Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art, Music (review)

Intended to amend an “almost inverse relation between Cage’s increasing fame and the degree of understanding of his work” (xxv), Joan Retallack’s Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art, Music presents an important effort to introduce an “American freethinking maverick.” ¹ The collected conversations between Cage and Retallack, conducted from 1990 to immediately before the artist’s sudden death in 1992, concentrate on what was Cage’s most recent work, with an emphasis on reviewing and clarifying his motives and methods. Complete with a semi-autobiographical introduction, copious footnotes, seventeen figures, and rare appendices, the book is at once a personal memoir of “one of the best (un)known artists of our time” (xli), a passionate attempt to map and develop Cage’s thinking into “new socioaesthetic paradigms” (xl), and an exhibition of an innovative mind working in “anarchic harmony” (xxx) with the “fractal models” (xl) of everyday life.

Retallack’s strong “sense of a need” (xxv) for such a book despite the already too many conversations in Cage scholarship constitutes a critique of those existing conversations—which by and large present Cage’s thinking by letting him talk—as inadequate. Her concern over a proper understanding of Cage’s work demands, as the structure of the book implicitly argues, a proper way not of presenting the artist’s aesthetic, since this has been done all along, but of representing it. Given its elusiveness, Cage’s work stands in urgent need of an interpretative framework. What distinguishes Musicage as different from “conversations” such as For the Birds: John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles (1981), is not so much the “newness” of the information it provides as its marked departure from the question-and-answer format. “Conversation,” Retallack specifies, “necessitates what it etymologically denotes—living with (con), turning (verse) toward—turning, that is, away from self alone” (xiv): in other words, a joined and coordinate operation.

Such a notion of conversation, however, does incur a problem of form. This revisionist approach to the interview jumps out of one rut only to fall into another. For while the “with (con)” is formally maintained between Cage and Retallack throughout the book, the “turning (verse)” is quite explicitly—and increasingly—directed away from the former’s thinking toward the latter’s: a turning away from presentation toward representation. This reversal of the “turning” is not, of course, without its reason, however implicit it might be.

Musicage is written from an insider’s perspective, with an unmistakable sense of privilege and authority. Its lengthy introduction, subtitled “Conversations in Retrospect,” presents itself as a personal exclusive, based on the author’s professional contact and long-term friendship with the artist. It is an introduction written as a conclusion, as an a priori, functioning both to guide the conversations and to orient one’s understanding of them. Thus positioned as the Cagean alter-ego, Retallack leads the conversations in Musicage to a great extent not as Cage’s interlocutor with questions to ask but as his collaborator with answers to offer. Not infrequently one finds Retallack putting words in Cage’s mouth. Take, for instance, the following segment of conversation:

JR

What would you substitute for the notion of politics?

JC

The uniqueness of the individual.

JR

In—

JC

In every case.

JR

In a free, anarchic society.

JC

Anarchic society.

JR

Wittgenstein, in this book [Culture and Value] which I know you’ve read, since you quote it in your sources—

JC

Well, I haven’t read them all, Joan. I’ve dipped. . . .

JR

You don’t have to have read it all for me to ask you this. . . . You talk very beautifully about “brushing” the source text.

JC

Yes. That term comes from Marshall McLuhan, you know, “brushing information against information.” . . .

JR

You may or may not have read this: Wittgenstein writes [she reads an excerpt from Wittgenstein’s Culture and Value]. . . .

JC

Suzuki said something similar. . . .

JR

You talk of artists setting examples. Do artists—in...