John Cage: Aesthetic Perception of Sound



John Cage: Aesthetic Perception of Sound

Kelly Meyer

CFA MU 736: Aesthetics and Criticism

Final Project

June 21, 2010

Sound is a naturally occurring phenomenon in all parts of the globe. Its properties have been studied extensively in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Galileo, Boyle, Descartes, Hooke, Mersenne, and Newton.[1] In the musical world, it can be debated that sound is the single most important aspect, but composers also took great advantage of the effects of “non-sound.” Carefully placed rests, performed with specificity, provide the opportunity to produce, sustain, or cancel an emotive response. This “non sound,” or perceived silence, is as essential to the musical world as sound itself, for sound cannot be perceived as sound, if the contrast of perceived silence is not present. Few composers have understood this aspect of the phenomenon like John Cage. Cage has left an indelible mark in music history with his use of perceived silence and his aesthetic perception of sound.

In order to fully grasp Cage’s perception of sound, we must also grasp Cage’s perception of silence. The term silence is a misnomer used almost exclusively to describe the perception of the absence of sound. Merriam-Webster defines silence as just that: “absence of sound or noise.”[2] Because of the nature of sound, two things are required for its existence; a medium in which to travel and a source. A third presence, the receptor of the sound waves, is a highly debatable point and we will not belabor that argument here. Because of the requirements for silence, it is nearly impossible to attain outside of a vacuum.

John Cage discovered that even in a completely controlled environment, if a living being is present, so is sound. From an anechoic chamber at Harvard University, Cage heard two sounds; one high and one low. The engineer told Cage that the high sound was the sound of his nervous system working and the low sound was the sound of blood circulating.[3] Cage realized that there is constant sound, whether intended or not. “I realized that I was, so to speak, a walking concert and that I didn’t really intend to be that.”[4] Many people would have perceived the anechoic chamber as silence, ignoring sounds that are unintentional. Cage’s realization, then, is that “silence,” is not necessarily silent. It is the conception of something that exists within something that is perceived to not. A moment of silence is actually full of activity. Kostelanetz notes that in an interview Cage conducted with C. H. Waddington (1972), Cage states:

I once went to a Quaker meeting – with silence – and found myself thinking of what I should say – that is, how to dominate the meeting (Faustian!) – and then I realized that was not the point – not to dominate, but to listen. And to listen to silence. By silence, I mean the multiplicity of activity that constantly surrounds us. We call it “silence” because it is free of our activity. [5]

Cage has expressed a valid point; what we call silence and what is silence are two different things. It is within our perception and our realizations of those sounds that make them recognizable, and even acceptable as a sound.

As an artist with a passion for architecture, Cage often compares sound, and his perception of silence, to architectural structures and techniques. Within this medium, Cage relates an understanding of silence to glass. He states that within music, some notations in music are written as silence. This silence creates an opening for other sounds to emerge. Just as with a pane of glass in a structure reflect its environment, creating an opening, an opportunity for something to present itself. The “something” may be the reflections of sky, trees, or whatever presents itself at the moment, but it could also be the objects seen through the glass, which could also change with the moment.[6]

Being able to perceive and accept silence as sound, requires openness from the listener. Cage suggests that listening to something is actually hearing something else. “The nature of listening is in hearing something and then realizing that you’re no longer hearing it, that you’re hearing something else.”[7] This is a very important aspect to listening; being able to hear everything present as opposed to only the intended stimuli. Most listeners are trained early to hear only what is presented, focusing only on the intended stimuli. In order to break the programmed method of listening, listeners must be retrained to achieve what Cage refers to as “zero.” Zero is the mental state in which listeners have no intentions and are open to all stimuli.

Cage’s wide range of philosophical influences support the notion of emptiness and acceptance of everything. During an interview with Roger Reynolds, Cage emphasizes quiet:

All those disciplines of the Orient both in Indian and in China and Japan were strenuous disciplines, and they were not, of course, for musicians, but for people who were attempting to change their minds towards a state of emptiness. By emptiness is meant not collapse of life, but rather the quieting of desire, the quieting of the ego.[8]

Cage states that “everything is permitted if zero is taken at the basis. That’s the part that isn’t often understood. If you’re nonintentional, then everything is permitted. If you’re intentional. . .then it’s not permitted.”[9] Allowing the ears and mind to be open to all stimuli is contradictory to the way we have been trained as listeners, but an effective tool nonetheless. We are trained to focus on sound, specifically the sound we are to hear. By doing so, we effectively eliminate outside sounds from our hearing. Therefore, if our focus is on a stimuli that does not produce a sound, our perception is of silence. If we, as listeners, have been able to regulate ourselves to what Cage refers to as “zero,” we would have perceived a single, silent source and a plethora of active sources.

Cage states that through the Indian aesthetic theory, “the purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.”[10] This statement seems to imply that the act of listening to or performing music serves the purpose of sobering and quieting the mind. Cage extends this philosophy to include the mind-set prior to the musical experience in an effort to reach zero. In order to reach that state of being, Cage noted that “a sober and quiet mind would have to be one that was sober and quiet in a non-sober and quiet situation.”[11] This would surely place the mind in a state to accept any stimuli offered and be able distinguish one sound from the others. The acceptance of stimuli moves beyond critiquing the sounds and remains an objective “sponge,” taking the sounds as merely sounds and not attempting to place them into self-imposed categories of like and dislike. Cage often references philosophical teachings from the gospel of Schrivan Krishna, Zen Buddhism, and the writings of Aldous Huxley who provided an anthology of remarks of people in different periods and cultures.

Cage has found a common thread amongst philosophers that suggest opening the mind, thereby relieving it of its likes and dislikes. The secret, states Cage, is to open the mind and become interested in things, “as they are in and of themselves, whether they are seen as the aspects of nirvana or whether they are seen as aspects of sansara, daily life.”[12] The interest of things, as simply things, leads to a greater awareness. Cage emphasizes this aspect by delineating between experiencing and understanding. The goal is not to understand things, rather to experience things. If we, as listeners, understand the sounds we hear and are able to categorize those sounds into a meaningful event, we have already narrowed our mind by predisposing the sounds into more than just sounds. We have created a relationship between the sounds and their supposed meanings.

Up to this point, Cage makes a valid case for the experience of sounds outside of our listening spectrum. One can argue that, by opening our minds to new experiences and stimuli, the result is an expansion of our aesthetic view of sound. In a state of “zero,” silence is no longer possible and our perception grows, creating an endless palette of natural sounds. Cage makes of point of drawing the correlation between natural sounds and musical sounds. From his experience in the anechoic chamber, he stated that, because of the natural sounds of his body, he was a walking concert, suggesting that possibly any sound could become a musical sound.

Cage further delineates between what constitutes a “modern” piece of music and

what is not. “Traditional,” common practice, Western music is a self-contained

intentional stimulus. Any outside sounds would be perceived as an interruption to this

stimulus and would negate any focus the listener may have had. “If the music can accept ambient sounds and not be interrupted thereby, it’s a modern piece of music.”[13] Cage suggests that the way to decide if something is useful as art, is to ask whether it interrupts other sounds or if it is fluent with other sounds. The perceived fluency of a sound is largely dependent on the “openness” of the listener, or rather how close to zero the listener is.

Cage’s perception of tonal music is despondent at best, with an exception given to muzak. Muzak, because of its extremely limited dynamic range, encourages the recognition of outside sounds. Western music, however, was viewed by Cage as an “outdated and abstract ordering principle which served to regulate the otherwise continuous field of sound.”[14] Cage viewed the trained musician as a victim of coerced labor, held prisoner by the musical score and the conductor’s baton. Metzger and Pepper state that Cage “set the musicians free, allowing them to do what they like in his works and giving them. . .the dignity of autonomous musical subjects.”[15] Part of Cage’s freedom was a direct response to tonal music.

As an opponent to traditional form, Cage contradicts this philosophy with 4’33”.

The piece is well-known enough to forgo a lengthy description of the work, but we should make note of its peculiarities. The piece, possibly a response to Rauschenberg’s White Paintings and Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages, was composed not as four minutes and thirty-three seconds of openness, but as three individual movements lasting 30”, 2’23”, and 1’40”. Ian Pepper justifies Cage’s work as musical: 1. Musical structure/ form divided into three separate sections of a predetermined whole. 2. “Composition” that is a “graphic production” that is not secondary to the sound of the work in performance. 3. Performance as the pedagogical demonstration of a philosophical program. Cage, then, in retaliation to traditional forms and structures, has created a “crisis in music that has barely been articulated.”[16]

Cage suggested new ordering principles in order to “solve the problems of musical structure so fatally misunderstood by Beethoven, whose influence had left music ‘shipwrecked on an island of decadence’.”[17] The idea of scale passages is disheartening to Cage. His perception is that they go by, all with the same color, “lined up like kids in a school with the same uniform on.”[18] Part of Cage’s philosophy deals with the blurring of boundaries, or rather, the defiance of definition. It can be argued that “musical sounds” differ from simply “sounds,” which differs again from “noise.” “Musical sounds” can be defined by ordered and organized “sound,” while “noise” is unwanted sound. These definitions, placed by society through consensual likes and dislikes are rejected by Cage, who believes a sound is simply a sound; “I don’t want them [sounds] to be psychological. I don’t want a sound to pretend that it’s a bucket, or that it’s President, or that it’s in love with another sound.”[19]

The purpose of the sound, then, is to simply exist as itself. Cage intentionally avoids including any emotion into his pieces, stating that emotions exist in each person and therefore are personal and should not be imposed on others.[20] If something is perceived to be something it is not, but rather a representation of something entirely different, the original existence is lost in translation. Cage uses an example of a car’s brakes: If a car’s brakes are depressed and a sound emits that signals the failing of the brakes, then the sound is no longer a sound, it is a representation of a probable crash. When we react to the sound as a signal of distress, we are responding with reaction rather than being allowed to experience the sound aesthetically.[21]

The experience, for Cage, is a mysterious one. He is a man that thrives on the unknown, which is really the Achilles Heel of tonal music; it is predictable, enslaved in a mire of precision. Cage admits himself that he is “frequently, deliberately ambiguous . . . or vague . . . or almost precisely vague.”[22] The ambiguity that Cage refers to is his unending search for the unknown and the presentation of that to an audience that will become a part of the composition, for reasons they do not understand. Cage states: “If I understand something, I have no further use for it. So I try to make music which I don’t understand and which will be difficult for other people to understand, too.”[23]

Cage often relates the function, or lack of function with the processes of the musical experience and the ability to listen effectively. He argues that music has even less influence that speaking and writing:

Speaking and writing [have] no influence. Music less. Play any music you like for two people and then talk to them afterward and see what went on in their heads. It may be . . .because people don’t know how to listen, that they haven’t even thought what music could be or what it could do to them. I think that people can easily go to a concert and come away just as stupid as they were when they went in.[24]

By intentionally removing function from all musical sounds, Cage has re-written analytical theory as we know it, placing the emphasis on the ego, or perhaps the minimization of the ego. Theodor Adorno places heavy criticism on Cage’s aesthetic philosophy of sound: “Cage. . .appears to ascribe metaphysical powers to the note once it has been liberated from all supposed superstructural baggage.. . .[Cage’s] aim is to transform psychological ego weakness into aesthetic strength.”[25] Adorno’s view was an accusation of “the revival of Dadaism,” in which Cage was to represent a rebellion against societal trends.

Cage did not view himself as a rebel; a philosophical respondent perhaps, but not a rebel. He has responded directly to composers, performers, visual artists, dancers, architects, and societal customs, not as a rebellion, but as a response. He does not view himself as an artist, composer, musician, or a philosopher, but as someone who is in touch with the natural world around him. Others, like Adorno, have very different, yet decisive views of Cage. Cage states that some people take him quite seriously as a philosopher, but consider him an amateur musician. Others consider him a fine composer, but an amateur philosopher. Calvin Tompkins, writer for the New Yorker states that Cage was, above all, a missionary; “I think he would like to make everybody

an artist and make everybody respond intensely to their living every day.”[26]

Cage’s philosophies, a culmination of some of the great philosophical minds and theories in history, are difficult to comprehend, but his aesthetic perception is not. It is, in fact, so simple that many do not understand his justifications. Sound is merely sound. It is without function or purpose, but simply exists amongst the plethora of other sounds that cohabitate within space and time. Cage, the man, is difficult to categorize, but knowing what we know about him, I would assume that he would prefer it that way. For if we could classify him, we would be placing him into the same realm as the very music he was deliberately trying to avoid. His music was often misunderstood and criticized for not being music. The term was irrelevant. We can best describe Cage’s thoughts the same way he defends the term. “You need not think of it as ‘music,’ if this expression shocks you.”[27]

References

Baschet, Francois, and Bernard Baschet. “Sound Sculpture: Sounds, Shapes, Public Participation, Education.” Leonardo, 20:2 (1987): 107-114.

Bruno Nettl. "Music." In Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, (accessed June 21, 2010).

Cage, John. “John Cage about Silence.” interview (date unknown).

Cage, John. “Reflections of a Progressive Composer on a Damaged Society.” October, 82 (1997): 77-93.

Grimes, Ev, and John Cage. “Conversations with American Composers.” Music Educator’s Journal, 73:3 (Nov. 1986): 47-49, 58-59.

Hanoch-Roe, Galia. “Musical Space and Architectural Time: Open Scoring versus Linear Processes.” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 34:2 (Dec. 2003): 145-160.

John Cage, John Cage Documentary 1,

Joseph, Branden W.. “John Cage and the Architecture of Silence.” October, 81 (1997): 80-104.

Kostelanetz, Richard, and John Cage. “The Aesthetics of John Cage: A Composite Interview.” The Kenyon Review, 9:4 (1987): 102-130.

Metzger, Heinz-Klaus, and Ian Pepper. “John Cage, or Liberated Music.” October, 82 (1997): 48-61.

Pepper, Ian. “From the ‘Aesthetics of Indifference’ to ‘Negative Aesthetics’: John Cage and Germany 1958.” October, 82 (1997): 30-47.

Reynolds, Roger, and John Cage. “John Cage and Roger Reynolds: A Conversation.” The Musical Quarterly, 65:4 (1979): 573-594.

Taylor, Charles, and Murray Campbell. "Sound." In Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. (accessed June 22, 2010).

Thorman, Marc. “John Cage’s ‘Letters to Erik Satie.” American Music, 24:1 (2006): 95-123.

Tone, Yasunao. “John Cage and Recording.” Leonardo Music Journal, 13 (2003): 11-15.

-----------------------

[1] Charles Taylor and Murray Campbell. "Sound." In Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, (accessed June 22, 2010).

[2]

[3] Richard Kostelanetz, and John Cage, “The Aesthetics of John Cage: A Composite Interview.” The Kenyon Review, 9:4 (1987): 120.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid. ,121.

[6] Branden W. Joseph, “John Cage and the Architecture of Silence,” October, 81 (1997): 85,87.

[7] Ev Grimes, and John Cage, “Conversations with American Composers,” Music Educator’s Journal, 73:3 (Nov. 1986): 49.

[8] Roger Reynolds, and John Cage, “John Cage and Roger Reynolds: A Conversation,” The Musical Quarterly, 65:4 (1979): 574.

[9] Richard Kostelanetz, and John Cage, “The Aesthetics of John Cage: A Composite Interview.” The Kenyon Review, 9:4 (1987): 104.

[10] Ev Grimes, and John Cage, “Conversations with American Composers,” Music Educator’s Journal, 73:3 (Nov. 1986): 48.

[11] Ev Grimes, and John Cage, “Conversations with American Composers,” Music Educator’s Journal, 73:3 (Nov. 1986): 48.

[12] Ev Grimes, and John Cage, “Conversations with American Composers,” Music Educator’s Journal, 73:3 (Nov. 1986): 48.

[13] Richard Kostelanetz, and John Cage, “The Aesthetics of John Cage: A Composite Interview.” The Kenyon Review, 9:4 (1987): 105.

[14] Branden W. Joseph, “John Cage and the Architecture of Silence,” October, 81 (1997): 80.

[15] Heinz-Klaus Metzger, and Ian Pepper, “John Cage, or Liberated Music,” October, 82 (1997): 54.

[16] Ian Pepper, “From the ‘Aesthetics of Indifference’ to ‘Negative Aesthetics’: John Cage and Germany 1958,” October, 82 (1997): 34.

[17]Ibid., 32.

[18] Richard Kostelanetz, and John Cage, “The Aesthetics of John Cage: A Composite Interview.” The Kenyon Review, 9:4 (1987): 124.

[19] John Cage, “John Cage about Silence,” interview (date unknown),

[20] Richard Kostelanetz, and John Cage, “The Aesthetics of John Cage: A Composite Interview.” The Kenyon Review, 9:4 (1987): 107.

[21] Roger Reynolds, and John Cage, “John Cage and Roger Reynolds: A Conversation,” The Musical Quarterly, 65:4 (1979): 579.

[22] Roger Reynolds, and John Cage, “John Cage and Roger Reynolds: A Conversation,” The Musical Quarterly, 65:4 (1979): 586.

[23] Richard Kostelanetz, and John Cage, “The Aesthetics of John Cage: A Composite Interview.” The Kenyon Review, 9:4 (1987): 104.

[24] John Cage, “Reflections of a Progressive Composer on a Damaged Society,” October, 82 (1997): 89.

[25] Branden W. Joseph, “John Cage and the Architecture of Silence,” October, 81 (1997): 90-91.

[26] John Cage, John Cage Documentary 1,

[27] Heinz-Klaus Metzger, and Ian Pepper, “John Cage, or Liberated Music,” October, 82 (1997): 55.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download