Abstract
In John Cage’s career as a composer, spanning nearly six decades, the years 1951 and 1952 provide for many purposes a convenient line of distinction. From the earlier year came the Concerto for Prepared Piano and the Music of Changes, Cage’s first compositions to make extensive use of chance operations, followed the next by 4′33″ — the “silent” piece. While it is certainly true that his subsequent works and methods compel their own attention, indeed presuming new analytic tools, it is not unreasonable to regard these compositions as epochal, defining the aesthetic and philosophical positions which made Cage the most broadly influential artist of the second half of the century.
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Notes
The title of this essay is taken from John Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing” (1959): “This space of time is organized. We need not fear these silences — we may love them.” In John Cage, Silence (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), pp. 109-10.
A. Zvie Bar-On, “ A Problem in the Phenomenology of Action: Are There Unintentional Actions?,” Analecta Husserliana XXXV (1991), p. 378.
Such an inquiry would begin by reading Bar-On in parallel with Tom Johnson’s “Intentionality and Nonintentionality in the Performance of Music by John Cage,” in John Cage at Seventy-Five, eds. Richard Fleming & William Duckworth (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1987), pp. 262-69.
John Cage, Silence, p. 63. See Christopher Shultis, “Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the Intentionality of Nonintention,” Musical Quarterly 79:2 (Summer, 1995), pp. 312–350, for the most complete discussion presently available of the relation of silence and intention in Cage’s work.
John Cage, Silence, p. 53.
John Cage, Silence, p. 23.
John Cage, Silence, p. 27.
Robert Snarrenberg, “Hearings of Webern’s Bewegt,” Perspectives of New Music 24:2 (Spring/Summer, 1986), p. 389.
See Don Ihde’s discussion of the problems attendant upon phenomenology’s “radical description” in Listening and Voice (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), pp. 104-5. Snarrenberg, interestingly, cites this text but seems to have ignored its caution.
Robert Snarrenberg, “Hearings of Webern’s Bewegt,” p. 390.
Robert Snarrenberg, “Hearings of Webern’s Bewegt” p. 390. Snarrenberg allows, correctly, that common performance practice admits a ready, if trivial, solution to the question by recourse to visible downbeats or releases. That pianist David Tudor reversed this convention for the premiere of 4 ′33 “ — closing the keyboard cover for each of the three movements — is most suggestive, deftly repudiating a regard of the work as merely a neo-Dadaist gesture and, in the specific context of this analysis, brilliantly demonstrating the phenomenological subtlety of the issues raised.
Cornelius Van Peursen, “The Horizon,” in Husserl: Expositions & Appraisals, eds. Frederick Ellison & Peter McCormick (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), p. 193.
Cornelius Van Peursen, “The Horizon,” p. 191.
Maria Bielawka, “Does Man Co-Create Time?,” Analecta Husserliana XXXVII (1991), p. 59.
There are numerous restatements of this exposition, but the most useful is John Brough’s “The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness,” in Husserl: Shorter Works (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), pp. 272-73.
One could take here virtually any composition from the Western tradition from the Renaissance through, say, Wagner’s Tristan. Yet the example of Bach seems particularly clear for its suggestion of a musical teleology; the structure of the Canon a 2 per Tonos, the “endlessly” modulating canon, makes a vivid contrast with Brown’s pointillism.
Jonathan Kramer, “New Temporalities in Music,” Critical Inquiry 7:3 (Spring, 1981), pp. 539–41. Kramer later expanded this model with the book-length The Time of Music.
Jonathan Kramer, “New Temporalities in Music,” p. 549.
Maria Bielawka, “Does Man Co-Create Time?,” p. 59. See also her “The Majesty of Time in Roman Ingarden’s Philosophy,” Analecta Husserliana XXXVII (1991), especially her conclusion that “the true ego… is not created in ever-new contemporariness, but… exists beyond time” (p. 115). These remarks should not be read as necessarily supporting that conclusion, as they suggest, if anything, an undermining of the assertion of a “true ego,” but her treatment of the question remains compelling.
David Revill, The Roaring Silence (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992), pp. 85–87.
Mercé Cunningham, The Dancer and the Dance (New York: Marion Boyars, 1985), p. 204.
John Cage, “A Composer’s Confessions,” in John Cage: Writer, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight Editions, 1993), p. 40.
Margaret Leng Tan, notes to her recording of the work for New Albion Records (San Francisco: New Albion NA037CD, 1991), n.p. David Revill, The Roaring Silence, p. 86. Subsequent remarks by Revill on Four Walls are taken from this discussion, pp. 85-88.
Thomas Hines, “Then Not Yet’ Cage’: The Los Angeles Years, 1912-1938,” in John Cage: Composed in America, eds. Marjorie Perloff & Charles Junkerman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 81.
Thomas Hines, “Then Not Yet’ Cage’: The Los Angeles Years, 1912-1938,” p. 93.
Thomas Hines, “Then Not Yet’ Cage’: The Los Angeles Years, 1912-1938,” p. 95.
Eric Salzman, notes to the recording of Four Walls by Joshua Pierce & Jay Clayton for Tomato Records (New York: Tomato 69559, 1989), n.p. Mark S wed, notes to the recording of Imaginary Landscape by Anthony De Marc for Koch International Classics (Westbury: Koch 37104,1992) n.p.
Wim Mertens, American Minimal Music, translated by J. Hautekiet (New York: Alexander Broude, Inc., 1983), p. 88.
Margaret Leng Tan, notes to her recording of the work for New Albion Records (San Francisco: NA070CD, 1994), n.p.
James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 55.
Pierre Boulez & John Cage, The Boulez-Cage Correspondence, éd. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, trans. Robert Samuels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 55.
James Pritchett, “Understanding John Cage’s Chance Music: An Analytic Approach,” in John Cage at Seventy-Five, eds. Richard Fleming & William Ducksworth (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1987), p. 251. The opening remarks of his recent The Music of John Cage treats the regard of Cage as philosopher harshly, but this should be read not as a rejection of the philosophical challenges of Cage’s work but instead as emblematic of Prichett’s desire for a musicological recuperation of Cage, a direct assault upon the critical apparatus which has for too long regarded Cage as merely a philosopher.
Andrzej Pytlak, “On Ingarden’s Conception of the Musical Composition,” in On the Aesthetics of Roman Ingarden, eds. B. Dziemidok & P. McCormick (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), pp. 241–42.
Peter Simons, “Computer Composition and Works of Music: Variations on a Theme of Ingarden,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 19:2 (May, 1988), pp. 143–147.
The essential texts here are Umberto Eco’s Opera Aperta (1962), published in English as The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) and Leonard Meyer’s Music, the Arts and Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). Herman Sabbe’s “Open Structure and the Problem of Criticism,” Perspectives of New Music 27:1 (Winter, 1989), pp. 312-16, is a useful summary of these positions. Yushiro Takei’s “The Aesthetics of Process and Human Life,” Analecta Husserliana XLVII (1995), pp. 165-82, opens the discussion to a broader range of phenomenological concerns, in part those of time-consciousness.
“The text is not to be thought of as an object that can be computed … the text is a methodological field.” Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), pp. 156-7.
Gregory Tropea, “I Ching Divination and the Absolutely Poetic Reconstruction of Intentionality,” Analecta Husserliana XLVII (1995), p. 207.
In John Cage: Writer, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight Editions, 1993), pp. 267–81.
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Davis, R. (2000). “ We Need Not Fear ” Expressivity and Silence in the Early Work of John Cage. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Aesthetic Discourse of the Arts. Analecta Husserliana, vol 61. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4263-2_14
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