John CageHUMN 2002 - Post Modernism and John Cage's - 4'33"
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John Cage is viewed by some as one of the most important composers of the twentieth century. His ideas brought new life into Western music, creating new ideas about the relationship between sound and music. His experimentations with minimalism and atonality are among the most interesting. They force one to look as the basics of sound which are the foundation of Western polyphony. If the reader may need them, definitions of musical terms are available.
One of Cage's most important influences is Zen Buddhism. He studied Buddhism under Daisetz T. Suzuki, one of the original people to teach aspects of Buddhism in this country. Buddhism taught Cage musical disinterest. A anecdote which Cage always told to explain his motives was,
I was at Harvard not quite forty years ago that I went into an anechoic chamber not expecting in that silent room to hear two sounds: one high, my nervous system in operation, one low, my blood in circulation. The reason I did not expect to hear those two sounds was that they were set into vibration without any intention on my part. That experience gave me my life direction, the exploration of nonintention. No one else was doing that. -John Cage
Cage was deeply influenced by Japanese musical thought. Rooted in the Zen philosophy, Japanese music reflects and imitates the sounds of nature. Cage picked up on this, even to the extent of featuring in a composition a musician plucking the spines of a cactus. Talking about the way an artist should create his art Cage said,
He begins from the premise that if art is to be useful it must not be separate from everyday life. The artist is to alert his audience to the beauties of everyday life, not substitute some beauty of his own, and he can best do this if he takes as his guide the unwilled creative processes in the world. If he imitates nature in her manner of operation.
Cage appreciated randomness in his music. Even to the extent of flipping coins in order to determine where his composition would go to next. He followed the Zen asethic of removing oneself entirely from the creative process. "The goal of my music is to be free of individual taste and memory (tradition) and also of the literature and 'tradition' of art."
Cage is perhaps the most well known of composers who follow the Zen ethic. More information is available about him at the John Cage website. Or you can enter a discussion group about John Cage at Silence. If you are interested in learning more about contemporary composers you should check out the contemporary composer website.
Cage wants us, as music listeners, to believe that music is non-representational, that there is no associative nature to music or it's meaning. Cage had extreme attitudes toward music as a whole, in fact, he wanted to do away with the notion of form altogether. Form invokes the notion of aesthetic intention, and Cage has state specifically, "My purpose is to eliminate purpose." Cage wants to sit alongside the listener and say "let's see what happens together." - this has an appeal of immediate openness to it. As we begin with no expectations-no preconceived notions-we should also not be disappointed if the end of a musical adventure yields little in the way of revelation. This is a somewhat veiled way of saying that what there is depends primarily upon the observer and his/her ability to concentrate. The degree to which the listener is no responsible for Actively completing the artwork signifies a radical change in the composer-performer-listener relationship. If the listener hears nothing, he/she did not take advantage of the opportunity the piece of music offered. Cage wants to push the limits of the listener's perceptions, yet by means directly antithetical to the formalist vision of a self-contained world of art. The effects are felt not so music in the perceptions and in the attitudes behind them. Cage is asking us to approach his work in a totally accepting frame of mind, in a mood of maximum tolerance. The essence of the Cage experience may be perceptual at a high level, but judgment has no place- a striking paradox to traditional thinking about musical performance. The ethos of formalism is that our perceptual powers will be enhanced when the musical materials are of such a kind as to permit us to make fine distinctions and unravel complex situations. The ethos of Cage's philosophy is that our musical perceptions are improved when we open ourselves to sound phenomenon of all kinds and are struck by their diversity and specificity.
In the final analysis the most radical aspect of Cage's aesthetic is the relation of artwork to composer. Cage wants to dispossess the creative artist of his purported dictatorial control but in so doing he has also effectively relieved himself of his artistic responsibilities. The composer is no longer a maker of images, musical experiences are found rather than invented, loosely or randomly assembled rather than carefully matched to form a complex coherence of shape and form. The "mythos:" of the artist is gone. The artwork no longer comes as an idealized vision of the artist, as a form of artistic knowledge; art might only happen as the artist and listener wander together aimlessly. Cage wants to demystify the objectification of the artist we spoke about in Classicism of the 18th century. The composer is no longer endowed with special gifts shared by only a minority few, and alone in their capacity to bestow on society certain revelations.