Pataphysics Magazine Interview with John Cage

January 20, 1990

from the Blue issue
Pataphysics: In the late '50s in a series of interviews with Georges Charbonnier, Claude
Lvi-Strauss said that he had a feeling that music has always been much more 'avantgarde' than other forms of aesthetic expression. He continued by saying that the music
composed at the time of the Impressionist movement was more adventurous musically
than Impressionism was pictorially...
John Cage: Really? That's very curious. I have the feeling that visual arts are more
advanced than music. It seemed that way to me; it seemed that music follows visual art.
For instance, I was born in 1912 and it was then that Duchamp was using chance
operations. When I saw him in Venice many years later in the late '50s I said, 'Isn't it
strange Marcel, I'm doing now what you did when I was born.' He smiled and he said, 'I
must have been 50 years ahead of my time.' His mathematics weren't perfect, but the idea
was there. I think people admire music and think that it is abstract-perhaps that's what
Lvi-Strauss was referring to. But if you're involved in music, the ideas expressed in it are
frequently unadventurous, in the sense that chance operations were used in painting
before they were used in composition. Work like that of Malevich is perhaps just now
conceivable in terms of music-that extraordinary simplicity. It's conceivable today that
someone might be-or is-doing something like Malevich. I think of La Monte Young.
P: Philip Glass?
JC: I think that music is, as everyone agrees, very popular, and it's because of its
repetition. I like some of it very much but I don't think it's an advance. It's not just
discovered, it's something that has been known for some time.
P: Do you feel that the distinctions that you drew in the late '50s between European and
American music still apply today?
JC: For me not quite as much, at least they don't strike me now as they did earlier. What
strikes me now is a correspondence between say the work of Walter Zimmermann, who is
living in Cologne, and a recent composition of mine for two pianos, Two2, which I wrote
last summer. When I heard Zimmermann's piece it gave me an experience similar to the
one which I had when I heard my own music-a kind of placelessness. I didn't know where
I was when I was listening to either his music or mine, and I had no sense of going
anywhere. I did have a sense of movement, not thinking of it as you would in Philip
Glass, as a staying, but of moving but not knowing where I was going. In the '50s I
suggested there was a great division between music that talks, and music that acts or
does-music which carries out a process, and which isn't talking but is doing. That still
strikes me very much, and it's something that I'm still concerned with. The differences
between Europe and America are sometimes very clear, but sometimes they're not, and
sometimes they appear to be the same so that in spots, as it were, we're coming to one
place and we don't know what that place is. For instance, I went to two concerts last

night; I went to the rehearsal of one of them and the actual performance of the other. I
enjoyed them both very much and they were both, of course, American. But it seems to
me that there could have been, for instance, music by Walter Zimmermann or certain
European musics, and I would have enjoyed them equally and almost in the same way-I
might have. What I'm trying to say is that the times are changing and the distinctions
between Europe and America are less immediately noticeable. And I hope that we get to
be, all of us, in the same world, not that we all do the same thing, but that there's not one
place but rather many places where we can enjoy the art, just as we do the nature in all the
places.
P: Buckminster Fuller's vision is certainly becoming more of a reality, but today do you
find anything problematic in this optimism in technology?
JC: I'm not sure technology changes things that much; it changes them if we are
concerned with what the results are. But if we deal with the new technologies as closely
as we have dealt with the old ones, then we will come to appearances that aren't
superficial. What I hope won't happen is that we are quickly satisfied with technology
itself. What is to be hoped for is an interaction of people with technology, rather than a
quick acceptance of what technology does. There's so much button pushing now, and the
results are so spectacular that there's a temptation, which I hope is avoided, of just taking
what the technology gives and not doing anything with it.
P: Much of your earlier work developed through a disregard for the distinctions between
art and life. Do you feel there has been progress made since first formulating those ideas?
JC: I think this is one of the familiar aspects of art, that it opens our eyes to things in what
we call nature or environment that had escaped our notice. In paying attention to art your
observation of nature changes. There's a strong action in both directions, between our
experience of environment and our experience of making things, of doing things.
P: Given your position in regard to art and life, did you ever feel that your work was
anachronistic?
JC: It's a curious and interesting question... I guess we get carried away and so does our
work.
P: Carried away in the work?
JC: Right. Carried away in paying attention to it. As we get involved in the work, in art so
to speak, then things could be happening in nature around you which would escape your
notice, because your attention is being placed on your work-so then the difference is
striking. At the same time the use of the work will be to carry you back to the absence of
work and just to the environment. It's very curious. It's actually a question of the
movement of attention, so that your attention is placed on the work that you're doing and
then once the work is done your attention moves, without any trouble, to not working, in
other words, environment. However, I don't think I would say the same things about what
I'm doing now. I have the impression in my work that things that I was avoiding formerly,

I now no longer avoid. One thing that remains of greatest importance to me is nonintention.
P: And structure?
JC: It needn't be structure, it can just be process. I think of a structure as something
having parts and I think of a process as something not having parts. You could now have
something not having parts that nevertheless begins and ends. The thing I think of as
being something I used to avoid, and which I no longer do, is something like harmony.
Now it seems to me that harmony happens no matter what we do. It's like melody; if you
make a number of sounds you automatically have melody, and now if you have several
sounds together they automatically produce harmony. Most of my life I thought that I had
to find an alternative to harmony, but the harmony I was thinking about was the one that
had been taught at school. Now I see that everything outside of school is also harmonious.
P: A wider definition of harmony?
JC: A changed definition of harmony; one that doesn't involve any rules or laws. You
might call it an anarchic harmony. Just sounds being together.