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

PART ONE/MUSIC

PART ONE/MUSIC / have never believed that any one individual could speak for an entire continent, in all its variety of cultures and societies. Nor has it ever seemed reasonable to me to believe that there could ever be one single "mainstream of music/'. . . In any case it seemed to me even then that to be American was to honor difference, and to welcome the experimental, the fresh and the new, instead of trying to establish in advance the road our creative life should follow. —Henry Cowell [American Composers on American Music) P • art I art One will consider the distinction of self in twentiethcentury American experimental music by locating that distinction with nineteenth-century predecessors. It will examine the aesthetic writings of the composers Charles Ives and John Cage and those of their respective mentors, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.1 Concerning Charles Ives, Howard Boatwright has written: "If music itself were his concern, he wrote music. But he used words to provide the general philosophical [3] support for his compositions/72 The analysis that follows shares Ives's point of view, addressing aesthetic issues that inform the making of experimental music rather than specifically discussing music as it is actually heard. The very notion of an "experimental tradition" may, at first, seem oxymoronic. How can experiment, whose fundamental concern is the discovery of the unknown, intersect with tradition , a word that, by nature, is concerned with history and with what is already known? The answer is simply this: experiment has a history in America.3 What Hyatt H. Waggoner has written about poetry may be extended to experimental American artmaking as a whole: "From the beginning, the most representative American poets have anticipated the characteristic that more than anything else distinguishes the American poetry of our own day from that of the past and of other societies: in it nothing is known, nothing given, everything is discovered or created, or else remains in doubt."4 Without specifically claiming experiment as its source, Waggoner describes a context out of which writers make what he considers to be characteristically American poetry. However, his description could easily serve as a definition of experiment. And it is that American characteristic which is both the source and, more critically, the method that underlies such artistic making. Interest in experiment is a connecting theme for Emerson and Thoreau, Ives and Cage. However, experiment, by definition, has two forms. The first, "an act or operation carried out under conditions determined by the experimenter in order to discover some unknown principle or effect," posits an open-ended project with no specific results anticipated. However, the second definition , "to test, establish, or illustrate some suggested or known truth," demonstrates a clearly preconceived intention on the part of the experimenter. The first definition holds no expectations , since what will be discovered is unknown. The second, however, does bring expectations into the experiment, making it quite different from the first definition. Thus, the two poles of experiment are the "unknown" ver- [ 4 ] PART ONE sus the "truth/7 It is especially important to note that truth is "suggested or known" and that the experiment is intended to "test, establish or illustrate" it. In establishing the known, the experimenter brings a very specific intent to the experiment, that of illustrating "some suggested or known truth." Such intentions are shared by both Emerson and Ives: the experiment is never complete until conclusions have been drawn and the "truth" in it has been found. In seeking the unknown, on the other hand, the experimenter simply establishes the "conditions ," or method, behind the experiment without preconceptions about the results. This is the experimentalism I find in the work of Thoreau and Cage: following a method of observation without intentionally drawing conclusions. Cage and Ives are central figures in the experimental tradition for many reasons, of which three are pertinent here. First, Ives wrote all his works well before World War II (most before World War I), whereas most of Cage's influential ideas (at least for this study) appear after World War II. Thus, Cage may be regarded as a second-generation successor to Ives's musical experimentalism . The year 1945 is often viewed as a stylistic benchmark in music history. Cage and Ives divide the century in similar fashion, and their differences may well be attributable...