Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the American Experimental Tradition

SILENCING THE SOUNDED SELF

SILENCING THE SOUNDED SELF The Poetry and Music of John Cage What we require is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking. —John Cage ("Lecture on Nothing") In this chapter I will address John Cage's inclusive desire to allow room for silence in both his musical compositions and written texts. Cage himself noted that "silence" had been a lifelong concern: I've lately been thinking again about Silence, which is the title of myfirstbook of my own writings. When I was twelve years old I wrote that oration that won a high school [85] oratorical contest in Southern California. It was called "Other People Think," and it was about our relation to the Latin American countries. What I proposed was silence on the part of the United States, in order that we could hear what other people think, and that they don't think the way we do, particularly about us. But could you say then that, as a twelve year old, that I was prepared to devote my life to silence, and to chance operations? It's hard to say.1 Proving a lifelong devotion to chance operations, Cage's method of achieving silence, would be difficult. However, his entire body of work has, from the very beginning, been devoted to the inclusion of silence in an otherwise sound-filled world. One of thefirstways in which Cage allowed silence into music was, in sharp contrast to Ives, by emphasizing duration instead of harmony. In the 1930s Cage studied with the AustroHungarian composer Arnold Schoenberg, who emigrated to the United States in 1933 and eventually settled in Los Angeles. Regarding his work then, Cage recalled: After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, "In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony." I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle , that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, "In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall."2 Cage found two allies in his battle with harmony: the French composer Erik Satie and Anton Webern, a former student of Schoenberg's.3 In a lecture given at Black Mountain College in 1948, Cage remarked: In thefieldof structure, thefieldof the definition of parts and their relation to a whole, there has been only one new idea since Beethoven. And that new idea can be perceived in the work of Anton Webern and Erik Satie. With Beethoven [86] SILENCING THE SOUNDED SELF the parts of a composition were defined by means of harmony . With Satie and Webern they are defined by means of time lengths. The question of structure is so basic, and it is so important to be in agreement about it, that one must now ask: Was Beethoven right or are Webern and Satie right? I answer immediately and unequivocally, Beethoven was in error, and his influence, which has been as extensive as it is lamentable, has been deadening to the art of music.4 For Cage, duration became a means of getting around the difficulty of having "no feeling for harmony." And by citing Webern, Cage was able to use one of Schoenberg's most famous pupils as an example of how harmony was an erroneous method of structuring music. It was silence that pointed Cage away from harmony and toward duration. As he saw it, harmony as a structuring method does not include silence: If you consider that sound is characterized by its pitch, its loudness, its timbre, and its duration, and that silence, which is the opposite and, therefore, the necessary partner of sound, is characterized only by its duration, you will be drawn to the conclusion that of the four characteristics of the material of music, duration, that is, time length, is the most fundamental. Silence cannot be heard in terms of pitch or harmony: It is heard in terms of time length.5 At this point, one could very well question Cage's logic. If duration, by nature, includes silence, while harmony, in and of itself, does not, does it follow that duration is the only possible approach to structuring music? Obviously not. However, this view does shed light on Cage's underlying motivation in believing that such was the case...