word of "NO NET DUE," once as a blank following the injunction, printed inside a red arrow, "PAY THIS AMOUNT $." 16 is the dominant number of the whole system: hence, sixteen parts for this review. The invoice number

appearing monotonously symmetrical, I took my cues on rhythm and

proportion from two of the Orphic ones: 0729, 0358. (As Cage has it, "New picking and choosing is just like the old picking and choosing...." [132]) I then finished writing the requisite sixteen sections except for this one, and, trying hard not to listen to the in-voice, arranged them in a chance order determined by the numbers and the invoice. The shortest sections were about three manuscript lines, thirty-one to thirty-seven words; hence, about a twentieth the length of the section beginning "(ZERO)," which has 704 words in 59 lines. On that proportional basis I

re-arranged a little to reconcile the original chance order with the rhythm of the Orphic numbers; I sought isometric sequences. The "piece" is in three parts, plus coda. Ideally, there should of course be many repeats of

sections, and much more silence, or blank space, in the typography: words and blanks should be in the proportion 21:19. But part of the spirit of the occasion should be to avoid uselessly trying the patience or budget of editors and typographers. There is a kind of acrostic reflection of the invoice in the fact that eight sections begin "One..." and one,

"(ZERO)." As for content, I tried to answer sixteen questions which might at this time be of interest to the readers of NOTES, to the M.I.T. Press, and

perhaps to John Cage. The questions were written after the answers. In an order determined by a permutation of the order of the answers, they are:

Is the world one world now? Who's who? What is a story? Who is John Cage? When?

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What is the Cornell Music Department doing about the state of things? What has happened? What's in a name? How can one best celebrate John Cage? Where is Ithaca, New York? What happened? What does John Cage have to say in Silence? Will you be kind enough to send us two copies of any review you may

publish? What's happening? What is the M.I.T. Press publishing that we might want to read? The

Wesleyan University Press? The Cornell University Press? What is silence? To put it another way, I reported things Silence had taught me to hear. Now "I have nothing to say and I am saying it." [51, 109, et passim]

One day I chanced to walk into Bill Holmes's office. There was a copy of Silence lying quietly on the table. I said, "My favorite book." Bill Holmes replied, "If you'll review it you can have it."

Practically, John Cage's favorite story is the story of the anechoic chamber; the story contains a new type of literary hero that one might call the Transcendental Auditory Ego, or the self as listening substance. "I entered one [chamber] at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high, one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds." [8] Indeed, "there is no such thing as silence" [191]. What really counts, then, is the quality of our attention. "In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it's not boring at all but very interesting." [93] Sure. Only, of course, one must never be sleepy or petulant. Should I be cross with myself if at evening's end I put on an LP record of a Chopin concerto or The Bird Fancyer's Delight as a mere fond sonore ("Record collections,-that is not music." [125]), drink whisky, and read Silence for fun, seeking an idle, half-aware pleasure? "If anybody is sleepy let him go to sleep." [119, 120, 121, 122, 123]

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Three Thousand Seven Hundred Forty-Seven Words about John Cage

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