Epiphanies:
John Cage (not)
published
in The Wire No.273, London 2006
(Opening
excerpt only currently published online.)
For
over 30 years, too much has been said about John Cage's
notion of 'silence'. I first encountered Cage in 1975 - my
formative year. While listening extensively to Prog,
Krautrock, glam, disco, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Stockhausen,
my interest in the musical polarities of heightened surface
and sonic density broadened my aural perception and made
me aware of obtuse interconnections in supposedly disparate
musics. Conversely, I heard next to no Cage that year,
but read his Silence (1961), Richard Kostelanetz's John
Cage (1970) and Calvin Tomkins's Ahead Of The Game (1965).
I thought Cage might provide insight into my 'conflicted' listening.
Although enthused by the concept of widening one's listening
range to accept all sounds, I could not get past the
haiku-tinged, wispy 'love of life' aphorisms mottling
these books. Fortunately, the Cage music I heard the
following year imparted greater moments, from the delicate
prepared piano of Sonatas & Interludes (1946-48) to the
overloaded sono-media collage of Fontana Mix (1958).
Yet while many other writers, composers and artists I
encountered also seemed attracted to his thoughts, Cage's
Easternised philosophising did not appeal to me, high
as I was at the time on Duchamp's wilfully perverse articulation
of a meta-practice of art and Warhol's theatrical denial
of any art practice.
Cage - or precisely, the presentation of Cage back then - irritated me with its 'a-culturalism' - the way his 'indeterminate' compositional strategies removed the work from any cultural specificity. This irritation acted on two levels: firstly via its locus in the rarefied domain of experimental music practice and its influence on Fluxus's alignment with the art gallery - realms where composer directive and artist statement overrode any socio-cultural framing of their outcomes. Secondly, through the reduction of 'sound' to a quasi-mystical zone where 'sound itself' speaks most eloquently of its substance and existence. From the precious privilege born of the former to the vacuous view endeared by the latter, the appreciation of Cage seemed delineated by its own anechoic chamber which excluded the world and its cultural noise - all while deftly reducing it to an amorphorous voluminous mass. It was as if all sound was to be celebrated - so long as it wasn't labelled, categorised or named.
