John Cage (review)

In the digital age one must consider the value of reprinting a collection of articles that are easily available through services such as JSTOR. This small volume on the twentieth-century composer John Cage is such a collection of articles that were either originally printed (or, in two cases, printed in translation) in the journal October or are generally available elsewhere. The eight articles reprinted here address different aspects of Cage by authors from a number of different disciplines. If such a volume of divergent yet widely available work is to be of value to the reader, then the juxtaposition of articles must yield insights beyond those offered by the individual articles themselves.

The series editors clearly elucidate the goal of each volume of the October Files series. Each book aims to trace the development of an important oeuvre as well as the construction of its discourse. In other words, when read together, the articles should construct a metahistorical or meta-critical picture of the field. The series preface (on p. vii of the book under review here) also adds that each volume should serve as a “primer” to each particular art practice, and that it should stand “in resistance to the amnesia and antitheoretical tendencies of our time.” Given these criteria, I assert that while there may be significant value to juxtaposing previously published studies in one volume, this volume is not entirely successful, despite the clear value of some of the individual articles.

The volume is arranged chronologically and contains work by Heinz-Klaus Metzger, Konrad Boehmer, Yvonne Rainer, David W. Patterson, Branden W. Joseph, Liz Kotz, Rebecca Y. Kim, and Julia Robinson. The best articles in the collection are the ones that remind us how revolutionary Cage was at one point in time, and how his contemporaries found his work to be incredibly provocative––socially and politically––even long before he wrote some of his most overtly political pieces. The least successful articles in the collection are more about the myriad artists who were influenced by Cage than about Cage, or more importantly, Cage’s music. In her article “Looking Myself in the Mouth,” Yvonne Rainer points up the fact that what Cage and Merce Cunningham did was to open up “a veritable Pandora’s Box” that “launched in due course a thousand dancers’, composers’, writers’, and performance artists’ ships” (p. 37). While this is an incredibly important notion to grasp for a deeper understanding of the avant-garde art world of the second half of the twentieth century, it also feels like territory well mapped.

The most compelling articles in the collection are the ones that are snapshots of the time in which they were written. The oldest articles in the collection, Heinz-Klaus Metzger’s “John Cage, or Liberated Music” (1959) and Konrad Boehmer’s “Chance as Ideology” (1967) are excellent examples of the state of thinking on Cage and his oeuvre during that time period. Instead of dealing directly with Cage’s most infamous work, 4’33”, and his connection to “silence,” Metzger chose to focus on Cage’s approach to time. He asserted that Cage’s music is a challenge to the idea of time as paramount in music, constituting a “rebellion against music as the real passage of time” and the resulting body of work as a “musical utopia” (p. 5). By focusing on works such Music for Piano, Concert for Piano and Orchestra, Winter Music, and Variations I, Metzger seems to be postulating Cage’s position as a true composer, not as the charlatan who was known in the popular press to have made “that silent piece.”

Boehmer’s article, on the other hand, is a pointed critique of what he identified as Cage’s most common and misguided tendency: the “isolation of sounds from one another” (p. 23). For the time period in which it was written this article is somewhat unique. Despite Boehmer’s position as a clear champion of serialism, he is not dismissive of...