Playing John Cage

My first exposure to John Cage's music came in eighth grade at age 14. I had begun work on an orchestral piece, and my parents decided that I should show my music to a composer. They brought me to a professor at the Manhattan School of Music who happened to live around the corner from our house. I took along my magnum-opus-in-progress, ambitiously titled "Nova". Perhaps without realizing that I was intimidated (it was the first time I had showed my work to anyone outside my friends and family), the prof glanced over it and remarked dismissively, "This is too square. You must instead write a piece for clarinet and voice, with no barlines." No barlines! I had thought "Nova" was adventurous; it even had a measure in 7/8 meter. "Do you know the music of John Cage?" the prof queried. "Isn't he the guy who wrote the piece with no notes?" I ventured, revealing my mistrust. "John Cage is a genius, a genius!" he exhorted, and for a good deal longer than 4'33" he pontificated on the many ways in which Cage had changed the course of music, while I cowered in shame and continued skepticism.

It was 7 years before I went near a composition teacher again. But I was intrigued by the memory of those strange and vivid - sometimes rambling and random, often humorous - Cage books and scores shoved under my nose on that frightening afternoon. An inner voice continually mused, "what if there's something profound to all that kooky stuff?" But I was too busy delving into counterpoint, fugue, jazz harmony, or Yemenite women's folk chants to spend time contemplating silence. Of course, Cage's name came up now and then, in composition seminars over the years or as a foil in musical conversations, usually in a joking context or in response to an unsolvable question.

In 1992 Cage walked into a hospital in New York and unceremoniously died. I remember the day vividly; I was listening to 'New Sounds' show on WNYC, and John Schaefer was presenting an all-day broadcast of Cage's works. By this time I had already come to know and appreciate many of Cage's earlier works, like the Studies for Prepared Piano, Aria, Clarinet Sonata, and the Constructions. I had a few extra cassettes (remember those?), so I decided to record the show. This broadcast was my first exposure to many of Cage's songs and to the String Quartet, which I listened to numerous times, mesmerized by the calmly shifting sonorities and the particular quality of timelessness. Yet I still found no way into Cage's later works, which seemed to be in the realm of either the purely comic or philosophical, or both, but hardly within the boundaries of what I considered to be 'music'. And I thought that I had a pretty open mind.

Until one fateful day a percussionist at the University of Michigan asked me to take part in her graduation recital, and I agreed to play. "It's all John Cage," she added gingerly, leaving me an opportunity to back out - which I luckily didn't. One of the pieces we played was "Four", a late composition in which stopwatches are used to determine general time frames of note placement (or non-placement) within the piece. Rehearsing it left me quizzical, but performing it proved to be profoundly moving. Before that concert, Cage's later music had seemed to me to be about the concept rather than the experience. But that evening I learned that playing John Cage was, in fact, only about the experience. These were truly ego-less pieces, at least as far as the composer was concerned. We, the performers, weren't compelled to worry about what he had wanted or intended; instead, playing Cage's music encouraged a heightened awareness by bringing the singularity of each moment into full focus. During the concert I felt what I can only describe as a palpable sense of 'becoming' -- we becoming the music and it becoming us. That transformation, a bona fide alteration of consciousness, rendered spiritual the process of realizing his music. I suspect that for Cage, too, it was listening to - above and beyond the act of writing - music that was the truly spiritual experience.

Hearing or performing a work that lasts for zero minutes and zero seconds - or one which lasts for 639 years - is bound to alter one's sense of perception. Engendering such a fundemental transformation in the listener would seem to be one of the primary goals for which most creative artists strive. Does that mean that 0'00" or ASLAP are 'great' works? Maybe it doesn't matter. Cage's music encourages us to consider whether we, as audience members, should even bother seeking greatness in a work. If a piece of art transforms our way of thinking and feeling about the world, it has already accomplished a pretty hefty task.

I find it difficult to reach clear and definite conclusions about Cage's music. I acknowledge feeling uncomfortable referring to him a 'genius' as the now-retired prof did; but then again, I don't relish conferring 'genius' status on anyone, because it distances me from, rather than drawing me towards, their work. I expect that my thoughts about John Cage will continue to morph and evolve, a state of constant flux and spontenaeity which he likely would have endorsed and appreciated.

Andriessen family values

10 years ago I was studying in Amsterdam with Louis Andriessen. I remember showing up one afternoon at his house on the Keizersgracht for a lesson. After the usual chit-chat he asked what I was writing, and I began to reply, "well, I have these two ideas..." "Too many!" he interrupted. Louis was joking, but he also wasn't. He has always been adept at encouraging students to reduce their ideas to the most basic elements. A decade later, I struggle with the same questions, both as a composer and an educator. Though I don't teach privately, I often tackle this issue with students in the New York Youth Symphony's Making Score program.

Young composers usually move too quickly between ideas; by this I don't mean that they use too much material, but rather that they use too many organizing principles. In my case, Louis was concerned that I recognize the musical building blocks already inherent in the musical material. So he kept encouraging me to reduce, reduce, reduce, until I was face to face with the most rudimentary gestures. He would ask, "ok, but what comes before that? and before that?" One might speculate that his "minimalist" aesthetic had something to do with this reductionist philosophy of teaching, but I think he was trying to promote a more general awareness; he was shining a light into the murkier levels of creative thinking, awakening my mind to formal structures and functionality on heretofore unexplored micro- and macro-levels.

Living in the so-called real world, we are often working on the most superficial layers of consciousness. Just addressing daily tasks and keeping the wheels of life turning uses up a great deal of energy. But as composers our calling is to access worlds hidden underneath the surface, worlds of philosophy, of theatre, of mathematics, of human instinct. Getting to the essence of a musical idea requires concentration, contemplation, and patience. Yet in the age of computers, giving full attention to musical detail can feel like dredging up a rusty relic from the past. It's so easy now to extend or shorten larges sections by cutting and pasting, to transpose with a click, to instantly move material from here to there, to add phat fonts and impressive graphics. Ironically, with the world at our fingertips, attention to the most crucial problems of form can be overlooked. In these moments of short shrift, it can be useful - even critical - to remember that technology is as dependent as anything else on the coherence of formal structures. Computers communicate through various layers of protocol; you may be working on the application/software level, the network level, or the transport level, but ultimately these layers work in tandem and are therefore dependent on each other. For a system to work as a whole, all layers must be built on consistent organizing principles; if the root level is strong, the top level will be correspondingly strong. The same applies for art.

Louis wanted me to be aware of what was happening in my music, even at levels where I was unaccustomed to poke around, and I feel grateful that he hammered these concepts home. I believe he was less interested that I reveal those levels to the listeners than he was determined that I should be able to recognize them myself. So along with the freedom to make our own aesthetic choices, we should shoulder the responsibility to analyze our own work - reducing it to the simplest elements and building it back up again. It is a powerful and empowering process, one which can help lend a work greater economy and coherence, while guiding us to become deeper and more resourceful artists.

Article in NewMusicBox

Here's my article posted this week, called "Making the I-Hop". I hope it's helpful!