by Alex Ross
Cage began as an acolyte of Arnold Schoenberg. In 1935 and 1936 he audited several of the great man’s classes at USC and UCLA. His attempts at twelve-tone writing were peculiar, featuring rows of up to twenty-five notes. From the start, he expressed disdain for the conventions of mainstream classical music and looked around for alternatives. In 1930, when he was only eighteen, he made a trip to Berlin and received stimulation from the culture of the Weimar Republic. He happened to attend a “phonograph concert” presented by Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch, at which phonographs played prerecorded sounds onstage, including a “spoken music” of phonetic syllables. In 1939 Cage wrote a work in which a phonograph becomes a musical instrument—Imaginary Landscape No. 1, for muted piano, Chinese cymbal, and variable-speed turntables. Three years later came Credo in Us, which includes a part for a record player or radio; the score suggests, with apparent sarcasm, that the operator “use some classic: e.g. Dvoák, Beethoven, Sibelius, or Shostakovich.”
For Cage, the classical tradition was worn-out kitsch ripe for deconstruction, in the manner of his intellectual hero, the conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp. A record player squawking random bits of Beethoven or Shostakovich became the sonic equivalent of painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa or displaying a urinal as sculpture.
Also, Cage loved noise. In a 1937 manifesto he 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.” He made his name as a composer for percussion, manufacturing instruments from brake drums, hubcaps, spring coils, and other cast-off car parts. At the same time, he was bewitched by soft sounds, rustlings on the border between noise and silence. The prepared piano, his most famous invention, never fails to surprise listeners expecting to be battered by some unholy racket; the preparation process, involving the insertion of bolts, screws, coins, pieces of wood and felt, and other objects between the strings, is conceptually violent, but the sounds themselves are innately sweet. Cage’s prepared-piano pieces—among them The Perilous Night, Daughters of the Lonesome Isle, and the cycle Sonatas and Interludes—have some of the supernatural poignancy of Erik Satie, whose music Cage loved from an early age.
The same gentleness governs the String Quartet in Four Parts (1949–50), whose movements are titled “Quietly Flowing Along,” “Slowly Rocking,” “Nearly Stationary,” and “Quodlibet.” Underneath the ethereal surface, however, unsettling new processes are at work. In the quartet Cage gathers various kernels of musical sound and arranges them in a “gamut,” a kind of chessboard of possibilities. He moves from one sound to another in a detached frame of mind, trying not to push them where they do not want to go. This abdication of control sets the stage for an enormous shock.
When Cage heard Boulez’s Second Sonata, he was, in his own words, “stupefied by its activism, by the sum of the activities inherent in it.” In his next works, Sixteen Dances and the Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra, everything disintegrated. At first, Cage maintained the method of the String Quartet in Four Parts, making moves on a chart of sixty-four sounds, containing notes, chords, trills, and so on. Then, while writing the final movement of the Concerto, in late 1950 and early 1951, the composer began tossing coins in order to determine what should come next. He followed the rules of the Chinese divinatory practice of the I Ching, or Book of Changes, which uses random operations to generate any one of sixty-four hexagrams, each describing a different state of mind or being (“force,” “radiance,” and so on). The piano cycle Music of Changes, composed in 1951, depended on the I Ching throughout; successive rolls of the dice determined what sound would be heard, how long it should last, how loud it should be, what tempo should be observed, and how many simultaneous layers of activity should accumulate. When the dice called for maximum density, Cage wrote down what he acknowledged to be an “irrational” quantity of notes, leaving the execution to the performer’s discretion.
Half the sounds on the charts were, in fact, silences. As James Pritchett writes in a study of Cage’s music, the composer was becoming interested in the “interchangeability of sound and silence.”
The use of chance—Cage would later make musical decisions based on imperfections in manuscript paper, star charts, and computer-generated numbers—strayed far outside European classical tradition. By downtown New York standards, however, it was nothing terribly outlandish. In these years Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Robert Rauschenberg were throwing down violent swirls of paint, stark monochrome patterns, and shiny geometric lines, or making canvases entirely black or entirely white. Pollock’s “drip paintings” used a semi-chance process.
Cage consorted with the painters, following them from the Artists’ Club on East Eighth Street to the Cedar Tavern. He also worked in tandem with Merce Cunningham, who had created the role of the Revivalist in Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring and later devised his own joltingly free and fluid choreographic language. Together, Cunningham and Cage invented a new kind of chance-driven dance in which sound and movement went their separate ways only to meet up again on a deeper conceptual level. Around this time, Cage browsed through the literature of Zen Buddhism, which supplied him with an all-accepting, “whatever happens will happen” approach to the creative process.
A few other New York–based composers were thinking along similar lines, and they gravitated into Cage’s orbit. The most important of these was Morton Feldman, a New York native who had steeped himself in Bartók, Varèse, the Second Viennese School, and Abstract Expressionist painting. It was Feldman who set loose the imp of chance; one day at Cage’s apartment he offered up for inspection a draft of a piece titled Projection 1, whose score consisted not of notes on staves but of a grid of boxes, each box lasting a certain period of time and indicating a high, middle, or low range. This novel practice came to be known as graphic notation: the composer was no longer telling performers exactly which notes to play at any given time.
A laboratory atmosphere developed in Cage’s apartment. Other frequent visitors were the teenage experimental prodigy Christian Wolff, whose early works drew on severely limited gamuts of three or four pitches; Earle Brown, whose open-form pieces imported some of the energy of bebop; and the pianist David Tudor, whose realizations of his friends’ graphic and chance scores were compositions in themselves.
Cage launched his revolution at three historic concerts in the spring and summer of 1952. First came Water Music, at the New School for Social Research, in May. David Tudor not only played the prepared piano but shuffled cards, poured water from one receptacle to another, blew a duck whistle, and changed stations on a radio. Each action was plotted on a time continuum. Then came Black Mountain Piece, at Black Mountain College, the first true “happening.” The boundary between artist and audience disappeared as participants stepped out of the crowd to perform musical or extramusical actions. Martin Duberman, in his history of the college, valiantly tried to determine what happened at the happening, but no two accounts agreed. Cage lectured on Zen Buddhism, perhaps standing on a ladder. Robert Rauschenberg exhibited artworks and/or played Edith Piaf records at double speed. Merce Cunningham danced. David Tudor played prepared piano. Movies of some kind were shown, boys or girls served coffee, a dog may or may not have barked. Black Mountain had always been a haven for adventurous spirits, but some of the faculty felt that Cage had gone too far. Stefan Wolpe, who had gone through his own Dada phase in 1920s Berlin, walked out in protest.
The final breakthrough was the premiere of 4´33?, the so-called silent piece, on August 29, in the upstate New York town of Woodstock. Cage later said that he had been inspired to write 4´33? after seeing a group of all-white Rauschenberg canvases at Black Mountain the previous year. “Music is lagging,” he thought to himself, on encountering Rauschenberg’s work. In fact, he had already experimented with spells of sile
nce in Music of Changes, and, back in 1948, he had talked about writing a four-and-a-half-minute soundless piece titled Silent Prayer. Rauschenberg simply emboldened him to do the unthinkable.
The original score was written out on conventional music paper, tempo = 60, in three movements. David Tudor walked onstage, sat down at the piano, opened the piano lid, and did nothing, except to close the lid and open it again at the beginning of each subsequent movement. The music was the sound of the surrounding space. It was at once a head-spinning philosophical statement and a Zen-like ritual of contemplation. It was a piece that anyone could have written, as skeptics never failed to point out, but, as Cage seldom failed to respond, no one else did.
The bourgeois piano having been silenced, the age of the machines could begin. On his European trip of 1949, Cage encountered several pioneering technicians of electronic music, who had set in motion the most sweeping of all postwar campaigns against the musical past.
The previous year, Pierre Schaeffer, an engineer at the French national radio network, had devised five electronic Études of Noises, one movement of which consisted of the huffing, chugging, and whistling of six locomotives that he had recorded in the Batignolles train station. Schaeffer worked initially with phonograph discs, but he soon realized that magnetic-tape recording, which German engineers had perfected during the war, allowed for the making of sound collages by way of cutting and splicing bits of tape. (His initial research into musical acoustics had actually taken place during the war, with the approval of the occupying German forces.) Schaeffer went on to create, in collaboration with another Messiaen pupil, Pierre Henry, an extended collage work titled Symphony for a Solitary Man. Schaeffer dubbed his work musique concrète and developed his tape fragments with contrapuntal intensity—playing them backward, speeding them up, slowing them down, slicing off the attack, or turning them into loops.
When Cage came to Paris, Boulez, knowing of his long-standing fascination with electronic gizmos, introduced him to Schaeffer. A few years later, in New York, Cage gained access to German-style magnetic-tape recorders, and, at the studio of Louis and Bebe Barron, he laboriously put together the four-minute tape collage Williams Mix, one of a group of pieces that emerged from the collaborative Project for Music for Magnetic Tape. The material came from an enormous heap of tape fragments, which were distributed in six categories: city sounds, country sounds, electronic sounds, manually produced sounds, wind sounds, and “small” sounds. Cage subjected these to I Ching manipulations, producing constant jumps from one sound to another or buzzing, scrambled textures of up to sixteen simultaneous layers. Notwithstanding the emotional detachment of the method, Williams Mix has the air of a world gone berserk, of modernity imploding on itself.
Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951), for twelve radios, partakes of the same madhouse atmosphere: two players are positioned at each radio, one switching stations according to patterns specified in the score, the other making adjustments to volume. A more pointed satire of media-saturated society could hardly be imagined, although, as ever, the composer’s attitude is studiously deadpan. Some part of Cage longed for pretechnological, even preindustrial life. In his 1950 “Lecture on Nothing,” he quoted a woman from Texas who told him, “We have no music in Texas.” He then said, “The reason they’ve no music in Texas is because they have recordings in Texas. Remove the records from Texas and someone will learn to sing.”
All this was too much for Boulez, who was soon speaking as witheringly of Cage as he had of so many others. By the seventies he was calling his former friend a “performing monkey” whose methods betrayed “fascist tendencies”—thereby putting Cage next to Strauss, Sibelius, and Stravinsky in the crowded room of composers who had been labeled fascist for one reason or another.
The divide that opened up between Cage and Boulez indicated sociological differences between the avant-garde cultures of America and Europe. Cage’s audience was essentially a bohemian one, including like-minded artists, Greenwich Village eccentrics, and outsiders of every description. Boulez’s audience, on the other hand, overlapped with traditional circles of connoisseurship and art appreciation. In 1954, with the assistance of Suzanne Tézenas, Boulez founded the concert series Domaine Musical, in the course of which he demonstrated his flair for programming, explicating, and conducting difficult scores. Its patrons consisted, in Tézenas’s words, of “Nicolas de Staël, Mathieu, the great abstract painters, Michaux, Jouve, Char, Mandiargues, all the grands amis, gallery directors, society women.” This was an extension of the crowd that had patronized Stravinsky and Les Six in the twenties. Indeed, none other than Jean Cocteau showed up for the first concert, swathed in a cape. Morton Feldman was not far off in dubbing Boulez’s music a form of “hyperactive chic.”
The irony of the broken Cage-Boulez friendship was that certain of Cage’s chance pieces ended up sounding oddly similar to Boulez’s total-serialist pieces. The young Hungarian composer György Ligeti pointed out the resemblance in two penetrating analytical articles of 1958 and 1960, concluding that Boulez and other serialist composers were not fully responsible for the outcome of their works. Their method obeyed a “compulsion neurosis” that effectively randomized their musical material.
In truth, there had always been an element of arbitrariness, of automatism, in atonal and twelve-tone music. When Schoenberg wrote Erwartung in seventeen days, he could hardly have known in advance exactly what each of his nine-and ten-note orchestral chords would sound like; he, too, was throwing paint on canvas. Cage brought this arbitrariness into the open. Of the Concert for Piano and Orchestra, a summary of his 1950s-era techniques, Cage said, “My intention in this piece was to hold together extreme disparities, much as one finds them held together in the natural world, as, for instance, in a forest, or on a city street.” Back in 1949, on the eve of his most radical period, Cage had announced: “Any attempt to exclude the ‘irrational’ is irrational. Any composing strategy which is wholly ‘rational’ is irrational in the extreme.”
Copland Under Fire
On May 8, 1945—V-E Day, or Victory in Europe Day—American city streets overflowed with jubilant throngs. On the same day, Aaron Copland received a Pulitzer Prize for Appalachian Spring. Prospects seemed bright for a long-term continuation of the populist style that Copland had helped to engineer. The following year Virgil Thomson crowed in the New York Herald Tribune, “We are producing very nearly the best music in the world.” As evidence, the critic-composer listed most of the leading practitioners of the populist and/or neoclassical modes of American music—Copland, Harris, Barber, William Schuman, Walter Piston, Howard Hanson, and the boy wonder Leonard Bernstein, who had made a sensational conducting debut with the New York Philharmonic in 1943 and established himself as a composer with the oracular Jeremiah Symphony and the joyously hip musical On the Town.
Even as the confetti was being swept from Times Square, V-E exuberance faded into a darker, more volatile state of mind. America was surging toward unprecedented domestic prosperity and global influence, but the mood at home turned cynical and fearful. Roosevelt’s spirit of “common discipline” was dissolving: even as middle-class Americans pursued material happiness in the form of television, rock ’n’ roll records, cars, and tract homes, they fell prey to the overarching fear that Roosevelt had warned against in his first inaugural address. The fear focused, above all, on Communism. The year 1949 was pivotal: the detonation of the first Soviet nuclear device that summer and the subsequent unmasking of the physicist Klaus Fuchs as a KGB spy intensified the anti-Communist hysteria that was already sweeping the land.
In this same period, New Deal–style art for the masses began to acquire a dubious reputation. Excesses of populism in the “serious” arts counted as evidence of a politically compromised mind. Modernists, on the other hand, garnered admiring buzzwords such as “unyielding” and “uncompromising,” their contrary stance imbued with political as well as aesthetic implications.
Clement Greenberg, who i
n his famous 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” had set up an Adorno-like antithesis between the avant-garde and commercial culture, trumpeted Abstract Expressionist painters as icons of a tough postwar spirit. In a March 1948 essay Greenberg announced that with the rise of Pollock and others “the main premises of Western art have at last migrated to the United States, along with the center of gravity of industrial production and political power.” The mainstream media went along with this modernist morality play. In August 1949, Life magazine reproduced Jackson Pollock’s “drip paintings” and asked in a headline whether Pollock was “the Greatest Living Painter in the United States.” Given that Life was under the wing of the “American Century” mogul Henry Luce, Pollock’s abstractions acquired political nobility.
Just as the country was tilting to the right, Copland introduced his Third Symphony—an ill-timed stab at heroic symphonism in the Shostakovich mode. Audience reactions were positive: Serge Koussevitzky, who commissioned the work for the Boston Symphony, called it “the greatest American symphony.” But after the premiere in October 1946, Time magazine, Luce’s other flagship publication, averred that Copland was now too popular for his own good (“too busy to be a great composer”). A few years later, the musicologist William Austin felt compelled to defend the symphony thus: “Nothing can persuade a listener to enjoy the piece if he is altogether out of sympathy with its rather New-Deal-ish spirit of hopeful resolution and neighborliness.”