The Christopher Small Reader. Christopher Small G.

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The Christopher Small Reader - Christopher Small G.

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sounds in a fixed relationship,” his desire to allow sounds simply to “be themselves,” to refrain from imposing any outside order on them, is clearly anarchistic (we remind ourselves that the word “anarchism” is not a synonym for “chaos” but indicates rather a state in which men need no externally imposed laws), a metaphor for a potential society, which few Europeans have so far dared to imagine. His refusal to impose his will on the sounds has led him to his well-known use of chance operations, by the throwing of dice, the consultation of the Chinese Book of Changes, the I-Ching, or, more recently, the use of computers; he tries “to arrange my composing means so that I won’t have any knowledge of what might happen…. I like to think that I’m outside the circle of a known universe and dealing with things I literally don’t know anything about.”25 Boulez’ criticism, made from his echt-European viewpoint, that such procedures merely cover “weaknesses in the compositional methods involved,”26 is regarded by Cage as irrelevant, since if compositional methods are designed to assist the composer to submit the sound materials to his will, the absence of any desire to do so renders all such methods superfluous.

      The use of chance operations has a further consequence: that one accepts the validity of whatever sound chance turns up, without making any kind of value judgment on it. “Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness. How are you going to use this situation if you are there? That is the question,”27 he says, and quotes the Hindu aphorism, “Imitate the sands of the Ganges who are not pleased by perfume and who are not disgusted by filth.” And again: “Why do you waste your time and mine by trying to get value judgments? Don’t you know that when you get a value judgment that’s all you have?”28

      It is true that the European habit of placing value judgments on everything pervades our thinking to a degree that we hardly realize. Our minds are full of hierarchies; among composers, for example, we are accustomed to think of Bach and Beethoven, perhaps of Mozart (the hierarchy differs in detail between individuals but the main outlines are clear), with Brahms and Haydn perhaps a little below them, and so on down through Tchaikowsky, Schumann, Delibes, to Chaminade and Ketèlby to the lady next door who makes up little songs. This habit of thought is a cognate of the value placed on the art object rather than the creative process, since once a value is placed on the art object the natural question is, what value? Part of the reasoning behind Cage’s frequent refusal to fix his works in final form, behind his use of chance and indeterminacy, is the desire to preserve as much of the art process as is possible for the performer and even the listener; “Art instead of being an object made by one person is a process set in motion by a group of people. Art’s socialized. It isn’t someone saying something but people doing things, giving everyone (including those involved) the opportunity to have experiences they would not otherwise have had.”29 So, at least in many later works, he provides the structure leaving the performer to fill in the actual material in his own way. So, too, the apparent chaos of vast multi-media works such as HPSCHD is intended to allow the listener to put his own meaning on the piece, rather than to present him with a ready-made meaning. He makes an interesting antitheses between “emerging” and “entering in”; “Everybody,” he says, “hears the same thing if it emerges. Everybody hears what he alone hears if he enters in.”30 Again, to an interviewer who claimed to hear a sense of logic and cohesion in one of his indeterminate pieces, he replied, sharply, “This logic was not put there by me, but was the result of chance operations. The thought that it is logical grows up in you.”31

      With Cage, then, it would appear as if the emancipation from the drama, tension and domination of the will of European music is complete. And yet a doubt remains; the simple refusal to make any kind of value judgement, the unquestioning acceptance of any sound that happens along (which obliges us, it must be said, to accept at times some pretty excruciating sounds), is based on perhaps too facile an interpretation of Zen doctrines of art. Alan Watts points out, “Even in painting, the work of art is considered not as representing nature but as being itself a work of nature.” So far so good, but he goes on, “This does not mean that the art forms of Zen are left to mere chance … The point is rather that for Zen there is no duality, no conflict between the natural element of chance and the human element of control. The constructive powers of the human mind are no more artificial than the formative action of plants or bees, so that from the standpoint of Zen it is no contradiction to say that artistic technique is discipline in spontaneity and spontaneity in discipline.”32 Not even his worst enemies would accuse Cage of lack of discipline; nevertheless, to deny the reality of value is simply to continue the discourse on value on the same level as it has been conducted since the time of Aristotle. What is needed is a new concept of value that transcends western hierarchical thinking, and this Cage, for all the magnitude of his achievement, for all the new freedom he has brought into ways of musical thinking, has not succeeded in establishing.

      Since Cage, however, tonal harmony has no longer been a concern to those American musicians whose thinking does not follow that of Europe. American music no longer needs to protest its independence; that can now be taken for granted as American musicians compose their own models of the potential society that owe little to European precedents. I must emphasize again that this chapter makes no claim to being a comprehensive survey of American music, but simply attempts to offer an interpretation of certain aspects of that music in the light of the ideas presented in the earlier chapters, and in particular in the light of the ideal of individual liberty upon which the Republic was founded. With this in mind, let us consider only four of those musicians whose work is making the American scene today so much more lively than its European counterpart. The language may have changed, but the vision of the potential society remains as pervasive as ever.

      The principal concern of these musicians seems to be the projection of sounds into time, the loving exploration of the inner nature of sounds, in a world where the structures that contain the sounds are relatively unimportant—a complete reversal, in fact, of the classical European aesthetic of music. The antithesis is summed up neatly in an exchange, reported by the pianist John Tilbury, which is supposed to have taken place between Morton Feldman and Stockhausen:

      KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN: Morton, I know you have no system, but what’s your secret?

      MORTON FELDMAN: Leave the sounds alone, Karlheinz, don’t push them around.

      KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN: Not even just a little bit?33

      Feldman, who acknowledges Cage as having given him “early permissions to have confidence in my instincts,” takes sounds, as it were, and holds them up for our pleasure and admiration. The sounds he presents to us are generally quiet and unobtrusive, changing gently, creating stillness and peacefulness. The temporal order of the sounds scarcely matters, so that conventional concepts of musical time have no meaning; one feels that if it were possible to project the entire piece simultaneously Feldman would do so.

      La Monte Young is concerned also in the exploration of the inner nature of sounds. He recalls from childhood his fascination with the sound of the wind in telephone wires and says, “I noticed about 1956 that I seemed more interested in listening to chords than in listening to melodies. In other words, I was more interested in concurrency or simultaneity than in sequence.”34 The result of this concern was, for example, Composition 1960 No 7, which consists of the instruction “B and F sharp. To be held for a long time,” and the very long composition The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, in which “Young and three associates chant an open chord of intrinsically infinite duration, amplified to the point of aural pain. Public performances usually consist of two sessions, each nearly two hours in length, within a darkened room illuminated only by projections of pattern-art.”35 Young’s music, then, has little to do with listening in the traditional western sense, and much with absorption in the timeless rituals of Buddhism and Lamaism. The extreme length of time each sound lasts is vital to the awareness of each nuance of its nature; just as the ethologist must sit and wait for a long time for the living community to reveal itself, so Young’s music can be regarded as

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