In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • On John Cage’s Late Music, Analysis, and the Model of Renga in Two2
  • Rob Haskins (bio)

By the time John Cage celebrated his seventieth birthday in 1982, he was widely regarded as the elder statesman of the avant-garde. From 1981 to 1983, soloists and ensembles worldwide commissioned new works from him; some of the works include the Thirty Pieces for Five Orchestras (1981), commissioned by Rencontres internationales de musique contemporaine, Dance/4 Orchestras (1982), commissioned by Dennis Russell Davies and the Cabrillo Music Festival, and Thirty Pieces for String Quartet (1983), written for the Kronos Quartet. Audiences heard many of his works at festivals devoted to him, including the Wall-to-Wall Cage birthday tribute at Symphony Space in New York on March 13 (an event that began at 11 in the morning and ended at 1:15 the next morning), the fourteenth Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik from April 23 to April 25, and the Almeida Theatre Cage Festival in London from May 28 to May 30. Some of these events included presentations on Cage’s music, for instance the Semana John Cage at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Actividades Culturales, Semana, March 1–5, in which Francis Schwartz, Richard Kostelanetz, and Daniel Charles participated. By the time of his seventy-fifth birthday in 1987, a more substantial symposium, John Cage at Wesleyan, took place at Wesleyan University on February 22–27 and initiated a spate of publications on his work as well as subsequent conferences at Mills College, Stanford University, and elsewhere. Previous scholarship has drawn attention to the astonishing breadth and diversity of Cage’s work in his final years.1 But while Cage never wholly abandoned [End Page 327] the tendencies that marked his pioneering exploration of chance composition and indeterminacy in the 1950s and 1960s, his late work points toward new concerns—a desire to reconcile the process-oriented approach of indeterminacy and object-oriented approach of chance composition and a new, sustained interest in harmony—that have important implications for new analytical approaches to his work.

Cage’s late poetry—essentially a remarkable series of works intended for concert performance—illustrates some of the stylistic concerns that I believe became increasingly important in his final compositions. Consider the passage from his Themes & Variations (1979–80) in figure 1. The mesostic shows a central vertical string of capitalized letters which shows an idea, quotation, or person’s name that interested Cage. (In this case, the vertical string forms the name of the abstract painter Mark Tobey.2) The horizontal strings of words and phrases, on the other hand, originated in a library of original source poetry that Cage had written himself ahead of time; chance operations determined which of the horizontal strings would appear and in what sequence.


Click for larger view
View full resolution
Figure 1.

A closer look at the poetry shows more. Note the striking sparseness of the lines; most have only a few words. One becomes increasingly aware of the blank space that surrounds and penetrates the poetry, decidedly sensitive to the words themselves. Many of the poetic lines possess an [End Page 328] incantational or otherworldly quality: for example, “writing Music / in imitAtion / beyond affiRmation beyond negation” (rare, too, for the unexpected rhyme) or, further down, “nothing’s changed Yet / soMething immense / Asking.” Note, also, other stylistic intrusions: the name “guntheR stent” and the phrase “a Basic list / of magazinEs.” In the main, Cage’s late poetry exploits an ineffable and arresting alchemy of the noble and the common. The sequence of lines and their frequent abridgment—both of which Cage produced by way of chance operations—limn a structure that remains paradoxically unclear and inconclusive. Yet one can readily admire the evocative power of such passages. This work, in short, fulfills Cage’s desire for a new kind of poetry: “A way of writing which comes from ideas, is not about them, but which produces them.”3

One need not look very extensively to find comparable examples in Cage’s music from the same period. Example 1, an excerpt from the Music for _____ series (1984–87), shows a small amount of musical material that...

pdf

Share