This second interaction in the Sonicflux series focuses on John Cage -- at once the most influential, controversial, well-loved, and widely ridiculed composer of the late twentieth century. He became known for his expression of ideas that questioned existing notions of sound and music, silence and the role of the composer. Influenced by Zen Buddhism and the I Ching, Cage attempted to remove the ego of the composer and focus instead on such ideas as a faith in the rightness of the moment. Considered challenging perhaps even difficult to listen to, much of Cage's later work is randomly-determined or indeterminate, multi-interpretable, and unpredictable. Just as he wanted it.

While preparing a peformance (Sylvilla Fort's "Bacchanale") at the Cornish School, Cage found himself in immediate need of many percussive instruments. Having nothing but a grand piano to work with, he began stuffing all kinds of elements -- nuts, bolts, rubber erasers, insulation tape -- in between the strings, an idea pre-cursored by Henry Cowell. This created a veritable one-man percussion orchestra, sounding remarkably like West African drum ensembles or Javanese gamelans. This technique would become known as a "prepared piano." Around this time Cage also developed an influential "micro-macrocosmic" form using rhythm to define structure.

In the late 1940s, Cage became deeply influenced by Zen Buddhism, studying with Daisetz Suzuki, who also introduced Zen to Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg. Cage also studied Indian aesthetics with Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, where the purpose of music is "to quiet the mind and render it susceptible to divine influences." For Cage, the primary task became a meditational acceptance of nature.

Cage had begun integrating some chance-determination into his works using magic squares, but it was not until he was given a copy of the I Ching -- or Book of Changes -- by a precocious young Christian Wolff, that it became his primary means of composition. The I Ching teaches that each moment of the universe is a unity and that one must practise a faith in the rightness of the moment. In Eastern thought, as in the thought of Carl Jung, there are no accidents and chance does not exist.

In his later life, Cage became increasingly interested in writings, lectures, poetry, and oral performances. In his lecture-concert Indeterminacy he told one story each minute while pianist-electronic artist David Tudor made electronic noises, occasionally drowning out some part of the performance, which Cage considered acceptable. He was creating a situation that frustrated our habitual tendencies to "get" something from art.

This iconoclasm, or ability to flout the conventions of human habit and society, was for most of his career regarded as the work of a charming joker, a charlatan who sold the world nonsense packaged as art. Given that Cage was in his fifties before his music began to earn him anything more than the most meager income and that his music was typically vilified in most serious music circles for an even longer time, his detractors are hard put to identify what such charlatanism was supposed to achieve.

Controversial as Cage is, his importance to the re-direction of the visual arts, literature, and dance is now impossible to dispute.

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Believing that art is inseparable from life, John Cage was a composer whose influence expanded into art, dance, philosophy, and cultural debate. Considered by some a "musico-philosopher," Cage explored such subjects as the eradication of the artist's ego in the work, an aware acceptance of events, and the significance of nature. He was greatly influenced by many non-western disciplines, such as Zen Buddhism, Indian aesthetics, and theI Ching, and thereby presented an alternative to Western conceptions of music, art and performance.

Most famous for his work using chance-determination, Cage used the I Ching, or Chinese Book of Changes, and tossed coins to decide upon elements within a composition. He would come to experiment with this throughout his later life, using various media. The creator's role, was in the creation of the parameters of the system. Often, the elements going into a sound composition, print-work or mesostic (poem) might be known, but due to their infusion into a system, within which chance was embedded, the artist would often not know exactly or possibly have little idea what might result.

In this way, Cage sought to remove the artist's ego, personality and tastes from the work. Intending that one should be in a process of discovery and invention rather than self-expression or similar communication. The artist is then able to step back and see/hear/read the resulting work just as a member of an audience would.

Born of the Eastern philosophies Cage studied, the acceptance inherent in this working method is most famously demonstrated in his ideas on silence and in the piece 4'33". In the early 1950s, through Cage's experience of an anechoic (sound-eliminating) chamber where the sounds of his heartbeat and nervous system remained, he came to understand silence as "non-intentional and ambient sounds" -- that there was no absolute silence. As a progression from this, In his piece 4'33", premiered by the pianist David Tudor in 1952 to a packed concert hall, the piece consists of whatever non-intentional sounds that might happen between three time brackets of 33", 2'40" and 1'20", where the performer is instructed to play nothing. Tudor, in his interpretation, silently closed the lid and opened it upon each time signature, and when it was done, left the stage.

Needless to say Cage's ideas on chance-determination and silence caused much controversy. Cage was regarded as a charlatan and a charming hoaxter for much of his long career. Cage and 4'33" though, have come to be recognised as a turning point in musical history, a point from which all things shoot off in new directions. His ideas flew in the face of a personality-centered, self-expressive, European concept of art. He was turning things completely around. A case in point being those of his scores which are intended to inspire the player rather than command them. They are multi-interpretable and might contain graphic sheets, which the player would arrange by their own or random determination, for an unspecified number and/or type of instruments. Scores such as these, where the notation itself is ambiguous, with no ability to predict anything of its possible outcomes/interpretations, were what Cage referred to as Indeterminate.

This interpretable instruction-set idea would develop into several forms. As part of a performance conceived by Cage at Black Mountain College in 1952, he stood on a ladder and read a lecture, while Merce Cunningham danced, David Tudor played the piano, and Robert Rauschenberg played the Victor Victrola. All these unrelated and independent events happened simultaneously, while the audience was seated in a square, facing one another -- "for in life, we see each other." Considered a proto-Happening, this event was also important to the beginnings of the Fluxus and Performance Art movements. Possibly more key to these connections is the effect of an unstructured "class" given at the New School on Experimental Music, which was joined by key figures in these movements, such as Al Hansen, Allan Kaprow, George Brecht, Dick Higgins, Jackson Mac Low, and many others. Al Hansen has written a book about this class A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art (Something Else Press, 1965).

As a group of like-minded friends, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and the painters Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns became a combined force of cultural influence. Cage's long partnership with the choreographer Merce Cunningham, as the musical director of Merce Cunningham Dance Company, is regarded as one of the most significant artistic pairings of our time. Creating works where the music and the dance were independent of each other, they believed that the only necessary relationship between the two be that they occur in the same place at the same time. On occasion, the music would not be presented with the dance until the night of the performance. This exploration of non-intention, allowed unforeseen relationships to occur. Uninterested in effect, there was no attempt to "hold" the audience -- to communicate or manipulate emotions. Each member of the audience was responsible for what they saw in the performance.

Cage was, however, very much concerned with the relationship between the composer, the piece, and the audience. For him, music was never just sound; it is an invitation to alter one's way of perceiving the world. His appreciation of all kinds of sounds "as they are" lead to a major battle during Cage's lifetime for the acceptance of all kinds of sounds, as is evidenced by his 1937 The Future of Music: Credo

"If this word, music, is sacred and reserved for 18th and 19th century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound."

In this very early credo, Cage also writes: "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. ... Whereas, in the past, the point of disagreement has been between dissonance and consonance, it will be, in the immediate future, between noise and so-called musical sounds."

This statement, outlines his thinking in creating his early work with magnetic tape (Williams Mix, 1952) and electroacoustic composition (Imaginary Landscapes No.1). Both of these pieces -- thought to be the first of their kind -- provided the structural basis from which the sound for the online piece was created.

Much of Cage's work is referred to as "head-music," his ideas often considered more inspiring than listening to the actual pieces. These ideas have been communicated largely through his many writings, lectures, and oral performances. Silence (Wesleyan University Press, 1961), the first anthology of his lectures and writings is considered to be the most influential book written by a musician in the late twentieth century.

John Cage forever altered the way we think of silence, music and sound. In Michael Nyman's words he, "attempted -- and succeeded -- in removing the glue from musical relationships." Paradoxically, this led a number of composers to take a second look at tonality. Similarly, Cage's rejection of self-expression in his music opened up a freer attitude toward self-expression for composers who were inspired by his iconoclasm and the idea that they did not have to take European techniques as their starting point. His effect is so wide-spread as to have become a part of the very fabric of contemporary artistic practise.

The online piece brings together a range of different ideas in Cage's work -- chance-determination, systems, non-intention, and the creative process. In keeping with these ideas, the piece is built on a system that allows for a wide range of possibilities. The authors are, in fact, not entirely sure what it is going to do. It might well do very little for a while, an allowed for possibility, as in much of Cage's work with his ideas on silence.

Elements and ideas have been drawn from various areas of Cage's work -- his writing, printmaking, several of his scores, his work with the choreographer Merce Cunningham, and his oral performances recorded at the Walker Art Center. Cage often used chance-determination within a system to create situations where, as Cunningham put it, "anything could happen." In this online piece, chance-determination is used to decide the display and behavior of each element. The graphics and the sound, as in the work of Cage and Cunningham, are acting independently of each other, allowing for unforeseen relationships and fortuitous happenstance.

The system is self-generating, including it's acting upon itself as elements collide and exchange behaviors. Though interaction was kept intentionally minimal, viewers are able to have some impact on the situation, often in unseen ways. The different elements change then disappear, each with any number of possible behaviors and levels of reactions assigned to them.

Each launch of the piece sets off a new chain of events, a new experience. Not unlike Cage's work, it may take more than a glance to come to know it. It runs on it's own timetable. Upon viewing, remember that as Cage would have said, "there is no such thing as chance."


This piece was created by Jeff Feddersen & Trudy Lane, with thanks to Joel Pickard for his work with the oral recordings of John Cage and Dana Arvig for additional programming. If you would be interested to contribute additional sound files to the current sound bank, please contact us.