Three Thousand Seven Hundred Forty-Seven Words about John Cage
Edward Morris
Notes, 2nd Ser., Vol. 23, No. 3. (Mar., 1967), pp. 468-476.
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THREE THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED FORTY- SEVEN WORDS ABOUT JOHN CAGE 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 according 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 gentleness 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 arithmetical 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)." [68-91 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)l. Otherwise unspecified numbers in square brackets are pagereferences.
"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." [78-91 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." [I311 For them, "no life: Hamlet,
fear, guilt, concern, responsibility." [I321 One such person, much concerned with Hamlet: MallarmC. 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 compldtes, Paris, 1945, pp. 457-771.
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-pianonoises 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 abomination. "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
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.) I t 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 Bibliothkque Nationale: 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, dependable motor]. . .Giving up Bach, jazz, and order is difficult." [262-31)
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?
470
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. T h e people were entertaining themselves by drinking 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 Varhse, 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 compositions 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-andreadies 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. 1751. (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 provincially Parisian reviews accorded Merce Cunningham by journals like L e
Nouvel Obseruateur. Do read what Jean-Franqois Revel, a Parisian man
of the World, wrote in L'Oeil [juillet-aoiit 1964, p.71 about Rauschenberg, 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. 1581. (FIVE) It is pleasant
to read John Cage, preoccupied with "the present need for discontinuity,"
[83] sometimes writing smooth, continuous exposition: "History of Experimental Music in the United States" [67-751. Bill Austin writes, A
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.331. Sibnce 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 thirtytwo questions, or forty-four more ["Communication," 41,421 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." [91-21 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 Klavierstucke I1 and I11 (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 u p 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
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 rewed u p 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. Stanley 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 MallarmC. 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 c6tk 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 explicitate most of the stylistic and humane questions raised by Rabelais or
Proust. In Antiquity and the Middle Ages analogous chance-consultations
of Homer and Vergil (sortes virgilianae) were used to predict the turn of
events; Rabelais gives a string of famous instances in Tiers Lime, 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."
11261
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. T o 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 12% by 3% 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,
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 expression "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, "5.84" 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 N E T
DUE," once as a blank following the injunction, printed inside a red
arrow, "PAY THIS AMOUNT 8." 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. I n
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? 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?
T o 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,
1231