Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the American Experimental Tradition

Introduction to the New Edition

[xxv] INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION ilencing the Sounded Self was published in 1998. I tried to make an error-free book back then, and looking back, I think I mostly succeeded. This doesn’t mean there aren’t things I would change now, and I’m sure readers will find their own points of disagreement; however, I’ve decided Silencing the Sounded Self should remain as published originally, allowing both the book and the author who wrote it the chance to find a new audience. One minor correction should be mentioned S [xxvi] INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION here: the lecture John Cage gave at Darmstadt in 1990, a copy of which he mailed me that summer, was published after I completed my dissertation but before the book came out, something I was unaware of at the time.1 One major correction concerns Thoreau’s supposed translation of “The Preaching of the Buddha” from the French. Elizabeth Peabody translated that, although Thoreau did translate, also from the French, “The Transmigrations of the Seven Brahmans.”2 Two chapters of this book are often cited in Cage-related research, the reason being that they were published as articles in scholarly journals. The chapter on Cage and Thoreau, a subject championed early on by the composer and writer Konrad Boehmer , was published in a different form for a Dutch music theory journal, Tijdschrift voor Musiektheorie, in 1998, and he then did a German translation of it for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 2007.3 Even earlier, during my first Fulbright year in Germany (1993–94), I had prepared the last chapter of this book for submission to the Musical Quarterly, and, thanks to Mark Swed (then MQ’s twentieth-century-music editor), the result was my first publication in an academic journal: “Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the Intentionality of Nonintention.”4 Revisiting this book, which I worked on between 1988 and 1998—first as my doctoral dissertation, completed in 1993, then in updated form for book publication five years later— convinces me that the two chapters that appeared in academic journals deepen in meaning when taken alongside the other two chapters of the book, where they were originally placed. The book as a whole expands on what can be called the experimental tradition by looking back at antecedents in music and literature . And it also includes more detail and context concerning a discovery I made during my research: Cage’s writings and his musical compositions, when studied in combination, provide a fuller picture of Cage’s work than if one looks at one or the other separately. The historical record concerning John Cage is more complete now than it was when I wrote Silencing the Sounded Self.5 Researching this subject in the late 1980s and early ’90s, I found INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION [xxvii] very little published on Cage in academic journals, especially in the field of musicology. In fact, at that time the most prominent academic interested in Cage wasn’t a musicologist at all. I’m certain one reason I considered including the subject of poetry in my research was the championing of Cage as a poet by Marjorie Perloff and the influence her scholarship had on my own. The chapter placing Cage in experimental poetics would have been unthinkable without my having read her path-breaking works.6 My connecting Cage with Thoreau and contrasting that intersection with the link between Ives and Emerson benefited from important research that already existed on Charles Ives, including discussions of his aesthetics and historical influences .7 This research made it possible to compare and contrast what I learned about Ives and Emerson with what I’d discovered researching Cage and Thoreau. The comparison between these two, while not unprecedented, had never been examined as thoroughly as in Silencing the Sounded Self. Since then, Jannika Bock has written a book whose entire subject is the relationship between Cage and Thoreau, and she includes more current theoretical frames of analysis than I did when I wrote Silencing the Sounded Self.8 Indeed, I had intentionally avoided the attempt to present Cage in the context of current trends. As an example, I discussed philosophical subjects in the framework of the existential/ phenomenological views with which Cage would have been familiar at the time he was creating the works under examination (primarily the late 1940s through the...