Desire Paths: John Cage's Transatlantic Crossing

The Invention of Tradition

John Cage has had a long and remarkably wide influence in the United Kingdom. Not only was the run-up to his centenary year filled with music and art events, including a major touring exhibition of his visual art curated by British artist Jeremy Millar, but his work has also been adopted by popular culture. In 2010, for instance, a collective of pop musicians recorded his 4' 33" as a Christmas single and strove to have it head the music charts. In the same year, on the BBC's radio program Desert Island Discs, poet Ian McMillan chose 4' 33" as the one record he would want to take to a desert island.¹ Within British culture Cage remains a radical touchstone—an intriguing, even mysterious, figure: he was, after all, an American. Talking about what Cage has meant to him, again on BBC radio in the series Great Lives, in 2007, the British-born and American-raised artist Michael Craig Martin said of him, "when someone influences you, it is because they say something that in your heart is familiar to you. They are hitting on something you already feel." The history of that something, and of Cage's presence in Britain, is the subject of this. In it I pick up traces of some long standing, and in some cases, long forgotten, transatlantic conversations about art, education, and culture that reveal something about the times and circles through which Cage moved, and which connect British and American counter-cultural histories.

Michael Craig Martin sees Cage as "a kind of homespun American genius," part of a tradition that includes Mark Twain and Gertrude Stein. All three attempted to return to basic principles, to rethink the world in fundamentally simple ways, the better for us to see and understand it. Craig Martin argued that, while Cage had been of crucial importance to the art world since the 1960s, his presence in Britain had now become so deeply absorbed it was all but invisible. "I used to read his 'Lecture on Nothing,' every year I would read it to my students, and it always received an interesting response. I read it a few years ago at the Royal College to numbed silence, and it was clear that it just bored them to death and it meant absolutely nothing to them, but all of the elements in it were around us everywhere in what they were doing." Deeply absorbed, intangible, invisible, yet present; small wonder that 4' 33" was nominated as one of the 2010 Christmas hits in the UK.

It is instructive to think about what it means for an artist's influence to have so thoroughly infiltrated the culture that it is no longer understood as separable from its context, to be in effect hidden in plain sight. Though he died at the age of seventy-nine, now considered not such a very great age, Cage had a long creative career and lived a remarkably full and busy life. From his late teens on the west coast of America he was friendly, curious, and original, taking ideas common to the circles in which he moved, rethinking them and casting them in a different light. Born into an era that was looking to Asia for inspiration, he redrew the map of artistic method, using chance notations after reading the I Ching in the influential translation by Richard Wilhelm and Cary Baynes, published in 1950, and given to him by fellow composer Christian Wolff, the son of its publishers.

"Don't throw anything away, it may come in useful" reads a printed note by Cage on the table of a friend in New York who knew him well; exactly. Cage used what he had, what came his way, what he was and who he was, no more and no less, and he told and retold that life constantly. He reiterated his heroes, changing the list from time to time. He wrote mesostics for those he cared for. He made himself up, a little at least and possibly much more than a little, in order, as...