After the Silence: John Cage, Chance and Change

After the Silence: John Cage, Chance and Change

Joan Retallack: "What would you substitute for the notion of politics?"

John Cage: "The uniqueness of the individual."

(Sept. 6-7, 1990)

Around the time of the above conversation I began a correspondence with John Cage concerning his solo percussion piece "Child of Tree" (1975) which I had been performing since 1987. In fact the book Joan eventually published after Cage's death in 1992 even includes a discussion of my performance of the piece. I had questions about the score--a messy set of hand-written instructions on how to build the form of the piece and where to place the instruments. When I stopped performing as a percussionist in the mid-90s I put everything, including Cage's letters, away. I didn't look at it again until this year, preparing for lectures I've been given around the world as part of the centennial of Cage's birth in 1912.

  Performing Child of Tree (Morse Recital Hall, Yale University, February 19, 2012

Revisiting that time, I realize, now from the perspective of a musicologist who specializes in experimental music generally and the work of John Cage specifically, that the music Cage was writing toward the end of his life, and "Child of Tree" is an early example, was meant to aspire to what Wittgenstein called, concerning language, a "form of life." An important difference, however, is that Cage was decidedly NOT interested in music as a language, with all the historical and cultural baggage so often attached when making such claims. The way Cage put it was as follows: "Performance of a piece of music can be a metaphor of society. We could make a piece of music in which we would be willing to live, a piece of music as a representation of a society in which you would be willing to live."

Thinking of John Cage now, and in this way, after having studied his work for more than thirty years, I can now see what Norman O. Brown meant, in a lecture he gave at Stanford University in 1992, and with his friend John Cage (who would die in August of that year) in attendance. Brown audaciously proclaimed, that one might consider, when thinking about what comes after the fall of the ideological centers that informed cold war mentalities, "the life's work of John Cage." This astonishing remark, coming from one of the last century's most gifted intellectuals, when placed in the context of Cage's remark at the beginning of my text, points to Brown's meaning: cultivating one's self as an individual which, in turn, can then influence the society in which we live, creating situations that not only "improve" society but actually change it by individually making something new.

In that same lecture, Brown, speaking of Cage and sounding almost exasperated, proclaimed: "he keeps changing his mind." Too often when musicians think of Cage they only consider his work in the 50s and 60s, with the predominant features of silence, chance and indeterminacy. But this is but one moment in a long life of constant change. And it is the attitude of change as something to desire rather than resist, that I think points to what makes Cage himself an exemplary figure worth paying attention to when considering what in the past might be worth emulating in the future.

In 1988, while walking with John Cage after a concert in New Mexico where he was the featured guest, I asked him a question related to a subject much discussed at the time: "What do you think about the 'death of the avant-garde?" To which he responded, after his typical momentary pause to reflect on a response: "There will always be an avant-garde because there will always be people who want to do something new." That's what I mean by attitude.

Because Cage was a composer, the best way to experience this of course is not by writing about it but instead by listening. And a performance of "Child of Tree" (which I'm now playing again in concerts) offers the possibility of experiencing aesthetically what it might mean to be "influenced" by Cage: to approach what one hears with an open mind, to listen without preconception, hearing what there is to hear, and enjoying the experience without the typical value judgments so often attached to all we experience. If you consider John Cage from this perspective, which is I think is his ultimate legacy, everything becomes new. And we can all be changed.

Christopher Shultis

Ardmore PA

29 April 2012