non LIBRARY OF WELLESLEY COLLEGE PURCHASED FROM LIBRARY FUNDS Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from Wellesley College Library http://archive.org/details/silencelecturesw1961cage SILENCE Lectures and writings by JOHN CAGE DO, cas WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS Middletown, Connecticut Many of these lectures and articles have been delivered or published elsewhere in the past two decades. The headnote preceding each one makes grateful ac- knowledgment of its precise source. The design used on the endpapers is a part of the score of Mr. Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra, for Elaine de Kooning, copyright © I960 by Henmar Press Inc. Copyright © 1939, 1944, 1949, 1952, 1954, 1955, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1961 by John Cage Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 61-14238 Manufactured in the United States of America First Edition USIC LIBRAE To Whom It May Concern Foreword / ix Manifesto / xii The Future of Music: Credo I 3 Experimental Music / 7 Experimental Music: Doctrine / 13 Composition as Process / 18 I. Changes 18 CONTENTS / II. Indeterminacy I 35 III. Communication / 41 Composition / 57 To Describe the Process of Composition Used in Music of Changes and Imaginary Landscape No. 4/57 To Describe the Process of Composition Used in Music for Piano 21-52 / 60 Forerunners of Modern Music / 62 History of Experimental Music in the United States / 67 Erik Satie I 76 Edgard Varese / 83 Four Statements on the Dance / 86 Goal: New Music, New Dance / 87 Grace and Clarity / 89 In This Day . / 94 2 Pages, 122 Words on Music and Dance / 96 On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work / 98 Lecture on Nothing / 109 Lecture on Something / 128 45' for a Speaker / 146 Where Are We Going? and What Are We Doing? / 194 Indeterminacy / 260 Music Lovers' Field Companion / 274 FOREWORD For over twenty years I have been writing articles and giving lectures. Many of them have been unusual in form—this is especially true of the lec- tures—because I have employed in them means of composing analogous to my composing means in the field of music. My intention has been, often, to say what I had to say in a way that would exemplify it; that would, con- ceivably, permit the listener to experience what I had to say rather than just hear about it. This means that, being as I am engaged in a variety of activities, I attempt to introduce into each one of them aspects convention- ally limited to one or more of the others. So it was that I gave about 1949 my Lecture on Nothing at the Artists' Club on Eighth Street in New York City (the artists' club started by Robert Motherwell, which predated the popular one associated with Philip Pavia, Bill de Kooning, et al. ) . This Lecture on Nothing was written in the same rhythmic structure I employed at the time in my musical compositions ) . ( Sonatas and Interludes, Three Dances, etc. One of the structural divi- sions was the repetition, some fourteen times, of a single page in which occurred the refrain, "If anyone is sleepy let him go to sleep." Jeanne Reynal, I remember, stood up part way through, screamed, and then said, while I continued speaking, "John, I dearly love you, but I can't bear another minute." She then walked out. Later, during the question period, I gave one of six previously prepared answers regardless of the question asked. This was a reflection of my engagement in Zen. FOREWORD/ix At Black Mountain College in 1952, 1 organized an event that involved the paintings of Bob Rauschenberg, the dancing of Merce Cunningham, films, slides, phonograph records, radios, the poetries of Charles Olson and M. C. Richards recited from the tops of ladders, and the pianism of David Tudor, together with my Juilliard lecture, which ends: "A piece of string, a sunset, each acts." The audience was seated in the center of all this activ- ity. Later that summer, vacationing in New England, I visited America's first synagogue, to discover that the congregation was there seated pre- cisely the way I had arranged the audience at Black Mountain. As I look back, I realize that a concern with poetry was early with me. At Pomona College, in response to questions about the Lake poets, I wrote in the manner of Gertrude Stein, irrelevantly and repetitiously. I got an A. The second time I did it I was failed. Since the Lecture on Nothing there have been more than a dozen pieces that were unconventionally written, including some that were done by means of chance operations and one that was largely a series of questions left unanswered. When M. C. Richards asked me why I didn't one day give a conventional informative lecture, adding that that would be the most shocking thing I could do, I said, "I don't give these lectures to surprise people, but out of a need for poetry." As I see it, poetry is not prose simply because poetry is in one way or another formalized. It is not poetry by reason of its content or ambiguity but by reason of its allowing musical elements (time, sound) to be intro- duced into the world of words. Thus, traditionally, information no matter how stuffy (e.g., the sutras and shastras of India) was transmitted in poetry. It was easier to grasp that way. Karl Shapiro may have been think- ing along these lines when he wrote his Essay on Rime in poetry. Committing these formalized lectures to print has presented certain problems, and some of the solutions reached are compromises between what would have been desirable and what was practicable. The lecture Where Are We Going? and What Are We Doing? is an example. In this and other cases, a headnote explains the means to be used in the event of oral delivery. Not all these pieces, of course, are unusual in form. Several were writ- ten to be printed—that is, to be seen rather than to be heard. Several others were composed and delivered as conventional informative lectures (with- out shocking their audiences for that reason, so far as I could determine). x/SILENCE This collection does not include all that I have written; it does reflect what have been, and continue to be, my major concerns. Critics frequently cry "Dada" after attending one of my concerts or hearing one of my lectures. Others bemoan my interest in Zen. One of the liveliest lectures I ever heard was given by Nancy Wilson Ross at the Cornish School in Seattle. It was called Zen Buddhism and Dada. It is pos- sible to make a connection between the two, but neither Dada nor Zen is a fixed tangible. They change; and in quite different ways in different places and times, they invigorate action. What was Dada in the 1920's is now, with the exception of the work of Marcel Duchamp, just art. What I do, I do not wish blamed on Zen, though without my engagement with Zen ( attendance at lectures by Alan Watts and D. T. Suzuki, reading of the literature) I doubt whether I would have done what I have done. I am told that Alan Watts has questioned the relation between my work and Zen. I mention this in order to free Zen of any responsibility for my actions. I shall continue making them, however. I often point out that Dada nowa- days has in it a space, an emptiness, that it formerly lacked. What now- adays, America mid-twentieth century, is Zen? I am grateful to Richard K. Winslow, composer, whose musical ways are different from mine, who seven years ago, as Professor of Music at Wesleyan University, engaged David Tudor and me for a concert and who, at the time as we were walking along, introduced me without warn- ing to his habit of suddenly quietly singing. Since then, he has twice invited us back to Wesleyan, even though our programs were consistently percus- sive, noisy, and silent, and the views which I expressed were consistently antischolastic and anarchic. He helped obtain for me the Fellowship at the Wesleyan Center for Advanced Studies which, in spite of the air-condition- ing, I have enjoyed during the last academic year. And he inspired the University Press to publish this book. The reader may argue the propri- ety of this support, but he must admire, as I do, Winslow's courage and unselfishness. -J.C. June 1961 FOREWORD/xi The text below was written for Julian Beck and Judith Molina, directors of the Living Theatre, for use in their program booklet when they were performing at the Cherry Lane Theatre, Greenwich Village, New York. written in response i toarequestfor \ . , ,,.,, ) instantaneous and unpredictable a manifesto on ( music, 1952 1 nothing is accomplished by writing a piece of music our ears are J " - « - hearing" " " " > now " " " " " " playing" " \ in excellent condition —John CA9E xM/SILENCE SILENCE V. The following text was delivered as a talk at a meeting of a Seattle arts society organized by Bonnie Bird in 1937. It was printed in the brochure accompanying George Avakian's recording of my twenty-five-year retrospective concert at Town Hall, New York, in 1958. THE FUTURE OF MUSIC: CREDO I BELIEVE THAT THE USE OF NOISE Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments.