Essay on Cage & Schafer

Written by André Pinto

Introduction on Schizophonia

“Ancient life was all silence. In the 19th Century, with the invention of machines,

Noise was born.” (Russolo, Luigi, 1913)

It is clear that the Industrial Revolution (19th Century) was one of the most significant

events in human history since the change from nomadic to agrarian life. It initiated the

transition from rural to urban life, from the agricultural work in the fields to the

standardized and repetitive work in the factories. The steam engine was invented, and

the locomotive became the symbol of the industrial era.

Along with factories, trains and new machinery and the new speed of living,

also came a new sound universe, never heard before, never so loud. The new voice of

machines! The so-called Noise. The world soundscape mutated. Now, urban life was

becoming cacophonic, lo-fi, for we began losing aural perspective, drowning in a

dense mass of sounds.

The Electric Revolution of the 20th Century aggravated the soundscape even

more. The speed of life significantly increased and transformed repetitive /rhythmic

noises in electric drones with the invention of the automobile, the jet plane, the

electric train…

Also, the electricity came to change sound radically, for it lost its physical and

acoustical source, its visual and material body. Loudspeakers and tape recorders were

invented, and sounds became just sounds – sonus: “The dissociation of seeing and

hearing here encourages another way of listening: we listen to sonorous forms,

without any aim other than that” (Schaeffer, Pierre, 1977). R Murray Schafer (1977)

nominated this phenomenon Schizophonia, i.e. where sounds are split from their

original sources by electroacoustical reproduction.

Electro-acoustics and magnetic tape, together with the new “noisy”

soundscape of the industrialized world, provoked a drastic change in the paradigms of

previous times. It originated a whole new way of thinking Sound and Music and its

composing methods, since they were not necessarily connected to its acoustical source

anymore, sounds could now be played, composed and manipulated as independent

objects.

Silence and The Soundscape

How do we perceive the sounds of the environment? How do we perceive music?

What is music to us? What do we call noise? And what can we call silence?

These are some of the points on which John Cage’s Silence (1961) and R

Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape: The Tuning of the World (1977) works focuses on

(Cage in the field of musical composition and Schafer in the field of acoustic

ecology):

From noises to sounds

The soundscape of the world has changed! We now live in a reality that

Mankind has never listened to before, surrounded by sounds, with no space for

silence. A constant immersion in the new urban (and many times also rural)

soundscape of noises. What is noise?

Schafer and Cage have similar theories about this topic: Schafer states that

“Noise pollution results when man does not listen carefully. Noises are sounds we

have learned to ignore.” (1977, p.4), and for Cage “wherever we are, what we hear is

mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it

fascinating” (1961, p.3).

It is clear, in both opinions, that noise only exists when one isn’t focused on a

particular sound phenomenon. In that case, sound may turn irritating, polluting. Both

of them share concepts of Ear Cleaning for Clairaudience, even though slightly

different from one to another.

John Cage is concerned with listening to sounds as they are, and giving them

(similarly to what Schoenberg did with the tonal system) total liberty of being/living

without hierarchic rules, but a total importance and independence is given to the

individual sound which automatically integrates itself in its group, which is

determined by the other individual sounds, time and space. Total freedom to all

sounds—and noises! One ought to regard them for their morphology, their living

characteristics, their acting in time and space, and one ought to learn to listen to them

carefully and appreciate them for what they are, “not an attempt to understand

something that is being said, for, if something were being said, the sounds would be

given the shapes of words. Just an attention to sounds” (Cage, 1961, p.10). All noises

are thus welcome—and we must be fully respectful of their nature. Cage is interested

in these sounds for musical use. He is interested in capturing, via tape recorder, and

being able to control these sounds as musical instruments.

Schafer turns his attention to the “healing” of the acoustic environment, where

Clairaudience is necessary for the understanding, judgement, and later, discrimination

of the sounds/noises which are prejudicial for our livings. Ear Cleaning is a discipline

one should develop for discerning the sounds that involve us, and to fight against

Noise Pollution. For we live in a lo-fi soundscape, where aural perspective is lost, we

can no longer distinguish between background and foreground sounds for the acoustic

environment is densely over-populated and over-amplified.

This ecological approach has been designed to improve our lives in the

acoustic environment, with full respect for our nature and Nature itself. Schafer’s

project consists in studying the soundscape of the world through history and its social

implications and effects, so we can discern what’s acoustically harmful and

unpleasant for us and naturally be able to erase it. It is of course a hard task, because

noises change, “what’s considered a noise in one society is not considered a noise in

another society” (Schafer, 2010). But it all may be subjective, that’s why all the study

of the world soundscape has been made. The Acoustic Designer, as also an ecologist,

has the task of improving the acoustic reality of nowadays in order to provide the

world with a healthier sonorous morphology, not with the aim of silencing the world,

but of restoring freedom of sounding from a highly imperialistic soundscape.

In a little different way, Schafer is interested in the tape recorder. The tape

recorder brought about the possibility of conserving extinguishing sounds. From the

beginning of times it only has been possible to register experiences of sounds, i.e.,

through oral transmission, literature and musical notation. Until the creation of sound

recording devices, we could only imagine, and study the soundscape through

“digested” descriptions of experiences of other people. Now, not only has it become

possible to record, to preserve, but also to manipulate them and add them to the

musical practice as new instrument for musical composition, as Pierre Schaeffer did

back in the 1940s. “The unique soundmark deserves to make history as surely as a

Beethoven symphony” (Schafer, 1977, p.239).

Silence

Silence used to be a very concrete, objective idea. It meant the absolute

absence of sound. But, when one realises sound never ceases to exist, that conception

of silence gets questioned, and becomes an abstract idyllic concept, like infinity,

eternity or nothingness. It is now up to us to find it an appropriate meaning.

Schafer considers that absolute silence is feared by the western man, because

it represents the absence of life, it is in a sense connected to solitude and death—for

death is our ultimate silence. Man, therefore, has the need of breaking silence bursting

a sound. But what silence? Well, Schafer considers that “When man regards himself

as central in the universe, silence can only be considered as approximate, never

absolute” (1977, p.256), therefore he uses Poe’s definition of silence from Al Aaraaf:

“Quiet we call ‘Silence’—which is the merest word of all” (1829).

For Schafer, silence is something positive to be restored, something the new

soundscape stole from us, since there were no people concerned in maintaining it until

it was crushed by machines! Schafer’s silence, therefore, is more accurately closer to

the calm keynote ambience of a region’s environment, the remaining sounds of

nature, when one enjoys it as tranquillity.

Cage considers that silence doesn’t exist as we first conceived of it, because

that conception is created mentally in order to give us a measurement. “We had to

conceive of silence in order to open our ears” (Cage, 1988, p.9). “In fact, try as we

may to make a silence, we cannot” (Cage, 1961, p.8).

In musical notation silence exists conceptually, it happens in the times

instruments don’t play, the pauses. Therefore we must hear something, and that is the

sounds of the environment surrounding us, sounds which the composer has no control

over, sounds of the environment that happen unintentionally and many times aren’t

even very welcome by the composer or the audience. The “silences” that happen in a

musical piece, turn out to act like a breathing point where one can hear the

surrounding environment, as a mirroring back of the place where the piece is

performed.

At last, if we require practical definition of silence, it ends up being the sounds

of the environment, when that environment is most calm. The more aural perspective

we have in a soundscape where there is depth and we can better distinguish the figure

and ground sounds, the more silent the environment is. In the words of John Cage:

“Silence, almost everywhere in the world now, is traffic” (1992).

The Harmony of the Spheres

John Cage and R Murray Schafer, both embraced the 20 th Century’s evolution

of the world soundscape and of the music medium as a new form of freedom for new

approaches to composing and theorizing sound, as the raw material.

Yet, both of them inspire (as a basis in their philosophies) the ideas of the

ancient Pythagorean musical theory of the Harmony of the Spheres, where the

Cosmos may be interpreted as a moving organism governed by a celestial harmony—

Music.

Cage understands music as simply being sounds heard, intended or not, this

way preceding Schafer’s line of thought of the macrocosmic musical composition. As

said previously relating to sounds—Cage is always concerned in letting them be

freely respecting their nature and contemplating them. Therefore his musical practice

and theorization is a constant realization that we are part of Nature, and letting us be

freely part of it. Thus, making no distinction between intentional and unintentional

sounds, he revitalizes the modernists’ aspiration of dissolving the dichotomies of art-

life, subject-object, humanity-nature...

“this turning is psychological and seems at first to be a giving up of

everything that belongs to humanity – for a musician, the giving up of music.

This psychological turning leads to the world of nature, where, gradually or

suddenly, one sees that humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world

together; that nothing was lost when everything was given away. In fact,

everything is gained.”

(Cage, 1961, p.8)

However, Cage has a special pleasure in exploring mostly the unintentional sounds by

means of chance operations. His ways of regarding sounds and silence reflect a

deeper understanding of life and they transmit an ideal concept of what a society

based on freedom should be.

“People expect listening to be more than listening” (Cage, 1992). Sounds are

part of Nature like any other thing, and they’re always present, always happening, we

are able to create and control some, but they’re the same way part of a bigger Nature.

Regarding the sonic world as a musical piece one has to listen to sounds outwardly,

with no symbolic human meanings or emotions, and appreciate them in that way.

Sounds happen as a manifestation of life, and life simply happens. We ought

to enjoy the sounds of life just as simply as the life they sound when they act. Sounds

have a duration in time, they’re born and they die, between the two is when their

acting takes place and when we listen to them. They’re always different for they are

life! “A sound accomplishes nothing, without it life would not last a second” (Cage,

1961, p.14).

Schafer (1977) treats the world as a macrocosmic musical composition. and he

questions if it is an indeterminate composition over which we have no hand on, or if

we have the power to change it and act as if we were its composers and orchestra.

This is a question with no objective answer, for its purpose isn’t its direct response,

but an incentive to an ecological thinking consciousness on the sounds of the world.

But, either way, Schafer takes a stance towards this in his book The Soundscape: The

Tuning of the World (1977). In it, he pretends to regard the world as he states an

acoustic designer should: the world as a huge musical composition where “we are

simultaneously its audience, its performers and its composers.” (1977, p.205) This

makes us participants in the Symphony of the Universe, part of the environment in an

active way, part of Nature. We aspire to the utopian soundscape, and the key for

reaching it is music, the direct connection to the Harmony of the Spheres, which

would be listened to “if we could extend our consciousness outward to the universe

and to eternity” (Schafer, 1977, p.262). We would then, listen to silence—the

aspiration of perfection, the strive of every sound to infinity and eternity in the

cosmos.

“Through the practice of contemplation, little by little, the muscles and the

mind relax and the whole body opens out to become an ear” (Schafer, 1977, p.262).

Sources

Cage, John, 1961. Silence. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

Cage, John, 1988. anaRchy. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

Cage, John, 1992. In Listen, 1992. [Documentary film] Directed by Miroslav

Sebestik. France: Centre Georges Pompidou.

Poe, Edgar A, 1829. Al Aaraaf. In Schafer, R Murray, 1977. Our Sonic Environment

and THE SOUNDSCAPE: the Tuning of the World. Rochester: Destiny Books.

Scafer, R Murray, 1977. Our Sonic Environment and THE SOUNDSCAPE: the

Tuning of the World. Rochester: Destiny Books.

Schaeffer, Pierre, 1966. Traité des objects musicaux. Translated from French by

Daniel W Smith. In Cox, Christoph & Warner, Daniel eds., 2006. Audio Culture—Readings

in Modern Music. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc.

VideoScopie, 2010. Murray Schafer – La Semaine du Son 2010. [video online]

available at:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JX9VzICmKpA&feature=player_embedded> [Accessed

15 August 2010]