John Cage\'s Peculiar Musical Ontology (Draft)

John Cage’s Peculiar Ontology: Concrete Anti-Creationism

William Pearson MUS507 Cage, Feldman, Brown Prof. Erik Lund 2015

I. Introduction: John Cage and Philosophy It is often said that John Cage is as much a philosopher as he is a composer. Indeed, much of Cage’s documented thought on music revolves around musical ontology and epistemology. When Cage says, for example, that “[s]ince the sounds were just sounds, this gave people hearing them the chance to be people, centered within themselves where they actually are, not off artificially in the distance as they are accustomed to be, trying to figure out what is being said by some artist by means of sounds,” he is wading into deep philosophical waters, speculating on what he takes musical works to be and what he believes our relationship to them should be.1 Much of the discussion of Cage’s philosophy has stayed within the confines of musicological literature, or has revolved around his relationship to eastern philosophy, namely Zen Buddhism. When discussions of Cage’s philosophy do venture into Western philosophical thought, they tend to focus on the Continental literature (as do most discussions of aesthetics or philosophy of music, generally). Cage’s deference to chance procedures, for example, has been seen as a Schopenhauerian relinquishing of self to the chaotic “Will” of the universe.2 Cage has also been seen as akin to post-modern or post-structural thinkers, like Gilles Deleuze. Indeed, Cage’s focus on “sounds in themselves,” emancipated from the Germanic aspiration of transcendent musical organization, is highly reminiscent of Deleuze’s view of structure as secondary to a fundamental and unrestrained aesthetic material.3

1

Quoted in Paul Griffiths, Modern Music: The Avant Garde Since 1945. New York: G. Braziller, (1981)

2 Alperson,

Philip. Musical Worlds: New Directions in the Philosophy of Music. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, (1998): 125. 3

Ibid., 126

What has been largely neglected in Cage scholarship, however, is how his philosophy of music intersects with the Analytic tradition of Philosophy which permeates academia in the English speaking world. This oversight is perhaps not surprising. The Analytic tradition, predicated as it is on formal logic and mathematical precision, contrasts greatly with Cage’s often amorphous and vague style of speech and writing. Despite this stylistic difference, I will attempt in this paper to situate Cage’s thought (extracted not just from his writings, but from his music as well) within current Analytic thought. Indeed, there has been a recent surge of interest in musical ontology and epistemology in the Analytic community, spearheaded by philosophers like Julian Dodd, Brian Caplan, Jerrold Levinson and others. Much of their writing revolves around fundamental ontological and epistemological questions: what constitutes a work of music, and how can we know anything about it? Broadly speaking, there are two opposing schools of thought regarding musical ontology: Eternalism (often described as Platonism) and Creationism. Before beginning an orientation of Cage, I will begin by explicating these two contrasting ontological theses and their respective epistemological consequences.

II. Musical Eternalism and Musical Creationism Eternalism is the view that musical works are eternal, abstract objects which exist independently of us. Creationism is the view that musical works are created by us. There are two sub-genres of Creationism, Concrete Creationism and Abstract Creationism. Concrete Creationism is the view that musical works are identical to concrete events or objects. The Concrete Creationist might describe musical works as “fusions of spatially scattered performances,” for example.4 Abstract Creationism, like Eternalism, holds that musical works 4

Caplan, B. "Defending Musical Perdurantism." The British Journal of Aesthetics 46 (2006): 59-69.

are abstract. But contra the Eternalist, the Abstract Creationist believes that musical works are crucially connected to their composer, “contextually qualified, person-and-time-tethered abstract[a].”5 The reason analytic philosophers disagree so fundamentally on what constitutes a musical work has to do with the multiplicity of musical works. Musical works are not like paintings. A painting is a “non-repeatable… there can be only one [Mona Lisa] at any given time and place.”6 Eternalists like Julian Dodd see musical works as abstract entities in large part because it seems impossible to locate a single thing in the world which constitutes the work of music. As Dodd puts it, “There exists no concrete particular with which a piece of music can be plausibly identified.”7 Indeed, musical works are instantiated in diverse media: recordings, performances, and scores. Furthermore, each performance, recording or score is itself one of many; musical work instantiations are multiple and varied. If performances simply were the musical work, missed or wrong notes in performance would necessarily result in new musical works. But for the Eternalist a missed or wrong note in a musical performance is not, ontologically speaking, that big of a deal. An Eternalist, who takes musical works to be eternal abstracta, escapes the multiplicity problem by subsuming repeated performances under the umbrella of the abstract musical work. On the other side of the ontological spectrum, Concrete Creationists cannot sidestep multiplicity so elegantly. For the Concrete Creationist a musical work does not give rise to varied performances like it does for the Eternalist or Abstract Creationist, but instead consists of all of 5

Levinson, Jerrold. Music, Art and Metaphysics. Ithica: Cornell University Press, (1990): 63

6

Le, Thien-Tin M. "Musical Platonism: A Challenge to Levinson," Res Cogitans: Vol. 3: Iss. 1, (2010): 62

7

Dodd, Julian. “Musical Works and Eternal Types.” British Journal of Aesthetics 40, (2000): 424.

those varied performances. Whatever viewing musical works as “fusions of spatially scattered performances” lacks in elegance, however, it makes up for in epistemic access. It is easy to see how we can know things about concrete musical performances and thus it is easy to see how we can know things about musical works given Concrete Creationism. An Abstract Creationist who takes musical works to be “contextually qualified, personand-time-tethered abstract[a]” must be concerned with facts of authorship or historical circumstance that are ontologically irrelevant to Eternalists. For the Eternalist, the musical work exists independently of authorship and historical context just as it does for scores and performances. As the Eternalist Peter Kivy asks about our intuitive reaction to learning that a work was written not by JS Bach, but by his son JC Bach: “Do we think of it as a different work or as the same work with a different history?”8 Kivy believes the latter. Placing the ontological center of gravity on the creator requires the Abstract Creationist to concede that two identically scored works are fundamentally different if they have different authors. Eternalism thus escapes the multiplicity problem without offending some of these intuitions about musical works. Unlike Concrete Creationism, it maintains musical works as singular objects which exist independently of varied performances, not clunky “fusions” of performances. It also avoids the uncomfortable conclusion of Abstract Creationists that two sonically indistinguishable pieces of music may indeed be different works. But Eternalism importantly differs from Abstract and Concrete Creationism in its epistemological repercussions. Because the Eternalist cannot appeal to concrete scores, performances or authorial indications to secure their beliefs about musical works (because none of these things are the

8

Kivy, Peter. “Platonism in Music: Another Kind of Defense.” American Philosophical Quarterly 24 (1987): 246.

musical work), they must contend that it is the sound of the work which constitutes its normative properties. That is, it is purely the sounds of a given performance which make it a properly or improperly formed instantiation of the abstract musical work. Dodd describes musical works as “sequence[s] of sound-[abstracta] with all audible characteristics comprised.” And, unlike some Eternalists (notably Roger Scruton9), Dodd includes timbral properties in his ontology, and not simply pitch. This view, that the normative properties of musical works are sonic, is called Sonicism. Dodd takes Sonicism to be the prima facie correct description of normative musical properties. The Eternalist’s dependence on Sonicism only exacerbates the epistemological problem, despite its intuitive appeal. This is because the sonic element of music is multiplicitous to the extreme. The qualitative nature of the sound from multiple performances of a single musical work will vary greatly depending on countless factors: the performer, the precision of the performance, the instrument it is played on, etc. Indeed, even the qualitative nature of the sound from a single performance will vary greatly depending on where the listener sits in the hall, how acute their hearing is, etc. This is all to stress that the problem of multiplicity, which persists for the Eternalist/Sonicist, is a problem which Cage seems deeply interested in throughout his career.

III. Situating Cage: Anti-Creationism, Sonicism and Multiplicity “When we listen to a piece of music, the sounds made are not of interest to us as symptoms of their causes; they are of interest in themselves.” 10 This is a quote by the Eternalist Julian Dodd, but it could easily be misattributed to an unusually cogent John Cage. What Dodd is 9

Dodd, Julian. “Confessions of an Unrepentant Timbral Sonicist.” British Journal of Aesthetics 50 (2010): 35.

10

Ibid., 37

expressing here in the name of Eternalism, and with which Cage seems to agree, is an anticreationist sentiment. Remember, Eternalists like Julian Dodd do not believe that musical works are created. Instead, Dodd would suggest they are discovered in the same way that mathematical equations or scientific breakthroughs are. Cage, again striking an anti-creationist tone, seems to agree, famously saying that “just as you go along the beach and pick up pretty shells that please you, I go into the piano and find sounds I like.”11 Cage’s resonance with an Eternalist like Dodd does not include, however, the view that musical works are abstract. Cage says, for example: “I imagine that as contemporary music goes on changing in the way that I'm changing it what will be done is to more and more completely liberate sounds from abstract ideas about them and more and more exactly to let them be physically uniquely themselves.”12 This is an explicitly anti-abstract statement, suggesting with the use of the word “physically” that he views sounds as concrete objects. Cage may be best described, it seems, as a Concrete Anti-Creationist. This is a curious label; there are no concrete anti-creationists in the Analytic literature. Why might this be? It does not seem to be the case that Concrete Anti-Creationism is metaphysically incoherent. That is, the reason it has not been taken up by philosophers is not that it is an untenable position. Compositional discovery in this Cageian context isn’t like the discovery Dodd imagines, akin to mathematical discovery. Instead, composers are something like explorers, discovering new species in uncharted landscapes. This is a perfectly coherent view to have of composition, if somewhat unorthodox. It is likely, then, that the reason Concrete Anti-Creationism is not a

11

Cage, John, and Richard Kostelanetz. John Cage: An Anthology. New York, NY: Da Capo, 1991.

12

Ibid., 54

defended position in the analytic literature has something to do with its implications for epistemology. After all, the reasons for defending Eternalism over Creationism have everything to do with how Eternalism deals with the epistemological problem of multiplicity. It makes sense, then, to see how Cage deals with this problem in his own musical thought. In order to tackle multiplicity in Cage’s work, Sonicism should first be considered, especially since Sonicism seems to exacerbate this issue of multiplicity. John Cage often spoke about sound, and did so in a manner consistent with the metaphor of the explorer put forward above: “Hearing sounds which are just sound immediately sets the theorizing mind to theorizing, and the emotions of human beings are continually aroused by encounters with nature. Does not a mountain unintentionally evoke in us a sense of wonder? otters along a stream a sense of mirth? Night in the woods a sense of fear?” 13 Again we see in Cage’s thought a fixation on the physicality or naturalness of sound consistent with the proposed Concrete Anti-Creationist view. Cage goes on to say that, “These responses to nature are mine and will not necessarily correspond with another's. Emotion takes place in the person who has it. And sounds, when allowed to be themselves, do not require that those who hear them do so unfeelingly.” It would seem, then, that just as the Eternalist is drawn to their Eternalism because of the work it does in explaining how different performances of a work can be of the same work, so too is Cage drawn to his Concrete view for ulterior reasons. For Cage this seems to address head on the multiplicity problem in its most potent form. Remember, what I have argued is epistemologically problematic for Eternalism is that the Eternalist’s commitment to Sonicism undoes the exact thing that motivates Eternalism in the first

13

Pritchett, James. The Music of John Cage. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, (1993): 207.

place. The Eternalist can claim that two different performances can be of the same work because the work is something separate, something abstract and eternal. But in adding Sonicism to the mix, the Eternalist opens herself up again to the problem of multiplicity. Not only does the sound of every piano differ, but the sound of the same piano will differ within a single performance depending on, for example, where the listener is seated in the hall, or how acute their hearing is. Cage’s Sonicism thus appears somewhat better motivated than the Eternalist’s. Cage appears to embrace outright the multiplicity problem in his speaking about music, and indeed, as we will see, many of his works seem to explicitly invite multiplicity. Furthermore, because Cage’s Sonicism is not paired with abstraction, he avoids the epistemological morass that the Eternalist finds herself in. How do we know anything about musical works, given this Cageian ontology of Concrete Anti-Creationism? It’s trivially easy. Musical works are concrete objects just like mountains or tables or chairs, and we thus have a causal relationship with them, sufficient for securing knowledge.14

IV. Case Studies: Music of Changes, Variation V, and the Number Pieces Having sketched Cage’s musical ontology as derived from his speech and writing, we can now turn to his compositions, and see if this Concrete Anti-Creationism is retained, and how it might evolve over the course of his career. Music of Changes (1951) contains a compositional technique which stayed with Cage through his entire career: the use of I Ching-derived chance procedures to determine various

14

Eternalism’s epistemological problems are even worse than not being able to secure causal knowledge. Indeed, for many Analytic Philosophers, causal connection is too high a bar to set. For example, I know that all rubies are red despite not having a causal connection to all rubies. Cases like this lead philosophers to instead speak of explanatory security, wherein one can have knowledge about something if one’s beliefs are explained by that thing, but needn’t be causally connected.

musical parameters. These chance procedures, and where they intercede in the work are relevant to present philosophical concerns. First, the main function these chance procedures have is to lesson the composer’s control of the resulting work. As such, they are perfectly in line with anticreationism. Second, these chance procedures happen in the process of creating (or perhaps assembling is more apt) the work, and the finished work itself is as strictly notated as any. That is, the work itself, once composed, is fixed. The fixedness of Music of Changes resonates with Cage’s views of musical works as Concrete. Just as there can be “only one Mona Lisa,” so too can there be only one Music of Changes. In these two ways, this early work seems to support Cage as Concrete Anti-Creationist. It is worth mentioning, however, that this work is subject to the same problem of multiplicity as any Beethoven sonata or Schubert lied. That in itself is not surprising, but it is notable that the multiplicity which arrises from performance is not accounted for in any way within the work. Instead it seems to focus solely on the multiplicity of the compositional process, the many ways such a work could be assembled. This suggests that Cage’s Concrete AntiCreationism might not be a fundamental metaphysical claim, but merely an aesthetic one. It is not that musical works can not contain the kinds of communicative power often attributed to them, that “[composing] is not a question of having something to say,” but instead it seems that Cage merely prefers to write music which doesn’t communicate in the way the Romantics imagined. And one easy way of insuring this is to allow chance procedures into the compositional process. Music of Changes is thus consistent with the current hypothesis, but is not a home-run exemplar of Concrete Anti-Creationism. Other works of Cage, however, seem to suggest deeper ontological views.

Variations V (1965) is one such piece. This work could be classified as a ‘happening,’ that is, an organized collection of disparate activities, many of which are indeterminate in performance. The score to Variations V calls itself “37 Remarks re: An Audio-Visual Performance.” These remarks range from very indeterminate and opaque suggestions (“Intermittent,” “Irrelevance”) to more specific instructions (“Change tuning of short wave receivers selectively, favoring non-referential noise areas”). The original performance of this work involved choreography by Merce Cunningham, a film by Stan VanDerBeek, and television images by Nam June Paik. The sound sources for the first performance were short-wave radios and tapes with recordings of sounds (the sound of a kitchen drain, for example) that were recorded by Cage. With such disparate authorship, this work fits into the Anti-Creationist mold, but in a much less self-conscious way than Music of Changes. That is to say that in Music of Changes, Cage’s main preoccupation seems to be with the mitigation of authorship by using chance procedures, while in Variations V the authorship is simply spread around. Variations V, and Cage’s pieces of this era in general, is less fixated on sound than much of his previous work. Here movement, image, activity, and sound are all on equal footing. This adds further support to the observation that Cage’s Sonicism is motivated by different reasons than the Eternalist’s is. The Eternalist turns to sound as something of a last resort, having discarded the possibility that Authorship or Concrete score/performance determine the normative properties of any given work. But Cage, I am arguing, embraces the concrete performance, the happening, and his Sonicism is merely the default position of a Concrete Anti-Creationist working in the medium of sound. When the medium shifts, as it does in Variation V, to dance,

video and activity, Cage’s philosophy needn’t shift with it; a concrete sound object is simply replaced by a concrete performance-object. The issue of multiplicity is curious in the case of Variations V. On the one hand, the instructions seem to refer to the first performance, with Cage, Cunningham and Paik. That original performance is, again, ontologically on-par with a Concrete view. There is only one Mona Lisa and only one first performance of Variations V. But any subsequent performance of the work will differ greatly, as the instructions lack the specificity for a faithful reproduction of the first performance. This is a fascinating state of affairs in how it mirrors the Eternalist position. For the Eternalist, the musical work is an abstraction floating in the Platonic heavens, a perfect form of the work which subsumes the necessarily varied instantiations that are it’s performances. Cage seems to have brought this Platonic structure down to Earth, with the first performance giving rise to the score, which, in its vagueness, will necessarily give rise to varied performances. This analogy between Eternalism and Cage’s Concrete Anti-Creationism perfectly captures, I think, his unusual Ontological orientation. In the last years of Cage’s life, from 1987-1992, he wrote mostly ‘Number Pieces.’ The vast majority of these pieces use “time-brackets” which indicate a small bit of musical material (often only a single pitch) and two time-stamps. The first time indicates at what time the musical material should begin (this can be either a fixed time or a range) and the second time-stamp indicates where it should end. Chance procedures were used to create these works, granting the same mitigation of Creationism or authorship seen in Music of Changes. But the flexibility of the time-bracket technique injects indeterminacy into the performance, as well. In this way, the Anti-

Creationism of the number pieces is more complete, having gained, perhaps, some of the performative indeterminacy contained in his works from the 60s. Cage’s Sonicism in the number pieces is not quite what it appears, either. Most of the number pieces are traditionally scored for instrumentalists, like Music of Changes. But the number pieces indicate actions in a way that Music of Changes does not. It is true that any musical score, Music of Changes included, can be seen as purely indicating actions, but in the number pieces these actions are highlighted, while the traditional musical material is suppressed. This is to say that Cage extracts the activity of performance from the musical material: the single pitch printed on a page of a number piece has been drained of any indication of activity. That activity (of starting and stopping) is then presented separately in the score in the form of a timebracket. Again, this focus on activity perhaps reflects the influence of performance-based works like Variations V. The number pieces are perhaps, then, Cage’s most self-consciously multiplicitous works, and perhaps his most clearly Concrete Anti-Creationist. Multiplicity is built in to the work, fixed in the score, making it concrete. Furthermore, indeterminacy pervades the compositional process, mitigating Creationism. The work is concrete; it is a particularly notated collection of performative possibilities, derived (through chance procedures) from some particular collection of compositional possibilities. VI. Addendum: Performing Feldman and Cage As a final addendum to this foray into Cage’s ontology, I will prepare and perform his first number piece, One for Solo Piano (1987), and compare it to Morton Feldman’s Intermission 6 for Solo Piano (1953), a piece which bears a superficial similarity.

Cage’s One is a particularly dense number piece, lasting ten minutes, and using mostly variable time brackets. That is, the beginnings and endings of musical material take place within ranges, and these ranges often overlap, in this case by fifteen seconds. The work also specifies dynamics for each vertical sonority. Feldman’s Intermission 6 also contains short snippets of musical material, often vertical sonorities, which are to be played in no particular order. All sounds should be played, Feldman notes, as softly as possible. The duration of the piece is indeterminate. In one crucial way, these two works are diametrically opposed. When performing the Cage, one is incredibly aware of the passing of time, while in Feldman’s work, there is no anxiety about when the performance should progress or end. Cage’s work is perhaps more nuanced in this way, in that the performer, when in ‘the middle’ of a time bracket, can capture some fleeting moments of the temporal freedom afforded throughout Feldman’s work. Playing Feldman’s work, I find myself meditating on the subjective experience of passing time. Playing Cage’s, I am consistently comparing the experience of paying attention to time with the experience of not paying attention to it. In this way, Cage comes off not as a vague spouter of Zen truisms, but as quite ‘analytical’ compared to Feldman. That is, Cage’s work seems to encourage something like the testing of a hypothesis of experience, and not simply subjective experience, unexamined. I find it hard to appreciate a sense of multiplicity when performing Cage’s work. It is, indeed, more fixed. And yet, as has often been observed, from its stricter structure springs overwhelming possibilities of performance choice. In the Feldman, despite its openness, the performer has perhaps only two choices to make: when to play the next sonority, and which

sonority to play. In the Cage, many more options arise regarding how each hand should line up, how to organize each time bracket. Another way of expressing this difference is that performing the Cage feels much more compositional than performing the Feldman. It is almost as if one is joining in on Cage’s compositional process, with an overwhelming amount of performative choices filling in for chance procedures. This seems to lend credence to Cage as an AntiCreationist. As far as Concreteness goes, Cage’s work is not only more temporally fixed, but it encourages less focus on subjective experience than Feldman’s. That is, it feels more like a concrete, solitary musical work than a listening experience.

Excerpt from One by John Cage

Intermission 6 by Morton Feldman

Works Cited

Alperson, Philip. Musical Worlds: New Directions in the Philosophy of Music. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1998. Cage, John, and Richard Kostelanetz. John Cage: An Anthology. New York, NY: Da Capo, 1991. Caplan, B. "Defending Musical Perdurantism." The British Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 46, 2006. Dodd, Julian. “Confessions of an Unrepentant Timbral Sonicist.” British Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 50, 2010. Dodd, Julian. “Musical Works and Eternal Types.” British Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 40, 2000. Griffiths, Paul. Modern Music: The Avant Garde Since 1945. New York: G. Braziller, 1981. Kivy, Peter. “Platonism in Music: Another Kind of Defense.” American Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 24, 1987. Le, Thien-Tin M. "Musical Platonism: A Challenge to Levinson," Res Cogitans Vol. 3, 2010. Levinson, Jerrold. Music, Art and Metaphysics. Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1990. Pritchett, James. The Music of John Cage. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.