Christopher Shultis Silencing the Sounded Self

7/29/2019 Christopher Shultis Silencing the Sounded Self

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Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the Intentionality of Nonintention

Christopher Shultis

The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 2. (Summer, 1995), pp. 312-350.

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Silencing the Sounded S e l f : JohnCageand the Intentionality of NonintentionChristopher Shultis

"What we require is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking."-John Cage, "Lecture on Nothing"

This essay will address John Cage's inclusive desire to allow room forsilence in both his musical compositions and his written texts. Cagehimself noted that "silence" had been a lifelong concern:

I've lately been thinking again about Silence, which is the title of myfirst book of my own writings. When I was twelve years old I wrote thatoration that won a high school oratorical contest in Southern Califor-nia. I t was called "Other People Think," and it was about our relationto the Latin American countries. What I proposed was silence on thepart of the United States, in order that we could hear what other peo-ple think, and that they don't think the way we do, particularly aboutus. But could you say then that, as a twelve year old, that I was pre-pared to devote my life to silence, and to chance operations? It's hardto say.

Proving a lifelong devotion to chance operations, Cage's method ofachieving silence, would be difficult to accomplish. However, Cage'sentire body of work has, from the very beginning, been devoted to theinclusion of silence in an otherwise sound-filled world.

One of the first ways in which Cage allowed silence into musicwas by emphasizing duration instead of harmony. In the 1930s Cagestudied with Arnold Schoenberg, who immigrated to Los Angeles justprior to World War 11. Regarding his studies, Cage wrote: "After Ihad been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said: 'In orderto write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.' I explained tohim that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I wouldalways encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to awall through which I could not pass. I said: 'In that case I will devotemy life to beating my head against that wall.' "2

Cage found two allies in his battle with harmony: the Frenchcomposer Erik Satie and Anton Webem, a former student of Schoen-


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berg. In a lecture given at Black Mou ntai n College in 1948, Cagewrote:

In the field of structure, the field of the definition of parts and theirrelation to a whole, there has been only one new idea since Beethoven.And that new idea can be perceived in the work of Anton Webern andErik Satie. With Beethoven, the parts of a composition were defined bymeans of harmony. W ith Satie and W ebern they are defined by meansof time lengths. The question of structure is so basic, and it is soimportant to be in agreement about it, that one must now ask: WasBeethoven right or are Webern and Satie right? I answer immediatelyand unequivocally, Beethoven was in error, and his influence, whichhas been as extensive as it is lamentable, has been deadening to the artof music.3

For Cag e, duration became a m eans of gett ing around t he diff iculty of"having n o feeling for harmony." A n d by c i t ing Webe rn , Cage wasable t o use Schoenberg 's most famous pupil as a n example of howharm ony was a n erroneous m etho d of s tructuring music.

I t was si lence that pointed Cage away from a harmony andtoward duration. According to Cage, harmony as a s tructuring methoddoes no t include si lence:

If you consider that sound is characterized by its pitch, its loudness, itstimbre, and its duration, and that silence, which is the opposite and,therefore, the necessary partner of sound, is characterized only by itsduration, you will be drawn to the conclusion that of the four charac-teristics of the material of music, duration, that is , time length, is themost fundamental. Silence cannot be heard in terms of pitch or har-mony: It is heard in terms of time length.4A t this point, one could very well question Cage's logic. Does

it follow that since duration, by nature, includes silence, whileharmony, in and of itself , does not, duration is the only possibleapproac h to structuring music? Obviously not . How ever, i t does shedl ight o n Cage 's motivat ion b ehind bel iev ing th at such was t he case .Ha rm ony requires th e imposit ion of unity u pon m usical mater ial . I tis a humanly contr ived method of writ ing music which cannot bedirectly found in nature. C-m ajor chords may be naturally derived, b uttheir structural relationships, as found in so-called tonal music, obey acarefully a nd hum anly constructed system of rules. Cag e, o n the oth erha nd , was looking for justification outside of any musical trad ition . H ewas a t tempting t o uncover a s t ructural connec t ion between t he m ak-ing of music a nd t he natural world. I t had l i t tle to d o with how music


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is conceived; it was instead an attempt to uncover how music is per-ceived. In other words, Cage was paying more attention to how weactually hear music than he was to how we think about music.

When we consider how music is heard, unrelated to how it ismade (if that is possible), then, indeed, duration is more fundamentalthan harmony. We hear sound and silence, and we can do so directlywith neither thought nor preconception. To hear harmony, as a pre-conceived structure of relationships between tones, requires a processthat includes a knowledge of certain musical procedures and traditionsthat have as much to do with thinking as they do with hearing.

In 1948, when he wrote his "Defense of Satie," Cage still sawcomposition as a unifier of experience, "an activity integrating theopposites, the rational and the irrati~nal."~nd, in another text,Cage extends such abstractions into concrete musical terms: "Thematerial of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is compos-ing."6 However, by looking toward natural rather than humandesigns, he was already on a path away from such ordered procedures:"there is a tendency in my composition means away from ideas oforder toward no ideas of ~ r d e r . " ~n 1958 Cage delivered a lecture atDarmstadt entitled "Composition as Process," from which the previoustwo citations are drawn. The first part of this lecture discusses changesin his approach to composition. These changes describe a processaway from "ideas of order," not away from order itself. The questioncontinually raised in Cage's work is the question of whose order willdetermine the course of the art experience. And the issue of durationis a first step away from human derivation and human control.

From the 1930s onward, Cage used what is known as square rootform, one of his first attempts at structuring music by duration ratherthan by pitch. Macrostructure and microstructure coincide, so that ifthere are four measures per unit there will be four units; and if theinternal phrasing of the bars is 1-2-1, the external division of parts(within the large structure of four units) will also be 1-2-1. Forexample, in his First Construction in Metal, there are sixteen measuresin each structural unit. To make the square root, there are, conse-quently, sixteen units. The large structure is divided symmetrically asfollows: four, three, two, three, four, thus totaling sixteen, and eachindividual unit is similarly divided. This method, used in most ofCage's music during the 1930s and 1940s, eventually produces a for-mal structure independent of its content. Content, in this period, wasstill primarily a matter of taste, as can be seen, for example, in Cage'sselection of piano preparations for his Sonatas and Interludes: "Thematerials, the piano preparations, were chosen as one chooses shells


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Silencing the Sounded Self 3 15

while walking along a beach. The form was as natural as my tastepermitted." O n the other hand, regarding the form of the sonatas,Cage wrote: "[Nlothing about the structure was determined by thematerials which were to occur in it; it was conceived, in fact, so thatit could be as well expressed by the absence of these materials as bytheir presence. "8

Interchangeability of content in a fixed structure is equally appar-ent in his "Lecture on Nothing" (1950), written soon after he wroteSonatas and Interludes (1946-48). This lecture is the first publishedinstance in which Cage took structural ideas from music and usedthem in the creation of texts. And it is this approach that character-izes a continuing relationship between Cage's music and his textsthrough the mid-1970s (at which point this study ends): "In writingmy 'literary' texts, I essentially make use of the same composing meansas in my mu~ic."~

The "Lecture on Nothing" uses square root form and is describedas such by Cage, in a way characteristic of many of his later texts,through an introduction to the published lecture: "There are fourmeasures in each line and twelve lines in each unit of the rhythmicstructure. There are forty-eight such units, each having forty-eightmeasures. The whole is divided into five large parts, in the proportion7 , 6, 14, 14, 7. The forty-eight measures of each unit are likewise sodivided."1 We are thus informed of exactly how Cage made thestructure. In this case, an integrating of rational and irrational wouldsee structure (form) as rational and content as irrational, or whatCage at that time regarded as the integration of mind and heart. l1

As a formal invention, Cage's use of square root form does sug-gest the direction of music first, text second. However, in keepingwith my thesis that music and text interact one with another, Cage's"Lecture on Nothing" contains certain important ideas not previouslydiscernible in his musical work. First and foremost is the distinctionbetween "having nothing to say and saying it"12 and the "integrationof opposites." What still applies as a formal idea no longer holds ascontent. Cage's writing is nonintentional, whereas integration, stillpresent in the relation between form and content, demands a veryspecific intention. Thus, while Cage's innovations regarding composi-tional form move from music to text, certain innovative ideas movefrom text to music.

The most important of those ideas is the coexistent nature ofsound and silence, of something and nothing: "I have nothing to sayand I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it."13 This remark, alsocited above, is from the beginning of Cage's "Lecture on Nothing." Its


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origin in Cage's aesthetic is twofold. First, Cage's attempts at art ascommunication were, according to him, miserable failures. A preparedpiano piece entitled The Perilous Night (1943-44) is a famous exam-ple. Based on "an Irish folktale he remembered from a volume ofmyths collected by Joseph Campbell," The Perilous Night concerns "aperilous bed which rested on a floor of polished jasper. The music tellsthe story of the dangers of the erotic life."14 After a critic wrote thatthe last movement sounded like "a woodpecker in a church belfry,"Cage responded: "I had poured a great deal of emotion into the piece,and obviously I wasn't communicating this at all. Or else, I thought,if I were communicating, then all artists must be speaking a differentlanguage, and thus speaking only for themselves."15 Cage decided,from that point on, that he would no longer compose music until hefound a reason other than communication for writing it.

Second, "having nothing to say" was the reason that allowedCage to continue composing. It was through Gita Sarabhai, an Indianmusician who was studying Western music with Cage, that he learned"the traditional reason for making a piece of music in India: 'to quietthe mind thus making it susceptible to divine influences.' " Accordingto Cage, this led music away from self-expression and toward self-alteration through the influence of our natural environment: "Welearned from Oriental thought that those divine influences are, infact, the environment in which we are. A sober and quiet mind is onein which the ego does not obstruct the fluency of the things whichcome in through our senses and up through our dreams."16

"Having nothing to say" allows that environment the opportu-nity to speak. In Cage's work, partially as a result of his studies ofEastern religion and philosophy beginning in the 1940s, it is a processof diminishing the role of the self in the creative act. He was espe-cially influenced in this regard by reading Aldous Huxley's anthologyThe Perennial Philosophy. l 7 This book describes a shared religiousmysticism found in both East and West:

The divine Ground of all existence is a spiritual Absolute, ineffable interms of discursive tho ug ht, b ut (i n cer tain circumstances) susceptibleof being directly experienced and realized by the human being. ThisAbsolute is the God-without-form of Hindu and Christian mysticalphraseology. The last end of man, the ultimate reason for human exist-enc e, is unitive knowledge of the divine Gr oun d-the knowledge tha tcan come only to those who are prepared to "die to self" and so makeroom as it were. for God. l8Cage, more often than not, tried to emphasize the removal of

separations between West and East. Consequently, it was of great


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significance when, after learning the Indian reason for making music,Lou Harrison discovered while "reading in an old English text, I thinkas old as the sixteenth century . . . he found this reason given forwriting a piece of music: 'to quiet the mind thus making it susceptibleto divine influences.' " I 9 This approach to composition was no longercultural; it was universal in the original sense of the Found inall cultures, such quietude was a reaching out into the world aroundus, a removal of the separation between self and world-a nondualview of reality.

Thus, although Cage's "Lecture on Nothing" is compositionallydual, in that form and content still combine rational and irrational,the written content is nondual in nature: "I have nothing to say and 1am saying it." "What silence requires is that I go on talking." Suchstatements are obviously paradoxical and thus obviously influenced byCage's study of Zen. In his introduction to The Zen Teaching of HuangPo, the translator, John Blofeld, writes: "At first sight Zen works mustseem so paradoxical as to bewilder the reader. O n one page we aretold that everything is indivisibly one Mind, on another that themoon is very much a moon and a tree indubitably a tree."21 Andwhile silence as a phenomenon outside the self had entered into sev-eral of Cage's musical compositions, both in the 1930s and 1940s, his"Lecture on Nothing" is the first ins~ance n which silence is producedthrough such paradox: within the self via what Cage considered hismost important legacy, "having shown the practicality of makingworks of art n~ ni nt en ti on al l~ .22

Nonintention had become, for Cage, a new, nondualistic realiza-tion of what silence really was. He used the example of his visit to ananechoic chamber which was supposed to produce a silent environ-ment: "I entered one at Harvard University several years ago andheard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them tothe engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was mynervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation.Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following mydeath. One need not fear about the future of music."23 His visit hadproved to him that, in the dualistic sense of sound versus silence,there "was no silence." There were only intended and unintendedsounds.

Cage's first recorded instance of unintended sound was textual:"I have nothing to say and am saying it." Having nothing to say andsaying it goes an important step further than just having nothing tosay. It implies what Cage makes specific in his "Lecture on Some-thing" (1950): "This is a talk about something and naturally also atalk about nothing. About how something and nothing are not


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opposed to each other but need each other to keep on goingn2"Andwhile formally Cage does not make nonintentional texts until longafter having accomplished this in musical compositions, he does man-age to address the idea of nonintentional content in a text before heis able to do so in music.

It is through chance operations that Cage begins making unin-tentional music. For Cage, it was an extremely unorthodox way ofZen practice:

Blather than taking the path that is prescribed in the formal practiceof Zen Buddhism itself, namely, sitting cross-legged and breathing andsuch things, I decided that my proper discipline was the one to which Iwas already committed, namely, the making of music. And that Iwould do it with a means that was as strict as sitting cross-legged,namely, the use of chance operations, and the shifting of my responsi-bility from the making of choices to that of asking questions.25

While those conversant with Zen might not view Cage's practice asBuddhism, it did serve as a very effective method of composing.Beginning around 1950, Cage used the 1 Ching (Book of Changes)as a source of response to his compositional questions.26 In his fore-word to the Richard Wilhelm translation, C. G. Jung writes:

The axioms of causality are being shaken to their foundations: we knownow that what we term natural laws are merely statistical truths andthus must necessarily allow for exceptions. We have not sufficientlytaken into account as yet that we need the laboratory with its incisiverestrictions in order to demonstrate the invariable validity of naturallaw. If we leave things to nature, we see a very different picture: everyprocess is partially or totally interfered with by chance, so much so thatunder natural circumstances a course of events absolutely conforming tospecific laws is almost an exception. The Chinese mind, as I see it atwork in the 1 Ching, seems to be exclusively preoccupied with thechance aspect of things.27

And while Jung used the I Ching as a means of discovering the uncon-scious mind within, Cage saw it as a way of getting outside the mindaltogether, a way of allowing nature, the environment, or what Zenwould call Mind with a capital M, to respond to his compositionalquestions.

As Cage frequently mentioned, the idea of a "silent piece" wasconceived earlier than 1952, when 4'33" received its premiere. Itwas first publicly mentioned in an address entitled "A Composer's


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Confessions," given on 28 February 1948 before the National Inter-collegiate Arts Conference at Vassar College:

I have, for instance, several new desires (two may seem absurd but I amserious about them): first, to compose a piece of uninterrupted silenceand sell it to the Muzak Co. I t will be 3 or 3f minutes long; thesebeing the standard lengths of "canned" music and its title will be SikntPrayer. It will open with a single idea which I will attempt to make asseductive as the color and shape and fragrance of a flower. The endingwill approach imper~eptibilit~.8

This "single idea" became a process of making music that Cagelearned from Ananda Coomeraswamy: "I have for many yearsaccepted, and I still do, the doctrine about Art, occidental and orien-tal, set forth by Ananda K. Coomeraswamy in his book The Transfor-mation of Nature in Art, that the function of art is to imitate Nature inher manner of ~peration."~~age used the I Ching as a way of "imi-tating nature in her manner of operation," and by constructing his4'33" through chance operations, he did indeed find a method ofmaking a process parallel to the seductiveness of "the color and shapeand fragrance of a flower." It was Cage's use of chance operations thatmade possible a formal design to place the silence in. And when onelistens to the silence of 4'33", one hears nature.

However, following nature in her manner of operation proved tobe problematic for Cage. He realized that even though 4'33" wasmade solely of nonintended sounds, he was still providing the frame.Even if, as in the case of 4/33", the length of that frame was chosennonintentionally through chance operations, Cage was still making afixed object.

This eventually ran counter to Cage's notion that things"become" in processes rather than as fixed objects: "You say: the real,the world as it is. But it is no t, it becomes! It moves, it changes! Itdoesn't wait for us to change. . . . It is more mobile than you canimagine. You are getting closer to this reality when you say as it 'pre-sents itself'; that means that it is not there, existing as an object. Theworld, the real is not an object. It is a process."304'33" also insufficiently addresses Cage's professed nondualism,where "something and nothing" are unopposed. 4'33" allows the unin-tentional into music. The performer simply sits and listens as theaudience listens. As such, this piece exemplifies a movement towardthe silence of "nothing" and the acceptance of nonintentional sounds.But what about intentional sounds? Are these accepted? At whatpoint in 4'33" does Cage allow the performer, or the composer, for


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that matter, to produce the "something" of intentional sounds? Howcan something and nothing be unopposed if only "nothing" isallowed? These are, of course, rhetorical questions, and as such theiranswers are obvious. Something and nothing can be only unopposed ifboth intention and nonintention equally coexist.

This sent Cage in the direction of indeterminacy, and in 1958he began his famous series of Variations:

The first one was involved with the parameters of sound, the transpar-encies overlaid, and each performer making measurements that wouldlocate sounds in space. Then, while I was at Wesleyan University, inthis first piece I had had five lines on a single transparent sheet, thoughI had had no intention of putting them the way I did, I just drew themquickly. At Wesleyan while talking to some students it suddenlyoccurred to me that there would be much more freedom if I put only asingle line or a single notation on a single sheet. So I did that withVariations I 1 but it still involved mea~urernent.~~

Next followed a piece without measurement entitled Variations 111,written in the short period of two months, from December 1962 toJanuary 1963. Richard Kostelanetz implies that Variations 111 solvessome inherent problems with the published version of 4'33", one ofwhich, of course, is the measurement of time:

Since Cage invariably takes the intellectual leaps his radical ideasimply, he subsequently concluded that not only were any and all sounds"music," but the time-space frame of 4'33" was needlessly arbitrary, forunintentional music is indeed with us-available to the ear that wishesto perceive it-in all spaces and at all times. (Variations I11 [1964], heonce told me over dinner, is so open, "We could be performing it rightnow, if we decided to do so" . . .).32The published score includes a title page with the statement,

"Variations I I I for one or any number of people performing anyactions." There are no prescribed genres, either in music or any othermedium, except for the fact that it is to be "performed." The actionsthemselves are also undetermined except for the possibility that therewill be actions. The instruction page then reads:

Two transparent sheets of plastic, one having forty-two undifferentiatedcircles, the other blank. Cut the sheet having circles in such a way thatthere are forty-two sheets, each having a complete circle. Let these fallon a sheet of paper 8 x 11. If a circle does not overlap at least oneother circle, remove it. Remove also any smaller groups of circles that


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are separated from th e largest group, so th at a single maze of circlesremains, n o on e of the m isolated from at least on e other. Place th eblank transparent sheet over this complex.Starting with any circle, observe th e num ber of circles which overlapit . Make an action or actions having the corresponding number ofinterpene trating variables (1 + n) . T h is done , move o n to any one ofth e o verlapping circles again observing th e n um ber of interpenetrations,performing a suitable action or actions, and so on.Som e or all of one 's obligation may be performed th rough am bientcircumstances (environm ental changes) by simply noticing orresponding to them .Though no means are given for the measurement of t ime or space(beginning, e nding, or questions of con tinuity) o r th e specific interpen -etration of circles, such measurement and determination means are notnecessarily ex cluded from th e "interpen etrating variables."

Som e factors though no t all of a given interp enetration or succession ofseveral may be planne d in advance. But leave room for the use ofunforeseen eventualities.An y o ther ac t iv it ies are going o n a t th e same t ime.33

The following brief analysis will show that in this piece Cage pro-duced a truly nondual composition that allows both something andnothing to equally coexist.

Cage's use of transparencies is one of the best methods he everdevised to insure an indeterminate composition. The usual score, evenone where chance procedures determine it, is fixed. Once printed, thenotation by nature is unchanged. This produces an object, and Cagefully realized that. Even in his Music fo r Piano series for example,where the notations are merely his observations of imperfections inthe score paper, or in the elaborately constructed series of chanceoperations used to make Williams Mix, "[A111 the cutting, all the splic-ing of the Williams Mix is carefully controlled by chance operations.This was characteristic of an old period, before indeterminacy in per-formance, you see; for all I was doing then by chance operations wasrenouncing my intention. Although my choices 'were controlled bychance operations, I was still making an

Through transparencies, however, the score need not be initiallyfixed. For example, in Variations I11 one drops circles on a page, whichresults in a collection of interpenetrating circles. However, there are


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multiple possibilities regarding how many circles remain, if they inter-sect, and how many must be removed if they do not. The composercertainly does not determine that; nor does the performer. Eventhough the score is eventually fixed, it can be fixed differently foreach performance. Furthermore, if there is more than one performer,there can also be more than one determined score. While fixity stillexists in Cage's transparency scores, the variables are so multiple(hence the title "variations") it would be next to impossible todetermine what exactly will be fixed and what will remain open.

If the score itself seems variably determined, the performer'sinteraction with the score is even more variable. By looking at onecircle, one simply observes how many interpenetrations there arebetween it and any other connecting circle and then performs anaction for each observed interpenetration. Such actions can be eitherplanned or unplanned, although Cage does insist that room be left todo both. Observation of "ambient circumstances" can either producean action or can actually be the action. Because there is no indicatedtime measurement and because "other activities are going on at thesame time," a performance of Variations 111, once begun, need neverend. One could follow the score for a time, enter into the experienceof an ambient circumstance, and continue reacting to those circum-stances indefinitely. Or as Cage noted:

Just as I came to see that there was no such thing as silence, and sowrote the silent piece, I was now coming to the realization that therewas no such thing as nonactivity. In other words the sand in which thestones in a Japanese garden lie is also something . . . And so I madeVariations 111which leaves no space between one thing and the nextand posits that we are constantly active, that these actions can be ofany kind and all I ask the performer to do is to be aware as much as hecan of how many actions he is performing. I ask him, in other words,to count. That's all I ask him to do. I ask him even to count passiveactions, such as noticing that there is a noise in the environment. Wemove through our activity without any space between one action andthe next, and with many overlapping actions. The thing I don't likeabout Variations 111 is that it requires counting and I'm now trying toget rid of that. But I thought that performance was simply getting upand then doing it.35

O n the other hand, one need not count past an environmentalexperience, if one chooses to remain in it. And Cage himself under-stood the difficulties: "But what, how and why are we counting? Sincethere are no gaps between one action and another (and many of them


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overlap) do we know when something is finished and the next begins?The situation is ir r a t i ~ n a l . " ~ ~t is, in fact, the openness of VariationsIII, where rational and irrational coexist without reconciliation, thatallows the performer to enter into or go out of the piece at will, whileparadoxically staying within its notated structure. Thus intention andnonintention equally coexist, while, due to the several layers of expe-riences going on at the same time, a multiplicity of intentions collec-tively produce an unintentional and indeterminate piece. In VariationsIII something and nothing really do need each other; they coexist in afabric of art and life completely interwoven one with another. Cageonce spoke of a conversation with the visual artist Willem de Koon-ing: "I was with de Kooning once in a restaurant and he said, 'if I puta frame around these bread crumbs, that isn't art.' And what I'm say-ing is that it is. .He was saying it wasn't because he connects art withhis activity-he connects with himself as an artist whereas I wouldwant art to slip out of us into the world in which we live."37 In 4'33"Cage placed a frame around the "bread crumbs," thus beginning theprocess of dismantling dualistic separations such as the one mentionedbetween art and life. In Variations III, nondual experience is complete:the final impediment, the frame, is removed.

If, as has been suggested here, the lectures on both "nothing"and "something" inform the musical directions Cage pursues in 4'33"and Variations III, it is equally true that those two compositions pointtoward Cage's future developments in literature. The gestation periodwas long. Richard Kostelanetz wrote in 1968: "What is conspicuouslylacking in A Year from Monday [Cage's second book] is an analogouspath-breaking gesture that could command as much suggestive influ-ence for literature as his earlier 'musical' demonstration^."^^ This, inand of itself, need not matter. Many composers have also been writ-ers, and there is usually no consequent claim asserted that somehowthe writing must be up to the same level as the music. Frequently-and this is as true of Cage as of many others-the writings are anexplanation of what is happening in the music. Thus it is not a com-mon expectation that a composer's writings must somehow qualify asliterature.

However, Cage implies from the very first that, in some cases atleast, his writings go beyond musical explanation. As Cage wrote inhis introduction to Silence, "When M. C. Richards asked me why Ididn't one day give a conventional informative lecture, adding thatthat would be the most shocking thing I could do, I said, 'I don't givethese lectures to surprise people, but out of a need for poetry.' " Hewent on to write: "As I see it, poetry is not prose simply because


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poetry is in one way or another formalized. It is not poetry by reasonof its content or ambiguity but by reason of its allowing musical ele-ments (time, sound) to be introduced into the world of words."39 It isin this context, then, that one might expect a literary critic (which isthe hat Kostelanetz most frequently wears) familiar with Cage's musi-cal inventions to express disappointment in the less revolutionarynature of Cage's texts.

Cage's textual work in the 1960s had more to do with his devel-oping sensibilities as a poet than it did with trying to equal hisachievements in music. On the other hand, two textual inventionsare worthy of note: his mesostics and his diaries, only one of which(the diaries) concerns this analy~is.4~

The diary form was used by Cage for many years, beginning in1965 and ending with his eighth diary in 1982. His Diary: Audience1966, while not a part of this series, is short and uses the same formalstructure as his other diaries. I also received permission from Cage touse photocopies of pages from the stenographic notepad Cage used tocompose this piece. These were obtained from the John Cage LiteraryArchive, Wesleyan University Library, and serve as the raw materialfor this analysis. While Cage did not leave detailed information abouthow those materials were used, he did leave a trail, in various sources,through which I will try to reconstruct the compositional process.

The first place to check for clues is the introduction to the text,where Cage frequently provided information about how his pieceswere written:

This text was written on the highways while driving from an audiencein Rochester, New York, to one in Philadelphia. Following the writingplan I had used for Diary: Emma Lake, I formulated in my mind whiledriving a statement having a given number of words. When it hadjelled and I could repeat it, I drew up somewhere along the road, wroteit down, and then drove on. When I arrived in Philadelphia, the textwas finished.4'The full title of the source Cage mentions is Diary: Emma Lake

Music Workshop 1965. This introduction reads:Just before setting out for Saskatchewan to conduct a music workshopat Emma Lake in July 1965, I received a request from the editor ofCamdun Art for an article having fifteen hundred words. Since I wasbusy with a number of projects, I was on the point of replying that Ihad no time, when I noticed that I would be at the workshop for fif-teen days and that if I wrote one hundred words a day it wouldn't be


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Si lencing the S o u n d e d S e l f 325

too much for me and the magazine would get what it wanted. Insteadof different type faces, I used parentheses and italics to distinguish onestatement from another. I set the text in a single block like a paragraphof prose. Otherwise I used the mosaic-discipline of writing described inthe note preceding Diary: How to Improve etc. 1965.42The above-mentioned Diary introduction reads: "It is a mosaic of

ideas, statements, words and stories. It is also a diary. For each day, Idetermined by chance operations how many parts of the mosaic Iwould write and how many words there would be in each. The num-ber of words per day was to equal, or, by the last statement written, toexceed one hundred words. "43

With the information provided by these introductions, analysiscan begin. The first page of Cage's notebook (Figure 1) includes theworking title "On Audience" and shows a series of numbers to the leftof the roman numerals I-VI. These roman numerals correspond to thesix large sections of the text. As will be seen, everything but the six isexplainable according to the procedures previously described. How-ever, one thing that characterizes all of Cage's work is that everycompositional decision had a reason behind it, even if the decisionwas not to decide. Why six? Two clues offer a plausible answer. First,Cage claims to have followed the same procedure in writing "Audi-ence" that he used for Emma Lake. That diary had fifteen parts, onefor each day of the workshop. Second, in Cage's introduction to"Audience" he writes that it was composed while driving from Roch-ester to Philadelphia. An d (not coincidentally, I believe) in 1965 theapproximate driving time from Rochester to Philadelphia was sixhours.44 Thus, the large structure may have been conceived by writinga hundred words per hour!

The first page also has thirteen I Ching derived hexagrams, withsome (but not all) of the corresponding numbers written out below.Cage described how he used the I Ching in "To Describe the Processof Composition Used in Music of Changes and Imaginary LandscapeNo. 4":

What brings about this ~n~redictabilitys the use of the method estab-lished in the I Ching (Boo k of Changes) for the obtaining of oracles,that of tossing three coins six times. Three coins tossed once yields fourlines: three heads, broken with a circle; two tails and a head, straight;two heads and a tail, broken; three tails, straight with a circle. Threecoins tossed thrice yields eight trigrams (written from the base up):chien, three straight; chen, straight, broken, broken; kan, broken,straight, broken; ken, broken, broken, straight; kun, three broken; sun,


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Figure 1 .

broken, straight, straight; li, straight, broken, straight; tui, straight,straight, broken. Three coins tossed six times yield sixty-four hexagrams(two trigrams, the second written above the first) read in reference to achart of the numbers 1 to 64 in a traditional arrangement having eightdivisions horizontally corresponding to the eight lower trigrams and


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Silencing the Sounded Self 327

eight divisions vertically corresponding to the eight upper trigrams. Ahexagram having lines with circles is read twice, first as written, thenas changed. Thus, chien-chien, straight lines with circles, is read firstas 1, then as kun-kun, 2; whereas chien-chien, straight lines withoutcircles is read only as 1.45

In Diary: Audience 1966, the first hexagram (see Figure 1) corre-sponds to number sixty-three on the chart and is then placed first nextto the roman numeral I. The next hexagram is t h i ~ - t ~ . 4 ~owever,since the first hexagram has a changing line in the li trigram (straight,broken, straight) it changes that trigram to chien (straight, straight,straight) to form the chien-kan hexagram of five. In like fashion,thirty becomes twenty-one to form the first large part of the Diary.47Consequently, it is a reading of the changing lines that enables thir-teen hexagrams to produce twenty-one numbers. Symmetrical alter-ation (four texts, part 1; three texts, part 11; four texts, part 111; threetexts, part IV; four texts, part V; three texts, part V1) seems likely tohave been planned. However, following Cage's previous use of at leastone hundred words per structural unit, one discovers that such arelationship is literally produced "by chance. "48

While such symmetry as well as the number of words in eachwritten statement is chance derived, little else is. The method ofdistinguishing between statements (see Figure 2) is the same as withthe Diary: Emma Lake. Each of the six groups has either three or fourstatements. If there are three statements, they are distinguished byputting the second statement in parentheses. If there are four, thestatements are distinguished in two possible ways. First, the initialstatement is printed normally, the second is underlined (italicized inthe published text), the third is printed normally, and the fourth is inparentheses. Second, the initial statement is printed normally, thesecond statement is in parentheses, the third statement is printednormally, and the fourth is underlined (italicized in the publishedtext). This procedure obviously demonstrates both consistency andfairness (in the four statements, he reverses the pattern of underliningand parentheses); however, these are not necessarily traits of chance-operated results.

The method described above was probably chosen arbitrarilywithin what has been shown to be a chance-derived formal structure.However, granting that, an analysis of the content placed within thisstructure shows the composer to be even more actively involved inmaking choices. Choosing the texts themselves is obvious enough.Cage constructed them in his mind while driving, according to the


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328 The Mwical Quarterl)

#Y; AUDIENCE 1966I. Are we an a u d ie n c e f o r co mp uter a r t ? The a n e re r ' a n o t No; i t 1 s Yes.What r e need in a cornpatter th a t i s n ' t labor-savFng but , w hich i n c r e m e s t h ework f o r ua t o d o , that p u n s ( t h i s is McLuhan8a, deq) as r a n an Joycer e v e a l i n g b r i d g e s ( t h i s i s Brown's i de a) where we thou ght t h a r e were n't any,t u r n s U s (my i d e a ) n o t "ontg b u t i n t o art is ts . Or thodox s e a t i n n a r r a n ~ e m e n ti n s y n a m ~ u e e . I n di a ns have kn o m i t f o r a ges ; l i f e ' s a dance, a p lay ,i l lu s i on . L i la * WyP. Twent ie th -cen tury art 's opened o u r e;reS* Now m u s ic ' so pe ne d o u r e a r s . Th e a t re ? Ju a t n o t i c e w h a t ' s around. (If what you w a n ti n I n d ia i s an a ud ie nc e, Q i t a S v a b h a i t o l d me, a l l you nea t i s one or twopeople.) 11. He s a i d , U s t e n i n g t o y ou r m us ic I f h d i t p ro ro k e s me. Whatsh o u ld I do t o en joy i t ? Answer r The re' re many ways t o he1.p you. I ' d gi veyou a l i f t , f o r i ns ta nc e, i f you were g o h g i n my d i r e c t i o n , b o t t h e l as tt h in g I ' d do would be t o t e l l you how t o u se y o ur own a e s t h e t i c f a c u l t i e s .(You s e e ? We're unemployed. I f no t y e t , "soon again ' t w i l l be." We haveno th in g t o do. So what s h a l l we do? S i t i n an a ud ie nc e? W i t e c r i t i c i s m ?Be c r e a t i v e ? ) We u sed t o ha ve t h e art is t up on a pedes ta l . Now h e ' s no n o r eex tr ao rd in ar y than we are . 111. N o t i c e a u t i e n c e s a t h ig h a l t i t u d e s a nda u d i e n c e s in n o r t h e r n c o u n t r i e s t e n d t o b e a t t e n t i v e d u r i n g pe rf or ma nc esr h i l e a u di en ce s a t s e a- l ev el o r i n w a r m c o u nt r i e s v oi c e t h e i r f e e l i n g swhenever they have them. Are we, s o t o spea k, going s ou t h in t h e way r ee x p e r ie n c e a r t ? Audience p a r t i c ip a t io n ? (Ba r in g n o th i n g t o d o, we do i tnon e th e le ss ; our b ig ges t prob le lc i s f in d i ng s c r ap s o f t h e i n which t o ~ e tit done. Dbco very . Awarenese.) "Leave t h e beat en tra- k. Yo u' ll s e esometh ing never seen before. " Af te r th e f i r s t pe rfo rmance o f my p i ec e f o rtwe lve ra d i os , Vi rg i l Thomson s a i d , "You c an ' t do th a t s o r t o f thin^ andexpec t peop le t o pay f o r i t . " Gepars t ion . IV. When our t i r e was z ive n t oph ys ic a l lab or , r e needed a s t i f f upper l i p and backbone. Eiow t h a t we ' rec h a ng in g o ur mh d s , in t e n t on th in g s in v ic ib le , in a u d ib le , vie h av e o th e rs p i n e l e s s v i r t u e s : f l e x i b i l i t y , f l u en cy . Dreems, d a i l y e v e n t s , ev e r y t h i ngg e t s t o a nd th ro ug h u s . (Ar t , i f you want a d e f in i t io n o f i t , i s c r i m i n a la c t i o n . I t conforms t o no ru le s. Hot even i t s own. Anyone who e x p e r i e n c e sa work of ar t i s as g u i l t y as t h e a r t i s t . I t i s n o t a q u e s t i o n o f s h a r i n et h e g u i l t . Each one of us gets a l l of i t . ) They asked me abo ut t h e a t r e si n New Pork . I s a i d we co ul d use them. They sh oul d be smal l f o r t h ea u d i en c e s , t h e p e rf or mi ng a r e a s l a r g e an d s p a c io u s , e q ui p pe d f o r t e l e v i s i o nb r oa d ca s t f o r t h os e who p r e f e r s t a y i n g a t r - f e i n

Figure 2


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Sikncing the Sounded Self 329

number of words required. After he had worked them into a form hecould remember, he pulled over and wrote them down. According tohis written introduction, the text was finished by the time he arrivedin Philadelphia. This story seemed so remarkable that David Revillactually comments specifically about it in his biography of Cage:"With characteristic self-discipline, he ascertained at the start of eachleg of the journey how many words were needed for the next state-ment of the text, formulated it and revised it in his head as he drove,pulled over and wrote it down, checked the length of the next state-ment and drove on. By the time he reached Philadelphia, the piecewas This may seem somewhat redundant, since when onelooks up the author's reference it is, in fact, the text itself as pub-lished in A Year from Monday. However, when one compares thestenographic notebook to both Cage's introduction and Revill's bio-graphical elaboration of it, certain things do not add up. If Cage werewriting according to the number of words required in each statement,one would assume that the first text in the notebook would correspondto the first I Ching-derived hexagram number sixty-three. Instead wefind that the first written text in the notebook is fifty-one. There is,in fact, no correlation between the order of hexagrams drawn on thefirst notebook page and the order of texts found in the notebook.50

It is unlikely that Cage really finished the Diary by the time hereached Philadelphia and even less likely that he wrote it in the wayRevill describes. The following is a more likely scenario. Cage formu-lated certain statements, some of which were directly related to thetopic of the conference where the speech was to be delivered ("TheChanging Audience for the Changing Arts"). When looking at theinitial numbers most of them are large-5 1, 50, 43, 33, 46, and soon-and at the very end there are four numbers left-24, 17, 10, and5 (see Figure 3). And Cage does indeed do these last four in orderfrom large to small (see n. 50). Thus, Cage probably began thinkingof things either that he wanted to say or that independently came intohis head, paying attention to whether these statements were long orshort approximately according to the I Ching numbers he, in alllikelihood, generated prior to the trip.

How do we know that they were approximations and that Cagedid not have an exact number of words in his mind? First, there is adisparity between generated numbers and written texts. The onlyother possibility is that Cage worked out of another notebook first andthen rewrote everything into the notebook found in his archive. Thisis extremely doubtful. Anyone who visits either of Cage's archives isimmediately impressed by the fact that he appears to have saved


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330 The Musicul Quurterlv


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Si lencing the S o u n d e d S e l f 33 1

everything, and saved it in an orderly fashion. This is particularly truewith the materials found in the literary archive at Wesleyan, most ofwhich were eventually published. In all probability, this notebook iswhat Cage used to initially write down these texts. Looking again atFigure 1, one notices as further confirmation that the numbers listedto the left of the roman numerals are circled. I would suggest thatthese were circled as Cage completed that particular text. If accepted,this reasoning also helps explain both the four numbers (24, 17, 10,and 5 ) on the last four pages of the notebook and the fact that nei-ther 10 nor 5 is circled: since these were probably the last-completedtexts, circling was therefore unnecessary.

Second, the notebooks show that Cage very carefully edited eachof the statements until they did match exactly. And although it isquestionable whether or not Cage could both write and edit each ofthese texts while at the same time driving to Philadelphia, such issues,unlike the previous speculations, do not directly affect this analysis.What matters is the editing itself. Figure 4 shows what reads as num-ber sixty-one but is actually sixty-three and is thus the very first state-ment in the published text. For comparison (and for reasons oflegibility) it is reproduced below (parentheses correspond to text Cagecrossed out):

(Stet) 61 (Could we do it with a computer?

(Not art, but) I don't mean make computer art

Are we an audience for computer art? but Can ( ~ d . ) ~ l e sit in an audience

computer artand enjoy (i t) once it (was)/is made?)

not(Don't think) (T)the answer's No;it's (inevitably) Yes. (Wha t) W( w)eneed (is) a computer thatisn't labor saving but whichincreases the work for usto do, that (as McLuhan says)this is McLuhan's idea(can) puns as well as Joyce

(this is) this is Brown's idearevealing bridges where we thoughtthere weren't (none). any, turns usmy idea not "on" but intoartists.


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Figure 4 .


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Compare this to the published text:I. Are we an audience for computer a rt? The answer's not No; it's Yes.

What we need is a computer that isn't labor-saving but whichincreases the work for us to do, that puns (this is McLuhan's idea) aswell as Joyce revealing bridges (this is Brown's idea) where wethought there weren't any, turns us (my idea) not "on" but intoartists.52

The difference is remarkable, and the final result (even if the originalsomehow seems more poetic) does closely resemble Cage's view ofpoetry as "formalized" prose.53 This leads to the following question:Did Cage edit the text simply to meet the prescribed sixty-threewords, or did he also edit for reasons of personal taste? By comparingscript and differing ways of crossing out words we can reproduce whatCage originally wrote:

Could we do it with a computer? I don't mean make computer art but cd. we sit in an audience and enjoy it once it was made? Don't think the answer's No; it's inevitably Yes. What we need is a computer that isn't labor saving but which increases the work for us to do, that as McLuhan says can puns as well as Joyce revealing bridges where we thought there weren't none.

This excerpt, as is, totals seventy-two words. If one looks at the top ofthe page (Figure 4) one can distinguish two crossed-out numbers fol-lowed by "-1." These numbers are first 9, then 4. The text repro-duced above minus nine words would have equaled the required sixty-three. Consequently, Cage needed to remove nine words. It would bevery difficult to determine the order in which Cage made thesechanges, so instead we will follow them as they occur in the text.Cage crosses out all of "Could we do it with a computer? I don't meanmake computer art but cd. we sit in an audience and enjoy it once itwas made?" and changes it to "Are we an audience for computer art?"The original has twenty-seven words while the change has seven,leaving a difference of twenty words. This is not exactly a time-savingmethod of removing nine words. It means that Cage would have had


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to come up with eleven more words if he accepted the change, whichseems unlikely.What if Cage instead began by crossing out unnecessary words asfollows, without an alteration of the text: "inevitably," "what," "is,""as McLuhan says," "can, " "none. " This shows a remarkable similarityto the crossed-out numbers. Removing "inevitably," "what," "is,""can," and "none" leaves four; removing "as McLuhan says" leavesone. And, although I am by no means a handwriting expert, it alsoappears to be consistent with Cage's various noticeable styles of cross-ing out words. If such were the case, by crossing out "Don't think"and adding "not" to make "The answer's not No; it's Yes," Cagewould have made a statement with sixty-three words:

Could we do it with a computer?I don't mean make computer artbut cd. we sit in an audienceand enjoy it once it was made?The answer's not No; it's Yes.We need a computer that isn'tlabor saving but which increasesthe work for us to do, that punsas well as Joyce revealing bridgeswhere we thought there weren't.I believe the evidence indicates that Cage initially made this textand then changed it. It was purposely altered at great additionalexpense of time, especially considering the fact that he reportedly was

in a hurry. The reasons could be several, but two are probable andimportant to this analysis. One, he may have wished to alter the orig-inal meaning: "any, turns us (my idea) not 'on' but into artists" isclearly a text added to suit the addition of "this is McLuhan's idea"and "this is Brown's idea." Two, he may simply have not liked theresults of his initial editing and one could say that the final productdoes read "better."Looking at the manuscript as a whole, one sees that there arealterations made on every page. The five-word page "Orthodox seatingarrangement" (see Figure 5) was originally "Ordinary 20th Centuryhuman beings." In addition, there are two versions, of which only oneis selected, for both numbers forty-three and forty-six. The textsrespectively have to do with Cage's mother and with television andwere, in all likelihood, omitted for the same reason "Ordinary 20thcentury human beings" was changed: because they are not directlyrelated to "audience," the subject of the speech.


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I I . Are we a n a u d i e n c e f o r c m pu te r a r t ? The a n s w e r ' s n o tNo; i t ' s Yes. What we need 4s a computer t h a t i s n ' tl a b o r s a v i n g b u t w hich i n c r e s e s t h e work f o r u s t o d o,t h a t puns ( t h i s i s McLuhanVs i d e a ) a s w e l l as J o y c er e v e a l i n g b r i d g e s ( t h i s i s l3;ownqs i d e a ) where we th ou gh tIt h e r e wer_enq - a n y , t u r n s u s (m y i d e a ) n o t "on" b u t i n t oa r t i s t s . .

Iknown i t f o r a g e s : l i f e ' s a Fee, a p l ay , i l l u s i o n . L i l a .Maya. Tw ent ie t h ce nt ur y a r t ' s opened our eyes . NOW m u s i c ' sIIo pened o u r e a r s . T h e a t e r ? J s t n o t i c e w h a t ' s a ro un d . ( I fy wha t you wan t i n In d i a i s a n ' a u d i e n c e , G i t a S a r a b h a i t o l dme, a l l y ou n e ed i s one or two people . ) 11. He s a i d :L i s t e n i n g t o y ou r m us ic I f i n d i t pr ov ok es me. What sh ou ldI do t o en j oy i t ? Answer: Th e re ' r e many ways t o he l p you .I ' d g i v e you a l i f t , f o r i n s t p n c e , i f you were g o i n g i n myd i r e c t i o n , b u t tk,e l a s t t h i n g I ' d do would be t o t e l l youhow t o u s e y o u r own a e s t h e t i c f a c u l t i e s . ( Y O U e e ? W e'r eunemployed . I f no t y e t , " soon ag a i n ' t w i l l be.' ' We haven o t h i n g t o d o. So w hat s h a l l we d o ? S i t i n a n a u d i e n c e?W r i te c r i t i c i s m ? Be c r e a t i v e ? ) We u se d t o have t h ea r t i s t up on a p e d e s t a l . Now h e ' s no more ex t r ao rd i n a r yth an vre a r e . 111. N ot i ce a u di en c es a t h i gh a l t i t u d e sand a u d i e n c e s i n n o r t h e r n c o u n t r i e s t en d t o b e a t t e n t i v eFigure 5 .


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Thus what initially appears to be an improvised and haphazardtext is actually extremely well-organized. Some aspects of form are theresult of chance operations and some aren't. The contents, on theother hand, are clearly the result of trying to meet the extraordinarydemands of numerical form, subject matter and personal taste. Eventhough the juxtapositions, as Cage points out, are chance-derived, thecomposer's role is so pervasive that the resultant collage of text is, ifnot completely determined, at least predictable. It is, I would suggest,an immensely taxing exercise of the composer's will that does notcompare favorably if one is trying to produce the kind of nonintentionin text that he had already produced in music.Was Cage trying to produce nonintention in text? His statementslean in that direction. In 1965 he said, "It has been my habit forsome years to write texts in a way analogous to the way I writemusic."54 Yet, as the previous analysis has shown, analogous means,in this case chance operations, do not necessarily produce similarresults. Something more was necessary, something more than simplyformalized prose. Cage was looking for a way to "musicate language,"as can be seen in the following exchange between Cage and theFrench philosopher and musicologist Daniel Charles sometimebetween 1968 and 1970:

CHARLES:ou propose t o musicate language; you w ant language to beheard as music.CAGE: hope to let words exist, as I have tried t o let sounds exist.55

An essential aspect of Cage's approach to sound is away from memory:There is a beautiful statement, in my opinion, by Marcel Duchamp:"To reach the impossibility of transferring from one like object toanother the memory imprint." And he expressed that as a goal. Thatmeans, from his visual point of view, to look at a Coca-Cola bottlewithout the feeling that you've ever seen one before, as though youwere looking at it for the very first time. That's what I'd like to findwith sounds-to play them a nd hea r them as if you've never heardthem before. 56

The failure of Cage's earlier text pieces was their acceptance of thesymbolism that relies upon memory through the syntactical connec-tions and relationships inherent in language. To move away frommemory, one must move away from language.In the mid-1960s he found a connection between Duchamp'sapproach and that of his nineteenth-century predecessor T h ~ r e a u : ~ ~


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And that's what links me the most closely with Duchamp and Thoreau.In both of them, as different as they may be, you find a completeabsence of interest in self expression. Thoreau wanted only one thing:to see and hear the world around him. When he found himself inter-ested in writing, he hoped to find a way of writing which would allowothers not to see and hear how he had done it, but to see what he hadseen and to hear what he had heard. He was not the one who chose hiswords. They came to him from what there is to see and hear. You'regoing to tell me that Thoreau had a definite style. He has his very ownway of writing. But in a rather significant way, as his Journal continues,his words become simplified or shorter. The longest words, I would betempted to say, contain something of Thoreau in them. But not in theshortest words. They are words from common language, everydaywords. So as the words become shorter, Thoreau's own experiencesbecome more and more transparent. They are no longer his experi-ences. It is experience. And his work improves to the extent that hedisappears. He no longer speaks, he no longer writes; he lets thingsspeak and write as they are; I have tried to do nothing else in music.Subjectivity no longer comes into it.58Cage considered this a movement away from memory, from sym-

bolism, in a way strikingly similar to a common phrase quite familiarto Americanists. It i n fact serves as a chapter heading i n F. 0. Mat-thiessen's American Renaissance, "The Word O n e with t he Thing ."Matthiessen writes, "The epitome of Emerson's belief is that 'in goodwriting, words become one with things.' " This th en leads to a discus-sion of organic unity, in which symbolism plays an essential role.Consequently, it is the direction of language that differs and, in thiscase, leads one away from Matthiessen's Emerson, "where the object islost in thought,"59 and toward Thoreau, who, Cage believed, wasmoving away from thought and toward the experience of the object inand of itself. An d it is the example of Thoreau that showed Cage away of "musicating language":

CHARLES:f 1 may now transpose everything you just said to the area oflanguage, it seems to me that Thoreau is no less fascinatingwhen he writes, when he frees words. Isn't he concernedwith opening up words? And haven't you taken up this con-cern in turn? Aren't your lectures, for example, musicalworks in the manner of the different chapters of Walden?

CAGE:hey are when sounds are words. But I must say that 1 havenot yet carried language to the point to which I have takenmusical sounds. I have not yet made noise with it. I hope tomake something other than language from it.


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CHARLES:ow do you expect to accomplish that?CAGE:t is that aspect, the impossibility of language, that interests meat present. 1 am now working o n tha t problem in a text

take n straigh t from t he Song Books, whic h deals directly withletters, syllables, etc., mixing them in such a way that youcould call it a Thoreau Mix. 60

Th is p iece, as men t ioned in th e previous endno te , was eventu-ally called M u r e a u , th e t i t le being a com binat io n of "music" ( t h e f irsttwo letters) an d "Thoreau " (t h e last four letters). C age discusses thiswork in the foreword to M: " Mu re a u departs from conventional syn-tax. It is a mix of letters, syllables, wo rds, phrases, a n d sentences. Iwrote i t by subject ing al l the remarks of Henry David Thoreau aboutmusic , s i lence , and sounds h e heard th a t a re indexed in t he Doverpublicat ion of the Journal to a series of 1 Ching c h a n ce ~ p e r a t i o n s . " ~ ~The t i t le indicates that Cage was, as he suggests in his conversat ionwith Charles, looking to f ind a way to take the Journal of Thoreauan d somehow "m usicate i t ." His ini t ia l task i n tha t direct ion wasthe removal of syntax: "As we move away from it , we demilitarizelanguage. "62

Removing syntax would a l low words to d o what C age thou ghtThoreau was t ry ing to have them do: "Since words , when they com-mun ica te , h ave n o e f fec t, words become nonsense as they do be tweenlovers, in w hich w ords become w ha t they original ly were: t rees a ndsta rs and the rest of the pr imeval envi ronment . "63 Language wouldmove in the direct ion of the observat ion of things. Thus, paral le l toCage' s v iew th a t m usic does no t comm unica te , C age t r ied t o make alanguage that does not communicate: "The demil i tarizat ion oflanguage: a serious musical concern. "64

However, Cage real ized that M u r e a u had no t yet made mus ic ou tof language; there was st i l l too much language in i t and not enoughsilence:

sparrowsitA gROsbeak betrays itself by that peculiarsqueakariEFFECT O F S LIG H TE ST tinkling measures soundnessingplease W e hear! Does it not rather hear us ? sW hen h ehears the telegraph, he thinksthose bugs have issuedforthThe owl touches the stops, wakes reverberationsd qwalky In verse there is no inherent music65

In these first few lines of M u r e a u , th e chance-opera ted mixture ofle t ters, syl lables, words, and senten ces goes far beyond th e ch anc eoperat ions used t o make Cage 's Diaries. B ut M u r e a u stil l makes sense.Indiv idua l words ten d to be read as sentences ev en wh en those sen-


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tences are devised by th e reader rather th a n by Thore au. Syllablestend to sound as inter rupt ions of though t ra ther th an as capable ofthought, or , as with individual let ters , s imply attach themselves too th er words, syllables, or letters. W hi le M ureau is still interestingpoetry, i t does n o t accomplish what Cage ha d in mind: "I th ink wen e ed t o h a v e m ore nonsense i n t h e field of l a n g ~ a g e . " ~ ~e thereforecon t inue d to search for a verse th at had wh at h e could regard as"in he ren t music." Th is led to th e creation of wh at I regard as on e ofCage's finest poetic works, Empty Words.Empty Words was writ ten between 1973 and 1974. According toRevill , the t i t le was inspired by a conversation with the Orientalscholar Wil l iam M cNa ugh ton, wh o in 1973 " told Cag e tha t th e classi -cal Chinese language can be classified into 'full words' and 'emptywords.' A full word has a specific, in a loose sense referential meaning;nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, are full words, though which ofthese forms the word takes cannot always be determined. Empty wordsare con junctio ns, par ticles, pron oun s, wh ich refer only t o othe r terms:a, at, it ."67

In his introduction to the f irs t par t , Cage descr ibes the directionof his work leading to t he creation of Empty Words: hearing WendellBerry read aloud from t h e Journal in 196 7, th e im portan ce of Tho rea uin Cage's com posit ion Songbooks (19 70 ) , an d th e use of ch an ce opera-tions i n M u r e a ~ . ~ ~hance, as in all of Cage's composit ions that useit , al ters the composer's role f rom th at of making choices to o ne ofasking q uestions:

My composition arises out of asking questions. I am reminded of a storyearly on about a class with Schoenberg. He had us go to the blackboardto solve a particular problem in counterpoint (though it was a class inharmony). He said: "When you have a solution, turn around and letme see it." 1 did that. He then said: "Now another solution please." Igave another and another until finally, having made seven or eight, Ireflected a moment and then said with some certainty: "There aren'tany more solutions." He said: "O.K. What is the principle underlyingall of the solutions?" I couldn't answer his question; but I had alwaysworshipped the man, and at that point I did even more. He ascended,so to speak. I spent the rest of my life, until recently, hearing him askthat question over and over. And then it occurred to me through thedirection that my work has taken, which is renunciation of choices andthe substitution of asking questions, tha t the principle underlying all ofthe solutions that 1 had given him was the question that he had asked,because they certainly didn't come from any other point. He wouldhave accepted that answer, 1 think. The answers have the question incommon. Therefore the question underlies the answers.69


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Both Mureau and Empty Words begin with the same question:W ha t can be don e with t he English language? Use it as material. M ate-rial of five kinds: letters, syllables, words, phrases, sentences. A text fora song can be a vocalise: just letters. Can be just syllables, just words;just a string of phrases; sentences. O r com binations of letters an d sylla-bles (for example), letters and words, et cetera. There are 25 possiblecombinations. Relate 64 (I Ching) to 25 . . . Mureau uses all twenty-five possibilities. 7O

O n the other hand-and this is of key significance-Empty Wordsdoes not use all twenty-five: in the first part, Cage, without usingchance operations, eliminated the possibility of sentences by choice. 7 lThe difference is striking:

no tA t even ingright can see

suited to the morning hourtrucksrsq Measured tSee t A

ys sK)i w dee e str oaisstkva o dcom moncurious 20

theeberries flowers r clover72In Mureau, chance operations produced an almost flowing sentencestructure, whereas in Empty Words, due to the elimination of sen-tences, the text becomes much more disjunct. If phrases, they appearas phrases, if words as words, thus illustrating in text what Cage oncesaid about music: "I try to approach each sound as itselLYq3Due toCage's purposeful subtraction of sentences, each phrase, word,syllable, and letter begins to be read "as itself."

Another clue to Cage's intentions was his inclusion of drawingsby Thoreau, which he describes in the introduction to part one:"Amazed (1) by their beauty, (2) by fact I had not (67-73) beenseeing 'em as beautiful, (3) by running across Thoreau's remark: 'Nopage in my Journal is more suggestive than one which includes asketch.' Illustrations out of context. Suggestivity. Through a museumon roller skates. Cloud of unknowing. Ideograms. Modern Art. Tho-r e a ~ . " ~ ~n Empty Words, language begins to move in the direction ofthose illustrations, those ideograms where in China, according to EzraPound, they "still use pictures AS pictures, that is to say, Chineseideogram does not try to be the picture of a sound, or to be a writtensign recalling a sound, but it is still the picture of a thing; of a thingin a given position or relation, or of a combination of things. It meansthe thing or the action or the ~ituation."~~


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Silencing the S o u d d Self 341

However, the emphasis remains on "begins." For Cage correctlyenvisioned this text as a "transition from literature to music."76 Assuch, it is a transition in process, where the symbolic nature of lan-guage is being subverted. In part one, while intention is removedthrough chance operations, words still connect in specifically mean-ingful ways: "notAt evening," for example, or "suited to the morninghour." For language to exist as sounds exist, it must be somethingother than just nonintentional: it must cease to intentionally "mean."This is the process that Cage has set in motion.

Part two removes the possibility of phrases. The introduction tothis part continues to describe what questions were asked: "First ques-tions; What is being done? for how many times? . . . In which vol-ume of the Journal's fourteen is the syllable to be found? In whichgroup of pages? O n which page of this group? O n which line of thispage?"77The questions help inform both the immensity of the taskand why it took so long to complete. And yet, the most significantchange in this part is the elimination of phrases, which was not achance operation at all:

s or past anotherthise and on ghth wouldhadandibullfrogswasina-perhapss blackbus

each f nsqlike globe?oi for osurprisingy ter spect y-s of

wildclouds deooa Di from theocolorsadby h allb eblei ingselfi foot7*

Eventually the process is moving away from any intentional meaning,and while one could make a comparison between Mureau and Joyce'slanguage experiment Finnegans Wake, clearly the intended meaningsof Joyce's experiment differ greatly even if , on the surface, there aretextual similarities. Cage is directing the reader to the same Tower ofBabel situation he had found in music more than twenty years before:"the impossibility of language." If it can't communicate, what canit do? In the introduction to part three, Cage continues to describethe direction of this process: "Searching (outloud) for a way to read.Changing frequency. Going up and then going down; going to ex-tremes. Establish (I, 11) stanza's time. That brings about a variety oftempi (short stanzas become slow; long become fast). "79 Measurementcontinues through the selection of tempi, but the reader's role beginsto change; the reader searches "outloud for a way to read."80 Afterhaving "gone to extremes" in parts one and two, Cage instructs thereader to "move toward a center" in parts three and four: "To bringabout quiet of IV (silence) establish no stanza time in 111 or IV."81


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342 Tk Musical Quarterly

In part three, Cage omits the possibility of words. However, thestructures overlap: "E.g., 'a' is a letter, is a syllable, is a word."82Thus, as the opening to part three demonstrates, Empty Words are notyet fully empty: "The," "perch," "great," "hind," "ten," and so on.Are these ideograms? Or are they still symbols of things rather thanthe "things themselves?" Is this the nondualism Cage produced in hisVariations III? Even when removing all but syllables and letters, thetext still linguistically "means":

theAf perchgreathind and tenhave andthewitha naethatIas be theirofsparrermayyour

hsglanruas theeshelfnot er n housthe ing e

-shaped wk; Wid n pstw etybou-a the dherlyth gth db tgn-plh ng

sthrce ght rc t e Tmsttht thsno sngly oophys thepfbbe ndnd tsh m ie ghl

ldsbdfrrtlybflyf Ir i q oss bns83I think Cage realized that making the "word one with the thing"was not enough. Nor was the increased semantic openness of languagethrough the use of ideograms a satisfactory solution. For Cage, theonly possibility in the midst of this impossibility called language wasa new language. And this new language required the same silence4'33" had provided in music; the absence of any (even inherently, asin language) intentional meaning. In a 1958 interview with MikeWallace, Cage addressed this very issue:

CAGE:hose artists for whom I have regard have always put theirwork at the service of religion or of metaphysical truth. Andart without meaning, like mine, is also at the service ofmetaphysical truth. But it also puts it in terms which areurgent and meaningful to a person of this century.

WALLACE:Meaningful? But you said it has no meaning.CAGE:But I mean no meaning ha meaning.WALLACE:O h?CAGE:Yes. This idea of no idea is a very important

For Cage, "no meaning" still had meaning. As we see in hisconversation with Richard Kostelanetz, empty words are empty not ofmeaning but of intentional meaning:


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CAGE: 'm not being at all scholarly about my use of the term"empty words." I'm suggesting something more in linewith what I've already told you, namely, the transitionfrom language to music, and I would like with my titleto suggest the emptiness of meaning that is characteristicof musical sounds.KOSTELANETZ:That is to say, they exist by themselves.CAGE:Yes. That when words are seen from a musical point ofview, they are all empty.KOSTELANETZ:They are empty semantically?

CAGE:How do you mean?KOSTELANETZ:Semantic" refers to meaning. They are also empty syn-tactically.

CAGE:would rather say they're empty of intention.85To remove intention requires the omission of even the ideogrammicnature of language. It requires a complete removal of aU symbolicreference: "I'm always amazed when people say, 'Do you mean it's justsounds?' How they can imagine that it's anything but sounds is what'sso alarming."86 Sounds thus refer to themselves rather than to ahumanly constructed relationship between sounds and what they canmean. Languages, too, are humanly constructed symbolic relation-ships, and Cage's intention in part four, accomplished, once again, bychoice rather than by chance, was to remove any trace of that sym-bolic relationship: "IV: equation between letters and silence. Makinglanguage saying nothing at all," and finally, "Languages becomingmusics":

ie th A h bathi c r t t 1 m rdt et shgg

o no d ans n i

er t s p r t o o sspwlae sb97

Whereas Cage's "Lecture on Nothing" announced Cage'sintent-"I have nothing to say and I am saying it"-Empty Words, ina way that has long typified his successful experiments, exemplifiesthat intent: "Making language saying nothing at all." And as Perloffhas written, "In Cage's art of 'exemplary presentation,' the meaninginferred is that we can only know how things happen ('nature in hermanner of operation') but never quite what happens, much lesswhy."88


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Empty Words also exemplifies the essential role of the creatoreven when the goal is a "silenced" creative self. Chance operationswere used by Cage as a means of opening up the creative process, ofallowing the "outside" into the work of art. As has been shown, whilechance operations let the "outside" in, they do not, in and of them-selves, necessarily produce "silence." It requires an intentional choice,the successive removal of sentences, phrases, syllables and words, toproduce textual silence. In other words, something (intention) andnothing (nonintention) are not really opposed; they do "need eachother to keep on going."89 Cage's work is therefore not an abdicationbut rather a redirection of the role of the artist: "I believe that byeliminating purpose, what I call awareness increases. Therefore mypurpose is to remove purpose."90 That "purposeful purposelessness"attempts to remove human constructions of meaning, thus allowingawareness of the world around us the opportunity to increase. Making,then, need not mean in itself; it may instead open a clearing where,as Robert Duncan has written, "We do not make things meaningful,but in our making work toward an awareness of meaningng1Theresult is the creation of a place where distinctions between text andmusic disappear, and where, as Charles Olson writes in Causal Mythol-ogy, "that which exists through itself is what is called meaning."92

In Empty Words, music and text become one. In fact, its greatestsignificance is the exemplification of the act of becoming: "how thingshappen." As in Thoreau's Walden, Cage takes the reader from wherehe or she is, a world in which language communicates, and very grad-ually (the piece takes eleven hours to perform) moves to a placewhere language disappears and words do indeed become "just sounds."In fact, the lecture ends as Walden ends, at dawn: "I thought of it assomething that could be read throughout the whole night . . . timingthe last part, which is nothing but silences and letters, so that itwould end at dawn along with the opening of the windows and doorsof the world outside . . . I have become through Empty Words awareof the dawnMg3n Empty Words, Cage "opens words" as Thoreau did,allowing them the freedom to mean apart from symbolic intent, fromtheir human construction. As Thoreau wrote, "There is more day todawn.'j94 In other words, there is more than our present experience ofit, and by emptying these words of all linguistic intention, one maythen be open to an experience that includes the outside: "quieting themind, thus making it susceptible to divine infl~ences,"~~hich is, notsurprisingly, what in Cage's view, replaced communication as thepurpose of writing music.


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In both his writings and his compositions, Cage devoted himselfto an aesthetic of coexistent inclusion. By comparing his texts andmusic, one discovers a shared direction away from compositional con-trol and .toward nonintention, where "something" and "nothing" areunopposed. Cage accomplished this first in music with 4'33" (1952)and Variations 111 (1962-63). He then proceeded to accomplish thesame result in his texts. By attempting to "musicate" language, Cageeventually moved away from syntactically controlled meaningaltogether, and language became, like music, just sounds.

In the introduction to Empty Words, Cage wrote that "a text fora song can be a vocalise: just letters."96 In Empty Words, Cage pro-duced that text, where language, intentionally stripped of the dualitiesof its symbolism, becomes unintentional, and thus silenced, song:

Everybody has a songwhich is no song at all:it is a process of singing ,

and when you sing ,you are where you are

All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimesthink I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear that Iknow nothing.97

Notes1. Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage (New York: Limelight Editions, 198 7) ,218. Although Cage elsewhere asserts that he wrote this speech at age twelve (EmptyWords [Middletow n, Co nn .: Wesleyan University Press, 19791, 5 ) , his biographer,David R evill (The Roaring Silence [New York: Arc ade Publishing, 19921, 30 ), and thecritic Kostelanetz Uohn Cage [New York: Da C ap o Press, 19911, 45 ) claim t ha t thistex t was written in 1927, when C age was fifteen.2. Jo hn Cage, Silence (Middleto wn, C on n.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 261.3. Kostelanetz, John Cage, 81 . A t issue here is not whe ther Cage's assessment ofW eb em and Satie is accurate. His opinion is, i n fact, debatable. Instead it is a ques-tion of whom Cage considered to be his predecessors.4. Kostelane tz, John Cage, 81 .5. Ca ge , Silence, 18.6. Jo h n Cag e, "Forerunners of M od em Music," in Silence, 62.7 . Jo hn Cage, "Composition as Process, I: Changes," in Silence, 19, 20.


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8. Cage, "Com position as Process," 19-20. I should mentio n tha t Cage uses "struc-ture" to describe what might be traditionally called form while using "form" todescribe what would usually (especially in a literary sense) be called content.9. Jo hn Cage with Daniel Charles, For the Birds (London: Marion Boyars, 1981), 55.10. Cage, "Lecture o n No thin g," in Siknce, 109.11 . See Cage, "Composition as Process," 18.12. Cage , "Lecture on Nothing," 109.13. Cage, "Lecture o n Noth ing," 109.14. Revill, 85.15. Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors (N ew York: Penguin, 1968), 97.16. Jo hn Cage, "Memoir," in Kostelanetz, John Cage, 77.17. Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 231: "[Aln important book for me was ThePerennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley, which is an anthology of remarks of people indifferent periods of history a nd from different cultures-that they are all saying thesame thing, namely a quiet mind is a mind that is free of its likes and dislikes. Youcan become narrow-minded, literally, by only liking certain things, and disliking oth-ers. But you can become open-minded, literally, by giving up your likes and dislikesand becoming interested in things. I think the Buddhists would say, 'As they are inand of themselves.' "18. Aldous Huxley , The Perennial Philosophy (N ew York: Harper & Row, 1945), 20.19. Cage, "Memoir," 77.20. It also con nec ted musical and spiritual purposes, which in 1948 Cage consideredto be a n important compositional concern: "I felt th at an artist ha d a n ethical respon-sibility to society to keep alive to the contemporary spiritual needs; I felt that if hedid this, admittedly vague as it is a thing to do, his work would automatically carrywith it a usefulness to others." J oh n Cage, "A Composer's Confessions," in John Cage:Writer, comp . Richa rd Kostelanetz (N ew York: Limelight Editions, 199 3), 34.21. Huang Po, Th e Zen Teaching of Huang Po, trans. J oh n Blofeld ( Ne w York:Grov e Press, 1958), 14.22. Kostelanetz, Conuersing with Cage, 25.23. Cage, Siknce, 8.24 . Cage, "Lecture on Something," in Silence, 129.25 . Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 42.26 . He received it from Christian Wolff, who was studying with Cage at the time.According to Cage: "I didn't make him pay for his lessons. Well, his father was apublisher. To thank me, Christian brought me books published by his father. Oneday, the I Ching was among them." In Cage and Charles, 43.27. C . G . Jung, foreword to The I Ching or Book of Changes, trans. Richard Wilhelm(N ew York: Prin cet on University Press, 1 95 0) , xxii.


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Silencing the Sou nded Self 347

28. Cage, "A Composer 's Confessions," 43. As for the second piece: "to composeand have performed a composition using as instruments nothing but twelve radios. Itwill be my Imaginary Landscape No. 4. "29. J o h n C a ge , A Year from Monday (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan UniversityPress, 1 96 7) , 31.30. Cage and Charles, 80.31. Ko stelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 110.32. Cag e, "Some Random Remarks" in Kostelanetz, John Cage, 195-96. A n d thishas become, for Cage, the purpose of 4'33" as well: "I don't si t down to do i t ; I turnmy attention toward i t . I realize th at it 's going o n continuously. So , more an d more,my at tention, as now, is on i t ." Richard Fleming and Will iam Duckworth, eds. , JohnCage at Seventy-Five (Lo nd on : Associated U niversity Presses, 1 98 9), 22.33. Jo h n Cage, Variations I I I (N ew York: Henm ar Press, 1963 ) .34. Kostelanetz, John Cage, 19.35 . Ko stelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 110-1 1.36. Ca ge , Variations Ill, p. 4 of l ist , Jo h n Cage Literary Ar chive , Wes leyan Univ er-sity Library.37. Ko stelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 211-12.38. Kostelanetz, John Cage, 197.39. Ca ge , Silence, x. Cag e's definition of wh at constitutes poetry is reduc tive at best.It does, however, help to place several of Cage's writings (which would include thoseso far discussed, "Lecture o n No thing " an d "Lecture o n Something") in the co ntextof poetry. It is not the place of this analysis to define poetry; I would, however, sub-mit that poetry is usually written by writers who consider it to be poetry. As such, Iregard the aforementioned lectures as Cage regarded them: as poetry.40. Th is study ends in 1975 with th e com pletion of Empty Words for reasons tha twill become apparent as the analysis progresses. Cage's

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