0.10 Appendix 1: musician biographies  (Page 9/37)

Cage regarded all sounds, including noise, as legitimate materials for his compositions, so in addition to “normal” musical sounds he employed such untraditional sources as automobile brake drums, thunder sheets, and radios. While studying with Schoenberg, Cage worked in a book bindery and after hours started a percussion orchestra with his coworkers. Cage invented his own instruments for the group drawing on the waste materials found in and around the shop (scrap wood, metal objects, etc.). Years later, in Seattle, Cage was asked to compose percussion music for a dance, but only had a grand piano available to him. Remembering some of the piano pieces by Henry Cowell, Cage experimented with putting small objects between and around different strings of the piano, transforming its timbre so that it sounded like a percussion ensemble. This became one of Cage’s best-known inventions, the prepared piano. Silence can be as important as sound in a work of Cage. A prime example, inspired by the white paintings of Robert Rauschenberg, was Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds, composed in 1952 and premiered that same year on August 29th in Woodstock, New York by the pianist David Tudor. In this performance Tudor came on stage, sat down at the piano, started a stopwatch, and closed the lid on the piano keyboard to begin the piece. He followed a musical score with a vertical line drawn on it showing the precise duration for each soundless event, turning the pages as time passed. After thirty-three seconds Tudor opened the keyboard lid and reset the stopwatch ending the first movement. For the second movement Tudor followed the same procedure of stopwatch and keyboard lid, ending after two minutes, forty seconds, and likewise for the third movement, which lasted one minute, twenty seconds.

Cage was, in effect, asking the audience to experience whatever aural events occurred during that period of time as being part of his composition, whether ambient sounds or silence. (In fact, one realizes very quickly that Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds is anything but silent.) Cage’s goal was to let sounds exist purely for their own sake within the time structure that he had established. In his words, the composer should “set about discovering means to let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expressions of human sentiments.” The Woodstock audience, a group of fellow artists and musicians normally sympathetic to the avant-garde, was perplexed by this piece and the first performance ended in a riot.

Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds was the culmination of a search that began for Cage at the end of World War II when he saw what extreme human intention led to in Nazi Germany. He was “concerned about why one would write music at this time in this society?” It eventually became clear to him “that the function of art is not to communicate one’s personal ideas or feelings, but rather to imitate nature in her manner of operation.” Cage found in the I Ching (the Chinese Book of Changes), with its random procedure for obtaining an oracle numbered from one to sixty-four, an objective model of how nature operates. After 1950 Cage began to use the I Ching to determine the pitches, durations, and other essential aspects of his music; initially by using the coin oracle (tossing three copper coins six times) and later by programming a computer to generate a virtual coin oracle. The result was “chance music,” in which significant aspects of composition and/or performance are governed through chance procedures, like the I Ching, in order to free the music from ego, memory, and taste. With Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds, Cage used the I Ching to compose the piece “note by note,” it just turned out that each note, according to the I Ching, was silent. His composition Radio Music is performed by tuning to chance (I Ching) determined stations on eight radios, producing a mixture of talk, music, and silence, depending on whatever is on the air at the moment.