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John Cage and Recording

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John Cage and Recording LMJ13_02body_005-096 11/25/03 2:57 PM Page 11 John Cage and Recording Yasunao Tone ABSTRACT There is general agree- ment that John Cage’s attitude toward records and recording If you close your eyes, you lose the power of abstraction. “It’s really not useful at all,” Cage was ambiguous and not neces- answers with a sudden and surprising sarily coherent. However, if one —Michel Serres impatience, even anger....“It closely analyzes his work and merely destroys one’s need for real his evolution of the concept of music. It substitutes artificial music the art—that is, from his pieces How does one encounter John Cage? for real music, and it makes people for prepared piano to his use of It would be problematic to say that I encounter John Cage think that they’re engaging in a mu- the I Ching for Music of Changes in his music, because I do not encounter him, as F.J.J. Buy- sical activity when they’re actually to 4’33” to his prototype of not. And it has completely distorted Happenings at Black Mountain tendijk in his widely known text Phenomenology of the Encounter and turned upside down the function points out, in the way that I encounter a thing in a box. Was College in 1952—one finds a of music in anyone’s experience.” . critique of something that other it not Cage who forbade above all else the consideration of We didn’t pay any attention to Cage composers take as self-evident. music as an object? Even so, we can still encounter him even on the subject of recordings then, and Cage’s critique of recording though we are no longer able to see him. The idea of en- we certainly don’t 10 years later....It relates to the representation as is almost taken for granted by just countering John Cage reminds me of Jasper Johns’s remark re-presentation of music. The about everyone who uses recordings author aims in this article to “The best criticism of a painting is to put another painting that recordings, whether or not they discover/uncover Cage’s next to it.” I perhaps encounter Cage when I am composing are the experience of music, have critique of the metaphysics of and reaching a point at which I am trying to get beyond his something very important to presence through his work and offer....And, remarkably, three years utterances. music. Cage himself once said that he would prefer to respond after his death, Cage himself has be- to another’s work by writing a new piece rather than by writ- come ...the most recorded of mod- ing a critique. In fact, he once created a piece, Not Wanting to ern composers. ...[1] Say Anything about Marcel, in the form of a visual poem instead Swed dismissed Cage’s antipathy to records as a musician’s of writing criticism of Duchamp. Nevertheless, I have chosen typical manner of thinking, disregarding the fact that re- writing. Needless to say, for Cage categories would not matter. markably few compositions are made specifically for the I have to admonish myself not to become Zarathustra’s ape by medium: mimicking Cage’s discourse, so that I do not become the exact opposite of Cage. Yet, is there anyone devoted to music who isn’t stopped just a lit- tle bit short by Cage’s remarks about recordings? In the televi- sion and computer age, when the dubious value of virtual experience is becoming increasingly clear, does anyone really be- CAGE AND RECORDS lieve that recordings replace music? [2] Cage’s antipathy towards recording is widely known; but it Swed continues and points out Cage’s contradictory atti- seems to me that there has never been an attempt to discuss tude towards recording: this phenomenon as derived from his musical ideas. People assume that Cage was against recordings as substitutes for live Indeed, Cage was involved in recording, in one way or other, all his life. ...He was always generous about allowing his live per- music, in the sense that recordings are copies, with the live formances to be recorded and broadcast. ...And most impor- performances as the originals. This assumption would perhaps tant of all, he used recordings. Recordings, or at least the make him a vulgar media theorist, if not a reactionary. Cage, technology of them, were in Cage’s blood. ...[3] who admired Marshall McLuhan a great deal, would not agree In the last years of his life, Cage seemed to become more with this assumption. It is true that Cage was against record- open to the idea of recordings and was pleased to make record- ing as a substitute, but in a different sense. I will elaborate on ings. He had written a new piece that was composed for the this topic below. If one closely examines Cage’s antipathy to- CD medium, which his sudden death prevented him from lis- wards recording, one would find this seemingly contradictory tening to. Swed then notes the change in Cage toward record- attitude consistent with his ideas; however, many people have ing and concludes: not fully explored his antipathy toward recording. For instance, music critic Mark Swed’s article in the Did this mean that Cage ...had in the end lightened up some- 1995–1996 John Cage special issue of Schwann Opus attracted what about recordings? Well, Cage confessed that he had not, and for the best and most practical of reasons. ...Cage chose to my attention. In it Swed refers to remarks Cage made in a 1985 live without music for his mental well-being, just as he chose a British television documentary directed by Peter Greenaway: “I don’t myself use records,” Cage says, “and I give the example Yasunao Tone (sound artist, theorist, performance artist), 307 West Broadway, New York, of someone who lives happily without records. But I notice that NY 10013, U.S.A. nobody pays any attention to me. Or maybe a few pay attention, This essay was written for a book commemorating John Cage, entitled Rencontrer/Encounter- but most people use records.” ...[O]ne interviewer innocently ing John Cage, edited by Daniel Charles and Jean-Louis Houchard. Publication of the book asks the question likely to pop into most music lovers’ heads at has been suspended since 1997. Minor revisions were made for this publication. The text that point. Isn’t a recording at least useful for the purpose of hear- was translated into Japanese by Toshie Kakinuma and published in InterCommunication 35 (NTT Publishing division, Tokyo) (2001) pp. 116–125. ing music from concerts or performances you simply can’t get to? © 2003 ISAST LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 13, pp. 11–15, 2003 11 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/096112104322750728 by guest on 25 September 2021 LMJ13_02body_005-096 11/25/03 2:57 PM Page 12 macrobiotic diet for his physical well- quency record. Credo in Us (1942) he ex- graphic images, from which the Chinese being [4]. plained as follows: “Interviewer—So the characters were derived by studying their When I read this article I empathized irony is also romantic, classical music ancient pictographic forms, which are with the irritation Cage expressed in this bursting out of the speakers, and that was closer to images than are their modern interview. For I myself have experienced [the] American idea of culture. Cage— forms. I scanned the images into the a similar situation, to which I will return And a jazz solo, a cowboy solo and so computer and digitized them, convert- later. forth. The phonograph is playing ing them to binary code (simple 0s and Tchaikovsky and other classical music 1s). I then obtained histograms from the and [the] radio played whatever they put binary code and had the computer read THE USE OF RECORDS AND on the air” [7], in addition to percussion. the histograms as sound waves; thus I ob- CREATION WITH RECORDS Cage also used other pre-recorded sound tained sound from the images. There- Cage’s thoughts on records are not sim- media up to his last years. For example, fore, I used visualized text (images) as the ply the negation of records. The fact that Sculpture Musicale (1989) is a piece for source—that is, the message—which he sometimes showed apparently incon- four tape recorders with recorded sound. after encoding was recorded on a CD. sistent attitudes towards records was not Now, I would like to report on my own Now, when playing the CD, what is re- a contradiction; likewise, his attitude to- experience using recordings with Cage ceived are not images as message, but wards records did not change. In fact, if as my audience. In March 1986, a year sound that is simply an excess. Accord- we closely examine his work, we find that after Cage’s interview for Greenaway’s ing to information theory the resultant his cooperation with the recording of his documentary, I gave a concert at the Ex- sound is nothing other than noise. As the music by other performers is in fact in ac- perimental Intermedia Foundation in French word for (static) noise, parasite, cordance with his antipathy towards New York, during which I premiered a indicates, noise is parasitic on its host, records. For Cage, records existed only piece called Music for 2 CD Players. Cage that is, the message. But in this case there as a problem of preservation and distri- sat in the front row, and several minutes is no host, only a parasite on the CD.
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