The Put On of the Century, or the Cage Centenary

[James]

The Put On of the Century, or the Cage Centenary
Editorial by composer Daniel Asia, faculty at the University of Arizona.
Posted: 01/03/2013 5:34 pm

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-asia/the-put-on-of-the-century_b_2403915.html

It is the John Cage Centenary and the 100th birthday of the Rite of Spring. Why is the former so unimportant, and the latter so important? In the last few weeks I heard four full concerts of Stravinsky's work as part of a festival I ran here in Tucson at the University of Arizona. And last night I heard a gorgeous performance by a gifted colleague of Cage's Sonatas and Interludes, which left me mostly frustrated, angry, and irritated. While Cage is being feted this year among my musical colleagues almost as much as Stravinsky, why should this be so, and what does it mean?

Stravinsky's place in the musical pantheon is clear. He and Schoenberg are certainly the two most important composers of the 20th century. There is of course a vast difference between the two. Stravinsky wrote much music that people actually wish to hear, and Schoenberg did not. Does this matter? I think it does.

Let me make a bold proposition in this regard. Music appeals to the mind, emotions, and body. It unites these three aspects of man in a way that perhaps no other art form does. The greatest music thus in some way taps into the listener's life experience, which is of course a journey over time, from birth to death. It is no surprise that music, and the tonal enterprise broadly interpreted, manifests a similar arc. The greatest of music provides musical experiences in the deepest and richest way possible, that provides a sense of transcendence. While I find this goal in almost all of Stravinsky's music, and while I happen to admire much of Schoenberg's output, I think the latter is less successful at uniting these three spheres on a regular basis.

So this brings us to Maestro Cage. Where in fact does he fall on this spectrum? As we know, Cage was a student of Schoenberg, who clearly intuited that Cage had no feeling for harmony, considered by Schoenberg to be a basic perquisite for a Western composer. Why did Shoenberg think this? Quite simply, harmony, and thus counter-point, has been central to Western music for over a thousand years, and it is one of the glories of Western Civilization, and is a creation of that culture. It has allowed for some of the greatest artistic achievements of mankind. So what was Cage's response. He famously said that he would knock his head against the wall of harmony and counterpoint, and see what the results were. His philosophical understanding that guided his first works was that music is to sooth the soul and calm the mind. Sonatas and Interludes is emblematic of this first period. Let's see wherein the problems lie.

The work lasts over an hour. Most works in the repertoire of this duration contain a sizeable amount of contrast, musical and emotional. They offer an architectonic form that makes sense of this time frame. Sonatas and Interludes offers many movements that add up to no perceivable aural structure. The emotional landscape is limited and proscribed, ultimately wan and shadowy.

The work is for prepared piano, a creation of Cage's. Various materials are placed between the strings to produce percussive sounds as well as pitched sounds that are outside of common Western tuning. Cage, by necessity, gives up on what is commonly called pitch relations. In his world, all sounds are equal, thus depriving the listener of any hierarchical relationship, and the sense of consonance and dissonance that is created within that environment. The pitch world created is placid and flaccid. While occasional sounds are quite beautiful, the pitches/sounds themselves never quite add up to anything; which is to say melody or motive is rarely present. If it is true that the ear and brain seek to add information up into some form of gestalt, as neuroscientists now tell us, Cage frustrates this possibility. And while music is based on the frustration and ultimate resolution of expectations, the Cageian frustration is never overcome. The materials sound random, dimensionless, adrift, like a wind chime.

The music is mostly quiet, a dynamic associated perhaps with the thoughts of introspection and quietude. Unfortunately, in this music the lack of dynamic quality acts like a gentle tranquilizer, dulling the mind's capability of perception. It does indeed sooth, but so does a nice massage, but the latter is not presented as an artistic expression. The registral range used, that space of high and low frequencies that we hear, is generally rather limited, again producing not much sense of variation. Rhythms are based on a very limited vocabulary that are used over and over ad nauseum, rarely building into any perceivable units.

The result of all of this is a music sadly lacking in any directionality, a music that is essentially rudderless. The music is emotionally bland and lackluster, its contours in this regard terribly narrow. Lastly, rather than engaging the mind, this is a music that purposely demands the mind be held at a distance, in abeyance. Ultimately, the music is simply downright sophomoric and boring. In Cage's latter and final chance period, by the way, matters only got much, much worse in regards to all of the above.

So where does this leave us? Cage argues the following, "If you think something is boring, try doing it for two minutes. If you still think it's boring, try it for four. If you still think it's boring, try it for eight, then sixteen, then thirty-two, and so on and so forth. Soon enough you'll find that it's really not boring at all." I think not, as boredom simply wears you down. And alas, life is too short to waste in boring activities. I think most of my colleagues ultimately think this too. It is not uncommon for composers and musicians to find Cage's ideas intriguing or provocative, but to find these same folks in the lobby during performances of the music, because they find it so tedious. The problem here is that the art itself should be of great interest in any medium, and what is said about it of lesser or secondary interest. This is of course the inverse with Cage.

So why is Cage lauded? I think his transgressive, stick-it-in your face approach finds resonance with those who think they hate the Western musical tradition, for its supposed patriarchal and masterwork approach. I think his oceanic view of rationality versus chance finds acceptance in a time which is profoundly anti-rational, and therefore unwilling to make serious artistic judgements regarding real quality, including those of genre. I think his trickster qualities, borrowed from the ultimate trickster, Duchamp, perfectly reflect our time's sense of profound unseriousness. Because, while art for most is not a matter of life or death, it does profoundly reflect our understanding and approach to ultimate values, and I have never heard "fun" described as an ultimate value to rival those old fogies of beauty, truth, and justice. But I fear this is where we are now in the culture.

So, if you want the real thing, forgo Cage for Stravinsky. Listen for starters to the earth-shattering Rite, the remarkably pithy Three Japanese Lyrics, the transcendent Symphony of Psalms, and In Memoriam Dylan Thomas. In a few years time, Cage will be a small footnote to all of this, remembered if at all, for his self-advertising, whimsy and smile, and love of mushrooms. But for his music, not a chance.

[Octave]

*yawn*

"I don't get this, and I don't want anybody else to get this, either!"  yap yap yap
"A bold proposition!  A bold proposition!"
The essay is actually fun to read if you are super-rich like me, and can pay Harry Shearer to call you up and read it to you with his Ned Flanders voice.

[Mirror Image]

I didn't read the whole article, but the few last sentences did get me in the mood for some Stravinsky. Thanks, Daniel Asia! Hahaha....

[Octave]

There's something essentially boring about living in secular neoliberal society that prompts this kind of alternative (i.e. either/or, i.e. without [external] alternatives)-cum-ultimatum kind of mentality.  How could anyone ever have taken the program vs. absolute debate seriously, ever?  How could anyone ever have taken the Stravinsky or Schoenberg debate seriously?   That's relatively recent history!  (Of course, those examples were from epochs arguably quite a bit less secular or "neoliberal" than our own.)

I guess these kinds of false dilemma and false debates are still preferable to pogroms, lynching, and ethnic cleansing, all of which also make life more "interesting".  People who can't handle four and half minutes of freedom or gently mandated reflection, probably don't need to be dictating aesthetics to others: that's all I'm saying.  I've seen stodgy classical audiences during at least a couple performances of 4'33"---only to pick arguably the most exceptional and extreme of Cage's very large body of very beautiful and quite traditionally-musical works---and these audiences (sometimes including the trained musicians on stage) performed badly.  The only pretense on the scene is on these dismissers' parts: that they already know what Cage has to offer and can therefore take an educated pass on it, or still further, belittle it. 

Like I said, yawn yawn yawn.  That dogmatic, theological Old World is finished, dead by its own mismanagement and bloated self-satisfaction and contempt for the people who did its manual labor for it.  And to think: I barely even listen to Cage-type music these days.  I can't even participate properly in that cool contemporary composers thread because my tastes have become so conservative and I can't even remember what to recommend in terms of recent developments in the music.  Even my current interests and curmudgeonly disgust with hipsters and decadent art-school types makes it in my own self-interest to enjoy articles like the D. Asia one above, but I don't.  It just sounds like the same tone that people who hate (traditional) classical music use: "We have rock music now [or substitute whatever is hot for the next ~15 minutes], why do we need those moldy old patriarchal sounds?"  *Sigh*  I regret ever listening to anyone who took Hannibal Lecter seriously as a metaphor for lovers of so-called High Culture; but now I know that that metaphor didn't come from nowhere. 

Apparently learning is no match for knowing; there's just no need for the former when you've got the latter.  The second obviates the first.  Humankind is doomed.

[Mirror Image]

These kinds of articles don't surprise me and they really should be ignored because they're insignificant and, if anything, only hurt the author which in this case is Daniel Asia and his own music. I don't like Cage, I don't care about Cage, but people enjoy different things. What's music to my ears is the sound of the nails on the chalkboard to another. I'm the only one in the universe that knows what I like. I don't need some snob like Asia telling me otherwise.

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

The Put On of the Century, or the Cage Centenary
Editorial by composer Daniel Asia, faculty at the University of Arizona.

So why is Cage lauded? I think his transgressive, stick-it-in your face approach finds resonance with those who think they hate the Western musical tradition, for its supposed patriarchal and masterwork approach. I think his oceanic view of rationality versus chance finds acceptance in a time which is profoundly anti-rational, and therefore unwilling to make serious artistic judgements regarding real quality, including those of genre. I think his trickster qualities, borrowed from the ultimate trickster, Duchamp, perfectly reflect our time's sense of profound unseriousness. Because, while art for most is not a matter of life or death, it does profoundly reflect our understanding and approach to ultimate values, and I have never heard "fun" described as an ultimate value to rival those old fogies of beauty, truth, and justice. But I fear this is where we are now in the culture.

The highlighted bits show what's wrong (I think!) with this type of musical polemic, the sort of effusion which seems to flow with depressing regularity from the pens of neo-tonal and neo-romantic composers. The argument is largely based on their own personal thoughts and feelings, without any deeper research, and amounts to saying "I don't like this music, therefore nobody else does."

[Octave]

Certainly fair enough!  I also should have acknowledged that self-evident [sic!] notions of "progress" were in circulation for a long, long time, and might ever so possibly still be.  Saying that all future music be written within some narrow methodological horizon: that's not progress.  Even saying that we'll know progress when we see it: please.  We might as well say that we know great music when we hear it: really?  Really?  I can believe someone, particularly a connoisseur, knows good music---music well-played---when she hears it.  And I am all for good music.  Why call it "mediocre"?  Why harp on notions of greatness?  Frequently when I hear "greatness" invoked, I wonder if what the person means---even if they don't know they mean it, that is, what they mean in practice---is "greatness" as "really really good"-ness.  What about greatness that transports you to another continent, and you wake beneath strange constellations?  The originary sense of the "great" would seem to be, how do we say it, "temporarily incommensurable"?  That isn't too ponderous, is it? 

Closed horizons are probably necessary for a happy life (I think I'm quoting Nietzsche, but I can't source it, for the moment), so none of this blather about "open-mindedness".  But what strange dogmatism.  Aren't there plenty of people who just love classical music broadly-construed?  I was under the impression that Jed Distler is like this, though I don't read him all the time.

I apologize for going on at length about this.  I don't mind arriving late for the (traditional) classical music party; that's exciting.  But much, much more troubling is the prospect that the worst damage to classical music has been done on the hither side of the city wall.  Where, exactly, are the real barbarians?

[some guy]

What's music to my ears is the sound of the nails on the chalkboard to another.

What's music to my ears is the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard.

(I was still teaching when chalkboards were replaced by whiteboards. And while the squeek of a whiteboard pen is OK, it's nothing so lovely as fingernails on a chalkboard. )

[Mirror Image]

What's music to my ears is the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard.

Touche!

[Karl Henning]

The fact remains that there are more discs of Cage's music in my library than of Stockhausen's. If I had to choose which of those two was the put-on of the century . . . .

[Cato]

The fact remains that there are more discs of Cage's music in my library than of Stockhausen's. If I had to choose which of those two was the put-on of the century . . . .

And Stockhausen's can be expensive!   

I read the article and heard nothing afterward...or after word.

[Karl Henning]

Mr. Asia, pardon me for saying this, but who cares?

The desire (or need) of some folks to limit what others should enjoy, music-wise but really of any art, baffles me.  I am for more and more and more, not less music to consider and hear. 

(* pounds the table *)

[Cato]

Mr. Asia, pardon me for saying this, but who cares?

The desire (or need) of some folks to limit what others should enjoy, music-wise but really of any art, baffles me.  I am for more and more and more, not less music to consider and hear. 

(* pounds the table *)

0:)  Amen!   0:)

Possibly because Life is short, Mr. Asia wants us to use our time more profitably by not giving John Cage a chance, and instead wants us to listen to Stravinsky...or Daniel Asia.  He sees his essay as a public service.

From the essay:

The result of all of this is a music sadly lacking in any directionality, a music that is essentially rudderless. The music is emotionally bland and lackluster, its contours in this regard terribly narrow. Lastly, rather than engaging the mind, this is a music that purposely demands the mind be held at a distance, in abeyance. Ultimately, the music is simply downright sophomoric and boring. In Cage's latter and final chance period, by the way, matters only got much, much worse in regards to all of the above.

Some specific examples of these regrettable qualities would be nice to know, but instead the entire oeuvre of Cage is lumped together.

[Karl Henning]

Some folks simply aren't questioning their own premises.

The result of all of this is a music sadly lacking in any directionality, a music that is essentially rudderless.

Now, someone else might have said, The result of all of this is a music felicitously lacking in any directionality, a music that is essentially rudderless.

[Karl Henning]

Some specific examples of these regrettable qualities would be nice to know, but instead the entire oeuvre of Cage is lumped together.

Exactly the same error which our James is happy habitually to fall into.

[Mirror Image]

I remember hearing some of Daniel Asia's music and wishing it was John Cage I was listening to instead.

[dyn]

i like how daniel asia says john cage's music "won't survive the test of time" (not in so many words) while talking about a performance he went to of a 70-year-old piece, frequently performed and recorded despite its length and difficulty, by a dead composer.

(i have a hard time thinking of any music by daniel asia that has "survived the test of time" btw)

[not edward]

Here's the thing, though: for all that people may be critical of Cage, it's absolutely uncontroversial to say that he's one of the most influential figures in 20th century music. Of course, it's also uncontroversial to say that Cage as a composer had severe limitations (when he tried to write in forms related to the Western art music tradition, his weaknesses in harmony and structure are obvious).

But where Cage differs from so many completely forgotten figures is, I think, this: he knew his limitations and embraced them, using them to create his own distinctive style. So works like the String Quartet in Four Parts and the Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra utilise a near-mechanical, very restricted harmonic gamut, and many of the more intuitive later works elide even more of the common techniques of their genre.

Perhaps that makes him a niche composer (and from all I've read about Cage I don't suppose he would have argued with that), but I think it's a bigger niche than Mr. Asia would have us believe. And I certainly find some of the late works quite beautiful (even if many--but not all--are rudderless):

http://www.youtube.com/v/C2iy0z5pb_Y

[Karl Henning]

Spot on, Edward

[Mirror Image]

I care and value serious artistic judgements regarding real quality, Mr. Asia's assessment of Cage is right on the mark.

Define 'real quality,' James since you're the expert on what constitutes quality music.