|
September 5, 2004, would have been the 92nd birthday
of composer John Cage. The 12th Annual John Cage Birthday Event was held
in St. Mark's Church; the proceeding consists of people with connections
to Cage reading from his works or commenting on him in some way. This
year, there is a DVD containing films of Cage, and one was shown after
the reading. In 19 Questions, he states his anarchy repeatedly,
and points out (speaking in 1987) that if a President as bad as Ronald
Reagan isn't enough to sink Presidency altogether, he hopes that an even
worse President will come along.
This, immediately on the heels of the locally bothersome
2004 Republican National Convention—surely the largest celebration
of lies and villainy ever broadcast to the American electorate—brought
the loudest response of the evening. The other major bookend around the
Cage Event, and his statement, is the third anniversary of the September
11th attacks, six days later. It is to be remembered that German composer
Karlheinz Stockhausen said at the time that the attacks were "the
greatest work of art ever," generating mostly bewildered consternation—enough
to actually get him into the newspapers here, which is remarkable. I can't
remember any avant-garde composer making the U.S. news so prominently
in my lifetime, unless it was the unfortunate news of Frank Zappa's death.
As has been noted elsewhere, the Stockhausen definition of a "work
of art" is that which redefines our perceptual borders, and the most
reactionary polity defines 9/11 as that, indeed insists upon it.
This meshes with the Zen notion, mentioned at the Cage
Event, that every thing, in a sense, contains its opposite, and therefore
there are no opposites. Had the RNC remembered Stockhausen and hauled
him out again, to trash arts funding, say, would Peter Jennings step up
afterward to fill the role of Zen abbot? American television could have
bestowed an unprecedented level of relevance upon the modern-day composer.
Suddenly, a friend urging Cage to write the previous President (G. H.
W.) Bush for just that purpose—to raise the C-in-C's awareness of
experimental sound techniques as a response to the old Iraq war and bad
government in general—does not sound so crackpot. (Cage declined,
on the grounds that he is not political.)
Redefining perceptual borders is what Cage is best remembered
for, specifically for his piece 4'33", which consists of
three movements of silence. But the point is that silence is not silence.
One impetus for the piece's composition was Cage's visit to the anechoic
chamber at Harvard, a room designed to absorb all sound. He noticed that
he could still hear two sounds, one very low, one very high. He asked
the engineer why he could hear two sounds in a silent room. The man replied
that the high sound was his central nervous system, the low sound his
blood circulating. Those who experience silence during 4'33"
have limited (or ignored) their perceptual borders. Thus the piece combines
both this notion of expanded awareness and Cage's other main preoccupation,
indeterminacy, or chance. No two performances of 4'33" are
identical, as indeed are no two other delineated chunks of time, but the
point of the piece is to make the audience aware of it, and even hear
those four and a half minutes' sounds as music per se.
Last year, one reader described a performance of 4'33",
and, just as he did, two things happened. One was a stampede of dancers
and/or actors directly overhead, the other side of the ceiling being the
stage of Richard Foreman's Ontological Theater, which had a performance
that night. Ten bodies or so seemed to be rushing toward the center of
that room. (There was no simultaneous performance this year; theater personnel
upstairs appeared to be putting trash in bags, and one of the rest rooms
was out of order.) The second occurrence was an eruption of police sirens
immediately outside the church, rising to a level that drowned out the
speaker for a few moments. Fortunately, he did not pause. It couldn't
have been more correct.
Cage stated that audiences should not (ever) attempt
an emotional response at a concert, because, if they do not then manage
to have such a response, they're likely to decide they "don't like
it"—that "it" does not fall within their existing
constrictions—and will be unable to experience anything new. A scurrying
for cover, a retreat to Western barbarism in response to Middle Eastern
barbarism: this is the result of the new "work of art" which
claimed thousands of lives three years ago. Is Cage really asking so much,
to hope for such a change in perception?
The only reader on the program that I knew slightly was
composer Pauline Oliveros, and she was the only one who didn't appear.
I met her briefly, years ago, when she came to visit the Conservatory
where I was studying composition. She did not lay out complex mathematical
formulae for structure. My most prominent memory is of her response to
a long-winded student question about how to decide what to include in
your works: "The main thing is, if it sounds good," she said.
During her week there, a chamber ensemble was to perform one of her works,
which included a part for amplified cactus. This is not a euphemism, like
English Horn. This is an actual amplified cactus. Should I tell you what
an amplified cactus sounds like? By the way, John Cage's voice was a wisp,
a high-pitched, even effeminate, whisper.
Cage was opposed to governments, i.e. "and their
wars." Schoenberg (with whom Cage studied, briefly) and the rest
of the atonal crowd developed 20th-century music in part as a response
to the atrocities of World War I, declaring that the old class system
must be overturned in favor of true democracy, and music had to do likewise,
i.e., in the most extreme case, not placing any more value on one note
than another. To me this used to seem a tenuous connection at best, and
political-atonal equality had a flipside that got a lot of those people
in trouble with Communism, but can it be that this 9-1-1 world has reestablished
artistic primacy? Or, rather, proven that the preparations of a vanguard
were necessary; that the importance of the arts before the disaster was
the proper physic. This new form of art would not necessarily shape the
world into something better, but prepare its perceptual apparatus when
the next catastrophe arrived.
This didn't happen, and the attacks of rightist anti-humanities
forces must be seen as attacks against the coping mechanisms of those
in the path of disaster. Indeed, this works on both sides of the fence.
Where general education is lacking, fundamentalism rushes in to fill the
void. This is not a question of stupidity; education is not intelligence.
Thinking of the void as unnatural is a mistake. John Cage knew this.
The third Cage aesthetic is the unrepeatable, a relief
to think of in light of this other subject. This year's John Cage Birthday
Event is over, and one cannot sit through a John Cage Birthday Event without
becoming temporarily more aware of one's surroundings. My day in New York
("a way of facing the darkness," said John) was vile. Every
time I left the house somebody tried to pick a fight with me. A large
black SUV tried to run me down. I had an altercation with a woman randomly
promoting her vegan ideology to passersby on the street. Claiming superior
calm, she walked away screaming. These mouth-sounds are not music. A world
minus human intention does now seem more musical.
Arriving home, I held the elevator door for a woman trailing
some way behind me. She was surprised. I was as well, because this was
the second time that day I'd done it. This never happens. She was carrying
a paper funnel of flowers.
We rode up in silence (faint whine, pitch-spiraling hum,
rattle of metal doors, constant rush of ventilation, one piercing short
electric squeak per floor, thin rustle of shoes atop carpet, occ. heavy
rustle of wrapping paper, muffled rhythmic batting of cables), until I
broke that silence.
"Not a birthday, was it?" I pointed at the
bouquet.
"What?"
"I was just at a birthday celebration, so, I was
thinking...."
She smiled. "No, I just...wanted to have them."
"You just needed flowers."
"Yeah," she said, "sometimes you just
do."
|
OTR Comment & Culture - November, 2004