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Cage wants to get to the thing which lies outside the realm of logic. He starts with a platitude that most of us could hear without raising an eyebrow ‘Art should come form within; then it is profound.’ Then he opens an attack on the psychology instilled in composers from the cultural expectation of making their music profound:
When a composer feels a responsibility to make, rather than accept, he eliminates from the area of possibility all those events that do not suggest that at the point in time vogue of profundity. For takes himself seriously, wishes to be considered great, and he thereby diminishes his love and increases his fear and concern about what people will think. There are many serious problems confronting such an individual. He must do it better, more impressively, more beautifully etc. than anyone else. And what, precisely, does this, this beautiful profound object, this masterpiece, have to do with Life? It has this to do with Life: that it is separate from it.
To start out with the internalized pressure to be profound, is a recipe for tiresomeness. This confronts the belief that by the 50s had reached a type of neurosis, that people who listen to “deep” classical music are more cultured, better than other people.
Experimental music is a term greatly propagated by Cage (objected by Robert Ashley). Cage defined this style more strictly as ‘music based on actions the outcome of which is not foreseen’
Cage: Experimental music (as defined) is indifferent to emotion. Another thing we’re doing is leaving the things that are in us in us. We’re leaving our emotions where they are in each one of us. One of us is not trying to put his emotions into someone else. It seems on surface humane, but it animalizes and we are not doing it.
The most that can be accomplished by the musical expression of feeling is to show how emotional the composer was who had it. If anyone wants to get a feeling of how emotional a composer proved himself to be, he has to confuse himself to the same final extent that the composer did and imagine that sounds are not sounds at all but are Beethoven.
Cage emphasizes the listener’s responsibility for the musical experience, the extent to which the way one listens determines what is heard. We filter what we hear, even at concerts and our listening habits are culturally conditioned.
“All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something… but when I am working it is quite clear I know nothing.
What happens to a piece of music when it is purposelessly made? What happens, for instance, to silence. That is how does the mind’s perception of it change? Formerly, silence was the time lapse between sounds, useful towards a variety of ends, among them that of tasteful arrangements.. Where none of these or other goals are present, silence becomes something else - not silence at all but sounds, that ambient sounds… Where these ears are in connection with the mind has nothing to do, that mind is free to enter into the act of listening, hearing each sound just as it is, not as phenomenon more or less approximating a preconception.
Experimental music
The glass houses of Mies van der Rohe reflect their environment, presenting to the eye images of clouds, trees or grass according to the situation. There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make silence, we cannot.
Cage went into an anechoic chamber and heard two sounds, one high and one low. The high was his nervous system in operation and the other his circulatory. Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One not fear about the future of music.
new music: new listening. Not an attempt to understand something that is being said, for if something were being said the sounds would be given shapes of words. Just attention to the activity of sounds.
De Kooning: “The past does not influence me; I influence it.”
What is the nature of experimental action. It is an action which the result is unforeseen.
one could write music by observing the imperfections in the paper upon which one was writing. “why would one piece of paper be better than another: one for instance that had more imperfections?”
“If music’s that easy to write, I could do it.” Of course they could, but they don’t.
Out of a sound sleep he awoke, to say: “Now that things are so simple, there’s so much to do” And then he went back to sleep.
I am bored with dying of a broken heart. Everything I timidly start fails with a boldness before unknown. What can I do but turn towards God and point my finger at him. I have come to the conclusion that the old man is even more stupid than he is weak.
Statements on dance
Percussion music is revolution. Tomorrow, with electronic music in our ears, we will hear freedom.
Instead of giving us new sounds, the 19th century composers have given us endless arrangements of old sounds. We have turned on the radios and always known when we were tuned to a symphony.
… the greatest advantage to modern dance: the simultaneous compositions of both dance and music. The music must not be an accompaniment it must be part of the dance.
Ballet is in possession of a tradition of clarity in its rhythmic structure. Phrases begin and end in such a way that anyone in the audience knows when they begin and end, and breathes accordingly.
Silence
A New-Yorker who is being interested in spite of himself, in everything.
The other day a pupil said, after trying to compose a melody using only three tones “I felt limited.” Had she concerned herself with the three tones, her materials, she would not have felt limited and since materials are without feeling, there would have not been any limitations. It was all in her mind. whereas it belonged in the materials.
I decided to use only quiet sounds. There seemed to me to be no truth, no good, in anything big in society. But quiet sounds were like loneliness, love or friendship.
A lady from Texas said: I live in Texas. We have no music in Texas. They reason they’ve no music in Texas is because they have recordings in Texas. Remove records from Texas and someone will learn to sing.
Everyone has a song which is no song at all: and when you sing, you are where you are.
All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working it is quite clear that I know nothing.
Lecture on Something
something and nothing are not opposed to each other, but need each other to function.
someone said “Art should come from within”; to it seems to me “Art goes within, and I don’t see the need for should or it or profound. When Art comes from within, which is what it was for so long doing, it became a thing which seemed to elevate the man who made it above those who observed or heard it and the artist was considered a genius or given a rating, until … he signs his work like a manufacturer.
He has changed the responsibility of the composer from making to accepting. To accept whatever comes regardless of the consequences is to be unafraid, to be full of that love which comes from a sense of at-one-ness with whatever.
Music Lovers’ Field Companion
I have come to the conclusion that much can be learned about music by devoting oneself to the mushroom.
The winter for mushrooms, as for music, is a most sorry season. Only in caves and houses where matters of temperature and humidity, and in concert halls where matters of trusteeship and box office are under constant surveillance do vulgar and accepted forms thrive.
I have spent many pleasant hours in the woods conducting performances of my silent pieces, transcriptions that is for an audience of myself, since they were much longer than the popular length which I had published. At one performance, I passed the first movement by attempting the identification of a mushroom which remained successfully unidentified.