Sketching and Imitating: Cage, Satie, Thoreau, and the Song Books Jeff Perry (
[email protected]) Society for Music Theory • Columbus, OH • November 10, 2019 Some examples from my talk aren’t reproduced here, since they include images that belong to the John Cage Trust or NYPL Special Collections. Example 1. Socrate is an incredibly beautiful work. There is no expression in the music or in the words, and the result is that it is overpoweringly expressive. The melody is simply an atmosphere which floats. The accompaniment is a continuous juxtaposition of square simplicities. But the combination is of such grace! --JC to Merce Cunningham, 1944 (Kuhn 2016, 66) With clarity of rhythmic structure, grace forms a duality. Together they have a relation like that of body and soul. Clarity is cold, mathematical, inhuman, but basic and earthy. Grace is warm, incalculable, human, opposed to clarity, and like the air. Grace is… the play with and against the clarity of the rhythmic structure. The two are always present together in the best works of the time arts, endlessly, and life-givingly, opposed to each other. --JC, 1944 (Silence, 91-92) Example 2. I am getting more and more involved with thoughts about society—the situation is so depraved. Have been reading Thoreau —Civil Disobedience. Getting his Journals, the new 2-vol. set. I want somehow to examine the situation, the social one, as we did the musical one, to change it or change “my” part of it so that I can “listen” to my “life” without self-consciousness, i.e., moral embarrassment.