Silence. John Cage

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СКАЧАТЬ In the “Lecture on Something” Cage lists Eckhart among several Western authors (with R. H. Blyth, Joseph Campbell, and Alan Watts) from whom one can learn the principles of Zen if the Zen writings themselves seem too alien.

      In 1949 Cage gave the aforementioned “Lecture on Nothing” at the Artists’ Club in New York. “The Club,” as it was generally referred to, had been founded by the painter Robert Motherwell in 1948, and many of its regulars were caught up in the Zen craze. Visual artists Mark Tobey, Ad Reinhart, Franz Kline, David Smith, Philip Pavia, Motherwell, and others had been impressed by, and were in some cases imitating, Japanese calligraphy and Ukiyo-e paintings, the “floating world” genre of Japanese prints.³ Some of these people, at least, would have been in the audience for the “Lecture on Nothing” and also that on “Something” a year later. Poets and literary figures like Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder were Zen enthusiasts of the time as well, but among composers of his generation Cage seems virtually unique in this respect (for which reason he has had a tremendous impact awakening musicians to alternative and occult spirituality). His increasing interest led him to study with Diasetz Suzuki (1870–1966), a lay historian and philosopher who had an unparalleled impact on the understanding of Buddhism in the West. Cage, self-admittedly, had a faulty memory for dates, and his claims in various writings that he attended Suzuki’s classes between 1945 and 1951 must be mistaken. Suzuki arrived in New York in the late summer of 1950, first lectured at Columbia in March 1951, and taught no courses until the spring of 1952.⁴ Cage’s first printed reference to Suzuki comes in his “Juilliard Lecture” of that same year.⁵

      The MOMA percussion-ensemble concert, on February 7, 1943, resulted in a bemused two-page spread on Cage in Life Magazine. Nice as the publicity was, it failed to rescue Cage from genteel poverty, and he spent the rest of the decade writing mostly keyboard works that could be performed solo. The 1940s brought the beginnings of a historic collaboration between Cage and the dancer Merce Cunningham (1919–2009); Cunningham choreographed much of Cage’s music, and Cage was the founding music director of the world-famous Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Then in 1950 Cage met two of the three protégés whose names figure heavily in this book: Morton Feldman (1926–87) and Christian Wolff (b. 1934), the latter only sixteen at the time. Encouraged by Cage to follow his muse, Feldman began writing pieces (Projections I–V, 1950–51) on graph paper, indicating only relative registers of notes played (high, medium, low), and leaving the pitch to the performer. Although Feldman resumed conventional pitch notation soon afterward, these chance-accepting pieces made a big impression on Cage, possibly even moving him closer to the idea of chance composition himself, and their technique is referred to often in Silence.

      Wolff was the son of publishers, and made Cage a gift of a book his parents had just published: the first English translation of the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes. Intended as both philosophical system and divinatory oracle, the I Ching contains commentaries on sixty-four hexagrams, patterns of six broken and unbroken lines, which are meant to be obtained at random by drawing yarrow sticks or, more often today, tossing a set of three coins six times. Cage began consulting the I Ching for all problems of his everyday life; then, in a massive piano piece titled Music of Changes (1951), he used the oracle to generate random numbers to determine pitch, duration, dynamics, and other aspects of notes, to create a music totally independent of his own tastes and preferences. This was radical, but not as radical as the piece he wrote the following year, using the I Ching to determine only durations, and leaving out pitches and sounds altogether: 4′33′′. At the August 29, 1952, performance in Woodstock, New York, David Tudor sat at the piano for that amount of time, four minutes and thirty-three seconds, and played—nothing. The piece the audience listened to consisted of whatever sounds occurred during the interval.

      4′33′′ was a scandal, but contrary to what one might assume from its iconic status today, it did not alter Cage’s reputation overnight. (You’ll notice that, even though it remains his most famous piece, 4′33′′ is only mentioned twice in Silence, never by name, but as “my silent piece”: in the introduction to “On Robert Rauschenberg” and in the concluding “Music Lover’s Field Companion,” where a private performance is humorously described.) Cage continued scraping by on temporary jobs, though several events in the ’50s expanded his fame and influence. In October 1954 he and David Tudor began a two-month tour of performances at Donaueschingen, Cologne, Paris, Brussels, Stockholm, Zurich, Milan, and London; Cage later complained that they were treated as idiots and clowns.⁶ Nevertheless, in Germany he became good friends with Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007), as he had with Pierre Boulez (b. 1925) in Paris in 1949, though you might not think so from the sidelong glances he throws them both in “Erik Satie” and other articles. From 1956 to ’60 Cage taught a course in Experimental Composition at the New School for Social Research in New York, where his students (including Toshi Ichiyanagi and his wife Yoko Ono) would go on to form the Fluxus movement, which pioneered conceptual art under his influence. On May 15, 1958, Cage’s friends presented a Twenty-Five-Year Retrospective Concert for him at Town Hall in New York, attended by a thousand people, some of whose catcalls and disruptive clapping (but also wild cheers) can be heard on the recording of the event. And a few months later Cage and Tudor were invited to the new-music festival at Darmstadt, where they were taken more seriously than in 1954, and started to have an impact on European music. It was here that the three lectures grouped together as “Composition as Process” (“I. Changes,” “II. Indeterminacy,” and “III. Communication”) were delivered.

      Cage’s sunny personality and odd performances brought him publicity beyond the closed circuits of contemporary music. In January 1959 he appeared on an Italian quiz show Lascia o Raddoppio, on which he won five million lira by correctly answering extremely detailed questions about mushrooms; he also performed his pieces Sounds of Venice and Water Walk. In January 1960 he appeared on the popular American television show I’ve Got a Secret, hosted by Garry Moore, with fellow guest celebrity Zsa-Zsa Gabor. Again Cage reprised Water Walk, and Moore called him “the most controversial figure in the musical world today” (the episode is multiply archived on YouTube). In June 1960, the publisher C. F. Peters agreed to publish Cage’s musical works, a significant boost for his more serious reputation. At the same time, Cage left the New School because he had been invited by composer Richard Winslow to teach for a year at the Center for Advanced Study at Wesleyan University.

      Winslow also contacted Wesleyan University Press about the possibility of publishing a book of Cage’s writings—and in October 1961, Silence hit the bookstores. More than anything else to that point, it made Cage famous. “I’ve had more response from the book,” he said, “than I’ve ever had from the publication of a record, the publication of music, the giving of a concert, the giving of a lecture or anything.” Seven thousand copies sold by 1968; today, the number exceeds half a million, including numerous foreign language editions.⁷ Thousands of lives were changed as a result of the book’s publication. To cite one of the most celebrated examples, composer John Adams received Silence as a present from his mother in 1969, and his enthusiasm remains vivid in his memoir from four decades later: “what he represented stood in sharp contrast to the depressing tone of the postwar European avant-garde and the pseudoscience of serialism. I read Silence and A Year from Monday, and I kept going back to them almost as if they were sacred texts. The personal style of Cage’s prose was refreshing, inviting, and inclusive.”⁸

      Not only is there little mention in Silence of 4′33′′, but also there are few mentions of the prepared piano, and not much about percussion. There is, instead, plenty of talk about electronics, serialism (the expansion of the twelve-tone idea to all aspects of music), and a younger generation of artists, including Feldman, Wolff, Rauschenberg (whom Cage met in New York City in 1951), and Jasper Johns. Silence offered Cage the enviable opportunity, at age forty-nine, to reinvent himself for a younger generation—to a point that the previous Cage of quiet, lyrical prepared-piano music almost disappeared from his popular image. And the book’s timing was serendipitous: a new generation СКАЧАТЬ