Composing after Cage: Permission granted

GEOFF SMITH considers the liberating legacy of John Cage for generations of composers

The question is no longer `Can we do it?' - that goes without saying - but `What do we want to do?'.1

JOHN CAGE'S own, highly individual musical style was, according to Christian Wolff, like a thunderstorm or the growing of grass, beyond imitation, and Robert Ashley has pointed out that Cage `never suggested that anyone ought to compose music using chance procedures'.2 He never held up his work to younger composers as a model of how to proceed, but aimed merely to stimulate activity and free composers from their limitations (whether musical, historical, intellectual or psychological). As Yoko Ono recalls, `What Cage did for us on an artistic level was to tell us that we were all right. That gave us an incredible sense of freedom and confidence'.3 The fact that many composers drew `inspiration and encouragement from the direction he [took] but didn't necessarily follow him'4 also suggests that it is more accurate to regard Cage as a catalyst rather than an influence. Cage explained thus: 'I think that what appears to be my influence is merely that I fell into a situation that other people are falling into. And what is so nice about this situation is that it admits a great deal of variety'.5 Indeed the post-Cagean field has been described as a rich mosaic `whose integrative logic would seem to support a multitude of propositions'.6

The Buddhist idea of `plurality in one' where all things belong to an all-embracing unity was central to Cage's philosophy and led him to declare in 1966 that `The boundaries have gone...'.7 In a world where `what you see, framed or unframed, is art... [and] where what you hear on or off the record is music...',s all distinctions disappear. Not only did he reveal the unity beyond the dualistic concept of sound versus silence,9 he also unified art and life by creating a music that was no longer 'spoilt' by ambient sound but which embraced it as material (his 'silent' piece, 4' 33", for example). In the same way, the white paintings of Robert Rauschenberg (a close friend of Cage's) are not objects that can be 'spoilt' by shadows but open works that embrace their changing environments.

Cage excluded nothing from his work, and not only are noises and dissonances welcome in his music, but `so is the dominant seventh chord if it happens to put in an appearance'.lo As the American composer Ben Johnston noted, one cannot deny the multiplicity and interpenetration of today's musical world `in which Machaut, the Beatles, Wagner, Ravi Shankar, Pete Seeger, Bach and Xenakis meet. This musical world, too, is proof against any take-over by such exclusive points of view as tonality, serialism, indeterminacy...'.11 Though Cage was aware that `To affirm or deny was to limit',12 many European avant-garde composers seemed less so and indeterminacy became another point of view' when it was adopted as another means of control.13 It is this aspect of control that differentiates the avant-garde's use of indeterminacy from the wholly open approach of Cage. He was not concerned with `prescribing a defined time-object'4 where all the elements are calculated and arranged a priori but with outlining a situation. Boulez, however, introduced indeterminate elements into his music `whilst respecting the finished aspect of the Occidental work'.15 Similarly, Stockhausen regarded indeterminacy not as a way of perceiving, reflecting and embodying the open nature of reality but as an `expansion of the traditional concept of organisation'.16

IT IS sometimes suggested that Cage's ideas in particular and much American music in general represent a reaction to the intellectual complexity of much European avant-garde music. The reality, suggests American composer James Fulkerson, is quite different:

the fact is we don't give a shit about European complexity. [...] We're quite clear about what we want to do, and our whole idea about freedom or experimentation is that anything is possible. [...] It's only American academics and the inflated egos of places like Britain that think we actually pay any attention to those problems'.17

Disagreement amongst people working in the same field can, according to Cage, only `weaken the activity of people in the field',ls and, aware that belief is divisive, his aim was always to promote an allinclusive commonality for `An up-to-date aquarium has all the fish swimming together in one huge tank'.19

The idea of Cage and many American composers that we live in a non-linear, field situation is one shared by few of their European peers. The New York composer Philip Corner, for example, recalls being shocked by the attitude of Boulez that new work had to be a linear continuation from the past and that rather than making an open search of the field, one had to `go in a straight line from what the past has done and make the next step'.20 This is a belief that Boulez has more recently reiterated: speaking of the need for an evolution of musical language, he continues, 'I am sure that as long as you haven't absorbed the history which comes before you, you certainly cannot go very far'.21 Cage also noticed that Schoenberg, his one-time teacher, was not interested in an `all-at-once' view of history but `in Bach, in Beethoven, in Brahms and in Schoenberg'.22