The Book of Music and Nature: An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts

Happy New Ears

Happy New Ears Max Ernst, around 1950, speaking at the Arts Club on Eighth Street in New York City, said that significant changes in the arts formerly occurred every three hundred years, whereas now they take place every twenty minutes. Such changes happen first in the arts which, like plants, are fixed to particular points in space: architecture, painting, and sculpture. They happen afterward in the performance arts, music and theater, which require, as animals do, the passing of time for their realization. In literature, as with the myxomycetes and similar organisms which are classified sometimes as plants and sometimes as animals, changes take place both early and late. This art, if it is understood as printed material, has the characteristics of objects in space; but, understood as a performance, it takes on the aspects of processes in time. I have for many years accepted, and I still do, the doctrine about Art, occidental and oriental, set forth by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy in his book The Transformation of Nature in Art, that the function of Art is to imitate Nature in her manner of operation. Our understanding of “her manner of operation” changes according to advances in the sciences. These advances in this century have brought the term “space-time” into our vocabulary. Thus, the distinctions made above between the space and the time arts are at present an oversimpli fication. Observe that the enjoyment of a modern painting carries one’s attention not to a center of interest but all over the canvas and not following any particular path. Each point on the canvas may be used as a beginning, continuing, or ending of one’s observation of it. This is the case also with those works which are symmetrical, for then the observer’s attention is made mobile by the rapidity with which he drops the problem of understanding structure. Whether or not a painting or sculpture lacks a center of interest may be determined by observing whether or not it is destroyed by the eVects of shadows. (Intrusions of the environment are eVects of time. But they are welcomed by a painting which makes no attempt to focus the observer’s attention.) Observe also those [ 25 ] john cage ⢇ works of painting, sculpture, and architecture which, employing transparent materials, become inseparable from their changing environments. The tardiness of music with respect to the arts just mentioned is its good fortune. It is able to make deductions from their experiences and to combine these with necessarily diVerent experiences which arise from its special nature. First of all, then, a composer at this moment frees his music of a single overwhelming climax. Seeking an interpenetration and non-obstruction of sounds, he renounces harmony and its eVect of fusing sounds in a fixed relationship. Giving up the notion of Hauptstimme his “counterpoints” are superimpositions , events that are related to one another only because they take place at the same time. If he maintains in his work aspects of structure, they are symmetrical in character, canonic or enjoying an equal importance of parts, either those that are present at one instant, or those that succeed one another in time. His music is not interrupted by the sounds of the environment, and to make this a fact he either includes silences in his work or gives to his continuity the very nature of silence (absence of intention). In addition, musicians, since they are several people rather than one person as a painter or sculptor is, are now able to be independent each from another. A composer writes at this moment indeterminately. The performers are no longer his servants but are freemen. A composer writes parts but, leaving their relationship unfixed, he writes no score. Sound sources are at a multiplicity of points in space with respect to the audience so that each listener’s experience is his own. The mobiles of modern sculpture come to mind, but the parts they have are not as free as those of a musical composition since they share a common suspension means and follow the law of gravity. In architecture, where labor is divided as it is in music, music’s freedom is not yet to be observed. Pinned to the earth, a building well made does not fall apart. Perhaps, though, when the dreams of Buckminster Fuller become actualities, houses, for example , that are dropped from the air instead of bombs...