The other side of silence
Fiona Maddocks CAGE TALK by Peter Dickinson University of Rochester Press, £25, pp. 296, ISBN 9781580462372 Asked by a journalist whether he went to the opera, John Cage replied, 'No, I listen to the traffic.' The remark, often quoted, was less sententious than this abbreviated form would imply. Typically Cage, more interested in communicating than teasing despite his reputation as one of the funniest conversationalists, continued with an explanation: 'I live in the Sixth Avenue area in New York, and there is lots of noise there. That is my music.'
Ever the pioneer, Cage (1912-92) influenced a generation of composers and artists inspired by his experimentalism. Everything he did was new. Most was little understood at the time outside his immediate circle. He used chance, via the I Ching, and electronics. He invited every noise-making thing, nut, bolt, slide whistle, to be an instrument on a par with the violin, at a time when the harness of a doctrinaire and puritanical avant garde was threatening to strangle contemporary music. Many thought him mad, a flowerpower hippy who never grew up.
Cage's observation about traffic remains pertinent to our understanding of this 20thcentury adventurer. In his now notorious 433", in which no sounds are intentionally produced, performers come on stage and hold out an invitation for silence itself to take a solo role. The enterprise may have become a byword for crankiness, yet the serious point, about there being no such thing as silence is now a given, the musical equivalent of Duchamp's famous urinal, the found object.
4'33" has been (inventively) broadcast, orchestrated, and given a jazz makeover. A rock group purloined its name. John Lennon and Yoko Ono, as well as Mike Batt, better known for his score for The Wombles TV series, are only the most famous to have paid tribute with their own versions. A secret homage to Cage takes place daily at the Royal Academy of Arts, where the Burlington House fountain has a periodicity of 4'33". Such is Cage's iconic status.
The first and definitive performance, however, was given in 1952 by the American pianist David Tudor, a great Cage exponent, who came on stage, opened the piano, closed it after the requisite time, bowed and walked off. Tudor (who died in 1996) explains the work's origins in Cage Talk, Peter Dickinson's lively compilation of dialogues with and about Cage, spanning three decades and often transcribed from programmes first broadcast on BBC Radio 3.
The friends, colleagues and critics include many from other media he inhabited: dance via his one-time partner and collaborator, Merce Cunningham, visual art and culture through David Sylvester and Frank Kermode. The list of composers, fans as well as sceptics, includes Virgil Thomson, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Kurt Schwertsik and that eccentric grand-daddy of minimalism, La Monte Young.
Stockhausen expresses doubt about Cage's musicianship, wondering how 'someone like him can be called a composer', while at the same time calling him 'morally a great example for many artists'. The American cultural critic John Rockwell expresses a similar ambivalence, finding much of the later music boring, accusing Cage of being a careerist 'in the American way' yet unable to deny his lasting influence on artists and musicians as one of the greatest 'philosopher speculators of our time'.
Today, nearly 15 years after his death, most serious musicians realise the service Cage performed with such unselfish grace. He took the extreme frontier position, extending the territorial definition of music, thereby making all other types of experiment allowable. Dickinson's valuable anthology, with its useful introductory overview, has the feel of a final gathering up of oral history relating to Cage. Many of its contributors are dead. Though his antics and inventions are now history, his influence burns brighter than ever.
Mercifully Dickinson retains a clear-eyed briskness towards his subject's frequent and inevitable notoriety, reminding us of a cartoon which appeared in Private Eye in 1975: five bell-ringers are getting legless in a church belfry, variously asleep, supine, or collapsed; a figure peers in through the belfry door. The caption reads, 'Piss off will you, Vicar — this one's by John Cage.' Apparently Cage was not especially amused. But nor is the joke half as funny as some of Cage's own. Here was a man who could make a ballet score of elegantly witty anecdotes, which he would read with the music of natural speech rhythms Scorn towards Cage endures. In fact in this battle of wild experiment, it is Stockhausen whose music has been seen to fall apart. If anyone doubts the musical learning and compositional eloquence that underpin Cage's experiments let them listen to the Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, quiet, lyrical, elusive. John Tilbury's recording from the early 1970s remains a benchmark. Its reissue only two months ago (on the Explore label) reminds us that interest in the composer is alive and growing. John Cage gave the world of music a get-out-of-jail card. Despite his name, there were no iron bars.
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