John Cage 100

The year 2012 celebrated the Centennial of John Cage’s birth, and I am impelled to write a few words of tribute.

There are still many, I surmise, who still don’t understand John Cage’s music, or choose not to understand it, rejecting it that he was merely out to scandalize the audience -- épater les bourgeois as the phrase goes -- and nothing else.  True, the audience was in uproar to ‘hear’ the silent music, 4’33”, his 1952 cause célèbre now 60 years old.  True, it was radical; certainly, it was totally unconventional. But the audience’s shock in response to the work only means that that its author created a work that happened to disgust the audience, not that she or he created it to stir up the crowd to anger.  It is naive to transfer the reaction incited by the work to the maker and make her or him an iconoclast. 

Stravinsky’s and shocked his audience a few decades earlier; a century later it is still shockingly fresh to the ear today but it no longer sounds cacophonous to most. 

Tchaikovsky’s contemporaries reported that his works were unmusical, as in this comment on his First Piano Concerto:
    Tchaikovsky appears to be a victim of the epidemic of the Music of the Future, that in its hydrophobia, scorns logic, wallows in torpor, and time and again, collapses in dissonant convulsions.  [Wiener Fremdenblat, November 28, 1876; from Nicolas Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective, University of Washington Press, 1969, pp. 205-6]
 
An English critic reviewing Chopin’s recital in London wrote:
    The entire works of Chopin present a motley surface of ranting hyperbole and excruciating cacophony. [Musical World, London, October 28, 1841; from Slonimsky, ibid., p. 84]

It is now established that Cage’s principal innovation is indeterminacy in composition and performance, which led him to the law of chance on the one hand and the exploration of the unbounded resources of auditory stimulation, on the other, beyond the conventionally musical sounds.  These two factors made his music no doubt difficult to listen to comfortably but, to those intrigued by it and willing to listen, terribly exhilarating, like any significant avant-garde work, such as those of Marcel Duchamp and James Joyce (especially of Finnegan’s Wake), whom he adored, and of Merce Cunningham, whom he loved and collaborated with; and on both accounts they were widely influential on the younger musicians, composers and performers alike, of the last half century. 

To me, Cage’s greatest gift was his keen awareness of the potential beauty in all kinds of sounds, natural and artificial, pleasant and unpleasant, loud and soft, especially in our urban environment, which enrich our life if we learn to pay close attention to them.