Through the Looking Glass: John Cage and Avant-Garde Film by Richard H. Brown (review)

Regarding Richard Brown's ground-breaking book, I find the title more descriptive of its contents than the subtitle, as the book is less about Cage and avant-garde film than it is a study of Cage's work through the lens of audiovisuality. As I understand it, the titular looking glass isn't a mirror for Brown but rather a motion-picture camera lens that frames even Cage's "absolute" compositions as audiovisual events. For this study, Brown uses methods from the emerging field of "audiovisuology," an interdisciplinary field that studies the "aesthetic experience of both listening and seeing" (p. 4), using tools from historical musicology, film and film-music studies, and art theory. Brown uses the disciplinary habits of audiovisuology to ask questions about style, identity politics, ontology, and the relationship between sight and sound. Film is just one medium that Brown discusses in this context; radio, sound-reinforcement technologies, audiotape, and dance, Brown argues, have just as much influence on the nature of Cage's work as film.

One would expect in this book a discussion of the films that Cage scored—especially Works of Calder (1950), The Sun (1956), and One¹¹ (1992)—and Brown fulfills this expectation. The book, however, does more than simply document Cage's work methods and materials as a film composer. It also includes significant discussions of works such as Williams Mix (1952) and the Landscape series––works that are less likely to be understood or studied as audiovisual events. Brown's larger argument is that in order to understand Cage's music "the cinematographic experience" (p. 5) is a better interpretive frame than his musical notations. It is a compelling argument, one that he supports throughout the book, first by reminding readers of the inherent theatricality and visuality of Cage's music, and second by placing Cage within networks of artists, dancers, authors, and poets, as well as filmmakers. Many of these connections are familiar: Oskar Fischinger, László Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Richard Lippold, and others. Yet the conclusions Brown draws from these juxtapositions are often fresh and surprising. For example, in 1937, Cage apprenticed himself to the filmmaker Fischinger to work on a short called An Optical Poem, a stop-motion animation of geographic shapes tightly coordinated to Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. To synchronize the images with the sound, Fischinger devised a graphic notation that depicted the movement of the images across spans of time. Brown argues that despite the brevity of Cage's work on the project––lasting just a few days––there are remarkable similarities between Fischinger's notation and that of Cage's Quartet for Percussion (dated 1935, but likely composed later).

Much of this book has been previously published; it is an extension of Brown's PhD dissertation "Sound-on-Film: John Cage and Avant-Garde Cinema" (University of Southern California, 2012). Moreover, Brown's study of Cage's work with Fischinger in chapter 1 was also published as the article "The Spirit inside Each Object: John Cage, Oskar Fischinger, and 'The Future of Music'" (Journal of the Society for American Music 6, no. 1 [February 2012]: 83–113). And chapter 3, which deals with issues of chance and transparency (1948–58), is an expansion of an article on Cage's work with the filmmaker Herbert Matter: "Breaking the Sound Barrier: Transparency and Cinematic Space in Works of Calder (1950) and Jackson Pollock 51'" (Contemporary Music Review 33, nos. 5–6 [October–December 2014]: 512–38). Even though this research is available elsewhere, the book is valuable as a cohesive extension of the articles and dissertation. It is a joy to read, important for the field of Cage studies, and an excellent model for others who might wish to add audiovisual methods...