The Mus/ecology of John Cage

John Cage, New York, 1986. Photo: Bunita Marcus. Courtesy the John Cage Trust.

"If when I am in the woods, the woods are not in me, what right have I to be in the woods?" Thoreau's words inspired John Cage as a field guide to the life he would live in the world, which is to say, the life he would live in sound. If Thoreau elevated walking to an art form, Cage took the next step by declaring himself a walking concert. Both men were enamored of things as they are in their natural habitat, always becoming, changing, surprising, sounding. To live under the sign of wonder required inner silence, alertness, independence of mind, and a feeling for simple pleasures. Thoreau found the riddle of life in a bean field, and Cage sought his answers by a toss of the dice across an imaginary landscape. In the natural world a life was worth living.

Sentient or non-sentient beings, rocks or trees or plants or people, Cage considered them all equally "world-honored," as one of his Buddhist expressions explained. A man of the most contemporary diction, he chose a wonderfully chivalrous, gracious vocabulary when he spoke of things he valued. Equality for him was a matter of nobility, and with tranquility, devotion, and dignity it described worlds of meaning in both art and life. Cage embraced a view of the world as free and purposeless, oblivious to any separation of the elements, the air and sea, the sky and earth, a person or flower. His biocentrism encouraged Cage to remark on the dignity of sounds, the feeling of compassion for them, just as one might speak of the integrity of forms in sculpture. He didn't differentiate between nature and culture, or sound and space. He loved nature in art, nature as art. Most of all, he reveled in the swirling freedom of a field of sound where musical time turns into space and sound becomes a substitute for time, so that one lives in sound as if it were space.

A composer as naturalist, Cage didn't merely write musical notation, he documented the sounds of the world, bringing human, animal, vegetable, mineral, industrial, meteorological, natural, and artificial sounds together just as they exist in the environment. In its erasure of borders between the natural and social sciences his music metamorphosed into the socioecological, a different kind of anthropology, reporting on the life that was lived in the second half of the twentieth century, the vibrations of plants and peoples' voices, the objects around them, the tools people used and the art they created, the climate they lived in, their machines and modes of transport, what they listened to on the radio. He was in love with the ordinary. In his radical way of redefining science and art, Cage expanded the meaning of natural history by transforming music composition into an ecology.

Sound was conceived as an environment, another kind of landscape, sounds themselves as points in space, each one creating its own space and the spaces constantly multiplying, yet everything a part of everything else. The sounds of traffic could wander into a composition, or wind, rain, thunder, the touch of paper pressed against cactus, water floating in a conch shell, bird calls, clocks, striking matches, wire coils. One composition was patterned on astrological maps, another plotted as a "garden" of sounds, yet another created from a rubbing. Who more than Cage demonstrated that sound travels? He made music attentive to geography, or rather, he brought the sense of place into music.

What made a piece of music or a painting modern was the ability to live with a disruption of its surface by ambient sound or light. In other words, it had to be free to acknowledge the social along with the formal rather than close itself off to experience. It had to forgo privacy and to accept the theatrical. Every event could be an occasion for interaction, as if nothing in the world existed so well as in the company of others. Oh, things...