Flower-father
J. 0. URNISON
In 1965 John Cage gave a talk in Ann Arbor, lasting between an hour and a half and two hours, which was randomly relayed to the audience by a set of loudspeakers so that, he tells us, 'very little of anything that was said . . . was comprehensible to the audience.' Like this lecture and his music, some of the content of this book has also been determined by chance procedures, with inevitably similar re- sults. But it is not all like that; there are frequent lucid, if technical, discussions of fungi; there are anecdotes in the Zen or zany taste; there are illuminating biographical frag- ments on Schoenberg and others; there are strongly felt reflections on the maladies of the world and their remedies; and there are many scattered remarks which give some understand- ing of Cage's aims and attitudes. There can be no doubt that Mr Cage is both sensitive and gifted. Readint,him, I found myself, even when bewildered, continually say- ing to myself, erroneously, 'A very clever young , man.' Cage was, in fact, born in 1912, but, save that he hardly mentions sex, he reads like an outstandingly clever example of the more ad- vanced young men at our universities. The things that delight him, such as the man %yho rolled out a red carpet from his motor-car to the drug store while he visited it to make a trivial purchase, are the things which peren- nially delight the young; but also, no doubt, the able young are now much influenced by Cage and his like, which alone would make him interesting.
The important direct influence of Cage is, of course, on musicians. There is little reasoned discussion of music in this book, but one can certainly begin to get some under- standing of what Cage is after from it. In his foreword he says: The reason I am less and less interested in music is not only that I find environmental sounds and noises more useful aesthetically than the sounds produced by the world's musical cultures, but that when you get right down to it a composer is simply someone who tells other people what to do. I find this an unattractive way of getting things done.' This attitude presumably explains both the celebrated silent piano piece, which could scarcely interfere with environmental sound, and the extreme liberty left to the per- formers in other works. Cage has thrown out music as traditionally understood; he wants us to listen to the world around us with alert ears, to savour the crackling chocolate-box and rustling programme, with or without orches- tral accompaniment; if there is an orchestra, even the composer's ears should be astonished by each performance. .
Mr Cage would like to extend this anarchic individualism also to politics. 'We are,' he tells us, 'faced with a problem free of our emo- tions, a problem so simple computers in their infancy can aid in its solution, a technologitaL: problem Fuller long ago stated: to triple the effectiveness and to implement the distribu- tion of world resources so that everyone in ; the world will have what be needs. Rentuv- ciation of competition. World enlightenment.' It would be a mistake to see this.,. as the classical marxist doctrine of the withering away of the state, which is, by comparison, worldly cynicism; here we gain painlessly what in marxist theory must be.bought with blood.
It would be a mistake to read this book for enlightenment on any subject other than fungi; but it is worth reading for the light it throws on its creator and, indirectly, on an attitude which, whether exhibited by composers or by flower-children, is nowadays important enough to need comprehension even by those who do not share it. Unless we find self-satisfaction a virtue, we may even come to admire it.
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