There are two types of sound: music and noise - Cage on Composition
John Cage during his 1966 concert at the opening of the National Arts Foundation in Washington, D.C. Rowland Scherman/Getty Images
"Music is the actualisation of the possibility of any sound whatever to present to some human being a meaning which he experiences with his body—that is to say, with his mind, his feelings, his senses, his will, and his metabolism.” - Thomas Clifton, 1983
Defining terms is quite a challenge when there is no consensus over what music actually is. The implication from Clifton’s definition is that we have sound, then something happens, then we have music. Does it really matter? The clue is that there is no culture in the world except Western European, that has a word for ‘music’. There is no direct translation. John Cage would say that any sound and every sound can be music - if we want it to be. I like Luciano Berio's definition: “Music is everything that one listens to, with the intention of listening to music.” Distilling this further: there are two types of sound: noise and music. Music is sound we want, noise is sound we do not want. There are two types of music: your own, and everyone else’s.
I first heard these definitions at the beginning of my secondary education, and they made perfect sense. In fact, I do not recall anyone having to seek clarification. At the age of 11, I was empowered by my music teachers to explore sound as a creative and expressive force, a medium through which I could tell story, bring a drama to life, prepare sound to accompany a dance or just ‘do’ the sound. For me and my classmates, access to the creative sound world did not depend on us having technical prowess on a ‘musical instrument’. One of the lasting achievements of John Cage was giving permission to try anything with sound, whether you call yourself a composer, musician or just .. anyone. John Cage would, I think, not be displeased with this attempt to define music; then he would tell us to get on with it.
When Cage wrote ‘The Future of Music: Credo’ in 1937 he made some surprisingly accurate predictions. He was one step away from coining the term ‘synthesiser’. Cage certainly saw the potential of the ‘primitive’ electrical instruments to eventually make new sounds and timbres available to the composer. He advises not to pre-occupy imitating the real thing but to get on with trail-blazing into the sound world of the future. The first time the word ‘synthesiser’ was used to describe an instrument came with the release of the RCA Electronic Music Synthesiser Mark I in 1956, which used tuning forks and information punched onto a roll of paper tape to play music through a set of loudspeakers. It was called synthesiser or synth because it synthetically creates sound. Cage preferred the sonically new sound and criticised the preoccupation of using such devices to imitate traditional orchestral and band instruments. What Cage could not predict was that many styles, new and old, in the future, would coexist and not be subject to trends or fashion.
True, the synth was huge in 80’s Western Pop, and was seen then to be the future of popular music. But the piano, guitar and drum kit never went away. Indeed the ‘real’ is what live audiences want in the concert hall or cinema, perhaps blended with electronically produced soundscapes that give a scene depth and context. The scores of John Williams use the same musical language: orchestration, and notation, just as Gustav Malher did one hundred years before Jurassic Park.
If anyone was capable of predicting the future of music it would be John Cage: Composer, Philosopher, Writer, Theorist, Lecturer and Artist. Cage questioned the very basic terms of understanding what music is. A showman at heart, with a mischievous sense of humour who enjoyed provoking his audience into discourse. His ability to laugh at himself was a defence mechanism to cope with the audience reaction, which may be anything from interested fascination to outrage; ridicule or laughter. On the TV show I've Got A Secret Cage performed Water Walk in January 1960. The host announced that Cage was a lecturer in experimental sound. Cage corrected him and said ”experimental Music”, which brings us back to defining what music is.
Cage was determined to unpick the contemporary and traditional understanding of sound, noise and music. It was his thinking on Silence that had a profound influence on contemporary music. In 1952, Cage composed 4’33” for any instrument or combination of instruments; the score instructing the performer to not play during the entire duration of the three-movements. Silence is the music to hear the unintended. Cage’s ideas on the status of silence is that there is no such thing as absolute silence; silence incorporates the non-intentional sounds. He believed silence is all of the sounds we do not intend; that noise is all, or any sound, we do not intend.
Cage’s early compositions were written in the 12-tone system, pioneered by his teacher Arnold Schoenberg. Is this music less of value than that composed using traditional conventions? The music language of Mozart was also bound by a set of predetermined and accepted conventions in structure, form, harmonic progression, melodic shape and phrase - all couched within the stylistic features and what was considered good taste of the Classical tradition. The music stimulates mood, rouses emotion, engages the intellect and moves the spirit, taking the listener on a journey. This is abstract music but there is drama built in; a formula for a fight. Knowing the plot was no problem for the audience, and should be no problem for us, whether it is music or non-musical structural devices.
Cage experimented with structuring devices. Despite his intentions to break with the rigid past, he knew in order to communicate the plan of a piece of music (so the musicians would play the sounds in the ‘right’ place) he had to create a graphic plan or musical score.
“Sonata III” Graph explaining the structural proportions in Sonata III from John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes. Jashiin, Pinterest.
On first glance, the score has elements of standard notation but the performer will soon realise that this score needs working out as well as being read. Cage was choosing the best way possible to graphically represent his intentions. It is bespoke notation, in a form that most effectively represents the plan of the composition and organisation of the music.
Cage’s collaborations with contemporary artists, especially those working in New York from the 60s, gave him an insight to the trends and latest innovations. These collaborations helped Cage shape and distill his own thoughts on music, what Art is, and what it could be. Two important early collaborators were the dancer-choreographer Merce Cunningham, and the abstract expressionist-Neo-Dadaist painter Robert Rauschenberg. It was Rauschenberg’s White Paintings that gave Cage the motivation to complete his 4’33; the purpose of which was to reduce painting to its most essential nature, and to subsequently lead to the possibility of pure experience. Made in the tradition of monochromatic painting; these works were at first to be an essentially blank, white canvas. It was for Merce that Cage composed Dream (1948) - organised movement with organised sound as a piano accompaniment to dance. This music follows a rhythmic, choreographic structure, using a fixed gamut of tones.
In the late 1940s, Cage’s friend Gita Sarabhai assisted him in his learning about Indian music. This gave Cage an insight to Zen Buddhism which developed his thinking about abolishing ego. His most vibrant campaign was against self-expression, announcing that music should not carry any extraneous meaning and self-expression. These studies into Eastern Culture also gave rise to the idea of aleatoric or chance-controlled music, which he started composing in 1951. In aleatoric music, also called chance music, (aleatory from Latin alea, “dice”) chance or indeterminate elements are left for the performer to realise. It was also with Cunningham and Rauschenberg at Black Mountain College, where experiments with music composed through chance, started to take shape.
I-Ching Hexagrams. Wikipedia Commons, Pinterest.
Cage was a strong advocate for the freedom of the composer to create, but within his compositions he was disciplined; setting himself rules to follow explicitly. His greatest gift as a composer was realising how the chance would work. In 1951, his student Christian Wolff presented him with a copy of the I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of changes, which he used extensively for the rest of his career. I Ching divination involves determining which chapter to read next by using a hexagram chart and rolling a dice or tossing a coin. This practice struck Cage who began adjusting the final movement of his Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra (1950-51) to use the I Ching for determining the remaining music. The I Ching would free the music Cage was making from his memory, tastes, likes or dislikes.
Cage was an anarchist with Chance at the root of his philosophy. He was also a paradox - anything goes but you cannot do anything, there must be rules. His charming character disguised a discipline and rigour. He insisted on escaping ego, but then he takes centre stage; he was serious about the organisation of sound and with this he revolutionised how composers made music.
In 1993, Alistair Cooke gave a eulogy on the important people who had died that year, including John Cage. Cooke had attended the first performance of 4’33 and even though he understood that you are supposed to make up your own symphony from sounds in the concert hall and the sounds from outside, he could only add the epitaph: “I was baffled then, and I’m baffled now. Still, he is dead and the people who ought to know say he was one of the giants of modern music.”
You can listen to Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America here.
References
Thomas Clifton, “Music as Heard: A Study in Applied Phenomenology.” New Haven: Yale University Press (1983): 316. DOI: 10.2307/843378.
Nikki Rossi, “A talk with Luciano Berio. Italian composer turns musical pastiche into art.” csmonitor.com, accessed December 16, 2019, https://www.csmonitor.com/1987/1109/imusi11.html.
John Cage, “The Future of Music: Credo” in Richard Kostelanetz, “John Cage” An Anthology, New York (1968). This text was the single most influential of Cage’s, first delivered as a lecture in 1937 in Seattle, but not published until 1958 in the brochure accompanying George Avakian's recording of Cage's 25-Year Retrospective Concert.
“RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer”, wikipedia.org, accessed December 16, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA_Mark_II_Sound_Synthesizer
Dusin J. Green, ”The Synthesizer: Modernist and Technological Transformations in Film Sound and Contemporary Music" CMC Senior Theses (2013).
holotone, “John Cage - Water Walk.” May 4, 2007, video, 9:22, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSulycqZH-U.
Douglas Kahn, "John Cage: Silence and Silencing." The Musical Quarterly 81, no. 4 (1997): 556-98.
“John Cage: Beyond Silence”, Sunday Feature, BBC Radio 3, London, September 16, 2012.
Bernard Jacobson, “Sonata Form”, britannica.com, accessed December 16, 2019, https://www.britannica.com/art/sonata-form
“Twelve-Tone Theory - Basics”, openmusictheory.com, accessed December 2019, http://openmusictheory.com/twelveToneBasics.html
Stephen Davies, “John Cage’s 4’33”: Is it music?” Australasia Journal of Philosophy, Volume 75, 1997, Issue 4 (1996): 448-462.
“Monochrome painting”, wikipedia.org, accessed December 16, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monochrome_painting
“Dream”, johncage.org, accessed December 16, 2019, https://johncage.org/pp/John-Cage-Work-Detail.cfm?work_ID=54.
“John Cage”, Music Matters, BBC Radio 3, London, September 15, 2012.
“John Cage - Music of Changes”, classical20.com, accessed December 16, 2019, https://classical20.com/2014/11/27/john-cage-music-of-changes-1951/.
David Ryan, ”John Cage - Music of Changes” accessed December 16, 2019, http://knittedrecords.com/changes.
“John Cage Wilbur Mills and Oliver Franks”, Letter from America by Alistair Cooke, BBC Radio 4, January 1, 1993.
