Silencing the Sounded Self - Cage and the Intentionality of Non Intention

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Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cageand 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. It was called "Odier 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 tiiey 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.l

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 II. 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.' " 2Cage found two allies in his battle with harmony: the Frenchcomposer Erik Satie and Anton Webern, a former student of Schoen-

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berg. In a lecture given at Black Mountain 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. With Satie and Webern 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.3For Cage, duration became a means of getting around the difficulty of"having no feeling for harmony." And by citing Webern, Cage wasable to use Schoenberg's most famous pupil as an example of howharmony was an erroneous method of structuring music.

It was silence that pointed Cage away from a harmony andtoward duration. According to Cage, harmony as a structuring methoddoes not include silence: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.4At 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 possibleapproach to structuring music? Obviously not. However, it does shedlight on Cage's motivation behind believing that such was the case.Harmony requires the imposition of unity upon musical material. Itis a humanly contrived method of writing music which cannot bedirectly found in nature. C-major chords may be naturally derived, buttheir structural relationships, as found in so-called tonal music, obey acarefully and humanly constructed system of rules. Cage, on the otherhand, was looking for justification outside of any musical tradition. Hewas attempting to uncover a structural connection between the mak-ing of music and the natural world. It had little to do with how music

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3 1 4 The Musical Quarterly

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 witli 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 irrational."5 And, 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 order."7 In 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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while walking along a beach. The form was as natural as my tastepermitted." On the other hand, regarding the form of the sonatas,Cage wrote: "[N]othing 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."8Interchangeability 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 music."9The "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, H , 7. T he forty-eight measures of each u nit are likewise sodivided."10 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. 1 lAs 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." 1 3 This remark, alsocited above, is from the beginning of Cage's "Lecture on Nothing." Its


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3 16 TheMusical Quarterly

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.

17This 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 thought, but (in certain 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-ence, is unitive knowledge of the divine Groundthe knowledge thatcan come only to those who are prepared to "die to self" and so makeroom as it were, for God.18Cage, more often than not, tried to emphasize the removal ofseparations 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 sixteen th century . . . he found this reason given forwriting a piece of music: 'to quiet the mind thus making it susceptibleto divine influences.' " 1 9 This approach to composition was no longercultural; it was universal in the original sense of the word. 20 Found inall cultures, such quietude was a reaching out into the world aroundu s , a removal of the separation between self and worlda 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 Iam saying it" "W ha t 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 HuangP o , the translator, John Blofeld, writes: "At first sight Zen works mustseem so paradoxical as to bewilder the reader. On 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." 2 1 A ndwhile 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 instance in which silence is producedthrough such paradox: within the self via what Cage considered hismost important legacy, "having shown the practicality of makingworks of art nonintentionally."2 2Nonintention 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 eac h oth er but need ea ch o the r to keep on going. " 2 4 A n dwhile formally Cage does not make nonintentional texts unti l longaf ter having accomplished this in musical composit ions, he does man-age to address the idea of nonintentional content in a text before heis able to do so in music.

I t is through chance opera t ions that Cage begins making unin-tentional music . For Cage, i t was an extremely unor thodox way ofZen prac t ice :

[RJather 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 pract ice asBuddhism, it did serve as a very effective method of composing.

Beg inning aroun d 1950, Ca ge used th e I Ching (Book of Changes)as a source of response to his composit ional quest ions. 2 6 In his fore-word to the Richard W ilheb n t r ans la t ion , C . G . Jung wr ite s :

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 I Ching, seems to be exclusively preoccupied with thechance aspect of things.27

And while Jung used the I Ching as a means of discover ing the uncon-scious mind within, Cage saw it as a way of getting outside the mindaltogether , a way of a l lowing nature , the environment, or what Zenwould cal l Mind with a capita l M, to respond to his composit ionalques t ions .

As Cage f requently mentioned, the idea of a "si lent piece" wasconceived ear l ier than 1952, when 4'33" received its premiere. I twas firs t public ly men tion ed in an address ent i t le d " A Com poser '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 C o. It will be 3 or 3^ minutes long; diesebeing the standard lengths of "canned" music and its tide will be SilentPrater. 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 imperceptibility.28

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 N ature in Art, that the function of art is to imitate Nature inher manner of operation." 29 Cage 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 not, it becomes! It moves, it changes! Itdoesn't wait for us to change. . . . It is more mobile tha n 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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tha t ma t te r , to produce the " someth ing" of in ten t iona l sounds? Howcan som eth ing an d noth ing be unopposed if on ly "no th in g" i sa l lowed? These are , of course , rhetor ica l quest ions, and as such theiranswers are obvious. Something and nothing can be only unopposed ifbo th in ten t ion and nonin ten t ion equa l ly coexis t .

This sent Cage in the direc t ion 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 11 but it still involved measurement.31

N ex t fol lowed a piece with out meas urem ent ent i t le d Variations III,writ ten in the shor t per iod of two months, f rom December 1962 toJanuary 1963. Richard Koste lanetz implies that Variations 111 solvessome inherent problems with the published version of 4'33", one ofwh ich, of course , is th e measure men t of t im e:

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 usavailable to the ear that wishesto perceive itin all spaces and at all times. (Variations III [1964], heonce told me over dinner, is so open, "We could be performing it rightnow, if we decided to do so" . . .). 3 2

The published score includes a t i t le page with the s ta tement,"Variations III for one or any number of people performing anyactions." There are no prescr ibed genres, e i ther in music or any othermedium, except for the fac t tha t i t is to be "performed." The act ionsthemselves are a lso undetermined except for the possibi l i ty that therewil l be ac t ions. The instruct ion page then reads:

Tw o transpa rent sheets of plastic , on e 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 8j 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 the largest group, so that a single maze of circlesremains, no one of them isolated from at least one other. Place theblank transparent sheet over this complex.Starting with any circle, observe the number of circles which overlapit. Make an action or actions having the corresponding number ofinterpenetrating variables (1 + n). This done, move on to any one ofthe overlapping circles again observing the number of interpenetrations,performing a suitable action or actions, and so on.Some or all of one's obligation may be performed through ambientcircumstances (environmental changes) by simply noticing orresponding to them.Though no means are given for the measurement of time or space(beginning, ending, or questions of continuity) or the specific interpen-etration of circles, such measurement and determination means are notnecessarily excluded from the "interpenetrating variables."Some factors though not all of a given interpenetration or succession ofseveral may be planned in advance. But leave room for the use ofunforeseen eventualities.Any other activities are going on at the same time. 3 3

The following brief analysis will show that in this piece Cage pro-duced a t ru ly nondual compos i t ion tha t a l lows bo th someth ing 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 for 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, "[A]ll 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 object." 34Through transparencies, however, the score need not be initiallyfixed. For example, in Variations III one drops circles on a page, whichresults in a collection of interpenetrating circles. However, there are


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32 2 Th e Musical Quaneriy

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 w ith th e 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 III, 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 111 which 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.3 5

On 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 diem



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Silencing the Sounded Self 3 2 3

overlap) do we know when something is finished and the next begins?The situation is irrational."36 It 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 VariationsII I 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 activityhe 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' demonstrations." 38 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. Frequentlyand this is as true of Cage as of many othersthe 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 analysis.40The 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 diis 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 diis 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.41The full title of the source Cage mentions is Diary: Emm a Lake

Music Workshop 1965. This introduction reads:Just before setting out for Saskatchewan to conduct a music workshopat Emma Lake in July 1965, 1 received a request from the editor ofCanadian Art for an article having fifteenhundred words. Since I wasbusy with a number of projects, I was on the point of replying that Ihad no time, when 1 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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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. 1965.42

The above-mentioned Diary introduction reads: "It is a mosaic ofideas, 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. And (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 unpredictability is the use of the method estab-lished in the I Ching (Book 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; lean, broken,straight, broken; ken, broken, broken, straight; kun, three broken; sun,


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326 The Musical Quarterly

v V

to - . -&>- % - r - - = . . - = V 6 ) . :- (9 v v ^

&

Figure I.

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 die Sounded Self 3 27

eight divisions vertically corresponding to die eight upper trigrams. Ahexagram having lines with circles is read twice, first as written, thenas changed . T hus , ch ien-c hien , straight lines with circles, is read firstas 1, then as kun-kun, 2; whereas chien-chien, straight lines withoutcircles is read only as I. 4 5

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 thirty. 46 However,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 I; three texts, part II; four texts, part III; threetexts, part IV; four texts, part V; three texts, part VI) 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." 4 8While 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 statemen t 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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Silencing the Sounded Self - Cage and the Intentionality of Non Intention