For John Cage, music was more than just notes. It encompassed everything, from cacophony to silence. He considered his sound experiments to be part of the Buddhist practice of transcending the ego, which is why he relied on pure chance while composing, often quite literally—by rolling dice.
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few,” claimed the Japanese Zen master Suzuki Shunryū (1904–1971), one of the first ambassadors of Buddhism in the West. The quote appears in the compilation of his talks, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Suzuki suggests that the beginner’s mind is open, spontaneous, ready to take in whatever is happening at a given moment. The expert, on the other hand, tends to sink into routines and react according to established patterns. The beginner’s mind says “I don’t know,” whereas the expert’s mind says “I know better,” which is why the former is limitless and the latter is limited. Like all Zen teachings, this basic lesson appears to be both utterly simple and very difficult. It isn’t about refusing to develop skills or knowledge—the challenge is to preserve an ebullient, unprejudiced attitude towards oneself and life while making progress at work, in studies, or in daily practices. One can be a virtuoso in a certain field while remaining a “beginner”; some may understand very little, yet speak like “experts” whose relationship to the world is blocked by an excess of opinions, beliefs, and preferences.
“I try over and over to begin all over again,” John Cage (1912–1992) used to say about himself. He was a composer, poet, performer, and choreographer; “a theoretician of society and the arts of the future,” as the publisher of the Polish book Przeludnienie i sztuka [Overpopulation and Art] described him. An experimenter who evoked both admiration and resentment. Cage didn’t like to judge, what he cared about was adventure—and his life, entirely devoted to art, was eventful indeed. He created hundreds of compositions throughout his career, from the 1930s onwards. While his early pieces adhered to European theories of harmony, the later ones defied them and were determined by chance events. He used every instrument possible—from a regular violin and “prepared” piano (in order to alter its sound, the composer placed bolts, paper, rubber bands, and bits of wood on or between the strings) to a tape recorder or the sounds of mechanical toys, pouring water, and chopping vegetables. He treated his work very seriously, but his approach didn’t exclude humor and play. On the contrary—humor and the lack of solemnity in the way he perceived art and, most importantly, himself as an artist, did not exclude making revolutionary, breakthrough discoveries that shocked avant-garde artistic circles in the final decades of the 20th century. “Perhaps no one living artist has such a great influence over such a diverse lot of important people,” wrote Richard Kostelanetz in The New York Times in 1967.
Silence Is Music
Imagine the following scene: twenty-four musicians appear on stage. Instead of instruments they are holding twelve radio sets. Each set is operated in pairs—one person changes the station while the other handles the volume. The desired parameters are determined by a detailed score, and the conductor watches over everything. The setting is the McMillin theater at Columbia University, it’s May 1951. First, a live baseball game broadcast can be heard on stage, then fragments of one of Mozart’s violin concerts, snippets of news programs, radio static, and other random noises. They merge, creating a multilayered soundscape with the word “Korea” frequently surfacing (the war on the peninsula is in full swing). From time to time one of the radios goes quiet. It’s the middle of the night and some New York radio stations have stopped broadcasting. But silence is also significant here, and besides, it’s inseparable from sound—it’s “pregnant with meaning.” Just like emptiness, it contains the potentiality of form. Part of the audience listens, part is annoyed, some leave the room.
Imaginary Landscape No. 4 is approximately four minutes long. Cage dedicated the work to Morton Feldman, his soulmate and the pioneer of aleatorism, a technique that relies on chance in the process of creation. “Work,” is perhaps a problematic way of referring to this peculiar piece. The word usually indicates the final product of a conscious act of creation that is controlled by an author (from the Latin auctor—originator, initiator), while the course of Cage’s performance is largely governed by chance. The structure of Landscape (e.g., the length of particular movements) evolved from a series of random events—dice rolls—defined by the rules set in an ancient Chinese divination text—the I Ching. The elements that filled this structure were in turn determined by what happened to be playing on the radio. Landscape does not exist as a finite piece; it’s impossible to perform it the same way twice. It’s a hybrid of discipline (imposed by the eccentric method chosen by the composer) and radical openness to anything life brings forth. Authorial intention is thus pushed aside, the instigator of the event is not interested in expressing anything; neither their own emotion nor any other psychological aspect of creation matters. As the composer put it himself, such moments allowed him to discover the possibilities of art that was free from the constraint of self-expression—art that “doesn’t say anything,” or rather, “says nothing,” an ambivalent expression.
Noticing Nothing
A year after composing Imaginary Landscape No. 4, Cage staged his most famous sound event. The piece 4’33”, four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, premiered in Woodstock, NY, at the end of August 1952. The main performer—pianist David Tudor—entered the stage, sat down at the piano, but didn’t touch the keys, because “silence” is solely made of pauses. In accordance with the composer’s instructions, the musician marked the three movements of the “work” by closing and opening the lid of the instrument. Afterwards he said that 4’33” allowed “the most intense listening experience”; the audience notices sounds that are usually ignored, like the wind blowing in the trees outside or raindrops tapping on the tin roof. Just like Imaginary Landscape No. 4 and many other compositions by Cage, this piece doesn’t say anything (meaning: it says nothing). The length of the three movements was once again determined by the I Ching. The meticulously designed structure of silence does not express anything, but becomes a kind of frame that allows listeners to experience with particular intensity the sounds that life itself happens to provide.
Form and Emptiness
This combination of precision and freedom, form and chaos, brings to mind the discipline that accompanies Zen Buddhism, sometimes described as freedom within limitations. The strict forms of practice adopted by Zen monks and secular adepts—meticulously following a daily schedule, collaborating with others, performing everyday activities with high focus, sitting cross-legged for long hours, singing mantras, and bowing repeatedly—allow them to liberate themselves from what Buddhists call the “small self,” that is, from the mind tormented by desires, preferences, prejudices, anger, and fear. From clinging to objects of desire or, conversely, from the habit of abruptly rejecting everything that seems burdensome. Freedom and discipline are not mutually exclusive, quite the opposite—they determine one another. It’s possible that a similar dependence can also be found in nature. As A.R. Ammons notices in his poem Identity, one spiderweb is enough to recognize the species that made it, and yet identical webs do not exist and have never existed. The spider remains faithful to its own “style,” but changes it in accordance with various external conditions; it remains itself, even while adapting its behavior to specific situations. Dainin Katagiri, the author of Each Moment Is the Universe: Zen and the Way of Being Time, writes: “Freedom from suffering is not found by looking at our lives from an egoistic point of view; it is found by seeing our lives from the point of view of moment.” Freedom lies in recognizing the inseparability of this moment from emptiness (i.e., from nothing). Then, following Katagiri, “interdependent co-origination comes into existence as the contents of emptiness, and a new moment arises.” To quote the Heart Sutra, a text recited daily in Zen centers around the world: “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” Emptiness is also one of the ways of referring to the web of co-dependencies between all phenomena, processes, and entities. This inseparability is exactly what Cage’s experiment embodies.
The composer became interested in Eastern thought after reading The Transformation of Nature in Art, an essay by Sri Lankan Tamil philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy, who claimed that “art is the imitation of nature in her manner of operation.” In Cage’s approach, however, nature has nothing to do with the idealized bucolic domain to which some, exhausted by consumerist lifestyles, would like to “return.” Nature is plants, animals, mushrooms (a lifelong passion of Cage), but also stones, chemical elements, gravity, constellations—in short, the whole material world, which constantly evolves. The only immutable feature of nature is its mutability. When Suzuki was once asked to define Zen, he simply said: “Everything changes.”
Cage discovered Buddhism for himself around the year 1950 thanks to another teacher, whose surname also happened to be Suzuki. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki (1870–1966) was a somewhat controversial figure (he never became a Zen master, and was later accused of supporting Japanese nationalism), but a teacher doesn’t have to be flawless—all that counts is what the student manages to get out of the relationship. D.T. Suzuki’s approach was philosophical: he studied Buddhist thought and wrote about it extensively. When Cage read that “Zen in its essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one’s own being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom,” it became clear to him that he had found his own path. For some time he attended Suzuki’s lectures at Columbia’s Department of Philosophy. From then on he gradually filled his notebooks with Buddhist koans and parables known to Zen adepts all over the world.
Cage never entered a formal Zen training path, nor did he become a monk and spend hours sitting on a pillow. Instead, he treated his art as a kind of practice. Through carefully designed forms he sought freedom from the self in order to experience the unimpeded flow of life and open his “beginner’s” work to the world that extends beyond the “small self.” In reality everything connects to everything else—as in the net of the god Indra mentioned in the Flower Garland Sutra. Indra’s net extends infinitely in all directions; each eye of the net contains a glistening jewel. Each jewel reflects the rest of the jewels and is in turn reflected in them. This never ending process of mutual reflection is a visual metaphor for the process of interdependent origination.
Cage’s creation (poiesis) was based on unraveling nature’s processes—aimlessly, at any given moment, without expecting acclaim. In Lecture on Nothing, published in the volume Silence (1961), the author described his approach in the following words: “I have nothing to say / and I am saying it / and that is poetry / as I need it.” Poetry is form, a momentary quiver of meaning, a movement of the lips; it’s a way of experiencing time, since it reveals its passing to the human senses. Cage wrote his texts the same way he created sound compositions: he made use of chance operations, implemented mantric repetitions or formal constraints. One of his favorite forms was the mesostic, a text in which the middle letters of every line together create a word or sentence. According to Peter Jaeger, the mesostic is the middle way between intention and its absence. The piece 45’ for a Speaker, also included in Silence, contained instructions for the performer (“hiss,” “knock on the table,” “cough”), timing marks, and typographical indications of loudness. It is a lecture—perhaps a long poem—as well as something of a score. Some fragments may simply be read as a metacommentary on Cage’s output:
Our poetry now
is the realization
that we possess nothing.
Anything therefore
is a delight
(since we do not possess it)
and thus need
not fear.
Cage’s life fully manifested itself in his style—in the art he created—which is why the conventional details of his biography have been saved for last. He was born on September 5, 1912, in Los Angeles, California. His father was an inventor who designed a new type of submarine that could stay underwater for exceptionally long periods (it was reportedly the first submarine in which cigarettes could be smoked); Cage’s mother was a journalist. John started taking piano lessons during childhood; as a teen he believed he would become a writer, but when the time came to apply for college, he chose theology. Soon enough he abandoned formal education and set out on a trip around Europe. He visited Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, among others—learning everything he could about music and literature on the way. In 1935 he married Xenia Andreyevna, the Alaska-born daughter of an Orthodox priest, but their marriage didn’t last. They divorced in 1945. In the 40s—his crisis years—he discovered Eastern philosophies, grew disappointed with music as a form of communication, and established new friendships, for instance with the dancer Merce Cunningham. He was the one who introduced Cage to contemporary dance. Soon the two artists started collaborating; their artistic and personal relationship would last until Cage’s death. The Seasons (1947) is one of their first co-authored compositions, as well as one of the most communicative musical pieces by the composer.
In Cage’s later life, his art—always experimental and consistent in “beginning all over again”—became openly engaged. The writings of postmodernism theorist Marshall McLuhan inspired Cage’s interest in the influence of technology on society. The multimedia masterpiece HPSCHD (1969), created in collaboration with the composer Lejaren Hiller, includes superimposed solo pieces for seven harpsichords, randomly playing select fragments of pieces by Cage, Hiller, and various popular classics. They are accompanied by computer-generated sounds as well as images, including a photograph provided by NASA, simultaneously displayed on sixty-four projectors. A full list of Cage’s experiments—from any period of his career—would have been longer than this article. By giving only single examples the first principle that governed his works is emphasized: always start from scratch (and listen more than you talk).
In the 80s Cage’s health gradually declined, but he kept on working—and constantly tried to find new directions for his art (he discovered opera, and composed the five-part work Europeras). He died of a stroke on August 12, 1992. In accordance with his wishes, his body was cremated and his ashes were scattered in the Ramapo mountains in the state of New York.
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