Stories and Beyond

Notes on John Cage's composition Indeterminacy

John Cage is sitting in a hotel room in Stockholm in late September 1958. He is about to prepare for a lecture he will give in Brussels the following week. Whether he is doubtful how to go about the task the story doesn't tell but pondering what to write he recalls a remark made years earlier by David Tudor that he should give a talk that was nothing but stories. Cage liked the idea, but had never acted on it, until now. He decides to write a series of stories and present them as a lecture. The title he gave his Brussels talk was Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music. That was the beginning of the compositional and collaborative process that led to the composition that we know today as Indeterminacy.

The Brussels-version of the piece consisted of thirty stories without musical accompaniment but it was however going to grow, both in size and complexity, already the year after when Cage was asked to give a lecture at Columbia Teachers College. For this occasion he wrote sixty more stories and he asked David Tudor to make a 90 minute accompaniment to be presented in conjunction with the reading of the texts. As material for this musical accompaniment Tudor used parts from Concert for Piano and Orchestra and noise elements from several radios.[1] In close connection with the Colombia lecture/performance Cage and Tudor recorded the piece for Folkways Records. For that recording Cage used the same gamut of texts but Tudor decided to replace the radios with some specific tracks from the composition Fontana Mix.[2]

When talking about the stories and their origin Cage said that most of them "are things that happened that stuck in my mind. Others I read in books and remembered." A large part of the stories are anecdotes from his own life, meetings with friends and colleagues like Henry Cowell and Merce Cunningham, and memories from childhood. There are also stories from books that Cage read, like literature surrounding Zen, from writers like Aldous Huxley, Martin Buber and Joseph Campbell. They represent a broad variety of perspectives, they come from different times, some are open and poetic, others more actual and precise.  

Why many

A story is a relatively stable structure, even when we don't fully understand it. Ninety stories placed next to each other in a non-hierarchical way is something else. Taken together they make a new structure with a different and ambiguous meaning. Explaining the intention behind putting the stories together in an unplanned way Cage said it was "to suggest that all things – stories, incidental sounds from the environment, and, by extension, beings – are related, and that this complexity is more evident when it is not oversimplified by an idea of relationship in one person's mind".[3] There is no verticality, the stories are placed on a horizontal line and they have the same value. As such they can be seen as representing all the pieces, or parts, that are essential to the structure of our lives. That is what Cage suggests, that high and low, complexity and simplicity, concreteness and metaphor, make up the multiplicity in which we live. In this incalculable multiplicity, humans continually search for relationships, coherence and meaning. But human capacity is inadequate; it cannot encompass the totality of this diversity, but inevitably simplifies. Life is therefore always bigger than we see, feel and understand. Nor is it necessarily likely that one human being will see and make relationships between phenomena in the same way as another human being. The relations between the stories are therefore an open question, it is something that occurs in the mind of the listener. For Cage, this is not a dilemma but an opening and a formal asset. One can however also suggest that Cage is talking about himself as the "one person's mind" and that this mind - his - is not able to override the simplification all minds represents. He does not place himself above the listener, claiming that he – as a composer – is in control, neither of the presentation or the reception.  The idea of one mind set to communicate something to another mind is irrelevant. Art cannot have one purpose and the experience of it is uncontrollable; it is a hidden process.[4] 

        The question of how art-based communication is created, its quality and form, was central to Cage's work, both implicitly and explicitly. But communication is complicated, and for him it was essential to acknowledge and emphasize the problematic aspects of communication hence criticize the way we communicate in the culture we live in. He did this both by creating compositions that inspired shifts in the way we listen, but also through applying compositional techniques and compositional forms – scores of instructions engaging the creativity and judgment of the performer in new ways – new to the idiom of contemporary music. These two activities, or tactics, undermine our preconceptions about two things: first, about how music should sound; secondly, how music (i.e. art) should be made. Some of the ideas that John Cage fostered, and with which he was allied, like superimpositions in musical compositions, had been around a long time. Others, he might have thought were “new,” were not. It was however not important to him to be the originator of specific ideas; he wanted to make things that were unfamiliar to him, and in comparison with what was going on around him – things that had not been done.[5] Even though Cage was focused on inventing new compositional tools and new musical forms, his aim was to reshape the role of the composer, the role of the performer and the role of the listener. This shifting, reshaping, re-formulating of the role of the artist in relation to the making of art and to its listener and viewer is, in today’s post-postmodern times, a discourse both central (i.e. important) and dulled by over-use. Art that has provoked and questioned the modernist idea of the solid and admirable artifact made by a “genius,” is an energy that has been around for almost a hundred years.  Cage was certainly not the first, but the vital and enduring impact that his art has made in this respect, can hardly be disputed.

Communication as process

The function and role of the arts, for the individual as well as for society, was repeatedly, in different ways and in different contexts, reflected on by Cage. When juxtaposed with an analysis of his practice this inclination to theoretically activate the field of perception shows that Cage was an artist truly devoted to the relational qualities of art, thus separating himself from the modernist idea of a strong and autonomous artist subject. A significant number of the choices that Cage made in his art practice can instead be defined as representing a discrete shift towards what we today interpret as postmodern signifiers: a clear effort to develop methods that reduced the impact of his subjective stance and taste; the transference of certain parts of the artistic responsibility away from the composer to the performers; giving equal attention to the process of listening as to the process of composing; encouraging divergent interpretations through the technique of superimposing and emphasizing multiplicity.

Focusing on and nourishing the relational qualities of art, corresponds to the question of communication, which is, as mentioned, at the core of Cage’s investigations and compositional practice. But communication in the Cagean context should be understood as a sequence of exchange beyond semantic language, as well as a questioning of mimesis. Mediation purported by recognized and established signs enables only an illusion of communication and art should attempt to illuminate this through creating expressions that enable an increased awareness and a reconfiguring of esthetic – and communicative – norms. In Cage’s own words this intent takes on a slightly more concrete dynamic:

It’s not that I intend to express one particular thing, but to make something that can be used by the person who finds it expressive. But that expression grows up, so to speak, in the observer.                                                                                                                                                                                      

   Music is about changing the mind – not to understand, but to be aware.[6] 

                                                                                                                                                              When merging these quotations, the idea that the quality of art is immanent in the kind of reaction it causes in the listener/viewer, becomes clear. Together, they indicate the idea that art can – Cage would probably say “should” – take on the function to inspire change, or growth, and they indicate that the quality of art is defined through the relational qualities experienced during the event of perception. The interpretation is, therefore, that Cage intentionally wanted to create an affect rather than an object (to be judged, liked or disliked). This is accentuated, when he says: “And if one is making a work, which I often do, that is not an object, but a process, then that concern doesn’t enter in and the question of whether it is better or not better, is not to the point”.[7] The term process, as it is used here, should be understood as energy with divergent directions. The compositional practice as developed by Cage was a process of setting a specific sequence of activities in motion rather than applying a subjective sensitivity/judgment when deciding what choices to make. The conceptualization of this process resulted in a score, in a composition. In the hands of the performer this, in turn, sets off a process of interpretation, which in most compositions by Cage presents challenges of a kind quite different from other musical interpretation processes. The reason for this is that they demand that the interpreter not “only” shape what is there, but invest his/her own material. The composition is thus dependent on the creativity of the performer, which makes his/her practice somewhat equal to the practice of the composer. In light of Cage’s statements on affect, the term can also be easily extended to describe his intention to instigate the actual perceiving of a piece of music as an experience of a process. This notion of processes constitutes a shift that transforms the concept of communication into a concept of activity: The making of the art, as well as the perception of it, is a doing rather than an expression and a perception. The composer is nothing more than the instance composing, or as in many of Cage’s compositions, the inventor of the structure to be filled and set in motion. And the multilayered structure of the composition is the instance to be co-composed by the listener/perceiver. The relational quality is thus enhanced, or rather called for.          

As a significant and useful tool in the problematization of communication Cage emphasizes the importance of asking questions rather than producing answers. By doing so he implicitly suggests that we should refrain from the idea that answers can change the world, or that my answer is the most relevant one. Communication should then be seen as setting questions in motion. So, what are the questions that might ensue from listening to Indeterminacy? I don't know yet, and that's exciting.

The current rendition

The score for Indeterminacy consists of ninety stories, but the performer can choose to include as many as they want for a performance. They can be read in a random order and the reading of each text should have a duration of about sixty seconds, which obviously means that the tempo of the reading varies depending on the number of words in the story.  In the current rendition presented by Radioart the performers Robin McGinley (voice), Ricardo Atienza (electronics) and Niklas Billström (double bass) together created the framework for how to set the piece in motion. They decided to have McGinley read the same thirty stories, in the same order, as Cage used in the Folkways recording from 1959, but created their own method and form for the music accompaniment and the collaborative process. The basic sound source is the improvisations of the double bass, which then is transformed in various ways through electronic processes. In order to merge the different sound sources (voice, double bass and electronics), as well as to create a high level of unpredictability, the performers are placed in three different studios. In the main studio the voice - and the audience - are placed, and the double bass and electronics are placed in two adjacent studios. This means that the two musicians can see the audience but they cannot see, or hear McGinley's voice. The sound of Billström's bass is transmitted both to the main studio as well as to the studio were Atienza processes it electronically, which then is transmitted out to the main studio. For the audience, this set up means that they hear a mix of the voice reading the text, the un-processed sound of the double bass and the electronically processed sound of the double bass. The common denominator for the ensemble is the set duration; thirty stories equals thirty minutes. Each minute a new story starts but the musicians do not relate to this timing, hence the music is created quite independently from the reading.

Recorded at The Studio, Konstfack, University of Arts and Crafts, Stockholm 2015.

Links

About Indeterminacy - Eddie Kohler

https://www.lcdf.org/indeterminacy/about.html

John Cage Trust

https://johncage.org/indeterminacy.cfm

[1] Concert for Piano and Orchestra composed by Cage 1957/58

[2] Fontana Mix, tape music composed by Cage 1958

[3] From John Cage, Silence, Lectures and Writings, London: Marion Boyars. 2009

[4] "Whenever I have given a talk, someone comes up afterwards and insist that the continuity was a planned one, in spite of the ideas that are expressed regarding purposelessness, emptiness, chaos, etc." (Cage in the liner notes to Folkways record Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music, 1959)

[5]  “I am devoted to the principle of originality - not originality in the egoistic sense, but originality in the sense of doing something that it is necessary to do. Now, obviously, the things that it is necessary to do are not the things that have been done, but the ones that have not yet been done. This applies not only to other people's work, but seriously to my own work. That is to say if I have done something, then I consider it my business not to do that, but to find what must be done next” (Cage in Richard Kostelanetz Conversing with Cage, 1988, 207).

[6] Both quotes by John Cage in Richard Kostelanetz Conversing with Cage, 1988, 215

[7] In Richard Kostelanetz Conversing with Cage, 1988, 217