I Ching (Yi Jing) The Ancient Divination

~John Cage references the I Ching for a method of divination in his art.

 The I Ching - “Archaeological evidence shows that Zhou dynasty divination was grounded in cleromancy, the production of seemingly random numbers to determine divine intent. The Zhou yi provided a guide to cleromancy that used the stalks of the yarrow plant, but it is not known how the yarrow stalks became numbers, or how specific lines were chosen from the line readings. In the hexagrams, broken lines were used as shorthand for the numbers 6 (六) and 8 (八), and solid lines were shorthand for values of 7 (七) and 9 (九). The Great Commentary contains a late classic description of a process where various numerological operations are performed on a bundle of 50 stalks, leaving remainders of 6 to 9. Like the Zhou yi itself, yarrow stalk divination dates to the Western Zhou period, although its modern form is a reconstruction. The ancient narratives Zuo zhuan and Guoyu contain the oldest descriptions of divination using the Zhou yi. The two histories describe more than twenty successful divinations conducted by professional soothsayers for royal families between 671 BC and 487 BC. The method of divination is not explained, and none of the stories employ predetermined commentaries, patterns, or interpretations. Only the hexagrams and line statements are used. By the 4th century BC, the authority of the Zhou yi was also cited for rhetorical purposes, without relation to any stated divination. The Zuo zhuan does not contain records of private individuals, but Qin dynasty records found at Shuihudi show that the hexagrams were privately consulted to answer questions such as business, health, children, and determining lucky days. The most common form of divination with the I Ching in use today is a reconstruction of the method described in these histories, in the 300 BC Great Commentary, and later in the Huainanzi and the Lunheng. From the Great Commentary's description, the Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi reconstructed a method of yarrow stalk divination that is still used throughout the Far East. In the modern period, Gao Heng attempted his own reconstruction, which varies from Zhu Xi in places. Another divination method employing coins, became widely used in the Tang dynasty and is still used today. In the modern period, alternative methods such as specialized dice and cartomancy have also appeared.

 Sources:
 • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Ching
 • Smith, Richard J. (2008). Fathoming the Cosmos and Ordering the World: the Yijing (I Ching, or Classic of Changes) and its Evolution in China. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. ISBN 0-8139-2705-6.
 • Raphals, Lisa (2013). Divination and Prediction in Early China and Ancient Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. ISBN 1-107-01075-6.
 • Rutt, Richard (1996). The Book of Changes (Zhouyi): A Bronze Age Document. Richmond: Curzon. ISBN 0-7007-0467-1.
 • Redmond, Geoffrey; Hon, Tze-Ki (2014). Teaching the I Ching. Oxford University Press.ISBN 0-19-976681-9.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM (1919-2009) was a leader of the American avant-garde throughout his seventy-year career and is considered one of the most important choreographers of our time. Through much of his life, he was also one of the greatest American dancers. With an artistic career distinguished by constant innovation, Cunningham expanded the frontiers not only of dance, but also of contemporary visual and performing arts. His collaborations with artistic innovators from every creative discipline have yielded an unparalleled body of American dance, music, and visual art. Of all his collaborations, Cunningham’s work with John Cage, his life partner from the 1940s until Cage’s death in 1992, had the greatest influence on his practice. Together, Cunningham and Cage proposed a number of radical innovations. The most famous and controversial of these concerned the relationship between dance and music, which they concluded may occur in the same time and space, but could be created independently of one another. The two also made extensive use of chance procedures, abandoning not only musical forms, but narrative and other conventional elements of dance composition—such as cause and effect, and climax and anticlimax. For Cunningham the subject of his dances was always dance itself. Born in Centralia, Washington on April 16, 1919, Cunningham began his professional modern dance career at 20 with a six-year tenure as a soloist in the Martha Graham Dance Company. In 1944 he presented his first solo show and in 1953 formed the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as a forum to explore his groundbreaking ideas. Over the course of his career, Cunningham choreographed more than 150 dances and over 800 “Events.” Dancers who trained with Cunningham and have gone on to form their own companies include Paul Taylor, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Karole Armitage, Foofwa d’Immobilité, and Jonah Bokaer. Cunningham’s lifelong passion for exploration and innovation made him a leader in applying new technologies to the arts. He began investigating dance on film in the 1970s, and choreographed using the computer program DanceForms during the latter part of his career. He explored motion capture technology to create décor for BIPED (1999), and his interest in new media led to the creation of Mondays with Merce. This webcast series provides a never-before-seen look at the Company and Cunningham’s teaching technique with video of advanced technique class, Company rehearsal, archival footage, and interviews with current and former Company members, choreographers, and collaborators. An active choreographer and mentor to the arts world until his death at the age of 90, Cunningham earned some of the highest honors bestowed in the arts. Among his many awards are the National Medal of Arts (1990) and the MacArthur Fellowship (1985). He also received the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award in 2009, Japan’s Praemium Imperiale in 2005, the British Laurence Olivier Award in 1985, and was named Officier of the Legion d’Honneur in France in 2004. Cunningham’s life and artistic vision have been the subject of four books and three major exhibitions, and his works have been presented by groups including the Ballet of the Paris Opéra, New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theater, White Oak Dance Project, and London’s Rambert Dance Company. Cunningham passed away in his New York City home on July 26, 2009. Always forward-thinking, Cunningham developed the precedent-setting Legacy Plan prior to his death, to guide his Company and ensure the preservation of his artistic legacy. Copied from http://www.mercecunningham.org/merce-cunningham/

Gleiches Recht für alle! Nicht nur die Töne wollte John Cage befreien. Der Komponist war politischer, als viele seiner Hörer bis heute glauben. – Eine Betrachtung zu seinem 15. Todestag. Von Jannika Bock 27. Juli 2007, 14:00 Uhr Quelle: ZEIT online 6 Kommentare John Cage, Komponist, Pilzsammler und Philosoph, starb am 12. August vor 15 Jahren. An einem Schlaganfall, der so überraschend kam wie die Perkussion in seinen Kompositionen. Für die Musikwelt war sein Tod ein Paukenschlag, der alles Gewesene mit einem mächtigen Rumms in sich verschlang. Und da war sie wieder: die Stille. Zeitweise kehrten jene Konzepte zurück, die Cage ein Leben lang auflösen wollte: das Nichts, die Stille, die Frage nach dem Sinn. „ Think of my art as nonsense “, hatte er geschrieben. Man solle seine Kunst als sinnlos verstehen. Sie habe kein Ziel, keine Botschaft und ihr läge nichts zugrunde außer dem Zufall. Mehr noch als die starren Kompositionskonventionen seiner Zeit lehnte er Musik ab, die sich in einen Dienst stellte, zumal in den der Politik. Konsequent hielt er sich aus dem Tagesgeschehen heraus. Selten nahm er öffentlich Stellung, schon gar nicht schwarz auf weiß. Seit den sechziger Jahren ging er nicht mehr wählen. Er verließ New York City und zog in eine kleine Künstlerkommune auf dem Land. Er entzog sich der Gesellschaft und der Politik, und seinen Werken den Sinn und die Absicht. Aber enthalten seine Stücke, in ihrer Inhaltslosigkeit und Nicht-Intentionalität, keine klare gesellschaftspolitische Vision? Seit seinem Tod hat die Cage-Forschung eine Renaissance erlebt. Literatur-, Musik- und Theaterwissenschaftler widmen sich seinen Werken mit wachsendem Interesse. Marjorie Perloff, die wohl prominenteste Cage-Forscherin, arbeitet derzeit an einem neuen Buch, ebenso der einflussreiche Musikologe David Wayne Patterson. Stets im Mittelpunkt steht 4’33'' , jenes Stück, das der Pianist David Tudor vor 55 Jahren im ländlichen Woodstock uraufführte – nicht weit von jener Wiese der Rebellion, die 17 Jahre später weltberühmt werden sollte. Cage wandte sich mit seinen 4 Minuten und 33 Sekunden gegen die herrschende Musik. Kein einziger intendierter Ton ertönte in dem stillen Stück. Es gab bloß Nebengeräusche. Alles sollte gehört werden: das Husten des Nebenmanns, der Lärm von der Straße, das nervöse Hin- und Herrücken Gelangweilter auf den harten Konzertsaalstühlen. Cage wollte keinen Unterschied zwischen guten und schlechten Tönen mehr machen und auch nicht zwischen Klang und Stille. Eine musikalische Revolution, die natürlich nicht aus dem Nichts kam, aber dennoch das Publikum gehörig überraschte. Cage, der Rebell, das enfant terrible der klassischen Musik, das sein Publikum immer wieder verschreckte, es in den Wahnsinn trieb, wie ein Kritiker der New York Times einst feststellte. Er sei ein grenzenloser Optimist gewesen, sagen Weggefährten, ein Träumer, der durchaus eine gesellschaftspolitische Vision hatte. Über einen Zeitraum von fast 20 Jahren schrieb Cage sein Kettengedicht Diary: How to Improve the World , also ein Tagebuch zur Rettung der Welt. Er fügte ihm listig den Untertitel zu: „Du wirst alles nur schlimmer machen“, aber geschrieben hat er es dennoch. Ja, Cage wollte seinem Spaceship Earth helfen, sicher durch Zeit und Raum zu gleiten. In seinen Büchern finden sich etliche Hinweise, dass Cage viel politischer war, als viele seiner Hörer glaubten – und möglicherweise er selber auch. In seinen gesammelten Reden und Aufsätzen hat er auf den Amerikaner Henry David Thoreau verwiesen, vor allem auf das Werk Über die Pflicht des Ungehorsams gegenüber dem Staat . In der legendären Streitschrift aus dem Jahre 1849 fordert Thoreau, man müsse sich gegen die Regierung auflehnen, wenn sie gegen die eigenen Prinzipien handele. Er forderte ein herrschaftsfreies Miteinander. Cage sah das genauso. Er wollte die Hierarchien überwinden. In der Anarchie sah er die Chance zur Gleichstellung aller Menschen, ohne Machtzentren und Regeln, die aus Subjekten Objekte machen: „ I’m an anarchist, same as you are when you’re telephoning, turning on/off the lights, drinking water .“ Der Einzelne als autonome Einheit, als selbstbestimmtes Subjekt in allen Lebenslagen, auch in der Musik. Im Jahre 1974 schreibt Cage in seinem programmatischen Aufsatz The Future of Music : “Musicians can do without government.“ In Anlehnung an Thoreau stellt er fest, dass Musiker keine Regierung brauchen. Sie seien bereit, auf der Bühne Anarchie zu (er-)leben. Ein Jahr später komponiert Cage Renga with Apartment House 1776 , sein Auftragswerk zur 200-Jahr-Feier der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika. Er will damit ein „musikalisches Beispiel für die Machbarkeit und Vorzüge von Anarchie“ liefern. Also doch: eine gesellschaftspolitische Vision! Eine Botschaft! Ein Ziel! Cage schafft ein „aesthetic analogue“, ein künstlerisches Analogon: ein musikalisches Beispiel, das auf die Welt außerhalb der Kunst übertragen werden soll. In seiner musikalischen Vision sind alle Beteiligten gleichgestellt. Der Dirigent führt nicht mehr; die Musiker beschließen selbst, was sie wie spielen. Renga with Apartment House 1776 hat keinen konventionellen Notentext. Die Partitur besteht ausschließlich aus Zeichnungen aus den Tagebüchern Thoreaus. Die aufführenden Musiker entscheiden eigenständig, wie sie Bilder interpretieren wollen. Sie können sich aussuchen, welches Instrument sie spielen möchten. Sogar die Länge des Stücks liegt bei ihnen. Das Resultat: akustische Anarchie. Cage entmachtet den Dirigenten, den Notentext und auch sich, den Komponisten. Bei den Aufführungen des Stücks gibt es kein visuelles Zentrum. Der Dirigent steht nicht in der Mitte, nicht erhöht. Um ihn ordnen sich nicht die Musiker in einem strengen Halbrund an. Nein. Jeder sitzt, wo er möchte. Die erste Geige hinter dem Paukenspieler, der Solist am Bühnenrand, der Dirigent irgendwo. Ein Blickfang, eine Mitte existiert nicht. Es entsteht eine kakophone Freiheit. Copied from:

An interview with Film Artist Lawrence Brose, Christine Sevilla

April 12, 2004.

CAGE: A FILMIC CIRCUS ON METAPHORS ON VISION Afterimage July-August 2004

In his film and video portrait of composer John Cage, film artist Lawrence Brose and composer Douglas Cohen combine more than seventy compositions and performance works by forty-five composers. Originally presented in 1993 as a performance work in Los Angeles at LACE and LACMA, and in New York City at Experimental Intermedia Loft, the USA premiere of the gallery installation version (commissioned by the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork, Ireland) was on view at the Visual Studies Workshop Gallery in Rochester, New York until May 15. The work was part of a two-person exhibition of media art that included Brose's new series of large-format, film-based Iris prints from his film, De Profundis, and VSW Executive Director Chris Burnett's Messages to Extinct Places in the Present Tense.

Christine Sevilla: How did your interest in John Cage, the musical revolutionist / composer / artist / philosopher, begin? What was your first collaboration and what led you to honor him with this film portrait?

Lawrence Brose: I first worked with John Cage on a film that I made to his score. Ryoanji. That was the beginning of my series of films called Films for Music for Film. Before working with Cage, and before developing this film series, I started out making the film. Hyacinth Fire, a collaboration with the composer Douglas Cohen, who also worked on the Cage project with me. That led me to make six films for the North American New Music Festival--it was an evening of live music and film in which one of the films was Ryoanji. My lover at the time. Yvar Mikhashoff, was founder of the North American New Music Festival, a virtuoso planist, and artistic director of a number of new music festivals throughout the world. He worked with Virgil Thomson and John Cage. At this time Cage had just completed the Europeras; numbers five and six were created for Yvar. Through that association I began to know John, although I had met him many times because he frequently came to Buffalo as part of the Creative Associates who were bringing in composers in residence. Notable composers were here as full professors, such as Morton Feldman. That was the time of Black Mountain College II here, and the time when Artpark was the real thing, and Cage often came here with his partner. Merce Cunningham, to premiere his new works. Cage had a strong influence on the new music scene in Buffalo at the time.

When I finished making Ryoanji and showed it in New York--it was a rare thing for John to come out to see a film--he came to see it at the Maya Deren Theatre. That was a relief to me. I wanted to do a portrait piece of John, and I had just finished doing a portrait of Virgil Thomson set to his second piano sonata written in 1920.

So the Cage piece is your second film portrait of a musician?

Yes. Virgil had done hundreds of musical pieces that were portrait pieces. At first, he composed them at the piano, but he began to sketch you in music sitting at his table while you were present, initially. He would then send you away and bring you back after working on it weeks later, look at the score and check that he had captured your essence, your energy. So, I thought why not return the favor? He pointed to the second piano sonata, that it was a portrait piece--of someone, possibly a self-portrait--and suggested I use that. I shot images of him in the Chelsea Hotel. I work on the optical printer, a machine that slaves a camera and projector and synchs them to allow you to re-photograph a film-strip frame by frame, or repeat frames--any number of things. That was my first film for music where the score truly came first, so I did a translation of the score into film frames. All of the notation, all of the guiding principles within the score were translated to a different kind of a score for film. I worked on the optical printer with all of the footage I had shot of him, layering, doing multiple exposures and setting the mages to the music itself.

Douglas Cohen and I discussed how one could use Cage's procedures to compose a film. He first introduced me to Cage's Circus On and Roaratorio. We talked about how the Circus On instructions for sound might be translated to image, and thus began our collaboration on the project John suggested that the Roaratorio would be good for making a portrait of him because it sets out a series of instructions, as opposed to a written musical score. He created Roaratorio as a radio piece and he wrote the steps he had taken to make it. He called this resulting score Circus On. I took that and followed all the instructions, working with Douglas Cohen who was doing the music component of it. It was always intended to be a live performance piece.

When was this portrait of Cage first performed?

A short version was first performed in Buffalo in March on St. Patrick's Day of 1993 at the University of Buffalo music department. Guggenheim Soho and LACMA were requesting City Circus event proposals to accompany the large John Cage exhibition called Rolyholyover, a Circus. That was mounted first in LA in November of 1993. John never saw it performed; he passed away just before that opening. It then went to the Guggenheim Soho in April of 1994.

INSTALLATION To give readers a context--the installation uses five video monitors, each with a one-hour tape, and three audio recordings from the performance of IMUSICIRCUS, the live performance version of this work. Would you describe what comprises the audio component and tell about how you defined the structure of the installation? The audio includes recitations of John Cage's Empty Words, of mesostics created by "writing through" Empty Words (which was itself a set of mesostics Cage created by writing through Thoreau's Journals), the text Metaphors on Vision by Stan Brakhage, and a number of other readings. The audio also includes over seventy musical compositions by forty-five composers. When we originally performed it, we did so in the spirit of the Cage Circuses. We wrapped the environment in projection material and two of the videos were projected into the space along with my film, Ryoanji. Three large monitors were on the stage throughout the performance space. The Triskel Arts Centre in Ireland wanted me to reconceive it as a gallery installation.

What led to the commission of the work by the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork, Ireland?

While screening my film De Profundis at the Cork International Film Festival I met the Artistic Director of the Triskel Arts Centre who was interested in my work with composers. I was invited to participate in a festival of new music and was asked to screen my Films for Music for Film and to reconfigure IMUSICIRCUS into a gallery installation. This was one of the center-pieces of the Rhizome Festival in Cork, through the Triskel Arts Centre. We did the opening night with a live presentation, with traditional Celtic musicians, with other Cage performers. These performers were kind of like rock stars, but they knew Cage and had performed in Cage ensembles. So there was an interesting combination of musics. The orginal Roaratorio also used Celtic musicians so I thought it was a nice homage to Cage. However, it was intended as a gallery installation with five monitors and the sound from the major live performances.

INTENTION

Much of Cage's work explores non-intention, for example employing the I Ching in the chance selection of sounds. Your work begins with intention of creating a portrait of Cage and his ideas. How did you define chance procedures or criteria that determined the appearances and disappearances of different images? How random were they meant to be? If they were meant to be essentially random, what change procedures did you define for their appearance and disappearance? Were the five one-hour videos distinctly different from one another--based on different texts or ideas?

In his work. John often looked for numbers so he could enact chance procedures. For example there is Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for 12 radios and 24 players. There were two players on each radio, one adjusting the dial and one adjusting the volume; they were all on stopwatches. Interestingly, that piece is still performed and of course, where it is performed and the era of the performance creates a completely different landscape. That is the brilliance of Cage; even though it's chance, things seemed to work out in a pretry remarkable way. He was not using truly random procedures, but a set of methods or ways to put things into action or to create sound. He was less interested in tonality or harmony, emanating from his frustration with not "getting" the idea of being a composer and working with harmony.

When Cage did a film he gave instructions for the camera--aperture settings and so on. For example, in his film Chesspiece in which he was playing chess with Teeny Duchamp with a camera mounted above them, ninety-five percent of the film is over or underexposed, in pure white or pure black. Film has a narrow latitude--a couple of stops--in which you can see an image. I thought he wouldn't do that in music. He would start with a good recording and then enact chance procedures on its presence; the music might be present only ten percent or one hundred percent, but there would always be a quality sound. So, I thought it important to start with an image first, and deal with percentages of presence. In the videos images get masked and revealed and there are lots of things running beneath all the time that you are not seeing. What gets masked over is analogous to Cage's idea that what is not heard is just as important as what is heard. So I used chance procedures on images that had the ability to be present or not.

In Cirus On Metaphors on Vision choices of images were based upon the mesostics--places named in the text. I had been traveling all over the world and always carried my camera with me and it turned out I had shot film in every place Stan Brakhage spoke of in his text. So I created a library of images of those places and also of the types of images or concepts spoken of in Metaphors on Vision. I took this inventory of images to the Experimental Television Center and worked on transferring them to video, slowing the images down using variable speed projectors, using rear screen projections, and created a live camera feed off the rear screen into a matrix used to mix and layer video. There are a lot of electronic and hand made early video devices, many created by Nam June Paik at the Experimental Television Center. During a residency there I learned to use the tools available, such as luminous keyers, frame buffers and so on. This was my first foray into video so this was experimental machinery that was used to alter the look of the video and to layer it. Finally, I found tools in video that mirrored my film esthetic. It's different now with use of a computer, but these tools were unavailable to video previously.

It was exciting to set things in motion in this way, always using John Cage's image as a filter or a mask. That, to me, was parallel to writing through a text. When I distilled the entire Metaphors on Vision, I used John Cage's name. Writing a mesostic employs some strict rules: using John Cage's name, you go to the first word in the text containing a j that does not begin or end with the letter. But there is an arbitrary aspect where you can choose words on either side of the word, allowing you some input. It's not just a simple distillation method, but you can have your own presence and your own involvement. The poetic aspect of your endeavor is then allowed to speak a bit. Cage's distillation of Finnegan's Wake, using the mesostic, is considered one of the best, capturing the spirit more than any other distillation.

So then one goes back to the question, what is chance? We are so attuned to the idea that everything must be original in creation, but here the artist's hand is creating a different set of structures. So once I set up everything, worked with all the layers, determined what made sense, using John's image and the other footage, I ended up making seventeen different 40-minute tapes. Each one has a different tonality, different presence. Then, using the I Ching, we did the editing. For example, to create the first of the five videotapes used in the piece, the I Ching told me to use 0 minutes: 0 seconds to 1 minute: 32 seconds of tape 14 beginning at 30 minutes: 10 seconds, so that becomes the first cut. So the whole compilation edit of the five tapes used comes from all the 17 tapes.

That method sounds random, but the resulting tapes do not look random.

No, it's seamless. In Cork, a reviewer came to me and said he had come with great skepticism. He said, "After a few minutes I thought, OK, I've seen it. I get it, it's all these bright colors. And then I got transfixed. At the end I was crying. Somehow you managed to capture the essence of Cage and his ideas, and presented a kind of life to us." That was quite a beautiful thing for him to say ... to be moved in that way. I'm all for moving people. Cage was not necessarily about that, but it was my portrait of him. I'm interested in developing a real collaboration with the subject matter and the methods. I try to be very faithful to the musical scores, to the composer, to the musical form. The project is about trying to create and explore what an equal and parallel space could be between music and image; music is not in a supporting role here, as it is in a typical narrative or experimental movie. That's been my struggle and my intention for all of the Film for Music for Film series. And the IMUSICIRCUS tapes are part of that series. With the film Ryoanji I use a different approach--the score is for an ensemble of soloists and the film is another soloist.

TRANSLATION You use the word "translation" to describe the work, the translation of a score for music to a filmic score and of Cage's ideas and aesthetics in sound to the visual realm. Tell more about your interest in this translation, in contrast with the usual role of music in film.

It's always about translation, but the initial impetus for doing Film for Music for Film was that I constantly saw composers' works get chopped up and used in support of some other narrative device. I've even seen experimental filmmakers use music in a supportive role. This goes back to Eisenstein, who thought about it and didn't know if it could really be done. Some of the films in the series succeed more than others. Some scores don't leave much room for me and the making of it was a struggle, as it was in De Profundis. Trying to fit to that very dynamic piece, very present piece by Frederic Rzewski, and create the translation was the challenge of Part II. (a 32-minute scored piece for vocalizing pianist, which is a setting of excerpts from Oscar Wilde's prison letter.)

The entirety of it is sensory overload, more than one can absorb in any one viewing. Say a few words about the use of the word 'circus'--on the surface, analogous to circus rings, where the viewer places his or her attention or allows it to drift or to become transfixed, as that reviewer had--and the sensory experience. In this piece, what were the issues, contradictions or overlaps in the media?

The gallery installation becomes yet another translation. The original presentation included live music, in fact, a whole arena filled with musicians and performers, we even built a pool on the stage for Pool Piece, there was a naked opera singer, along with live saxophone and banjo ... There was a lot vying for the audience member's attention. So, I wanted a pull towards the visual that had an equal presence with the performer. So now we're translating into this austere space--where you are not distracted by performers moving around, and by other actions happening--putting together all of the sound from the various performances. It's a kind of winnowing down, a kind of distillation. You might say it's now so concentrated it needs to be diluted, but I don't think so-- just a different focus. I think it works, but I wanted to present this to the world as a simplistic presentation where people could experience the sound and the images. People have commented very positively, saying that it really honors Cage and his ideas. Ten years later it still feels incredibly faithful to his ideas. As in, for example, the setting of the videos and audiotapes to begin and end at any time, in no particular synchronization with one another?

Yes, that's another random element. That's why the audio is not on the video track, so they can have a freedom all their own.

AUDIENCE Do you have a particular audience in mind that you want to reach?

It straddles two audiences--people very interested in Cage's music (he had a strong presence here in Buffalo) and the visual arts where Cage also had a strong influence. I also wanted to bring the Avantgarde film image into the New Music world. The new music world includes the Club Foot Orchestra and the Alloy Orchestra thatperform music to films. Some make sense, like Ballet Mecanique, but if you just do Metropolis over and over, it reduces film to one of its original elements, that of entertainment. Coming from a serious engagement with film as its own art practice distinct from movies. I wanted to go into the new music world with these visual ideas, and be a player in that world.

What responses do you expect from your audience?

First of all. I've learned that you can't expect anything. With De Profundis, at the Eastman House, there were 500 people in the audience and I had just finished it the week before. It was double, billed with a short, lesbian comedy. Half the people were there for the maker of the short film, Chris Russo, and clearly they were not there for my film. Within twenty minutes of the beginning of my film I had completely cleared the house. They fled in droves. So I thought this is either a complete work of genius, or I'm totally screwed. I had literally worked on this thing for four years and had come out of the darkroom finally with this magnum opus, and they all left. Maybe 80 people were left at the end. But it led to a new way of dealing with audiences; I figured the best thing at a moment like that is to do some stand-up comedy. Some people were really into it, and others stayed out of sheer angst and hostility. Some were screaming at me.

I don't know. Once a piece of art is put out into the world, it has a life of its own. No matter what your intentions as a filmmaker, there is a certain degree where audience response isn't relevant any more, you just have to let people have their own experience with it. Working in the visual medium with Cage, and his distrust of that. I wanted to come through with something that was, on the first level, faithful. Secondly, I wanted to create an esthetic work that felt like my own. So I wasn't even thinking audience. I know with Cage the audience can go either way. People walked out on his stuff all the time, even today when he is part of the canon. But if I intended to please anyone, it would have been John or myself. Even when we did it in New York, we had such trouble in the beginning because even the musicians who were expert musicians; very familiar with Cage's work, came to the piece with great skepticism. During rehearsal it was pandemonium. Douglas Cohen had to convince them that we had our own expertise and were not just coming out of nowhere. It helped the musicians' mood that there was a full house for the performance, it got a good review, and the audience was totally with it. That's the great thing about New York--there's a knowledgeable audience. So, they got it; they loved it! The musicians turned around and said. "This may be the best Cage event we've ever done."

How long do you wish people would experience the work?

It was always intended in live performance to be a 70-minute piece. The videos in live performance were staggered.

WORK How does this piece fit with your previous work, and how does it shape your current and future work?

It gave me permission on one level, and on another level it taught me to trust my instincts and to trust the images. The images all have something to reveal. There are so many variations on how to put something together, and we anguish over is this the right connection or not. There are different approaches. Music composition is like film editing for me, where you are developing a crescendo or a movement, connecting one shot to the next, deciding whether to cut on a dominant or recessive theme, color or image. I think very musically, since that is my training. (I used to play the piano and once was a master craftsman of piano restoration.) That's how I approach film. That led me to other areas, in which I worked with Cage on special preparations for the piano to perform Ryoanji live, in which I would be the percussionist, using one end of a piano with solenoids stuck into the strings. So, I've been around composers. I used to read scores, just to read them, especially the beautiful scores of George Crumb. Those are very visual pieces.

Where might this installation piece travel?

Now that the Cage piece has been transferred from tape and digitized, it can travel in the form of DVDs. It may become part of the repertoire through the Cage Foundation.

What is coming up for you?

Well, I'm the Executive Director of CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, so I'm working on grants, Development issues and we have a major exhibit opening this week that will be part of an auction next month and then a big Queer art show. The work for this event can be seen at www.cepagallery.com. So that keeps me quite busy. But I am working on another film titled Crossing with Douglas Cohen that explores the erotic politics of Sailor hazing rituals, which will be very interesting Also, I have an exhibition of prints from the series De Profundis coming up at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY (dates are August 19-September 30, 2004).

Where can people learn more about your work?

www.lawrencebrose.com or a Google search are two ways to read about my work. The latest Millennium Film Journal is dedicated to Brakhage and Lesbian and Gay Experimental Cinema. Scott McDonald has written his interviews, called Critical Cinemas, of experimental filmmakers, and the next issue will have an interview with me. NYFA has just published a cover story about my work in the April issue of their quarterly FYI that can be seen on the NYFA web site.

AN INTERVIEW BY CHRISTINE SEVILLA CHRISTINE SEVILLA is an author, photographer, teacher, information designer and is a regular contributor to Afterimage.

above copied from:http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org/history/pdf/SevillaBrosecage_2563.pdf

THE ANARCHIST ART OF JOHN CAGE, Richard Kostelanetz

In surveying his work in music and theater, in poetry and visual art, I have noticed that the American John Cage favored a structure that is nonfocused, nonhierarchic and nonlinear, which is to say that his works in various media consist of collections of elements presented without climax and without definite beginnings and ends. This is less a negative structure, even though I am describing it negatively, than a visionary esthetic and political alternative. In creating artistic models of diffusion and freedom, Cage is a libertarian anarchist.

What makes Cage's art special, and to my senses politically original, is that his radical politics were expressed in decisions not of content but of form. For instance, one quality of nearly all works of his for large ensembles is that they do not need a conductor. By extension, the work implies that outside of music, as well as in, it is possible to create social mechanisms that likewise can function without conductors, without chiefs. In other words, in the form of his art, in the form of performance, is a representation of an ideal polity.

It is precisely in relinquishing traditional opportunities for authority that Cage made essentially political decisions. His scores are designed to encourage a greater variety of interpretations than usual. There is no 'right way' to do them, though there are wrong ways, especially if a performer violates the instructions that are not left to chance. A second reflection of Cage's politics was writing music for an ensemble of equals, even when he was one of the performers, thereby resisting such conventional hierarchical forms as a soloist with a backup group. (The fact that this last feature was always true indicates to me that Cage subscribed to his egalitarian esthetics long before he was conscious of them.) Thirdly, the principle of equality extends to the materials of his art. Not only are all notes equal, but all instruments are equal, regardless of their rank in the musical tradition. In Credo in Us (1942), for instance, the piano has no more presence than the home radio; all are equidistant from the audience. Fourth, he performed his music in gymnasiums as well as opera houses, the assumption being that all venues are equally legitimate.

In his book 'Notations' (1968), where Cage presented in alphabetical order a single page apiece of scores chosen by contributing composers, the radical assumption is that the editor has no more authority than the reader in assigning value. Nothing is featured by being put ahead of the others, or having its name on the book's cover. The absence of hierarchy and of editorial discrimination in this book likewise reflects his politics. (A traditional editor would huffily characterize a book like 'Notations' as 'an abdication of professional responsibility.') Anyone who ever worked in theater with Cage knew that he believed every performance venue should have convenient exits so that spectators can leave whenever they wish. Capturing anyone's body was to him no more justifiable in art than in life. One truth of Cage's own functioning was that no one loses anything by relinquishing power, but the essence of his method is not to tell but to show.

With that last point in mind, it is instructive to contrast the anarchism of Cage's art with another masterpiece of anarchist art in our time, the Living Theater's production of 'Paradise Now' (1968). Those of us who saw it two decades ago will remember that 'Paradise Now' was structured as a series of sketches designed to elicit audience participation. Thus, it opened with the performers reciting testimony of their own imprisonment: 'I can't travel without a passport,' they repeatedly proclaimed, confronting and challenging the audience to respond with argument or shocked acceptance. 'I am not allowed to take off my clothes.' 'I don't know how to stop the war,' they kept on repeating. From this purgatory the performers progress to sketches of liberation, which is paradise, culminating with members of the audience being invited onstage to leap into the locked arms of male company members. Structurally, this play is dialectical, moving from antithesis to synthesis; and in this respect, it differs from Cage who hasn't presented any antitheses, as far as I can tell, in at least forty years.

Another difference is that 'Paradise Now' is preachy, Julian Beck even telling us that we've been offered glimpses of the postrevolutionary age. Cage, by contrast, shows instead of tells, for his assumption is that, in the community represented by his art, the Promised Land has come. When asked about his response to such programmatic political music as Frederic Rzewski's, he said, 'I have difficulty with it, because it's so pushy. It has precisely in it what government has in it: the desire to control; and it leaves no freedom for me. It pushes me toward its conclusion, and I'd rather be a sheep, which I'm not, than be pushed along by a piece of music. I'm just as angry, or refusing to go along with the 'Hallelujah Chorus' as I am with the Attica one [by Rzewski]. The moment I hear that kind of music I go in the opposite direction. And they use the technique of repetition, and of sequence, incessantly [as did the Living Theater, I should add]. And I can do without that.'

One thing that fascinates me about Cage is the purity of his anarchism. His perceptions are true to his politics; in neither his speech nor his behavior do you find the kinds of contradictions and compromise that some political people think are opportune for ultimate ends. He is utterly free of pretenses to superior humanity and thus false snobbism (and in these respects so utterly different from his sometime protege Morton Feldman). I've always regarded Cage as epitomizing the noncompetitive life, where no one is regarded as a threat who must be eliminated, where you can afford to be generous with your own work as well as your possessions, and to do work so extreme and idiosyncratic that plagiarism need not be feared. As he has always made a point of publishing his writings in small magazines as well as large, assuming that the putative 'reputation' of any venue affects him not, it is not surprising that his 1980s creative text on the Satie society bypassed book-publishing entirely to become available gratis, but only through the modem on your home computer. Even Cage's philosophy is true to his politics, at a time when, to paraphrase Barnett Newman, Philosophy is for the artist, especially for some painters nowadays, much as the Bible is to the minister, which is to say a respectable source that can be used to justify anything. I recently read scores of interviews with him and have never found Cage claiming anything about his art that was demonstrably false.

It is scarcely surprising that in his own professional life he has resisted not only titles and accompanying power but servility, being neither a boss nor an employee but, instead both, or more precisely a small businessman with a peripheral relation to another small business that didn't give him much power (or until recently made much money)--the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. In other words, even in his own life there was an absence of antitheses. When Harvard offered him a professorship in 1988-89, giving him one of those titles purportedly raising its bearer above the nonprofessors, I warned him that, especially if you will be talking about anarchy, you must insist upon being called the Charles Eliot Norton 'Person' of Poetry. (I reminded him that England's anarchist movement went through a divisory crisis in 1953, when Herbert Read accepted a knighthood!) When I later asked him 'what it was like to be a Harvard Professor,' he replied, appropriately, 'not much different from not being a Harvard professor.'

Another quality I admired about Cage was that, especially in contrast to many post-socialists of his generation, he never doubled back. He never said that an earlier position of his was now unacceptably radical. As a result, he was never been an ex-anything in either esthetics or politics. His art, as I noted before, always displyed the anarchist characteristics defined here. I would judge that one reason for his professional confidence to the end, in politics as well as esthetics, is that he knew from the beginning that he never wrong, which I hasten to add is not the same thing, especially in politics, as being always right.

One Cagean tactic that always puzzled me in reading interviews with him is how he often rationalized an esthetic move in terms not of ideology but simply of social benefit. Let me quote an example from my book, 'Conversing with Cage' (1988, 2002), where he said of his 'Freeman Etudes' for violin: 'They are intentionally as difficult as I can make them, because I think we're now surrounded by very serious problems in the society, and we tend to think that the situation is hopeless and that it's just impossible to do something that will make everything turn out properly. So I think that this music, which is almost impossible, gives an instance of the practicality of the impossible.'

Once I recognized this tendency toward sociological rationalization in Cage's commentary, I was skeptical about it, thinking it might represent a certain opportunism; but the more often I saw it, I began to recognize Cage as someone who came of age in the 1930s, when ideas about social betterment through art were more plentiful. To me, Cage was essentially a thirties lefty, who was more interesting than others who came out of that period because he made some original perceptions not only about art but especially about the place of politics in art, and then the possible role of art for politics, all the while remaining true to the sentiment of that time. In my sense of Cage, Zen and chance and everything else came afterwards; they are merely icing on this essentially anarchist cake.

(1993).

www.richardkostelanetz.com
Rkosti@aol.com

above copied from:

John Cage at Seventy: An Interview, Stephen Montague

From "American Music" Summer 1985


John Cage hardly needs an introduction. Nineteen eighty-two was the year of his seventieth birthday and marked over half a century of creative activity. Celebrations were worldwide for the artist and man who has become one of the most important and influential composers of this century.

The following material is taken from interviews the author conducted with Cage on March 18, 1982, at Cage's loft on West 18th Street, New York, and on May 29, 1982, before a live audience during the "Cage at 70" weekend at the Almeida Festival, London, England. The photographer Mark Haven was present during the New York interview, and the critic Keith Potter was present during the London interview. The entire "Cage at 70" was filmed by Peter Greenaway (TransAtlantic Films) for a forthcoming documentary on Cage. Brief excerpts from this interview have appeared in Classical Music (May 22, 1982): 11, and in Contact, no. 25 (Autumn 1982): 30.



Stephen Montague: You are seventy years old on September 5. What are the best and the worst things about being your age? What are some of your reflections?

John Cage: Well, I have a friend named Doris Dennison, who is seventy-four and whose ninety-six-year-old mother lives alone in Oregon and is still taking care of herself. Doris called her one day and asked how she was. Mrs. Dennison said: "Oh, I'm fine, it's just that I don't have the energy I had when I was in my seventies."

My attitude toward old age is one of gratitude for each day. Poor Henry David Thoreau died at age forty-four. You know he had the habit of walking through the streets of Concord in the dead of winter without any clothes on, which must certainly to have disturbed the local citizens no end. Later there was a lady who each year would put flowers on Emerson's grave and mutter as she would pass Thoreau's: "And none for you, you dirty little atheist!" Anyway, as I get older and begin to be almost twice as old as Thoreau, I am naturally grateful for all this time. It strikes me that since there's obviously a shorter length of time left than I've already had, I'd better hurry up and be interested in whatever I can. There's no fooling around possible. No silliness. So where I used to spend so much of my time hunting mushrooms, I've recently become interested in indoor gardening. I now tend to spread myself thinner and thinner. I'm always looking for new ways of using my energy but meanwhile continuing the other activities.

About five or six years ago, I was invited to make etchings at the Crown Point Press in California. I accepted immediately, even though I didn't know how to make them, because about twenty years before, I was invited to trek in the Himalayas, and didn't. I later discovered that the walk was going to be on elephants with servants, and I've always regretted that missed opportunity. I thought I was too busy. I am now multiplying my interests because it is my last chance. I don't know what will turn up next. The doctor told me at my age anything can happen. He was right. I got rid of arthritis by following a macrobiotic diet; work is now taking on the aspect of play; and the older I get the more things I find myself interested in doing. If you don't have enough time to accomplish something, consider the work finished once it's begun. It then resembles the Venus da Mio, which manages quite well without an arm.

Montague: What are some of your other current interests?

Cage: Macrobiotic cooking within the last ten years. If I have the chance, I am going to do a macrobiotic cookbook in collaboration with Allison Knowles. It will resemble my mushroom book, which is part of my book called M. In other words, instead of just being about cooking, it will be about everything that interests me. But I will arrange the use of chance operations so that cooking comes up more than anything else.

Montague: Do you have any regrets, anything you might have done differently as you review your seventy years?

Cage: You mean, how would I re-create the past? Well, I said long ago that if I were to live my life over again, I would be a botanist rather than an artist. At that time the botanist Alexander Smith asked me why. And I said: "To avoid the jealousies that plague the arts. Because people think of art so often as self-expression." I don't, but so many people do. "And therefore, if their work is not receiving what they consider proper attention, they then feel unhappy about it and get offended." One of my teachers, Adolf Weiss, got very angry at me simply because I became famous. He was sure I was, in some way, being dishonest, because he had been honest all his life and he'd never become famous. So he was sure I was doing something wrong and evil. But when I said to Alexander Smith that I would like to change my life by being a botanist, he said that showed how little I knew about botany. Then later in the conversation I mentioned some other botanist, and he said: "Don't mention his name in my house!" So I think that all human activities are characterized in their unhappy forms by selfishness.

Montague: What was your earliest interest in composition? Were you interested as a child?

Cage: No, I was interested in music. You are not taught in school to become a composer. I think what you are taught in school is to become a poet. So much emphasis is put on reading and writing. So if you feel like making something new, I think the tendency is to make poetry. And I'll bet you a nickel that everyone who has gone to public school has written a poem. Music and things like that are put after hours, so to become interested in music you had to have some special inclination, and I had it. But in school, when I signed up for the glee club, they said we'll have to test your voice. They tested it and informed me that I didn't have one. So within school I was not a musician, but outside of school I studied the piano with my Aunt Phoebe. Mother and Dad bought me a piano.

Montague: Your father was an inventor. What were some of his inventions?

Cage: He invented a submarine that held the world's record in 1913 for staying underwater. But it ran by means of a gas engine, so it left bubbles on the surface, and you could tell where it was. It never occurred to him that it would be important to hide. When he saw that people wanted to travel underwater secretly, he then invented a way to discover them. It was used in World War I in the English Channel to detect German submarines. When he died he was working on space travel without the use of fuel. In other words, the release from or acceptance of gravity.

Montague: Where did he do his training?

Cage: Out of the blue. He never graduated from high school.

Montague: My grandfather was also an inventor and had a similar background with no real formal training. He was the inventor of the snap clothes pin, double-ended toothpick, hard-surface paper plate, book matches, and other such things, but never graduated from high school.

Cage: Right, inventors don't have to.

Montague: It was that era when the explosion of inventions was just beginning. So did your father encourage you in music, or did he want you to follow his work?

Cage: He wanted me to follow his work. He was nominally an electrical engineer, but I always felt like that humorous writer for the New Yorker who wrote a beautiful article on how frightened he was about being shocked by electricity. I always had that feeling about electricity, whereas my father evidently didn't.

Montague: Didn't you once say that your early work in electronic music was somewhat terminated because of your fear of electrical shock?

Cage: Well, it isn't exactly terminated, but there was a concert I gave with David Tudor in the late 1950s or early 60s in New Jersey where everything we touched gave us a shock. It must have been a very amusing concert because we were always jumping. Everything we touched shocked us. Everything!

Montague: That must be one of your definitions of a nightmare. Did you continue?

Cage: Yes, but we couldn't escape. We were constantly shocked everywhere.

Montague: Do you have any interest in pop music?

Cage: No, but every now and then I'm obliged to be curious because someone says, for example, Brian Eno likes my work very much. So what do I think of his? I don't have a playing machine, so it's awkward to find out. Recently I've been making etchings in California, and most of the artists that go to the Crown Point Press like to have music played while they are working. So there is a sound system. Realizing that, I asked them if they had some Brian Eno I could hear, and they did. So I heard some. What I liked about it were the silences in it. What I didn't like about it was the fact that after each silence the same kind of thing happened that happened after the first silence-or before the first silence. He had too much of an idea plus the idea of silence, and I liked that idea.

Also the silence had a kind of unpredictable length.

Montague: Earning a living as a composer in any era has traditionally been difficult. How old were you when you could really say you were earning a living just as a composer?

Cage: Well, I began to make money not from actually writing music but from lecturing, concerts, and all such things, what you might call the paraphernalia of music, not until I was fifty. But then I did. Now I could get along without giving any concerts if I chose to live in a poor corner of the world. My income from my past work is sufficient to live on in a very modest situation. I used to suggest to Merce Cunningham that it was time to retire, and he said: "Where would you go?" And I said: "To Bolivia." He said: "Why?" So I said: "Because surely no one there is interested in modern music." I'd like to be somewhere where the phone doesn't ring. You see I refuse to have an answering service. I consider it a form of twentieth-century immorality.

Montague: In what way?

Cage: Well, it means that you disconnect yourself from the society. And it will. It's a form of selfishness.

Montague: Do you have your name in the telephone book?

Cage: No, I don't, but that's not my wish. That's Merce's wish because he's involved with a large company of dancers and a school, so if his name were in the phone book, it would be awful. Anyway, people find out what your number is whether it's in the book or not.

Montague: The photographer Mark Haven has commented that in your loft there is more a suggestion of contemporary graphics, with the jasper Johns prints and so forth, than music. There does seem to be very little suggestion of your work as one walks around.

Cage: Well maybe, except there was an Italian article recently with photos about this loft which said it was musical. Everything here is as visible as sound is audible. The pictures unevenly placed are like notes on a staff. But the thing about this place that is musical is the street noise from Sixth Avenue.

Montague: Do you like all the noise?

Cage: I love it!

Montague: You don't have double glass on your windows. Is that because you've always been fascinated with sound, noise, and so forth?

Cage: I became very interested in noise a long time ago through Oscar Fishinger, who made abstract films. He made a remark that impressed me: "Everything has a spirit and that spirit can be released by setting whatever it is into vibration." That started me off hitting things, striking them, rubbing them, working with percussion, and getting interested in noise. I wouldn't dream of getting double glass because I love all the sounds. The traffic never stops, night and day. Every now and then a horn, siren, screeching brakes, extremely interesting and always unpredictable. At first I thought I couldn't sleep through it. Then I found a way of transposing the sounds into images so that they entered into my dreams without waking me up. A burglar alarm lasting several hours resembled a Brancusi.

Montague: Tell me more about Bolivia.

Cage: The funny thing is that this loft is Bolivia. See this is the Avenue of the Americas, and if you look out the window you'll see a plaque that says Bolivia. For years I'd been saying I wanted to live in Bolivia, so I could have found this apartment not by searching as I did, but by simply going to it. Coming here to the Avenue of the Americas.

Montague: Surely in seriousness.

Cage: You think I'm not serious?

Montague: But surely Bolivia is not politically the most savory country you could pick.

Cage: It's not very good here in the United States either.

Montague: Is there some place else where you'd prefer to live? Say politically?

Cage: On the moon.

Montague: I think you'd have other problems there... but you'd probably be the only composer.

Cage: That's how I invented the prepared piano.

Montague: On the moon?

Cage:... because I was the only composer around.

Montague: Wait, let's run that back again.

Cage: Well, in 1938 Syvilla Fort, a magnificent black dancer/choreographer in Bonnie Bird's company at the Cornish School in Seattle, was giving a dance program on Friday, and I was the only composer around. She asked me to make the music for this bacchanalia. The space was small, and there was no room for percussion, only room enough for a grand piano. So I had to do something suitable for her on that piano. And that's what happened. She asked me on a Tuesday. I got to work quickly and finished it by Thursday.

Montague: Were you trying to re-create African or oriental music?

Cage: At that time, because I had recently been studying with Arnold Schoenberg, I wrote either twelve-tone music or percussion music. I first tried to find a twelve-tone row that sounded African, and I failed. So then I remembered how, the piano sounded when Henry Cowell strummed the strings or plucked them, ran darning needles over them, and so forth. I went to the kitchen and got a pie plate and put it and a book on the strings and saw that I was going in the right direction. The only trouble with the pie plate was that it bounced. So then I got a nail, put it in, and the trouble was it slipped. So it dawned on me to wind a screw between the strings, and that was just right. Then weather stripping and so on. Little nuts around the screws, all sorts of things. I invited Mark Tobey and Morris Graves over to listen to it, and they were delighted. And so was Syvilla, and so was I, and so was my wife, Xenia. We were all so happy, happy as could be. When Lou Harrison came over and heard it, he said: "Oh dammit! I wish I'd thought of that!"

Montague: Recently I played some of your prepared-piano pieces in Montevideo, Uruguay, and a young composer ran up on stage after the concert, looked in the piano, and said nearly the same thing: "Dammit man, why I could not think of that!"

Cage: That's the trouble, of course, for any individual. There is the rest of society and the rest of history. I think we have to take that circumstance as the means upon which we work to help us discover the nature of the next step, rather than taking it as something to lament. That's what my father would have done.

Montague: You said in a lecture: "The past must be invented, the future must be revised. Doing both makes what the present is. Discovery never stops." Is the avant-garde dead?

Cage: People ask what the avant-garde is and whether it's finished. It isn't. There will always be one. The avantgarde is flexibility of mind. And it follows like day, the night from not falling prey to government and education. Without the avant-garde nothing would get invented. If your head is in the clouds, keep your feet on the ground. If your feet are on the ground, keep your head in the clouds.

Montague: How would you describe your politics?

Cage: I'm an anarchist. I don't know whether the adjective is pure and simple, or philosophical, or what, but I don't like government! And I don't like institutions! And I don't have any confidence in even good institutions. Just recently ... well you know how interested the English composer Cornelius Cardew was in politics. He made the mistake of being interested in what he would consider "good government." Good communist government. And now that the poor fellow is dead, the friends around him want to start institutions in his memory to further the institutions in which he was interested. I think that we should be sad that we have lost an individual, Cornelius Cardew at only forty-five, and look around for someone else who was as sensitive and open to changes. But not form an institution in memory of him, which I would certainly not support. I won't even support something like the Wilderness Society, and I love mushrooms, the forest, and all that. But I hate what those institutions are doing to them. Do you know what they do? They buy up a big piece of what you might call wilderness, or waste land, land that no industry or metropolis has thought suitable for a city or factory. Then they make rules that you can't pick anything. You have to approach the whole thing as a museum. And they are turning the whole of nature into museums in the name of saving the wilderness, but with no good reason or purpose.

Montague: What would you do as an alternative?

Cage: I would let it all go to heaven and to hell at the same time. That happens automatically. There's a poem by e e cummings: "sweet spontaneous earth." Have you read it? He says in it: "we poke and prod thee and thou answereth us only with spring." Look at the highway on the Hudson River which is not being used any longer. Walk on it, and you'll see that plants are growing up through the cement. Even in England, which seems to be such a small place, there seems to be plenty of land.

Montague: I grew up in Florida which, over the years since I've been away, has been ravaged by greedy land developers, and now the East Coast and much of the West Coast is a neon nightmare, a kind of formica monument to poor taste, bad planning, and avarice at its lowest level. How does one deal with this kind of greed?

Cage: There is no way. I don't think there is any way to deal with it; except I think the best thing to do is to do something through affirmative action rather than political action.

Montague: Affirmative in what sense? How would you do it? Stop it?

Cage: No, not stop it. Discourage it through your lack of interest in it. When you see all these detergents and things, just don't buy them anymore. I think the best way to get rid of government-which is the source of a lot of this, because the government is on the side of the developers and on the side of the factories and all that-is to embarrass the government out of existence. We have really ruined Puerto Rico and now El Salvador and many other places. I think we have to embarrass the government out of existence.

Montague: How?

Cage: By not voting. By not accepting their offer of letting us vote. By refusing any connection with the government. Thoreau said: "Government is a tree, its fruit are people. As people ripen, they drop from the tree"-his Essay on Civil Disobedience.

Montague: Do you pay taxes, or do you follow Thoreau's example?

Cage: I keep on paying my taxes which Thoreau wouldn't have done, but I do it in order to be free of the things the government could do to me in revenge. I want to be able to continue my work, so in that situation I do what the government requires, but no more. Thoreau didn't because he could continue his work, in which no one was interested while he was alive, whereas my situation is the reverse. Many, many people are interested in what I am doing, so I must continue. When Thoreau gave a lecture, only two or three people turned up, and when he published a book, he had to give it away. No one would buy them.

Montague: I know you are a great admirer of Thoreau. If you could speak with anyone else of the past eras, whom would you like to talk with?

Cage: James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Erik Satie. If we went back further, I wouldn't mind meeting Mozart. I think he was a great musician. I like his ten dency toward complexity and away from unity. I would let Bach stay on his side of the street, and I also wouldn't bother with Beethoven or Haydn.

Montague: Why not Haydn? I would have thought you'd be interested in his inventive quality.

Cage: No, it's not inventive. It's simpleminded. The cadences are impossible!

Montague: How about some composers in the nineteenth century? Wagner for instance?

Cage: I would have enjoyed meeting Grieg.

Montague: Grieg? Why Grieg?

Cage: Well, he had an independent mind. He was able to write all those fifths when they were forbidden in what was considered good writing.

Montague: How about people in other fields like literature, painting, poetry?

Cage: Well, I think anybody in his right mind would have enjoyed meeting Leonardo. Joyce loved the work of Ibsen, did you know that? Dostoyevski, but then I would have had to learn Russian. I'm very glad to be alive in the twentieth century with respect to painting. I don't find previous periods of painting as interesting as it is now, but Giotto might have been interesting. I would like to have known Johannes Eckhart, a contemporary of Dante. And I would have dearly loved to have seen Milarepa floating in the form of a thistle over the landscape of Tibet. Milarepa was the great Tibetan saint, if saint is the right word, or yogi, whatever.

Montague: You studied Zen Buddhism in the 1940s and '50s, which had a great influence on you. How much does the I Ching govern your life? Do you throw the I Ching each morning?

Cage: My life, as you can imagine from what I said earlier, is not governed. And certainly not by the I Ching. I attempt to move according to circumstances. I now have 200 plants, and when I'm home, they have first priority. I spend the first two hours of each day without the I Ching taking care of them. I use the I Ching when it is useful, just as I turn on the water faucet when I want a drink. I find the I Ching useful to answer questions, and when I have questions, I use it. Then the answers, instead of coming from my likes and dislikes, come from chance operations, and that has the effect of opening me to possibilities that I hadn't considered. Chance-determined answers will open my mind to the world around.

Montague: What was a recent question you asked the I Ching?

Cage: Gregory Rose and Michael Nyman had arranged a number of my works to be performed on the Almeida Festival, London. Michael had read my own criticism of a program a few years ago at the Whitney Museum where I said that I found my music very boring when it was played too seriously. So he suggested we liven up the situation in some way. I had done a "circus" of my music at San Diego a number of years ago by having quite a few of my works played simultaneously using chance operations to determine the number of times each piece was repeated during the event. I did a similar thing in London. A "circus" of simultaneous events in a derelict church. I knew the desired length of the concert and found out from the I Ching when a work was to be played. The problem here is that you have to ask practical questions. For example, the same person cannot play in two different pieces that are being performed simultaneously.

Montague: Most composers like some of their own works better than others or at least feel some are more important than others. Which piece or pieces of yours would you consider the most important?

Cage: Well the most important piece is my silent piece, 4'33".

Montague: That's very interesting. Why?

Cage: Because you don't need it in order to hear it.

Montague: Just a minute, let me think about that a moment.

Cage: You have it all the time. And it can change your mind, making it open to things outside it. It is continually changing. It's never the same twice. In fact, and Thoreau knew this, and it's been known traditionally in India, it is the statement that music is continuous. In India they say: "Music is continuous, it is we who turn away." So whenever you feel in need of a little music, all you have to do is to pay close attention to the sounds around you. I always think of my silent piece before I write the next piece.

Montague: Where was it first performed?

Cage: In Woodstock, New York, 1952, in a hall quite suitably called the Maverick Hall, which was out in the woods. The back of the hall was open to the forest, and it was performed on a program of piano music given by David Tudor.

Montague: How did you come to compose a piece which is silence?

Cage: I had thought of it already in 1948 and gave a lecture which is not published, and which won't be, called: "A Composer's Confessions." And it was given as a lecture at Vassar College in a course of a festival involving artists and thinkers in all fields. Among those was Paul Weiss, who taught philosophy at Yale University. I was just then in the flush of my early contact with oriental philosophy. It was out of that that my interest in silence naturally developed. I mean it's almost transparent. If you have, as you do in India, nine permanent emotions, and the center one is the one without color-the others are white or black-and tranquillity is in the center: freedom from likes and dislikes. It stands to reason the absence of activity, which is also characteristically Buddhist well, if you want the wheel to stop, and the wheel is the Four Noble Truths: the first is "Life is Activity," sometimes translated "Life is Pain." If the wheel is to be brought to a stop, the activity must stop. The marvelous thing about it is when activity comes to a stop, what is immediately seen is that the rest of the world has not stopped. There is no place without activity. Oh there are so many ways to say it. Say I die as a person. I continue to live as a landscape for smaller animals. I just never stop. Just put me in the ground, and I become part and parcel of another life, another activity. So the only difference between activity and inactivity is in the mind. And the mind that becomes free of desire, Joyce would agree here, free of desire and loathing-that's why he said he was so involved with comedy, because tragedy is not free from these two. So when the mind has become in that way free, even though there continues some kind of activity, it can be said to be inactivity. And that's what I have been doing, and that's why the critics are so annoyed with my work. Because they see that I am denying the things to which they are devoted.

Montague: What other works of yours do you feel have also been very important?

Cage: All the others.

Montague: All of the others, but the silent piece stands above the rest.

Cage: It's more radical. I think the pieces since the silent piece, in a sense, are more radical than the ones that precede it, though I had an inclination toward silence that you can discern in very early pieces written in the 1930s. One of my early teachers always complained that I no sooner started than I stopped. You can see that in the Duet for Two Flutes or in those early piano pieces that are written in the '30s. Then I'm always introducing silence right near the beginning when any composer in his right mind would be making things thicker and thicker. I was getting thinner and thinner.

Montague: Your music often suffers bad performances because it looks easy

Cage: And we don't have to practice it, right?

Montague: What can a composer who writes music that looks deceptively easy do to defeat this kind of attitude in performers? Try to give them some insight into the difficulties of "simple" music?

Cage: I don't think you can do that. You have to do what I did for a recent performance of my Thirty Pieces for Five Orchestras at the Metz Festival in France. I had written into the contract that there were to be ten rehearsals devoted entirely to this work. That is to say, thirty hours of rehearsal. About three-quarters of the way through rehearsals, the musicians obviously became interested in what they were doing. So interested that they wanted to hear it. Every time they had a chance they would leave the group and go out and listen, then go back. The performance was excellent! Do not write for an orchestra unless you have in the contract, some way that will hurt them, plenty of rehearsals. In other words, you have to get them into a situation in which they have nothing else to do but that work. Then while they're working, they'll become interested. But there is no way, as they say, to lead a horse to water and make him drink. You can't be sure that they'll get interested even though you make a time length in which they might, but that's the first step. Nothing else will work because you can write books galore as I have ... they won't read them. And even bright people won't read them. In Metz some of the musicians got interested in a way I would never have imagined. One man came up to me and said: "I like this music. It has pulse." Well that was the last thing I would have thought that it had!

Montague: What outstanding works besides your own works spring to mind if I were to ask you for some works you've heard that were written since say 1945?

Cage: I think that piece with the Spanish title Hay una mujer desaparecida, by Christian Wolff is a wonderful piece. I don't know his work sufficiently well, but I think his work is important. I thought Alvin Curran's For Cornelius on the March 13 "Wall to Wall Cage" marathon (New York) was very touching. I think the music of David Tudor is extraordinary. You see my situation is such that I write music all day, and I don't hear a great deal. So I don't know that my answer to you is of any use to anyone but me.

Montague: You have been using texts taken from James Joyce for at least forty years. In one of your recent works, Roaratorio, an Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake, you read another setting of Finnegans Wake along with a sixteen-channel tape and eight Irish musicians performing their instruments around the audience. You seem to have a great fascination with Irish culture. Are you of Irish descent?

Cage: No, I'm an Englishman. I have a little French blood and a little Scottish blood, and perhaps some Swedish blood. I would love to have some Irish blood, but I don't. Maybe if I were ill and had to have a transfusion in Dublin, or even New York, I could have some Irish blood.

Montague: Do you always drink Guinness, or Irish whiskey?

Cage: Well, now I don't drink alcohol because of my macrobiotic diet. It's a funny thing. I don't have any desire for it either. But when I was drinking, it was a very fine single malt whiskey. Let's see, what do I like to drink now? I guess I like water. (laughter) It quenches the thirst.

Montague: Do you smoke?

Cage: I used to smoke at least three packs a day. Everything that happened was a signal to light a cigarette. Finally I divided myself into two people: one who knew he'd stopped, the other who didn't. Every time the one who didn't know picked up a cigarette to light it, the other one laughed until he put it down.

Montague: Do you ever go to the cinema?

Cage: No.

Montague: What do you do for leisure?

Cage: I don't have any leisure. It's not that I have my nose to the grindstone. I enjoy my work. Nothing entertains me more than to do it. That's why I do it. So I have no need for entertainment. And my work is not really fatiguing, so that I don't need to relax. Merce's work is physically tiring, so he likes to look at television. But I don't so much enjoy that. Or put me down in a situation where I have plenty of energy and I'm not permitted to do my work, then I'll look at television.

Montague: I was interested in your comments on Watergate in your talk during the Almeida Festival.

Cage: "Watergate: It took Americans 200 years to produce its own form of theater. Compare The Persians by Aeschylus, Noh drama, boredom, fascination. The only time I wrote any music was between 12:00 A.M. and 2:00 P.M. when the Senators went to lunch."

Montague: And what was it you said about interruptions?

Cage: "Divide the work to be done into parts and the time into equal numbers. Then you can proceed giving equal attention to each of the parts. Or you could say, study being interrupted. Take telephone calls as unexpected pleasures. Free the mind from its desire to concentrate. Remain open to what you can't predict. I welcome whatever happens next."

Montague: This is your seventieth year-the beginning of a new decade for you. Your life-style and the macrobiotic diet seem to agree with you. You're in good health and seem very fit.

Cage: I'm gradually learning how to take care of myself. It has taken a long time. It seems to me that when I die, I'll be in perfect condition.


---
Stephen Montague is an American concert pianist and composer presently based in London. He has toured extensively throughout Europe and the Americas and most recently had done a series of broadcasts on American music for the BBC.


Above copied from: http://www.ubu.com/papers/cage_montague_interview.html

History of Experimental Music in the United States, John Cage

Once when Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki was giving a talk at Columbia University he mentioned the name of a Chinese monk who had figured in the history of Chinese Buddhism. Sukuki said, "He lived in the ninth or the tenth century." He added, after a pause, "or the seventh century, or the twelfth or thirteenth century of the fourteenth."

About the same time, Willem de Kooning, the New York painter, gave a talk at the Art Alliance in Philadelphia. Afterwards there was a discussion: questions and answers. Someone asked De mooning who the painters of the past were who had influenced him the most. De Kooning said, "The past does not influence me; I influence it."

A little over ten years ago I acted as music editor for a magazine called Possibilities. Only one issue of this magazine appeared. However: in it, four American composers (Virgil Thomson, Edgard Varese, Ben Weber, and Alexei Haieff) answered question put to them by twenty other composers. My question to Varese concerned his views of the future of music. His answer that neither the past nor the future interested him; that his concern was with the present.

Sri Ramakrishna was once asked, "Why, if God is good, is there evil in the world?" He said, "In order to thicken the plot." Nowadays in the field of music, we often hear that everything is possible; (for instance) that with electronic means one may employ any sound (any frequency, any amplitude, any timbre, any duration); that there are no limits to possibility. This is technically, nowadays, theoretically possible and in practical terms is often felt to be impossible only because of the absence of mechanical aids which, nevertheless, could be provided if the society felt the urgency of musical advance. Debussy said quite some time ago, "Any sounds in any combination and in any succession are henceforth free to be used in a musical continuity." Paraphrasing the question put to Sri Ramakrishna and the answer he gave, I would ask this: "Why, if everything is possible, do we concern ourselves with history (in other words with a sense of what is necessary to be done at a particular time?" And I would answer, "In order to thicken the plot." In this view, then, all those interpenetrations which seem at first glance to b hellish - history, for instance, if we are speaking of experimental music - are to be espoused. One does not then make just any experiment but dos what must be done. By this I mean one does not seek by his actions to arrive at fame (success) but does what must be done; one does not seek by his actions to provide pleasure to the senses (beauty) but does what must be done; one does not seek by this actions to arrive at the establishing of a school (truth) but does what must be done. One does something else. What else?

In an article called "new and Electronic Music," Christian Wolff says: What is, or seems to be, new in this music?... One finds a concern for a kind of objectivity, almost anonymity - sound come into its own. The 'music' is a resultant existing simply in the sounds we hear, given no impulse by expressions of self or personality. It is indifferent in motive, originating in no psychology nor in dramatic intentions, nor in literary or pictorial purposes. For at least some of these composers, then, the final intention is to be free of artistry and taste. But his need not make their work 'abstract,' for nothing, in the end, is denied. It is simply that personal expression, drama, psychology, and the like are not part of the composer's initial calculation: they are at best gratuitous.

"The procedure of composing tends to be radical, going directly to the sounds and their characteristics, to the way in which they are produced and how they are notated."

"Sound come into its own." What does that mean? For one thing: it means that noise s are as useful to new music as so-called musical tones, for the simple reason that they are sounds. This decision alters the view of history, so that one is no longer concerned with tonality or atonality, Schoenberg or Stravinsky (the twelve tones or the twelve expressed as seven plus five), nor with consonance and dissonance, but rather with Edgard Varese who fathered forth noise into twentieth-century music. But it is clear that ways must be discovered that allow noises and tones to be just noises and tones, not exponents subservient to Varese's imagination.

What else did Varese do that is relevant to present necessity? He was the first to write directly for instruments, giving up the practice of making a piano sketch and later orchestrating it. What is unnecessary in Varese (from a present point of view of necessity) are all his mannerisms, of which two stand out as signatures (the repeated note resembling a telegraphic transmission and the cadence of a tone held through a crescendo to maximum amplitude). These mannerisms do not establish sounds in their own right. They make it quit difficult to hear the sounds just as they are, for they draw attention to Varese ad his imagination.

What is the nature of an experimental action? It is simply an action the outcome of which is not foreseen. It is therefore very useful if one has decided that sounds are to come into their own, rather than being exploited to express sentiments or ideas of order. Among these actions the outcomes of which are not foreseen, actions resulting from chance operation are useful. However, more essential than composing by means of chance operations, it seems to me now is composing in such a way that what one does is indeterminate of its performance. In such a case one can just work directly, for nothing one does gives rise to anything that I preconceived. This necessitates, of course, a rather great change in habits of notation. I take a sheet of paper and place points on it. Next I make parallel lines on a transparency, say five parallel lines. I establish five categories of sound for the five lines, but I do not say which line is which category. The transparency may be placed on the sheet with points in any position and readings of the points may be taken with regard to all the characteristics one wishes to distinguish. Another transparency may be used for further measurements, even altering the succession of sounds in time. In this situation no chance operations are necessary (for instance, no tossing of coins) for nothing is foreseen, though everything may be later minutely measured or simply taken as a vague suggestion.

Implicit here, it seems to me, are principles familiar from modern painting and architecture: collage and space. What makes this action like Dada are the underlying philosophical views and the collage like actions. But 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 (not the sounds that happen in it - or their relationships) (not the stones - thinking of a Japanese stone garden - or their relationships but the emptiness of the sand which needs the stones anywhere in the space in order to be empty). When I said recently in Darmstadt that one could write music by observing the imperfections in the paper upon which one was writing, a student who did not understand because he was full of musical ideas asked, "Would one piece of paper be better than another: one for instance that had more imperfections? He was attached to sounds and because of his attachment could not let sounds be just sounds. He needed to attach himself to the emptiness, to the silence. Then things - sounds, that is - would come into being of themselves. Why is this so necessary that sounds should be just sounds? There are many ways of saying why. One is this: In order that each sound may become the Buddha. If that is too Oriental an expression, take the Christian Gnostic statement: "Split the stick and there is Jesus."

We know now that sounds and noises are not just frequencies (pitches): that is why so much of European musical studies and even so much of modern music is not longer urgently necessary. It is pleasant if you happen to hear Beethoven or Chopin or whatever, but it isn't urge st to do so any more. Nor is harmony or counterpoint or counting in meters of two, three, or four or any other number. So that much of Ives (Charles Ives) is no longer experimental or necessary for us (though people are so used to knowing that he was the first to do such and such). He did do things in space and in collage, and he did say, Do this or this (whichever you choose), and so indeterminacy which is so essential now did enter into his music. But his meters and rhythms are no longer any more important for us than curiosities of the past like the patterns one finds in Stravinsky. Counting is no longer necessary for magnetic tape music (where so many inches or centimeters equal so many seconds): magnetic tape music makes it clear that we are in time itself, not in measures of two, three, or four or any other number. And so instead of counting we use watches if we want to know where in time we are, or rather where in time a sound is to be. All this can be summed up by saying each aspect of sound (frequency, amplitude, timbre, duration) is to be seen as a continuum, not as a series of discrete steps favored by conventions (Occidental or Oriental). (Clearly all the Americana aspects of Ives are in the way of sound coming into its own, since sounds by their nature are no more American than they are Egyptian.)

Carl Ruggles? He works and reworks a handful of compositions o that they better and better express his intentions, which perhaps ever so slightly are changing. His work is therefore not experimental at all but in a most sophisticated way attached to the past and to art.

Henry Cowell was for many years the open sesame for new music in America. Mos selflessly he published the New Music Edition and encouraged the young to discover new directions. From him, as from an efficient information booth, you could always get not only the address and telephone number of anyone working in a lively way in music, but you could also get an unbiased introduction from him as to what that anyone was doing. He was not attached (as Varese also was not attached) to what seemed to so many to be he important question: Whether to follow Schoenberg or Stravinsky. He's early works for piano, long before Varese's Ionization (which, by the way, was published by Cowell), by their tone clusters and use of the piano strings, pointed towards noise and a continuum of timbre. Other works of his are indeterminate in ways analogous to those currently in use by Boulez and Stockhausen. For example: Cowell's Mosaic Quartet, where the performers, in any way they choose, produce a continuity from composed blocks provided by him. Or his Elastic Musics, the time lengths of which can be short or long through the use or omission of measures provided by him. These actions by Cowell Mae very close to current experimental compositions which have parts but no scores, and which are therefore not objects but processes providing experience not burdened by psychological intentions on the part of the composer.

And in connection with musical continuity, Cowell remarked at the New School before a concert of works by Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, and myself, that there were four composers where getting rid of glue. That is: Where people had felt the necessity to stick sounds together to make a continuity, we four felt the opposite necessity to get rid of the glue so that sounds would be themselves.

Christian Wolff was the first to do this. He wrote some pieces vertically on the page but recommended their being played horizontally left to right, as is conventional. Later he discovered other geometrical means for freeing his music of intentional continuity. Morton Feldman divided pitches into three areas, high middle, and low, and established a time unit. Writing on graph paper, he simply inscribed numbers of tones to be played at any time within specified periods of time.

There are people who say, "If music's that easy to write, I could do it." Of course they could, but they don't. I find Feldman's own statement more affirmative. We were driving back from some place in New England where a concert had been given. He is a large man and falls asleep easily. Out of a sound sleep, he awoke to say, "Now that things are so simple, there's so much to do." And then he went back to sleep.

Giving up control so that sounds can be sounds (they are not men: they are sounds) means for instance: the conductor of an orchestra is no longer a policeman. Simply an indicator of time - not in beats - like a chronometer. He has his own part. Actually he is not necessary if all the players have Somme other way of knowing what time it is and how that time is changing.

What else is there to say about the history of experimental music in America? Probably a lot. But we don't need to talk about neo-classicism (I agree with Varese when he says neo-classicism is indicative of intellectual poverty), nor about the twelve-tone system. In Europe, the number twelve has already been dropped and in a recent lecture Stockhausen questions the current necessity for the concept of a series. Elliott Carter's ideas about rhythmic modulation are not experimental They just extend sophistication out from tonality ideas towards ideas about modulation from one tempo to another. They put a new wing on the academy and open no doors to the world outside the school. Cowell's present interests in the various traditions, Oriental and early American, are not experimental but eclectic. Jazz per se derives from serious music. And when serious music derives from it, the situation becomes rather silly.

One must make an exception in the case of William Russell. Though still living, he no longer composes. His works, though stemming from jazz - hot jazz - New Orleans and Chicago styles - were short, epigrammatic, original and entirely interesting. It may be suspected that he lacked the academic skills which would have enabled him to extend and develop his ideas. The fact is, his pieces were all expositions without development and therefore, even today, twenty years after their composition, interesting to hear. He used string drums made from kerosene cans, washboards, out-of-tune upright pianos; he cut a board such a length that it could be used to play all the eighty-eight piano keys at once.

If one uses the word "experimental" (somewhat differently than I have been using it) to mean simply the introduction of novel elements into one's music, we find that America has a rich history: the clusters of Leo Ornstein, the resonances of Dane Rudhyar, the near-Eastern aspects of Alan Hovhaness, the tack piano of Lou Harrison, my own prepared piano, the distribution in space of instrumental ensembles in works by Henry Brant, the sliding tones of Ruth Crawford and, more recently, Gut her Schuller, the microtones and novel instruments of Harry Patch, the mathematic continuity of cliches of Virgil Thomson. These are not experimental composers in my terminology, but neither are they part of the stream of European music which though formerly divided into neo-classicism and dodecaphony has become one in America under Arthur Berger's term, consolidation: consolidation of the acquisitions of Schoenberg and Stravinsky.

Actually America has an intellectual climate suitable for radical experimentation. We are, as Gertrude Stein said, the oldest country of the twentieth century. And I like to add: in our air way of knowing nowness. Buckminister Fuller, the dymaxion architect, in his three-hour lecture on the history of civilization, explains that men leaving Asia to go to Europe went again the wind and developed machines, ideas, and Occidental philosophies in accord with a struggle against nature; that, on the other hand, men leaving Asia to go to America went with the wind, put up a sail, and developed ideas and Oriental philosophies in accord with the acceptance of nature. These two tendencies met in America, producing a movement into the air, not bound to the past, traditions, or whatever. Once in Amsterdam, a Dutch musician said to me, "it must be very difficult for you in America to write music, for you are so far away from the centers of tradition." I had to say, "It must be very difficult for you in Europe to write music, you are so close to the centers of tradition." Why, since the climate for experimentation in America is so good, why is American experimental music so lacking in strength politically ( mean unsupported by those with money (individuals and foundations), unpublished, undiffused, ignored), and why is there so little of that is truly uncompromising? I think the answer is this: Until 1950 about all the energy for furthering music America was concentrated either in the League of Composers or in the ISCM (another way of saying Boulanger and Stravinksy on the one hand and Schroeder on the other). The New Music Society of Henry Cowell was independent and therefore not politically strong. Anything that was vividly experimental was discouraged by the League and the ISCM. So that a long period of contemporary music history in America was devoid of performances by Ives and Varese. Now the scene changes, but the last few years have been quiet. The League and the ISCM fused and, so doing, gave no concerts at all. We may trust that new life will spring up,since society like nature abhors a vacuum.

What about music for magnetic tape in America? Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky call themselves experimental because of their use of this new medium. However, they just continue conventional musical practices, at most extending the ranges of instruments electronically and so forth. The Barrons, Loui and Bebe, are also cautious, doing nothing that does not have an immediate popular acceptance. The Canadian Norman McLaren, working with film, is more adventurous than these - also the Whitney brothers in California. Henry Jacobs and those who surround him in the San Francisco area are as conventional as Luening, Ussachevsky, and the Barrons. These do move move in directions that are as experimental as those taken by the Europeans: Pousseur, Berio, Maderna, Boulez, Stockhausen, and so forth. For this reason one can complain that the society of musicians in America has neither recognized nor furthered its native musical resource (by "native" I hat resource which distinguishes it from Europe and Asia - its capacity to easily break with tradition, to move easily into the air, its capacity for the unforeseen, its capacity for experimentation). The figures in the ISCM and the League, however, were not powerful aesthetically, but powerful only politically. The names of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern are more golden than any of their American derivatives. These latter have therefore little musical influence, and now that they are becoming quiescent politically, one may expect a change in the musical society.

above copied from: http://www.zakros.com/mica/soundart/s04/cage_text.html