MUSICAGE. John Cage

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СКАЧАТЬ which is [picked out] by chance, and then the total amount of the source material changes, and the source material changes for that section. So, when the material is very slight … then you get this ceaseless repetition. There’s a very funny one, you know, where it’s just repeated over and over—“the psychological … infantile and psychological.” And that was the only source material there was.¹⁹ So that’s why all the repetition. [Section 11.]

      JR: I know you’ve thought a lot about the structure of DNA, relating it to the sixty-four hexagrams in the I Ching. The visual outline of the mesostics on the page reminds me of the helical structure of DNA—wing words bonding in the spiraling—

      JC: Yes, it looks that way, doesn’t it?

      JR: —Around the generative letters of the mesostic strings. I wondered if that was part of your—

      JC: It wasn’t in my awareness, no.

      JR: —The pleasure you get from using—

      JC: No, I admit to liking the shape. And the variety of shapes that develop.

      JR: You have spoken of the lettristic principle in your practice with mesostics. The meso-letters are formally generative. But do you think as a lettristic principle they have any content? Is there any way in which lettrism is similar to a form of numerology for you?

      JC: Not in the sense of having anything to do with the content. Numerology in the case of Schoenberg did have to do with the content.

      JR: Yes.

      JC: And with the expressivity even. But I don’t think of that as taking place. I don’t notice it. I don’t know … of course it must have something … certain letters will have, will of course draw up the same—not the same, but related—bits of the source. So they are really, actually doing something. But some of them are more active than others. And there are some letters that are very inactive as the word game Scrabble shows. Qs are impossible, for instance. Zs, and so on. But vowels are very active. And there’s a kind of, a kind of middle ground for some letters, like P and M and B—between very little action [and a lot]. There’s some sort of slight action, some with more action than others.

      JR: You speak of the letters “drawing up” certain things, and that has to do with what I’m asking. If you think of the source text as a kind of oracle, as you have called it, is there a way in which the letters of the strings are the vehicle of that oracle? What does that mean—source as oracle?

      JC: I don’t know … I try in general to use the chance operations—each number that I use, I try to have it do one thing rather than two things. And I don’t know if this has anything to do with your question, but I try to, try to get an event divided into all the different things that bring it into existence and then to ask as many questions as there are aspects of an event—to bring an event into being, hmm? So that one number won’t bring two parameters into being, but only one. That is toward a kind of confidence in the uniqueness of happenings, hmm? And then taking what happens. But slightly changing it through the breathing—placing of those apostrophes—and the accents. And of course the omission or inclusion of wing words. Very strong things happen when you minimize the wing words.

      JR: What do you mean?

      JC: What’s an example of that? (leafs through I-VI) I had the feeling, probably mistakenly, that I was learning how to do this, finally—you see—when it was almost done. (laughs) And you can see, through the shape, there are fewer words [toward the end of Lecture VI] and in some places it will be extremely that way. That was not taking any of the wing words, or very few of them. But again, not making a judgment about “we will have no wing words.” Here [earlier in VI] there are a lot of them.

      JR: When you say “not making a judgment” about it, what do you mean?

      JC: Well I could have elected—even through chance operations I could have elected—to minimize or maximize wing words. And I could have known when I was starting to write this that I had to have lots of wing words. But I wasn’t working that way. I was working by improvising and trying to find out what the words wanted, how they wanted to work. I was trying to do that.

      JR: So at this point you “found yourself” choosing fewer wing words?

      JC: See, this is quite beautiful.

      It just works beautifully! (laughs) And that kind of thing didn’t work here. In fact, the opposite kind of thing worked here,

      That works too. It’s a different kind of thing. And then there’s … I think at the beginning of this—the sixth lecture—I think toward the beginning I must have had that feeling that the mesostic didn’t need any wing words at all. I was moving here whenever I could toward [fewer]—and I couldn’t there on page 379, which has lots of wing words—but here’s one that has fewer.

      JR: Could you say why you think that happened, with any one of the narrower columns? Specific to what the words were?

      JC: I think the closest I can come is to say that when I read it, or when I voiced it, or breathed it, that the breath worked—without wing words some times, and with them other times.

      JR: Does this have anything to do with the sort of thing [Charles] Olson was involved with?

      JC: I’m unfortunately not sufficiently aware of his “projective verse.” For me it has to do with my notion of … of music, I guess. Where this becomes most musical is in these sections which get repeated, because it—and now I’m saying music in the most conventional sense, because Schoenberg said that music was repetition—repetition and variation. And he said variation is also repetition with some things changed and others not. And in IV, V, and VI—and we’re now in VI—there is, through chance operations, a section which gets repeated.

      JR: While you’re looking I’ll turn the tape.

      JC: … This one,

      and then the whole thing gets repeated, “as an apple tree …,” and then you know you’re in the world of music. (laughs) I mean if you didn’t know it to begin with, (laughter)

      JR: The theme-and-variations structure is so striking in this work. Have you done any non-linguistic, musical compositions that use a theme-and-variation structure since doing these? Is your purely musical composition influenced by your language compositions?

      JC: What I’ve done that relates to these and goes off, say to music, is—perhaps the best example is—using a source material, a source that I don’t understand at all as language. And it was a poem of Hesse which happened to be a favorite poem of the book publisher Siegfried Unseld. Do you know his name? Ulla Berkewicz, who is now married to him, asked me, for one of his birthdays, like fifty or sixty or something, to write—and he had asked me earlier—to write some music on one of Hesse’s poems. But I didn’t like the poem that he likes. And it was all right in German because I didn’t really understand it. But he loved it. It was his really favorite poem. So I gave it to the computer and I did this kind of material with it. Except, I put the whole poem of Hesse as the string down the middle. And I gave the string СКАЧАТЬ