Experimental Practices of Music and Philosophy in John Cage and Gilles Deleuze
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Experimental Practices of Music and Philosophy in John Cage and Gilles Deleuze Iain CAMPBELL This thesis is being submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Kingston University for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy. October 2015 Abstract In this thesis we construct a critical encounter between the composer John Cage and the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. This encounter circulates through a constellation of problems found across and between mid-twentieth century musical, artistic, and philosophical practices, the central focus for our line of enquiry being the concept of experimentation. We emphasize the production of a method of experimentation through a practice historically situated with regards to the traditions of the respective fields of music and philosophy. However, we argue that these experimental practices are not reducible to their historical traditions, but rather, by adopting what we term a problematic reading, or transcendental critique, with regards to historical givens, they take their historical situation as the site of an experimental departure. We follow Cage through his relation to the history of Western classical music, his contemporaries in the musical avant-garde, and artistic movements surrounding and in some respects stemming from Cage’s work, and Deleuze through his relation to Kant, phenomenology, and structuralism, in order to map the production of a practice of experimentation spanning music, art, and philosophy. Some specific figures we engage with in these respective traditions include Jean-Phillipe Rameau, Pierre Schaeffer, Marcel Duchamp, Pierre Boulez, Robert Morris, Yoko Ono, La Monte Young, Edmund Husserl, Maurice- Merleau-Ponty, Alain Badiou, and Félix Guattari. In so doing we seek to find between these practices points of both conjunction and disjunction which enrich our understanding of Cage’s and Deleuze’s work, and, more widely speaking, of the passage of twentieth century music and philosophy in general. Here we hope to make contributions to the fields of continental philosophy and music theory especially, and to open a point of engagement with the nascent field of sound studies. Acknowledgements I would first like to thank Professor Éric Alliez and Professor Peter Hallward for their supervision over the past four years. Without their close engagement, guidance, feedback, and personal support throughout the writing process this work would not have been possible. I would also like to thank the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy for the research scholarship that supported my work on this thesis. Moreover, I would like to thank the staff and students of the centre for providing the intellectual engagement which has improved this work immensely, and the friendship which has guided me through its most challenging moments. Table of Contents Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 1 1. Experimentation and the problematization of music .................................................... 9 Founding moments of experimentation ............................................................... 14 Cage and the problematization of music .............................................................. 18 Deleuze and the problematic Idea ........................................................................ 30 Sound-space and Music of Changes .................................................................... 38 Experimentation as method – preparing the piano............................................... 42 2. Music and the development of sound as object .......................................................... 49 Debussy to Varèse ................................................................................................ 52 Origins of musique concrète ................................................................................ 60 Experimental method and the critique of abstract music ..................................... 64 The sound object and the formalization of experimentation................................ 70 Phenomenological grounding .............................................................................. 75 Critique and consequences of the phenomenological sound object ..................... 85 Tape music beyond Schaeffer – the reopening of sound ...................................... 94 3. Sound, music, and art after Cage .............................................................................. 101 Black Mountain College .................................................................................... 102 Lecture on Nothing, Lecture on Something ....................................................... 108 Indeterminacy and ‘The Cage Class’ ..................................................................113 Critical perspectives on Cage ..............................................................................118 Passages from Cage and the North American reception of phenomenology ..... 124 Space reconsidered ............................................................................................. 130 Cage and two Merleau-Pontys ........................................................................... 136 Merleau-Ponty and the flesh .............................................................................. 139 Beyond phenomenology .................................................................................... 147 i 4. Series, Structure, Chance ........................................................................................... 155 Cage and Duchamp ............................................................................................ 157 Chance and composition .................................................................................... 162 Chance and serialism ......................................................................................... 167 Structure and series ............................................................................................ 176 Recognizing structuralism ................................................................................. 182 Deleuze and chance............................................................................................ 187 Cage and series .................................................................................................. 193 Towards the machine ......................................................................................... 199 5. Rhythm, sound, performance ..................................................................................... 207 Notation, structure, and interpretation ............................................................... 208 Music and the problematic ................................................................................. 212 Sensation and sound as a problem after structure .............................................. 219 The synthesizer and music after Cage ............................................................... 227 Rhythm and modulation ..................................................................................... 236 Refrain and rhythm in Cage’s late work ............................................................ 249 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 261 Bibliography .................................................................................................................. 267 ii Introduction In this thesis we will construct a critical encounter between the composer John Cage and the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, based around the notion of experimental practice. Cage is located in the mid-twentieth century emergence of a musical avant-garde, his compositional practice defined not only through and against the tradition of Western classical music from which his early work sought a break, but alongside other contemporary musical practices oriented towards similar goals and artistic practices with resonant objectives. The development and theorization of these fields is inextricably implicated in a wider intellectual climate not only of aesthetics and art theory, but of questions at the core of the development of philosophical movements such as phenomenology and structuralism. With Deleuze alike, his mid-twentieth century engagement with a philosophical milieu dominated by phenomenology and structuralism is posed upon problems whose articulation is inseparable from their engagement with the arts. As such our confrontation will circulate across a constellation of problems between and across the two bodies of work, Cage and Deleuze, the engagement with which is articulated through what we are terming their experimental practices. With this notion we are emphasizing a historically-situated practice which is nevertheless not reducible to its given conditions, which takes the given and through a practice of experimentation can construct a line of flight away from it. This follows Deleuze’s early claim that “the only possible theory is a theory of practice”,1 a form of practice necessarily bound up in experimentation.2 As such the philosophical method here is less the often cited but perhaps overinvested and not entirely illuminating Deleuze remark regarding a “sort of buggery” performed 1 Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas