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Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition
De John Cage
Ações de livro
Comece a lerNotas:
Classificação: 3 de 5 estrelas3/5 (12 avaliações)
Duração: 608 páginas6 horas
- Editora:
- Wesleyan University Press
- Lançado em:
- Jun 26, 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780819571779
- Formato:
- Livro
Descrição
John Cage is the outstanding composer of avant-garde music today. The Saturday Review said of him: "Cage possesses one of the rarest qualities of the true creator- that of an original mind- and whether that originality pleases, irritates, amuses or outrages is irrelevant." "He refuses to sermonize or pontificate. What John Cage offers is more refreshing, more spirited, much more fun-a kind of carefree skinny-dipping in the infinite. It's what's happening now." –The American Record Guide
"There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. Sounds occur whether intended or not; the psychological turning in direction of those not intended seems at first to be a giving up of everything that belongs to humanity. But one must see that humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world together, that nothing was lost when everything was given away."
Ações de livro
Comece a lerDados do livro
Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition
De John Cage
Notas:
Classificação: 3 de 5 estrelas3/5 (12 avaliações)
Duração: 608 páginas6 horas
Descrição
John Cage is the outstanding composer of avant-garde music today. The Saturday Review said of him: "Cage possesses one of the rarest qualities of the true creator- that of an original mind- and whether that originality pleases, irritates, amuses or outrages is irrelevant." "He refuses to sermonize or pontificate. What John Cage offers is more refreshing, more spirited, much more fun-a kind of carefree skinny-dipping in the infinite. It's what's happening now." –The American Record Guide
"There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. Sounds occur whether intended or not; the psychological turning in direction of those not intended seems at first to be a giving up of everything that belongs to humanity. But one must see that humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world together, that nothing was lost when everything was given away."
- Editora:
- Wesleyan University Press
- Lançado em:
- Jun 26, 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780819571779
- Formato:
- Livro
Sobre o autor
Relacionado a Silence
Amostra do livro
Silence - John Cage
SILENCE
Lectures
and
writings
by
JOHN
CAGE
S I L E N C E
50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
With Foreword by Kyle Gann
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown, Connecticut
WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Middletown, CT 06459
www.wesleyan.edu/wespress
© 1939, 1944, 1949, 1952, 1955, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1961 by John Cage
Foreword to 50th Anniversary Edition © 2011 Kyle Gann
All rights reserved
First printing, 1961
Wesleyan paperback, 1973
50th Anniversary Edition, 2011
50th Anniversary Edition paperback, 2013
Manufactured in the United States of America
5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011936816
ISBN for the 50th Anniversary Edition paperback: 978-0-8195-7365-0
Many of these lectures and articles were delivered or published elsewhere from 1939 to 1958. The headnote preceding each one makes grateful acknowledgment of its precise source.
To Whom It May Concern
CONTENTS
Foreword to 50th Anniversary Edition by Kyle Gann / ix
Foreword / xxix
Manifesto / xxxii
The Future of Music: Credo / 3
Experimental Music / 7
Experimental Music: Doctrine / 13
Composition as Process / 18
I. Changes / 18
II. Indeterminacy / 35
III. Communication / 41
Composition / 57
To Describe the Process of Composition Used in Music of Changes and Imaginary Landscape No. 4 / 57
To Describe the Process of Composition Used in Music for Piano 21-52 / 60
Forerunners of Modern Music / 62
History of Experimental Music in the United States / 67
Erik Satie / 76
Edgard Varèse / 83
Four Statements on the Dance / 86
Goal: New Music, New Dance / 87
Grace and Clarity / 89
In This Day … / 94
2 Pages, 122 Words on Music and Dance / 96
On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work / 98
Lecture on Nothing / 109
Lecture on Something / 128
45′ for a Speaker / 146
Where Are We Going? and What Are We Doing? / 194
Indeterminacy / 260
Music Lovers’ Field Companion / 274
FOREWORD TO 50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
Kyle Gann
Silence by John Cage is the book I’ve reread most often in my life. It’s that kind of book. I kept rereading it partly because what it seemed to mean kept changing. I first read it in 1971, so while this publication marks the fiftieth anniversary of the book, it is the fortieth anniversary of my engagement with it. I was fifteen, and it had a profound, enlivening impact on me. At seventeen I read it again and realized I hadn’t really understood it the first time. At nineteen I revised my impression still more. And probably at twenty-one or twenty-two, and at twenty-five, and a few times in the 1980s and ’90s, periodically finding its meaning in kaleidoscopic flux. Now, rereading it again, intently, cover to cover, at age fifty-five, I get a picture of it I’ve never had before. But I am reluctant to conclude that my current reading is any more real or authentic than the earlier ones. The text remains the same; I change.
For instance, when I was fifteen I thought that Cage’s preparing six answers to give after the Lecture on Nothing
no matter what questions people asked was a hilariously clever way to get his point across. At fifty-five, I think it must have just been off-putting. Am I right now, or was I right then?
It’s not that Cage is an obscure writer: quite the contrary. He’s breezy, charming, precise, a little stylized at times. He’s even repetitive. The miserable shaggy nag
story comes up again and again, and the anechoic chamber, and the important question of what do you think about Bach. You get the point. But what is the point? Or are there multiple points? Or, more in accordance with Cage’s popular reputation, is there perhaps no point at all? Cage can be didactic at times, and pontifical, and he does try now and then to convince you that experimental music is preferable to classical music, or that you should enjoy audience coughs and babies crying as much as a symphony, or that he, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown were the only composers in the 1950s tuned in to the zeitgeist. As contemporary music goes on changing in the way I am changing it,
he jovially thunders in 45′ for a Speaker
; such boldness is bracing for the young, threatening to the old. But along the way he challenges conventional wisdom, deflates pretensions, wipes away misassumptions, erases the slate for us all to start over. Do you see how much easier it is to get people to think for themselves by asking questions than by making pronouncements? Hmm?
And then there are all those wonderful stories that make up the performance piece Indeterminacy, which are probably the dominant items that many people take away from the book. Some of them have become famous in the music world: the aunt who loves her washing machine more than she does Uncle Walter, the trip to New Zealand that never materializes, the nonsequiturs from the autocratic Schoenberg, the fables about Zen monks, the mushroom trivia. The way Cage tells them, devoid of emotional nuance, makes the world itself seem absurd, and all its inhabitants slightly nuts, Cage alone excepted. They are endearing; some, you realize, would come off as pedestrian if anyone but Cage were telling them. People who enjoy Cage’s books but can’t handle his music often call him a philosopher, but this bypasses the more obvious point: that, unlike your average philosopher, he was a brilliant writer, with a distinctively elegant style and a comic delight in paradoxes. And, in fact, writing was what he wanted to do before he turned to music.
And since people draw conclusions more intelligently from words than they do from music, it took this book to get Cage’s ideas noticed in the public world. Arriving as it did just at the onset of the 1960s, with a new generation eager for a new pace of living, it had a literary impact like an atom bomb. Silence has a reputation as the most influential book written by an American composer—do we need the word American
?—and it is difficult to argue otherwise. Other such books, and we might mention Henry Cowell’s New Musical Resources, Charles Ives’s Essays before a Sonata, and Harry Partch’s Genesis of a Music, have encouraged several generations of composers and musicians to think differently. But Silence was different. It encouraged everyone to think differently.
So before I run through the results of my latest rereading, let’s ask: Who was John Cage before he published Silence? And who was he afterward?
We need only sketch the relevant details. There were two great turning points in Cage’s life: the change in his music in 1951, at age thirty-eight, and the change in his public career—brought about by this book—at age forty-nine. He was born September 5, 1912, in Los Angeles. His father was an inventor; you’ll read the famous story of his submarine in the book, and many other stories of growing up in Los Angeles. A precocious but unassertive child, at age twelve Cage devoted himself to playing the piano works of Edvard Grieg, partly because that composer broke the prohibition against parallel fifths, which Cage interpreted as a liberation. Cage graduated high school as valedictorian and briefly attended Pomona College, more attracted to religion and then literature at the time than to music. Rebelling against the curriculum, he left college after a year to take a parentally financed tour of Europe in 1930 and ’31. He studied Gothic architecture with Ernö Goldfinger (1902–87), while also taking piano lessons at the Paris Conservatoire. When Goldfinger mentioned that in order to become an architect one must devote one’s life to architecture, Cage took flight.
Cage returned to Los Angeles just in time for the Depression. His early attempts at music he regarded as overly mathematical, and threw them away. He studied composition with Henry Cowell (1897–1965), the guru of everything avant-garde in music in 1930s America. Cowell, in turn, recommended that Cage work with Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), who had come to America in 1933 to escape the Nazis, and who was already world famous for pioneering both atonal music and the twelve-tone technique, which he had invented in 1921. Twelve-tone method, to which Cage refers frequently in Silence, starts with an ordering of the twelve notes of the musical scale and derives every pitch structure in the piece from some transposition of that row, or else from its backward or inverted form, with the intent of imposing a kind of super-unity on the piece—a unity that may not always be perceptible as such. After Schoenberg’s death, the musicologist Peter Yates informed Cage that Schoenberg had referred to him as his one interesting American student, but also called him not a composer, but an inventor—of genius.
I am sick and tired of these words. They have been too often adduced to acknowledge Cage’s innovations while downplaying the quality of his wonderful music; still, Cage trumpeted the praise proudly, and bears the blame for its frequency of citation. However, when asked in 1950 to list his best American students, Schoenberg came up with twenty-eight names, Cage’s not among them, so I’ve come to consider this story a little dubious.¹
Cage’s early career took the form of providing mostly percussion music for dance in the San Francisco and Seattle areas, where he made an important contact in the slightly younger composer Lou Harrison (1917–2003); it was Harrison who, in the stories, uttered the immortal line, If you think I came to the loony bin to learn to play bridge, you’re crazy.
To write for unpitched percussion, Cage needed a new idea of structure, since all the traditional musical forms revolved around pitch and harmony. He arrived at macro-microcosmic
rhythmic structure, sometimes called square-root structure, in which each phrase of a piece embodies the same rhythmic proportions as the entire piece. For instance, his First Construction in Metal (1939) is divided into sections with the proportions 4+3+2+3+4, which adds up to 16, so each of the 16 sections is also 16 measures divided 4+3+2+3+4. The more technical articles in Silence make frequent reference to this kind of structure, which he continued using even into his nonpercussion works of the 1950s.
The earliest article in Silence, The Future of Music: Credo,
is a talk delivered to a Seattle arts society in 1937 at the invitation of dancer Bonnie Bird, a Martha Graham protégée. Cage’s major innovation of the Seattle period was the prepared piano, an instrument he invented in 1940 by inserting screws, bolts, weather stripping, and other materials between the strings of a grand piano in order to turn it into a percussion instrument of indeterminate pitch. The bulk of his music of the 1940s, much of it quiet, lyrical, and even proto-minimalist, was written for this instrument, and it remains the most widely accepted part of his output. Half intellectually and half sentimentally,
he recalls in the Lecture on Nothing,
when the war came along, I decided to use only quiet sounds. There seemed to me to be no truth, no good, in anything big in society. But quiet sounds were like loneliness, or love or friendship. Permanent, I thought, values, independent at least from Life, Time, and Coca-Cola
(p. 117).
Cage continued to move wherever he was offered a job, and, following a 1941–42 season in Chicago, ended up in New York City at the invitation of Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim. The enterprising Cage convinced the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) to give him a concert venue. Guggenheim, however, had intended to have Cage’s percussion music at the opening of her new gallery, and when she learned of the MOMA show, she told Cage to leave her house. Cage wept at the reversal, and was comforted by the presence of the painter Marcel Duchamp; this is the incident referred to at the end of On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work
(p. 107). Luckily, the dancer Jean Erdman offered him her apartment. Erdman was working with the pianist David Tudor, who became Cage’s tireless and most brilliant interpreter, and it was Erdman’s husband, the distinguished expert on world mythology Joseph Campbell, who introduced Cage to Asian art and philosophy, which came to inform so much of his musical outlook (though his interest in Zen had first been sparked by a 1936 lecture in Seattle by Nancy Wilson Ross, on Dada and Zen Buddhism
).
Campbell’s circle also included Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877–1947), curator of Indian art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, who gets credit for having introduced Indian art and its aesthetics to the Western world. It may be Coomaraswamy’s writings that introduced Cage to the fourteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart (1260–1328), to whom he refers often in the Indeterminacy
lecture and elsewhere. Coomaraswamy championed Eckhart as being closer to Mahayana Buddhism than to conventional Christianity or modern philosophy, calling Eckhart’s sermons an Upanisad of Europe.
² 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 was poised to swing away from its parents in open revolt, embracing everything that had hitherto been banished. In subsequent books, Cage became less focused on music, and presented himself along with Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, Norman O. Brown, and others as a group of thinkers engineering a new kind of society. Silence would remain his supreme statement on music.
Let us turn to the book. The twenty-three articles, essays, and lectures in Silence range in date from 1937 to 1961. Cage’s next book after Silence, A Year from Monday (1967), opens by noting David Tudor’s disappointment that his 1952 Juilliard Lecture
wasn’t included in Silence, so he includes it there, but the material in that lecture overlaps so much with the Nothing
and Something
lectures that to group them would have seemed repetitious. No other items in A Year from Monday are pre-1961. In short, Silence seems to contain everything that Cage felt was most important in his writing up to that point. Intriguingly, a late 1959 memo to Wesleyan University Press in which Cage listed the book’s potential contents is almost identical to the book’s actual contents, except that instead of the essays on dance there was originally to be A Few Ideas about Music and Films.
⁹
Given the impact Silence had not only in music but in the other arts, it is odd to note how musically technical some of the articles are, notably the first two Darmstadt lectures and the detailed descriptions of how he composed Music of Changes, Imaginary Landscape No. 4, and Music for Piano. These are balanced, though, by the four brief statements on dance and the extensive article on Rauschenberg, which has been ubiquitously quoted in the literature on that artist. The cream of the book, for me, has always been the four long pieces at the end: Lecture on Nothing,
Lecture on Something,
45′ for a Speaker,
and Where Are We Going? and What Are We Doing?
All have in common their unconventional layout on the page denoting that they are performative lectures, to be read aloud and heard, with silences interspersed, rather than read on the page. The peculiarity makes these articles more inconvenient to read, but I have wondered if that in itself doesn’t actually increase their effectiveness. Gaps in mid-sentence lead one to pause and take the words in more than one possible sense. Skimming is inherently discouraged. The technique makes one regard each word independently, much as Cage’s music invites attention to each separate sound. Would these words have so sunk into our souls had they been printed in paragraph format for us to breeze through? And the occasional live performance—I once had four students read Where Are We Going?
in class, carefully timed—is a pleasure.
Were the book not centered upon music, Nothing
might have been as suitable a title as Silence.
Cage opens, Nothing is accomplished by writing a piece of music.
Time has done little to allay the shock of these words. At best one could utter them cynically, at worst nihilistically. Let us fuse them, however, with what may be the book’s most famous sentence, from Lecture on Nothing
(and let us give the complete citation for once): I have nothing to say and I am saying it, and that is poetry as I need it
(p. 109). Now recast the original passive sentence actively: I have nothing to accomplish, and I have accomplished it—by writing a piece of music.
Just as provocative is a statement in the Lecture on Something
: Every something is an echo of nothing
(p. 131).
What is this nothing that poetry says and that every something echoes? The question is the same as that raised by Heidegger’s elaborate disquisition on nothing in What Is Metaphysics? (1929): whether nothing
can be a noun rather than simply a logical negation. Taking nothing as what is left when one excludes the entirety of the what-is,
Heidegger posits it as something one becomes aware of and experiences in the feeling of dread. Working himself into a frenzy of saying what lies beyond words, he arrives at a phrase that the logical positivist philosopher Rudolf Carnap would later deride: the Nothing nothings
(Das Nichts nichtet).
But as Cage’s contemporary Paul Wienpahl (1916–80), a Western philosopher whose training in Zen Buddhism went somewhat further than Cage’s, has shown in a commentary on Heidegger, a statement or question that is logically meaningless can still have a use. Wienpahl’s example is the Zen koan, the seemingly nonsensical question and answer the study or contemplation of which can bring about enlightenment or direct perception of reality. Since, in common-language philosophy based on Wittgenstein, we discover a word’s meaning in its use, a koan, being useful, can therefore mean something even if that meaning lies outside the realm of logic. The positivist,
Wienpahl writes, arrived at meaninglessness on the intellectual level—and shied away from it. The Buddhist heads into it, takes the next step, and gets to it on the physical or non-verbal level. The positivist got to the notion of the meaningless. The Buddhist gets to the thing.
¹⁰
Cage wants to get to the thing, which lies outside the realm of logic. To parse his understanding of nothing, let’s examine what he’s talking about in his lecture on something.
He starts with a platitude that most of us could hear without raising an eyebrow: Art should come from within; then it is profound.
From here he opens an attack on the psychology instilled in composers by the cultural expectation of making their music profound (I will forego the unconventional typography):
When a composer feels a responsibility to make, rather than accept, he eliminates from the area of possibility all those events that do not suggest the at that point in time vogue of profundity. For he takes himself seriously, wishes to be considered great, and he thereby diminishes his love and increases his fear and concern about what people will think. There are many serious problems confronting such an individual. He must do it better, more impressively, more beautifully, etc., than anybody else. And what, precisely, does this, this beautiful profound object, this masterpiece, have to do with Life? It has this to do with Life: that it is separate from it. (p. 130)
This is excellent advice for a young (or not-so-young) composer, or artist in any medium, and one need not study at the feet of Daisetz Suzuki to be bowled over by it. To start out writing a piece conscious of the internalized pressure to be profound
: this is a recipe for tiresomeness. The platitude Cage begins with is the innocuous-looking surface of a musical condition that, by the 1950s, had reached a point
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