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The structure of Cage’s freedom – On discipline, the ego and metacomposition
By, Magnus Andersson, research fellow at the Norwegian Academy of Music
Understanding Cage is very often done from two opposite poles:
1) Newness, non-ego, non-intention NON-INTENTION
2) Structural analysis – how he went about to write his works. INTENTION
“I frequently say that I don’t have any purposes, and that I’m dealing with sounds, but that’s
obviously not the case. On the other hand it is. That is to say, I believe that by eliminating
purpose, what I call awareness increases. Therefore my purpose is to remove purpose.”1
1+2=3) Intentional movement towards non-intention.
Introduction:
There is an odd polarity in John Cage’s oeuvre between his inclination to perform disciplined
chance operations and his strive towards freedom in any sense, may it be musical or personal
liberation from the ego. As a matter of fact discipline and freedom are reciprocally dependent
on each other. Without freedom, if the subject is deprived of the privilege to choose why she
disciplines herself, discipline would turn into a meaningless ascetic activity. On the opposite
side, and this is rather Cage’s focal point, there is no freedom without discipline. By
composing through chance operations he tried to free himself of his ego. Without the
disciplined actions, he was afraid that he would only express what he already knew. I Ching
and the other chance methods he used to compose with were the precondition for something
new to arise. This differs from the possibilities an improvising musician has. The improviser
plays according to his likes and dislikes, that is, he performs what he already knows, whereas
by performing disciplined actions a new musical situation could arise, one that went beyond
the performer’s taste and thus was unthinkable without utilizing the instructions Cage
prescribed. In this paper I will first look at the structure of Cage’s chance procedures in
general. What are they? How can they come about? What kind of answer do different
questions give, etc.? I will then go more specifically into how Cage tried to escape his ego
through the Freeman Etudes, only to fail. I will elaborate a concept I call the ‘meta-
1
Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 231.
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composer’2 and through this explain why Cage should be considered as a much more
traditional composer than his reputation has it.
The structure of Cage’s questions:
In every question the answer is latent, or, as Cage’s most influential spiritual teacher Daisetz
Teitaro Suzuki put it: “the very asking is more than half the answering.”3 Now, if a question is
to give an answer, then the question must deal within an entity that in one way or the other,
even if it is only metaphorically, can have something to say about the answer. The question
that for example an equation poses is answered by determining the value of units like x’s and
y’s. Question and answer are related and thus meaningful, whereas if the equation question
would be “solved” by stating a colour or naming the capital of a foreign country, there would
be no such relation and the answer would not be adequate or meaningful to the question.
From 1952 and onwards Cage very seldom worked primarily with sound but instead he
spent a significant part of his life performing disciplined actions without any overt relation to
music, such as tossing coins, rolling dices and spotting imperfections in paper. In order to
make these actions meaningful in a musical context, Cage had on beforehand created keys and
legends so that the coins, dices or whatever chance methods he used could be understood in
his musical context. Taken at face value, the coins or dices have little or nothing to say about
sounds in a musical composition. Cage had several strategies to create this relation, which
furthermore was the precondition for something new to occur.
By severing the music into basic parameters he could take charge of the music in a way an
improviser or a traditional composer could not do. When an improviser makes something up
he is unable to make certain combinations of the parameters since it does not make sense as a
whole according to his musical imagination and taste. In a fixed score, on the other hand, the
composer can manipulate a particular parameter without changing any others, which leads to
a greater freedom for the composer than for the performer for whom the parameters are
interdependent. Still, from Cage’s point of view, this is not good enough because the
composer will be subjected to his own taste. Even if the composer was trying to neglect his
taste or ego, all that could be achieved would be a negative of the taste rather than something
completely new.
2
I owe my gratitude to professor Ivar Frounberg at the State Academy of Music in Norway for this concept.
Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism. Second Series (New Delhi: Munishram Manoharlal
Publishers, 2004), 74. A little discourse on Cage and questions is found in: Marjorie Perloff and Charles
Junkerman, "Introduction," in John Cage Composed in America, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman
(Chicago: The University Press of Chicago, 1994), 1-3.
3
2
What Cage did was that he split the music up into different parameters or layers and then he
subjected these to chance operations. By combining seemingly non-congruent entities, such as
letting the imperfections of a paper, the shape of a rock, or tossed coins determine aspects of
the structure of the music, he took a decisive step towards complete musical freedom and also
towards letting new situations occur.
All the same, Cage could not succeed fully in relieving his compositions of his ego because
he always had to pose the questions. He always had to create the translation key between
results of the chance operations and the musical output. In other words, Cage composed
indeed but his material was not set sound structures but rather premises on which the sounds
of a composition would be chosen. Furthermore, and this is one of the most important points
that I am advocating in my paper, from the way he forwarded many of the questions, it should
be obvious that he must have been able to anticipate something of the result of the chance
operations. Hence he should be considered as a composer; though through composing with
questions and structures that selected the detailed musical material the term ‘meta-composer’
is probably more fitting than ‘composer’.
But let us fist see what Cage actually wanted to achieve and then from there discuss to what
extent he managed to free his compositions of himself as a composer. The Freeman Etudes
will provide a very clear example.
Freeman Etudes
In Freeman Etudes Cage and Paul Zukofsky, for whom the first etudes were written, tried to
compile a complete list of possible violin stops RÄTT TERM?. Instead of trying to choose
which stops to combine he put them into charts and let I Ching do the work for him. By
letting chance work like this, combinations could arise that were inconceivable for a thinking
and feeling ego with its consciously or unconsciously regulative taste. A condition for I Ching
to really create new situations was that Cage accepted whatever outcome it produced so that
his ego was left outside the composition, even if he would find the outcome detesting. At least
this is how the conventional story about John Cage goes, but this is highly questionable. Even
so, at this stage in my paper I acknowledge his chance operations as a means to write music
that was assumingly unthinkable and that put him, as a listener, in a situation where he simply
could not even understand what he himself had written. The latter was a point Cage expressed
as an aim of his. He said that he wanted to “make a music which I don’t understand and which
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will be difficult for other people to understand, too”.4 As long as he could not understand
what he heard, his music could be used as a “means of self-alteration, and what it alters is
mind”.5 Changing one’s mind did not mean to find a new understanding but to “accept
THE??? uncertainties of change”.6 By using chance operations Cage could write a music that
was ever changing without letting itself be subordinated in any causal categories like
harmonic relations or formal schemes. Discipline was the condition and it led to freedom in
composition and ego, and the same goes for listening to his music, which was a way to
discipline oneself through hearing something that is not to be understood. Or was it really so?
Well, a short and simple answer would be ‘no, he did not manage to free himself of his ego’,
but that is not an interesting answer, so I will try to give a more elaborate one.
Intentional non-intention:
Cage frequently said that his intentions were to free himself and his music of intentions. There
is a paradox at work here and the common way to solve it in Cage research is to read his
praxis as a movement from intention towards non-intention, thus including both but
emphasizing the latter. Here, I will turn it about and rather dwell on how his compositions
started out with being put together by musically non-intentional building blocks that turned
intentional as they were put into his compositions. I think this will present an unorthodox
view of Cage and it will conclude negatively on the question of if he freed himself of his
intentions or not. Though Cage saw the Freeman Etudes, the example that I will now deal
with, as the antipode of 4’33’’ he also saw a common denominator between the two pieces,
which he furthermore said was central to his work, “namely, to find ways of writing music
where the sounds are free of my intentions.”7
There are 32 of the Freeman Etudes and each one of them is a different result of the same
chance procedure, or in other terms, each one is a different answer to the same question. The
temporal flow and the grain of every musical event of the Freeman Etudes are laid down by
letting star maps establish “the basic notes”.8 (KOLLA HUR!) Every basic note was to stand
on its own or function as the basis of an aggregate. These are very deliberate compositional
choices of Cage. Though the exact result of the chance operations was unknown to Cage,
before the procedures were actually carried out, one can imagine how the piece will sound.
4
Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage (New York: Routledge, 2003), 223.
Ibid., 230.
6
Ibid.
7
KOLLA!!!!!!!!!!!!!! REF ibid. s. 231
8
James Pritchett, "The Completion of John Cage's Freeman Etudes," Perspectives of New Music 32, no. 2
(1994): 266.
5
4
The 32 etudes all have 84 bars each and the work is to be played in one consistent tempo from
beginning to end. Cage proposes three seconds per bar but wants the performer to be as quick
as possible. Since we know this we know something about how long the piece is going to be,
which Cage also knew when the work was conceived. Furthermore, we can assume something
about the temporal succession and about the irregularly leaping pitches through visualising a
star map. We can assume that the temporal succession will not be regular, but this will not be
to the extent that there are any extremely dense parts. The temporal succession will rather be
characterized by striving towards equilibrium, just as the stars are spaced out in the universe.
When it comes to pitches we can assume that it will be much less balanced than the temporal
succession. A musical stave is much wider than it is high, and thus differences in height
(pitch) will give rise to more significant audible variations than differences in the width
(duration). At this stage we can also imagine that the etudes will have different characters
given the density of the star map that is chosen to establish that particular etude’s basic notes.
This will be most clearly heard in the temporal flow.
This technique of composing is very similar to the one he used in Atlas Ecpliticalis (1962)
and Etudes Australes (1974-75). He used star maps in all three works and all of them consists
of 32 parts (KOLLA ECPLI). The temporal flow and the way pitches are varied will be
similar in these pieces because Cage used similar techniques. Even though Cage constantly
tried to vary himself and his pieces, we see that the pieces have similarities within the large
scale form and that Freeman Etudes will sound as if it was written in a similar style to that of
Atlas Eclipticalis and Etudes Australes.9 Still, there will be differences in density and most of
all in sound because Eclipticalis was written for an orchestra and Australes was written for
solo piano. KIKA PÅ PARTITUREN. In other words, Cage wrote these pieces in a certain
style which was varied through changes in density. MER OM KLANG?
That much about large scale form. When it comes to how the music sounds at shorter time
spans, i.e. sound, articulation and character, an anticipation of the finished result could be
derived from the setup of several technical aspects of violin playing as charted parameters.
These performance instructions were to be determined through chance operations: “Staccato
and legato, up- and downbows, bowing locations and styles, tremolos, vibratos, a wide variety
of martellato attacks, and so forth were all determined individually for every single note in the
piece”.10 In addition, he decided that the piece should not be played solely with purely
intonated twelve chromatic tones but that it was to be a microtonal piece, though these notes
9
JAG HADE FÖRST SKRIVIT: “and indeed there is a style.” LÅT DETTA FÖLJA MED I AVHANDLINGEN
REF Pritchett: The Music of John Cage, s. 198f.
10
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were not independent but rather diverging variations from the chromatic scale. There were
different ways of treating intonation. Some notes are to be played slightly out of pitch, and he
operates with twelve different inflections of the basic pitch. Yet an aspect that was taken into
consideration was that Cage gave a number for every written ricochet, and the number stated
how many sounds to produce of the same note.11 All these parameters are also deliberate
choices that stemmed from Cage’s mind or ego, though the exact presentation was pinned
down by chance operations. Cage could have decided to use a certain combination of the
above mentioned parameters and then change them in turn. Through chance operations he
could have set rules for how the changes should occur. He could have decided that one
parameter would change every 1-8 bars, and then he could use I Ching to set the number of
bars that were to pass before it changed and I Ching could also decide which parameter that
was to change. This would produce a sound of the piece that was somewhat homogenous,
though with variations. But Cage made another decision, namely to let the articulation of
every aggregate be given its articulation individually. In practice, what happened through this
is that Cage decided that the sound and character of every event stemming from a basic note
should sound heterogeneous, almost chaotic. Points like these about how Cage composed or
meta-composed through his deliberate choices could be taken even further, going into his
decisions about single parameters of articulation, but it is time to conclude my paper.
Consequences:
The whole practice of dealing with parameters is highly paradoxical. On the one side, the
parameters are the precondition for changing single aspects of a musical event and the
combination thereof, and this practice allows for a type of music to be written that any
pragmatic relation to composition or improvisation would not render. On the other hand it is
peculiar that Cage, the touchstone of anarchistic composition, deconstructed music in a
fashion that may seem highly intellectual, which is contrary to his wish to dispose of the ego,
not to mention how an intellectual and thus discriminatory stance is incompatible with his
non-dualist way of conceiving reality. I suggest that we think of Cage from two different
vantage points. First we have him as the traditional composer that dealt with sounds, although
he tried to avoid establishing any relations between them, and then we try thinking about him
as a meta-composer, who rather dealt with the conditions and circumstances under which
11
John Cage, Freeman Etudes I-XVI. Books 1 & 2 (New York: Edition Peters. No. 66813a/b).; John Cage,
Freeman Etudes XVII-XXXII. Books 3 & 4 (New York: Edition Peters 66813c/d). Se också James Pritchett,
"John Cage: Freeman Etudes," http://www.rosewhitemusic.com/cage/texts/freeman.html.
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forms and sounds were combined. As a traditional composer he did make unforeseen events
arise. Here the parameter thinking is problematic since it represents a foreign element in his
anarchistic compositional freedom. On the other hand, as a meta-composer Cage did not
explicitly deal with sounds or sound events. He rather composed with types of large scale
form, with variations, with patterns of likeliness etc.
I am inclined to see Cage primarily as this kind of meta-composer. From this stance, the
definition of a parameter and how it is to be dealt with in a composition and in relation to
other parameters is meaningful, just as a particular sound event is considered meaningful to a
traditional composer. What matters less is the exact outcome of the chance operations. The
point is that Cage has composed with the likeliness of the outcome of certain densities of the
parameters. Cage once asked rhetorically: “Why do they call me a composer, then, if all I do
is ask questions?”12 Well, he was a master questioner, and as I mentioned that Suzuki said,
who Cage very often paraphrased: “the very asking is more than half the answering.”13 Cage
composed through asking questions. Still, his purpose was not to inflict anything particular
into his compositions but to remove purpose. His intention was to free himself of the
intentions he had. He wished not to act with his ego but rather to witness occurring events. As
a composer he was doomed to ask questions and opening his mouth, no matter how much
chance was put to work, he did act and thus changed reality rather than merely observe it as it
was before anything had happened to it.
By focusing on Cage as a meta-composer, we can start discussing what makes the Cagean
style, something that is neglected in Cage research. We can also gain a proper understanding
of what his practice as a composer was about. Once asked to summarize his philosophy, Cage
answered: “Get out of whatever cage you find yourself in.”14 Cage’s career as a composer was
a lifelong failed struggle to free himself of John Cage. All he did was to take one step further
back from the composition and the role of the composer, and he thus turned himself into a
meta-composer.
Why?
Not a question about either Composer or Meta-composer. He was both. More about balance
A simple fact: Cage was a composer (what he did, loving sounds, pragmatic, for-the-kicks)
But why did he not just write down what he liked, chaos, how he could envisage that the piece
would sound?
12
John Cage, "Composition as Process," in Silence (London: Marion Boyars, 1999), 48.
Suzuki, Essays 2, 74. För en liten diskurs om Cage och frågor, se: Perloff and Junkerman, "Introduction," 1-3.
14
John Cage, For the Birds. John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles (Boston and London: Marion
Boyars, 1995), 239.
13
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Chance may be blind but it cannot act blindly within music. Cage explains this clearly in
conjunction with Theatre Piece (1960), in which the performers are to write their own
performance instructions. At one performance, one of the musicians asked Cage if he could
not walk the easy path and just do anything. He reasoned that it would probably sound the
same at any rate. Cage explains:
Well, if they do just anything, then they do what they remember or what they like, and it becomes evident
that that’s the case, and the performance and the piece is not the discovery that it could have been had they
made a disciplined use of chance operations.15
As a spiritual practitioner it was important to aim at what he did not know. An impossibility
since: No search without utterance, no question without utterance.
Even so, through trying he could arrive at something that “resembled” something unforeseen.
He about aspects of the outcome of the piece but not about the details. Other times, such as in
open form works, it could be that he knew about the material but not of the form.
One reason to the constant attempt at creating something new as the 1700 koans. Another
reason was because he was simply curious on sounds.
Go back to quote where he emphasizes “the discovery”
Newness can be repeated, so he had to write with different kinds of newness (not several MoC
but different compositional means).
Talks of pieces as more or less like commodities (not his term).
With Suzuki’s words: “the koan is compared to a piece of brick used to knock at a gate; when
the gate is opened the brick is thrown away. The koan is useful as long as the mental doors are
closed, but when they are opened it may be forgotten.”16
MoC was only useful as long as it was chaotic. When he could follow the “melodies” he could
throw the brick away.
From object to process
Not the piece but the experience of the piece
Meeting the new, what can not be grasped intellectually, no beginning, middle, end
The Cagean experience
The Cagean experience denotes a possibility for composer, musician, and listener alike. Their
activities may seem unlike, but even for the composer and the performer, it all comes down to
setting themselves in a mind state resembling how the open listener meets what she does not
understand, a listener that even ventures for what cannot be understood.
Though it is not possible to enfold Cage’s paradoxical music, there is much to say on the
structure of the senseless. Underlying the diverse expressions of his practice is a common
goal, and understanding this is furthermore a precondition to achieve an adequate
understanding of how Cage’s often paradoxical utterances are to be interpreted. No matter
Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 235. I will deal several times with “Letter to Zurich”, but I also wish to
draw attention to how he in “John Cage and the Glaswegian Circus” tells that he was “unhappy, and even
disturbed” by musicians that played Five “incorrectly”. Furthermore he says that the correct action from his part
would be to interrupt the performance “and explained to the audience that the piece was not being played
correctly, then told the players what to do.” Turner and Cage, "Glaswegian Circus," 5. His ego was indeed very
present in his compositions.
16
Suzuki, Essays 2, 98.
15
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which stance we take on Cage, if we see his project as deconstructive or affirmative, if we
focus on pieces with a set sound structure, or if we emphasize open form pieces with
instructions, Cage had a similar aim with all of his works, at least this is true from the fifties
an onwards. The aim was that the pieces should make possible a mental change to the
composer, performer and listener.17 The structure of the music should facilitate for the
participant to partake in the music as a process. At times it may seem as if sound structures as
such were arbitrary to Cage. Yet other times he exercised an influence on the music and
reception thereof that may seem irreconcilable with his wish to liberate the music from his
intentions. Even so, he always aimed at opening up for a possible experience. This experience
derives from the musical material though it is not identical to it. In other words, music does
not express, it merely happens. The experience does not come from understanding music’s
expression. Instead, when music avoids expression the listener is faced with a situation
outside what she encounters in her everyday life.18 According to Cage’s religious views, the
extra-normal is not a construction but rather an instance of reality as it is, in a similar fashion
to how a haiku can point to reality. The analogue to a haiku is also apt because the reality that
is shown can only be experienced; it cannot be understood. The music is a mere pointing
finger. It does not express what it points against.
I have chosen to call the experience that Cage’s music points toward ‘the Cagean
experience’. The reason why I choose to coin a term is because there is an underlying
structure that is common to the expressions of the experience, no matter if it involves the
composer, performer or listener, or any combination thereof. The experience has two
reciprocal characteristics. The first is that the participant encounters a frame of references
which she is unable to grasp. The second characteristic of the Cagean experience concerns the
frame as such, and that is that the frame changes with the participant’s response to it. I will
explicate what this in short can mean to the listener, performer and composer.
Another example of Goehr’s turn since 1992 concerns this topic (see also footnote: Error! Bookmark not
defined.). In 2008 she distinguishes between “occasions for rather than of experience (Erfahrungen rather than
Erlebnisse). In occasions of experience, one would always know what would happen in advance of the actual
experiencing of the experience, rendering the actual experience unnecessary. In Cage’s happenings, by contrast,
one would genuinely not know, musically at least, for what one was buying a ticket and that surely was
liberating, especially because it would make the actual having of the experience one again necessary.” Goehr,
Elective Affinities. Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory, 120.
18
That Cage at times controlled the outcome of his music may seem to contradict that music is non-expressive.
The question is open to debate, but it is conceivable that Cage at times let I Ching construct the possibilities of
experience whereas he at other times had a clear preconceived view on how music could avoid expression.
Avoiding expression in order to express may sound Adornoesque. Though the German philosopher expressed
hostility towards Cage, extremes often meet, and I will point out some other likenesses in the course of my
thesis.
17
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1) To the listener, Cage’s post 4’33’’-music is almost always about encountering a structure
that does not make sense. The structure is non-linear, the music lacks expression and if there
are references to sounds that are usually to be found outside of music, they are deprived of
their ordinary reference. If there are references to traditional musical sounds, then they are
also deprived of their signifying force. Listening to Cage is not about understanding
something external such as the Composition or its expression, but it is about coming to terms
with the situation in which the listener finds himself. It is about accepting that there is nothing
to understand. Though Cage started out by wanting to include sounds that are traditionally
considered non-musical into his music, he later changed his frame of reference. If one listens
to Inlets as a work that has expanded the possible musical sounds, then one will most likely be
bored after a while because as a composition it is static and seems to lack content. Instead the
Cagean experience presupposes that the listener hears the sound of the water filled conches as
profound and sufficient as such. There is no narrative or expression to the sound. There is
only the fact that at that very moment, there is sound coming from the conches, and that sound
is profound. If the listener gets to know a piece so well that he can anticipate what is coming
up, then the piece has lost its value. It is then a solved koan. In short: listening to Cage’s
music is to come to terms with that there is no understanding to arrive at. It is not about
thinking or knowing with one’s intellect that such is the case, but it is about accepting and
enjoying the situation that music has taken the listener into.
2) As a composer Cage put himself in a position similar to that of the listener. After making
some initial decisions he withdrew his control of the material and let it act on its own. The
questions he initially asked were what generated the final result, and in the process of
generating Cage merely acted like a bureaucrat that administrated his executives’ (the initial
questions) decisions. Cage could not interfere with the outcome of the piece. His mission was
to make sure that the material was generated in accordance with the initial questions, hence
depriving him of the possibility to infuse the music with his taste and make it expressive.19
This conduct applies to works that are written out in detail, such as Music of Changes,
19
I will later deal in length with his relationship to Boulez, but here is a crucial point at which the two
composers’ ways were divided. Later Boulez came to see his serialism in Structures 1a not as “Total but
Totalitarian”. But it took him many years to draw that conclusion. At the time being, he first saw the faults of
others music, such as Cage’s which apparently betrayed “fascist tendencies”. (Alex Ross, The Rest is Noice.
Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 370.) His own works, on the
other hand, slowly shifted emphasis from total(ist)-serialist composition towards “indiscipline – a freedom to
choose, to decide, and to reject”, though all of this was made within a serialist paradigm. Cage on the other hand
would probably agree that Boulez’ conduct was totalitarian, but when it came to his own practice he was
unwilling to compromise with his strict respect of the outcome of his chance operations, and thereby they were
similar in some sense.
10
Freeman Etudes, Atlas Eclipticalis and Etudes Australes. Though, in most cases Cage
withdraws one further step from the composition. In Musicircus the time brackets gave the
exact moment for when the performer was to start and stop playing, though what the
performer played, within certain limits, was up to the performer to select. With numerous
players pouring their disciplined intention into the musical situation simultaneously, new
unexpected musical situations will be generated. Another way is the Number Pieces where
start and stop is executed within an interval, generating new combinations of events sounding
together and diffusing time. There are yet other types of instances, such as when he makes
initial decisions like deciding that the melodic contour would be derived from the shape of a
rock, and then he lets the performer be the bureaucrat that translates the instructions into
sound. Finally there are extreme instances like Variations IV where Cage instructs the
performers on how to generate their own instructions (this simplification will be discussed at
later stages). In this case Cage asks initial questions that render the basis for asking secondary
questions. With the secondary questions the performers turn into cooperating composers20 all
the while they are bureaucratic performers executing the given instructions.
From the composer’s point of view there are two ways we could say that he is having a
Cagean experience. First the composer is turned into a listener of the music. He gives a set of
instructions that will have synergetic effects that cannot be anticipated. But Cage has the
experience of the synergetic material in common with both listener and performer. What was
unique to him as a composer is that he too had to subordinate to his own questions. Cage
compared the activity of composing with meditation.
3) Finally we have the performer. I have already dealt with how the performer is turned into
a listener and composer. What is unique to the listener’s Cagean experience is that by
subordinating to the instructions the performer can, at best, bring forth musical events that
were inconceivable to a thinking intellect. The occasions are numerous where Cage
emphasizes that the musician must play without involving his ego and taste. Cage facilitated
this through writing music that will not make sense from an expressive point of view. The
performer had to make choices within given frames, and through exercising the instructions,
new situations could arise that the performer could not anticipate. At rare occasions Cage
spoke of the practice process as a way of letting the performer change his mind, such as he did
concerning Irvine Arditti studying the Freeman Etudes.
20
They would be called ’Co-Creative Musicians’ at the Norwegian Academy of Music.
11
It should by now be clear that the work is not about its ontology, but the work is rather an
instance that makes certain musical nonsensical events possible. This is starting to be
acknowledged within Cage research. In Elective Affinities, Goehr writes: “The question no
longer asks in an ontological vein what makes musical and natural sound different or the
same; instead, it asks psychologically how we can come to experience the natural world
through music in the right naturalistic way.”21 Earle Brown also expressed that Cage was
interested in a turn from sound to attitude saying: “John is more involved with the potentials
of performer’s minds”.22 Even so, one must be careful not to understand the nonsense of
Cage’s practice as an end in itself, as if the expressive content of the music that proves a
philosophical point.23 That is a simplification that does not do Cage’s music justice. The
nonsense is rather a precondition and a means through which the listener can have her Cagean
experiences, but neither the experiences nor the structure of the nonsense are the ends of
music. The meaning is in having the experiences but they will be ever changing and it is not
possible to make a taxonomy of the psychological experiences that constitutes a musical
meaning.
Now, to facilitate for this to happen, Cage had to ask questions. He had to make music where
parts of the outcome was unforeseen; but to do this, the questions were essential, and thus he
also knew something about what would come out of his creative practice. That takes us back
to meta-composition. To arrive at something un-intentional he had to have the intention to get
there. And having that intention, Cage said “I believe that by eliminating purpose, what I call
awareness increases. Therefore my purpose is to remove purpose.”24 And as awareness
increases, we are yet again within the discussion of the Cagean experience. And now, we are
at the very end of my presentation.
Thank you!
Cage, John. "Composition as Process." In Silence, 18-56. London: Marion Boyars, 1999.
———. For the Birds. John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles. Boston and London:
Marion Boyars, 1995.
———. Freeman Etudes I-XVI. Books 1 & 2. New York: Edition Peters. No. 66813a/b.
21
Goehr, Elective Affinities. Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory, 94. This is another clear
example of how Goehr has changed her understanding of Cage since 1992.
22
Dickinson, ed., CageTalk. Dialogues with and about John Cage, 145. This is not sheer fantasy from Brown’s
side, but he claims that Cage endorsed his interpretation: “I said to John, “What you’re saying is that you’re not
really interested in music but are writing experimental psychological and sociological works, experimenting with
people’s minds.” And he said, “Yes””. Dickinson, ed., CageTalk. Dialogues with and about John Cage, 145.
23
Brown explains Cage’s practice as manipulative. It was a question of whether “he can get them [the
performers and probably listeners as well although they are not explicitly mentioned] to do what he wants them
to do.” Dickinson, ed., CageTalk. Dialogues with and about John Cage, 145.
24
Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 231.
12
———. Freeman Etudes XVII-XXXII. Books 3 & 4. New York: Edition Peters 66813c/d.
Kostelanetz, Richard. Conversing with Cage. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Perloff, Marjorie, and Charles Junkerman. "Introduction." In John Cage Composed in
America, edited by Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman, 1-13. Chicago: The
University Press of Chicago, 1994.
Pritchett, James. "The Completion of John Cage's Freeman Etudes." Perspectives of New
Music 32, no. 2 (1994): 264-270.
———. "John Cage: Freeman Etudes."
http://www.rosewhitemusic.com/cage/texts/freeman.html.
Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro. Essays in Zen Buddhism. Second Series. New Delhi: Munishram
Manoharlal Publishers, 2004.
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