John Cage and the Question of Genre
BY RICK MOODY
The first performance of “4’33””—John Cage’s silent piece—that I saw,in the late seventies (about the time that John Cage was himself making his “Quartets I-VIII,” which are lovely disassemblies of early American music, torn from their melodic bedrock and allowed to float and collide in ways that seem to approximate harmony even though harmony was as yet something to which Cage was resistant), was a provocation. A provocation within the little, conservative private school where I spent my high school years. Perhaps Will Schwalbe, the performer, who was, at that time, mostly noteworthy for his theatrical skills, knew that the Sex Pistols were, at the same moment, releasing “God Save the Queen” single in the United Kingdom, and thereby thumbing their noses at the monarchy. Or maybe he knew about Laurie Anderson’s provocations of the moment, like “Duckets on Ice,” or Vito Acconci’s text and sound pieces from the early and mid-seventies. Or maybe Will was commenting, with his performance of “4’33”,” on the stifling environment of the little private school, but likely there were other layers of commentary, too—on performance itself, e.g. Perhaps he was simply encouraging us to listen, which would have been novel in that environment. In our chapel, the masters lined the walls all the way around the space, and we occupied the seats below them, so that the masters could mark down who was late and who was absent (and these absentees would then be required to attend some detention), and so there was, during “4’33”,” the marking down, the scribbling of pens and pencils, and the whispering of teenage ADHD cases, and the occasional cough (which cough has to have been the most consistent instrumental timbre across all the myriad performances of “4’33””), and then gradually there was consternation among the kids, among those more habitual listeners to Little Feat, and Traffic, and the Grateful Dead. In fact, the sound of this consternation, the increase in stirring and categorical anxiety, was the unmistakable music of that music.
John Cage’s chance operations are useful not simply because they eliminate ego or self-expression and the burdens thereof from the work, which is a breath of fresh air in the midst of bourgeois individualism; Cage’s chance operations also describe the way the universe works, at least according to Cage. While his expressions of outsized fealty to the Zen model are confined to a particular period, his adherence to the I Ching and to later computer programs that might generate random sequences are a commitment to music of chance, and the way in which chance is at hand, in every way willing to demonstrate itself and its unperturbable ubiquity.
Cage’s interventions on behalf of chance indicate that this is how things are, that the legacy of bourgeois individualism is temporary, is so much vanity when compared to the brute force of the laws of time and space, which are much more like what Cage managed to bring to the surface. Cage teased out some fundamental forces, so omnipresent and so invisible, and in a way the legacy of chance began to operate on Cage himself, on what he did professionally and on how he was spoken about after the fact.
Published in Salmagundi 2013 No. 178-179, Pages 66-68