by Alex Ross
Many people, of course, won’t hear of it. More than half a century after the work came into the world, 4’33” is still dismissed as “absolutely ridiculous,” “stupid,” “a gimmick,” and the “emperor’s new clothes”—to quote some sample putdowns that Gann extracted from an online comment board. Such judgments are especially common within classical music, where Cage, who died in 1992, remains an object of widespread scorn. In the visual arts, though, he long ago achieved monumental stature. He is considered a co-inventor of “happenings” and performance art; the Fluxus movement essentially arose from classes that Cage taught at the New School, in the late 1950s. (One exercise consisted of listening to a pin drop.) Cage emulated visual artists in turn, his chief idol being the master conceptualist Marcel Duchamp. The difference is that scorn for avant-garde art has almost entirely vanished. A New York Times editorial writer made an “emperor’s new clothes” jab at Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase when it showed at the 69th Regiment Armory, in 1913. Jackson Pollock, too, was once widely mocked. Now the art market bows before them.
The simplest explanation for the resistance to avant-garde music is that human ears have a catlike vulnerability to unfamiliar sounds, and that when people feel trapped, as in a concert hall, they panic. In museums and galleries, we are free to move around, and turn away from what bewilders us. It’s no surprise, then, that Cage has always gone over better in nontraditional spaces. In 2009, MACBA, in Barcelona, mounted a remarkable exhibition entitled The Anarchy of Silence, which traced Cage’s career and his myriad connections to other arts. The day I was there, the crowd was notably youthful: high schoolers and college students dashed through galleries devoted to Cage’s concepts and contraptions, their faces wavering between disbelief and delight. Like it or not, Cage will be with us a long time.
Morton Feldman, another avant-garde musician with an eye for the wider artistic landscape, once said, “John Cage was the first composer in the history of music who raised the question by implication that maybe music could be an art form rather than a music form.” Feldman meant that, since the Middle Ages, even the most adventurous composers had labored within a craftsmanlike tradition. Cage held that an artist can work as freely with sound as with paint: he changed what it meant to be a composer, and every kid manipulating music on a laptop is in his debt. Not everything he did was laudable, or even tolerable. Even his strongest admirers may admit to sometimes feeling as Jeanne Reynal did when, in 1950, Cage recited his “Lecture on Nothing” at the Artists’ Club: “John, I dearly love you, but I can’t bear another minute.” Yet the work remains inescapable, mesmerizing, and-as I’ve found over months of listening, mainly to Mode Records’ comprehensive Cage edition-often unexpectedly touching. It encompasses some of the most violent sounds of the twentieth century, as well as some of the most gently beguiling. It confronts us with the elemental question of what music is, and confounds all easy answers.
Cage’s high-school yearbook said of him, “Noted for: being radical.” His radicalism was lifelong and unrelenting: he took the path of most resistance. As much as any artist, he enjoyed receiving applause and recognition, but he had no need for wider public or institutional approval. The one time that I saw him up close, he was delivering the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, at Harvard. Eminences of the faculty had gathered in Memorial Hall, possibly laboring under the illusion that in such august company Cage would finally drop his games and explain himself. Unease rippled through the room as Cage began reciting a string of mesostics—acrostics in which the organizing word runs down the middle instead of the side. The opening sounded like this: “Much of our of boredom toward talks in it misled him diplomatic skill to place to place but does it look at present most five Iranian fishermen cutbacks would not …” And it went on like that, for six lectures, the verbal material generated randomly from Thoreau, Wittgenstein, and The New York Times, among other sources. Later, when Cage was asked what he thought of being a Harvard professor, he commented that it was “not much different from not being a Harvard professor.”
Carolyn Brown, a founding member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, offers a winning portrait of Cage in Chance and Circumstance, her 2007 memoir. “He was open, frank, ready to reveal all his most optimistic utopian schemes and dreams, willing to be a friend to any who sought him out,” Brown writes. In the early days of the Cunningham company, Cage served, variously, as tour manager, publicist, fund-raiser, and bus driver; Brown recalls him behind the wheel, chattering away on innumerable subjects while taking detours in search of odd sights and out-of-the-way restaurants. He had a sunny disposition and a stubborn soul, and was prone to flashes of anger. When he learned, in 1953, that he had to give up a beloved home—his tenement on Monroe Street, on the Lower East Side-he was crestfallen, and Brown made matters worse by reminding him of the Zen Buddhist principle of nonattachment. “Don’t you ever parrot my words back at me!” Cage roared. His indefatigable optimism carried him through periods of frustration. Gann writes, “He was a handbook on how to be a non-bitter composer in a democracy” The dance critic Jill Johnston called him a “cheerful existentialist.”
Cage was born in Los Angeles in 1912. His father, a brilliant, intermittently successful inventor, devised one of the earliest functioning submarines; his mother covered the women’s-club circuit for the Los Angeles Times. The art of publicity was hardly unknown in the Cage household, and the son inherited the ability to get his name in the papers, even when he was delivering an unpopular message. In 1928, he won the Southern California Oratorical Contest with a speech titled “Other People Think,” which he delivered at the Hollywood Bowl:
One of the greatest blessings that the United States could receive in the near future would be to have her industries halted, her business discontinued, her people speechless, a great pause in her world of affairs created … We should be hushed and silent, and we should have the opportunity to learn what other people think.
Cage’s passion for silence, it seems, had political roots. He was a lonely, precocious child, mocked by classmates as a sissy. “People would lie in wait for me and beat me up,” he said, in a rare comment on his personal life, shortly before his death. In 1935, when he was twenty-two, he married a young artist named Xenia Kashevaroff, but it soon became clear that he was more strongly attracted to men. His most sonically assaultive works might be understood, at least in part, as a sissy’s revenge.
Cage dabbled in art and architecture before settling on music. He studied with Henry Cowell, the godfather of American experimental music, and then took lessons with none other than Arnold Schoenberg, the supreme modernist, first at USC and then at UCLA. Although Cage was not a disciple, rejecting most of the Germanic canon that Schoenberg held dear (Mozart and Grieg were the only classics he admitted to loving), he fulfilled Schoenberg’s tenet that music should exercise a critical function, disturbing rather than comforting the listener. Cage was to the second half of the century what Schoenberg was to the first half: the angel of destruction, the agent of change. Some commentators later tried to dissociate Schoenberg from his most notorious student, claiming that the two had had little contact. But scraps of evidence suggest otherwise. When, in 1937, Schoenberg invited friends to his home for a run-through of his Fourth Quartet—the guest list included Otto Klemperer and the pianist Edward Steuermann—Cage seems to have been the only American pupil in attendance.
Schoenberg told Cage to immerse himself in harmony. Cage proceeded to ignore harmony for the next fifty years. He first made his name as a composer for percussion, following the example of Cowell and Edgard Varèse. He transformed the piano into a percussion instrument—the “prepared piano”—by inserting objects into its strings. He brought phonographs and radios into the concert hall. He famously declared, “I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard.�
� Yet most of his early music—from the mid-thirties to the end of the forties—speaks in a surprisingly subdued voice. Music for Marcel Duchamp, a prepared-piano work from 1947, never rises above mezzo-piano, offering exotic tendrils of melody, stop-and-start ostinatos, and, at the end, eighth-note patterns that drift upward into some vaguely Asian ether. “When the war came along, I decided to use only quiet sounds,” Cage later said. “There seemed to be no truth, no good, in anything big in society. But quiet sounds were like loneliness, or love, or friendship.”
Beneath the plinking of junkyard percussion and the chiming of the prepared piano was an unsettling new idea about the relation of music to time. Cage wanted sounds to follow one another in a free, artless sequence, without harmonic glue. Works would be structured simply in terms of durations between events. Later in the forties, he laid out “gamuts”-gridlike arrays of preset sounds—trying to go from one to the next without consciously shaping the outcome. He read widely in South Asian and East Asian thought, his readings guided by the young Indian musician Gita Sarabhai and, later, by the Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki. Sarabhai supplied him with a pivotal formulation of music’s purpose: “to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences.” Cage also looked to Meister Eckhart and Thomas Aquinas, finding another motto in Aquinas’s declaration that “art imitates nature in its manner of operation.”
Audiences were initially unaware that a musical upheaval was taking place. More often than not, they found Cage’s early work inoffensive, even charming. When he gave an all-percussion concert at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943, a year after he moved to New York, he received a wave of positive, if bemused, publicity. By the late forties, he had acquired a reputation as a serious new musical voice. After the premiere of his prepared-piano cycle Sonata and Interludes, in 1949, the Times declared the work “haunting and lovely,” and its composer “one of this country’s finest.”
Cage might easily have found a calling as a purveyor of delicate exoticism. Instead, he radicalized himself further. On a trip to Paris in 1949, Cage encountered Pierre Boulez, whose handsomely brutal music made him feel quaint. In 1951, writing the closing movement of his Concerto for Prepared Piano, he finally let nature run its course, flipping coins and consulting the I Ching to determine which elements in his charts should come next. Music of Changes, a forty-three-minute piece for solo piano, was written entirely in this manner, the labor-intensive process consuming most of a year. As randomness took over, so did noise. Imaginary Landscape No. 4 employs twelve radios, whose tuning, volume, and tone are governed by chance operations. Imaginary Landscape No. 5 does much the same with forty-two phonograph records. Williams Mix is a collage of thousands of prerecorded tape fragments. Water Music asks a pianist not only to play his instrument but also to turn a radio on and off, shuffle cards, blow a duck whistle into a bowl of water, pour water from one receptacle into another, and slam the keyboard lid shut. Black Mountain Piece, which is considered the first true sixties-style “happening,” involved piano playing, poetry recitation, record players, movie projectors, dancing, and, possibly, a barking dog. All this occurred in the eighteen or so months leading up to 4’33”, the still point in the sonic storm.
Did Cage love noise? Or did he merely make peace with it? Like many creative spirits, he was sensitive to intrusions of sound; years later, when he was living in the West Village, next door to John Lennon and Yoko Ono, he asked Lennon to stop using wall-mounted speakers. But he trained himself to find noise interesting rather than distracting. Once, in a radio discussion with Cage, Feldman complained about being subjected to the buzzing of radios at the beach. Never one to miss a good setup, Cage responded that in such a situation he’d say, “Well, they’re just playing my piece.” He also disliked Muzak, and in 1948 spoke of trying to sell a silent work to the Muzak company. Gann points out that in May 1952, three months before 4’33”, the Supreme Court took up a Muzak-related case, ruling against complainants who hoped to have piped-in music banned from public transport. There was no escaping the prosperous racket of postwar America. In a way, 4’33” is a tombstone for silence. Kenneth Silverman, in his 2010 biography Begin Again, rightly emphasizes Cage’s later obsession with Thoreau, who said, “Silence is the universal refuge.”
Zen attitudes notwithstanding, Cage had a conservative, controlling side. It is a mistake to think of him as the guru of Anything Goes. He sometimes lost patience with performers who took his chance and conceptual pieces as invitations to do whatever they pleased. Even his most earnest devotees sometimes disappointed him. Carolyn Brown recounts how puzzled she was when, after she had laboriously followed Cage’s instructions for one work, he reprimanded her for executing it “improperly.” If the idea is to free oneself from conscious will, Brown wondered, how can the composer issue decrees of right and wrong?
Even a piece as open-ended as 4’33” is, ultimately, an assertion of will. Lydia Goehr, in her book The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, notes that Cage is still playing by traditional rules: “It is because of his specifications that people gather together, usually in a concert hall, to listen to the sounds of the hall for the allotted time period.” If 4’33” is supposed to explode the idea of a fixed repertory of formally constrained works, it has failed, by virtue of having become a modernist classic. You could argue that this was Cage’s plan all along—his circuitous path to greatness. Richard Taruskin, in a cold-eyed 1993 essay reprinted in his collection The Danger of Music, proposes that Cage, no less than Schoenberg, participated in the Germanic cult of musical genius. Indeed, Taruskin writes, Cage brought the aesthetic of Western art “to its purest, scariest peak.” Perhaps Cage’s entire career was a colossal annexation of unclaimed territory. If, as he said, there is nothing that is not music, there is nothing that is not Cage.
Though Cage no doubt had one eye fixed on posterity, he delighted less in the spread of his influence than in the fracturing of the tidy musical order in which he came of age. Gann makes a persuasive case that 4’33” effectively split open the musical scene of the mid-twentieth century. He writes, “Listening to or merely thinking about 4’33” led composers to listen to phenomena that would have formerly been considered nonmusical”—sustained tones, repeating patterns, other murmurs of the mechanical world. Cage cleared the way for minimalism, even if he showed little sympathy for that movement when it came along. He also spurred the emergence of ambient music, sound art, and other forms of relating sound to particular spaces. (If you stand on the north end of the pedestrian island in Times Square between Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth Streets, you hear one such piece—Max Neuhaus’s Times Square, a processing of resonances emanating from the subway tunnels below.) John Adams, in his memoir, Hallelujah Junction, describes how a reading of Cage’s 1961 book Silence encouraged him to drop out of East Coast academia, pack his belongings into a VW Bug, and drive to California. The easiest way to pay tribute to Cage is to imagine how much duller the world would have been without him.
When Gann talks about 4’33” in classes—he teaches composition and music theory at Bard College—a student invariably asks him, “You mean he got paid for that?” Kids, Cage was not in it for the money. The Maverick concert was a benefit; Cage earned nothing from the premiere of 4’33” and little from anything else he was writing at the time. He had no publisher until the 1960s. After losing his loft on Monroe Street—the Vla-deck Houses stand there now—he moved north of the city, to Stony Point, where several artists had formed a rural collective. From the mid-fifties until the late sixties, he lived in a two-room cabin measuring ten by twenty feet, paying $24.15 a month in rent. He wasn’t far above the poverty level, and one year he received aid from the Musicians Emergency Fund. For years afterward, he counted every penny. I recently visited the collection of the John Cage Trust, at Bard, and had a look at his appointment books. Almost every page had a list like this one:
.63 stamps
1.29 turp.
.25 comb
1.17 fish
3.40 shampoo
2.36 groc
5.10 beer
6.00 Lucky
“I wanted to make poverty elegant,” he once said.
By the end of the fifties, however, Cage’s financial situation had improved, though not because of his music. After moving to Stony Point, he began collecting mushrooms during walks in the woods. Within a few years, he had mastered the mushroom literature and co-founded the New York Mycological Society. He supplied mushrooms to various elite restaurants, including the Four Seasons. In 1959, while working at the R.A.I. Studio of Musical Phonology, a pioneering electronic-music studio, in Milan, he was invited on a game show called Lascia o Raddoppia?—a Twenty One—style program in which contestants were asked questions on a subject of their choice. Each week, Cage answered, with deadly accuracy, increasingly obscure questions about mushrooms. On his final appearance, he was asked to list “the twenty-four kinds of white-spore mushrooms listed in Atkinson.” Cage named them all, in alphabetical order, and won eight thousand dollars. He used part of the money to purchase a VW bus for the Cunningham company. The following year, he appeared on the popular American game show I’ve Got a Secret: as he had done on Lascia o Raddoppia?, he performed Water Walk, a piece that employed, among other things, a rubber duck, a bathtub, and an electric mixer. Cage charmed the audience from the outset; when the host, Carry Moore, said that some viewers might laugh at him, the composer replied, in his sweet, reedy voice, “I consider laughter preferable to tears.” (YouTube has the clip.) Radios were included in the score, but they could not be turned on, supposedly because of a union dispute. Instead, Cage hit them and knocked them on the floor.