MUSICAGE. John Cage

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СКАЧАТЬ one of Fuller’s books, Utopia or Oblivion.

      21. I-VI (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 177-78. Punctuation has been added to what was continuous, unpunctuated text in the original.

      22. For instance, in the foreword to A Year from Monday.

      23. Cage’s marriage to Xenia Kashevaroff Cage ended in the mid-’40s as his relationship with Merce Cunningham was developing into what would turn out to be a fifty-year personal and professional union. Cage was deeply troubled about the dissolution of his commitment to Xenia and the highly charged implications of moving between “socially regulated” sexual categories. Ultimately, he told me, he felt that sexuality, like all of life, was manifestly more complicated than a handful of (invidiously competitive) categories suggests. He therefore refused to subscribe to any of them. He simply did not believe that there was truth in labeling. This, in my opinion, is the reason for his silence on these matters, as much as his firm belief that personal privacy should be respected. During this time Cage was also deeply affected by the horrors of World War II. His attempts to express his feelings about all these things in his music (e.g., In the Name of the Holocaust, 1942; The Perilous Night, 1945) were being met with misunderstanding and ridicule.

      24. From “Forerunners of Modern Music,” Silence, p. 64.

      25. This is my observation; I’m not at all sure Cage would have described it this way.

      26. More also used the term “Eutopia” (good place) in a nominal dialectic with “no place.”

      27. D. W. Winnicott is helpful here with his distinction between imagination—the source of play: a testing of ideas in material interactions—and fantasy, which is mind withdrawn from world, unsullied and unassisted by material contingencies. See, for example, Winnicott’s Playing and Reality (New York: Methuen, 1984). Utopianism which is entirely textual can be seen as public thought experiment—another form of “play” with real consequences.

      28. In some ways reminiscent of anarcho-syndicalist ideas?

      29. I-VI, p. 2.

      30. Though I would substitute “spiritual” for “religious,” despite some vapid new-age connotations, because Cage preferred it. Religion for him meant institutions bound up with “the police” (see the last conversation in this book). Cage’s spirituality was as humorous and pragmatic as the Buddhist texts he studied for five decades. It was not an attempt to transcend everyday life, but to recognize the material and conceptual interconnectedness of all things, to act out of that recognition.

      31. Similarly, Duchamp’s work seen as attention to “ambient everyday objects,” regardless of his intentions (no doubt more complex than irony alone), can move us beyond irony as well.

      32. X (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), p. 117.

      33. See Figure 14, page 193 of this volume. This poem is written in a form that actually requires multiple readings, of which what follows is only one. See my essay, “Poethics of a Complex Realism,” in John Cage: Composed in America, eds. Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

      34. From “The Chinese Avant-garde,” New York Times Magazine, 19 December 1993.

      35. A status recently ascribed to Cage. George J. Leonard, in Into the Light of Things: The Art of the Commonplace from Wordsworth to John Cage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), argues that Cage can best be understood as a religious figure. There is a recent renewal of interest in Epicurus. Two new translations of Epicurean texts are available: Eugene O’Connor, ed. and trans., The Essential Epicurus (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1993), and Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson, ed. and trans., with introduction by D.S. Hutchinson, The Epicurus Reader (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994). There is also the old standard edition translated and edited by Cyril Bailey: Epicurus: The Extant Remains (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926). The stylistic variations among these translations are striking, and I have moved among them looking for the most pleasing translations for my purposes, but have used Bailey as my primary source. Epicurus has also reemerged as a figure of intense controversy in two books by broadly interdisciplinary classicists: Peter Green, Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), and Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

      36. John Cage, “An Autobiographical Statement,” in the box catalog, Rolywholyover

      A Circus (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1993), unpaginated. Gita Sarabhai brought Cage The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna during the time in the ’40s when he was so disturbed that he vowed if he could not find a reason for composing better than personal communication he would give it up. This led to the writings of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (e.g., The Transformation of Nature in Art), where Cage found what would be his lifelong working principle: “the responsibility of the artist is to imitate nature in her manner of operation.” Ibid. James Pritchett has an interesting discussion of the effects of these Eastern principles on Cage’s music in his The Music of John Cage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

      37. Epicurus, like Plato, mistrusted music, but then so did Cage—the power assumed and asserted, by certain kinds of music, to mold the emotions and shape the soul.

      38. In describing his new principles of composition in “The History of Experimental Music in the United States,” Cage says, “What makes this action unlike Dada is the space in it. For it is the space and emptiness that is finally urgently necessary at this point in history.” Silence, p. 70.

      39. There are two Zen traditions: Rinzai, which cultivates the capacity for sudden enlightenment; Soto, which subscribes to a practice of gradual awakening.

      40. An etymology shared with French, Italian, Spanish, and German.

      41. From Japanese Life and Character in Senryu, ed. R. H. Blyth (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1960), p. 513. Senryu is the humorous Japanese literary form that comes from perceiving what in the West is separated into the comic and the tragic as inextricably intertwined. Blyth calls this “Senryu no Michi, the Way of Senryu.”

      42. Headnote to “Where are we going? And what are we doing?,” Silence, p. 195.

      43. See Benoit B. Mandelbrot’s The Fractal Geometry of Nature (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1983). Mandelbrot has developed the complex realist geometry of a broadly interdisciplinary thinker. He has taught in faculties of analytic and applied mathematics, economics, electrical engineering, and physiology at institutions such as University of Geneva, Ecole Polytechnique, Harvard, Yale, M.I.T., and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

      44. For a more detailed discussion of this proposal, see my “Poethics of a Complex Realism,” in John Cage: Composed in America.

      45. Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990), p. 410.

      46. “Experimental Music: Doctrine,” Silence, p. 14.

      47. At a weeklong festival and symposium on Cage’s work called John Cage at Stanford: Here Comes Everybody, in January 1992, seven months before his death.

      48. See Visual Art conversation, note 54.

      49. “Song of Myself, 6,” Leaves of Grass (Mount Vernon, N.Y.: Peter Pauper Press), p. СКАЧАТЬ