Conversing with Cage

Richard Kostelanetz

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135949709
• Edizione: 2
• Argomento: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoria: Music Biographies

Conversing with Cage draws on over 150 interviews with John Cage conducted over four decades to draw a full picture of his life and art. Filled with the witty aphorisms that have made Cage as famous as an esthetic philosopher as a composer, the book offers both an introduction to Cage's way of thinking and a rich gathering of his many thoughts on art, life, and music. John Cage is perhaps this century's most radical classical composer. From his famous silent piece (4'33) to his proclamation that all sound is music, Cage stretched the aesthetic boundaries of what could be performed in the modern concert hall. But, more than that, Cage was a provocative cultural figure, who played a key role in inspiring scores of other artists-and social philosophers-in the second half of the 20th century. Through his life and work, he created revolutions in thinking about art, and its relationship to the world around us. Conversing with Cage is the ideal introduction to this world, offering in the artist's own words his ideas about life and art. It will appeal to all fans of this mythic figure on the American scene, as well as anyone interested in better understanding 20th century modernism.

ONE: Autobiography

I was born in Los Angeles in 1912. My family’s roots are completely American. There was a John Cage who helped Washington in the surveying of Virginia. My grandfather was an itinerant Methodist Episcopal minister.

After preaching ineffectively against Mormonism in Utah,

he ended up in Denver where he established the first Methodist Episcopal church. He was a man of extraordinary puritanical righteousness and would get very angry with people who didn’t agree with him. As a child my father used to run away from home whenever he got the chance. He was regarded as a black sheep.

My mother was married twice before she married my father, but she never told me this until after he died. She couldn’t remember her first husband’s name.

My father invented a submarine just before the First World War which had the world’s record for staying underwater, and he dramatized this by making an experimental trip on Friday the thirteenth, with a crew of thirteen, staying underwater for thirteen hours. But it never entered his mind that the value of staying underneath water lay in being invisible to people above. Because his engine ran on gasoline it left bubbles on the surface of the water. So his sub wasn’t used in the war, and Dad went bankrupt.—Jeff Goldberg (1976)

My father was an inventor, and he had a very beautiful idea for space travel—going to the moon and such things. He had a theory of how the universe works; it was called “electrostatic field theory.” He was able in his laboratory to simulate the universe, and he had little pith-balls of different sizes, in an electrostatic field, that actually went through the revolutions and orbits and so forth that the planets do. The people at the Pasadena institute [Cal Tech] couldn’t explain why his thing worked, so they refused to believe it; but they also couldn’t explain it away.

He believed that everything in the world has an electrostatic charge. That, in effect, is what gravity is. We don’t fall off the earth because of our electrical connection with the earth; but if there were a sphere of an optimum size, we would have to hold it down to keep it here. Otherwise, because of its size, it would assume a charge opposite to that of the earth, and it would automatically move away. He had seen this happen in his laboratory.

Now with Buckminster Fuller’s domes and construction devices, it would be perfectly simple to make an enormous sphere. It would then move away from the earth, without force, but, so to speak, in accord with nature. Then my dad’s idea was that, since you would be able to do that, you would then be able to do the reverse, which would be to change the nature of the charge and so approach your destination.—Robert Cordier (1973)

My first experience with music was through neighborhood piano teachers, and particularly my Aunt Phoebe. She said of the work of Bach and Beethoven that it couldn’t possibly interest me, she herself being devoted to the music of the nineteenth century. She introduced me to Moszkowski and what you might call Piano Music the Whole World Loves to Play. In that volume, it seemed to me that the works of Grieg were more interesting than the others.—Roger Reynolds (1962)

I started taking piano lessons when I was in the fourth grade at school but I became more interested in sight-reading than in running up and down the scales. Being a virtuoso didn’t interest me at all.—Jeff Goldberg (1976)

When I was twelve years old, I had a radio program. It was for the Boy Scouts of America. I rode on my bicycle from

Moss Avenue near Eagle Rock,

where we lived, over to KFWB in Hollywood. I told them that I had the idea of having a Boy Scout program and that the performers on the program would be Boy Scouts and that ten minutes of each hour would be used by someone from either a synagogue or a church who would give some kind of an inspiring talk, you know. I was in the tenth grade, and so KFWB told me just to run along.

So I went to the next radio station—KNX. It was nearby, and they liked the idea, and they said, “Do you have permission from the Boy Scouts to do this?” I said, “No, but I can get that.” So I went to the Boy Scouts and said that I had the agreement of KNX to have an hour every week for the Boy Scouts and was it all right with them? They said yes, and I said, “Well, will you cooperate with me? For instance, can I have the Boy Scout Band?” And they said, certainly not. They said you can do anything you like, but we won’t cooperate; so I went back and told the people at the radio station. They agreed. Every Friday after school—I was still in high school—I would go over to the radio station and conduct the program which I think was at something like four to five in the afternoon or five to six. During the week I would prepare the program by getting as many scouts as I could to play, oh say, violin solos or trombone solos.

If this was in 1924-25, radio was still new to America.

Well, radio was very close to my experience, because my father was an inventor. He was never given the credit for it, but he had invented the first radio to be plugged into the electric light system.

What was your idea for the show?

Well, what I told you: Boy Scouts performing and some ten-minute inspirational talk from a member of the clergy. I no sooner began the program than there was a great deal of correspondence, people writing in; and those letters would be read on the air by me. I was the master of ceremonies. When there was no one else to perform I played piano solos.

Of?

Mostly Music the Whole World Loves to Play. There used to be these books with that title. They were on all the neighborhood pianos. It’s sad that we no longer have pianos in every house, with several members of the family able to play, instead of listening to radio or watching television.

How long did your juvenile radio career go?

That lasted for two years. Isn’t that amazing? And it was so popular that it became a two-hour program, and the Boy Scouts became jealous. They came to the radio station and said that I had no authority and no right to have the program. So, of necessity, the radio station asked me to leave, and they accepted the real Boy Scouts, because I was only second class. I was not even a first-class scout. They accepted the real ones, and the real ones used it in a quite different way. They were very ostentatious and pushy. The result was that after two programs they were asked to leave.

Was there a sponsor?

No, this was before the day of grants.

So, even into the late twenties, your experience of music came mostly from live music.

From piano lessons and so on. It was in church primarily. Aunt Marge had a beautiful contralto voice. I loved to hear her sing, always on Sundays in church and sometimes on weekdays at home. Then in college, at Pomona, I met a Japanese tennis player who had some kind of physical trouble as a result of playing tennis. So he was resting by taking a few classes at Pomona College. He was absolutely devoted to the string quartets of Beethoven, and he had as fine a collection of recordings of those as one could find. His name was Tamio Abe, and he played all those records for me.—Richard Kostelanetz (1984)

When I was a child I took for granted that I could sing, and so I applied to get in the glee club. And they said, “You cannot just get in the glee club. Your voice has to be tested.” So they tested my voice and they said, “You do not have a voice.” So I was not allowed to be in the glee club. And until I was thirty-five years old I lived without “bursting into song,” so that in group situations where other people were singing I remained silent, which is my tendency now, too.

But then I began to sing as a soloist and I found it was interesting to do, and I have done that a great deal both privately and publicly.—Mark Gresham (1991)

Since I was convinced I would be a writer when I was in college, I was also convinced that college was of no use to a writer because teachers required everyone to read the same books. So I persuaded my mother and father that going to Europe would be more useful for someone who was going to write than continuing college and they agreed.—Paul Cummings (1974)

I went to Paris instead of continuing my third year of college, and in Paris I was struck first of all by the Gothic architecture. I spent a number of months studying flamboyant Gothic architecture at the Bibliothéque Mazarin. A professor I had had in college

José Pijoan

was furious with me for not being involved in modern architecture. He got me working with a modern architect

whose name was Goldfinger. Ironically, he got me to drawing Greek capitals for columns.

And then I heard that architect one day say that to be an architect you’d have to devote your entire life to architecture. And I realized I wasn’t willing to do that. I loved a number of other things—poetry was one, and also music.—Rob Tannenbaum (1985)

During the Depression in the early 19305, I found myself in Santa Monica, California, after having spent about a year and a half in Europe—in Paris, actually—where I rather quickly came in contact with a wide variety of both modern painting and modern music. The effect was to give me the feeling that if other people could do things like that I myself could. And I began, without benefit of a teacher, to write music and to paint pictures, so that when I came back from Europe I was in Santa Monica where I had no way to make a living—I was a dropout from college—and I showed my music to people whose opinion I respected and I showed my paintings to people whose opinion I respected. Among those for painting were Galka Scheyer, who had brought “The Blue Four” [Lyonel Feininger, Alexej Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee] from Europe, and Walter Arensberg, who had the great collection that was formed really by Marcel Duchamp. And I showed my music to Richard Buhlig, who was the first person to play Schoenberg’s Opus II. The sum total of all that was that the people who heard my music had better things to say about it than the people who looked at my paintings had to say about my paintings. And so I decided to devote myself to music. Meanwhile I had gone from house to house in Santa Monica selling lectures on modern music and modern painting. I sold ten lectures for $2.50 and I had an audience of something like thirty or forty housewives once a week. I assured them that I knew nothing about the subject but that I would find out as much as I could each week and that what I did have was enthusiasm for both modern painting and modern music. In this way I taught myself, so to speak, what was going on in those two fields. And I came to prefer the thought and work of Arnold Schoenberg to that of Stravinsky.—Alan Gillmor (1973)

Schoenberg was approaching sixty when I became one of his students in 1933. At the time what one did was to choose between Stravinsky and Schoenberg. So, after studying for two years with his first American student, Adolph Weiss, I went to see him in Los Angeles. He said, “You probably can’t afford my price,” and I said, “You don’t need to mention it because I don’t have any money.” So he said, “Will you devote your life to music?” and I said I would. And though people might feel, because I know my work is controversial, that I have not devoted myself to music utterly, that I have spent too much time with chess, or with mushrooms, or writing, I still think I’ve remained faithful. You can stay with music while you’re hunting mushrooms. It’s a curious idea perhaps, but a mushroom grows for such a short time and if you happen to come across it when it’s fresh it’s like coming upon a sound which also lives a short time.—Jeff Goldberg (1976)

How did you, an experimentalist par excellence, come to study with such a formal structuralist twelve-tone composer?

In the ’30s we didn’t take Bartók seriously. We took Stravinsky and Schoenberg seriously as the two directions that one could legitimately take. I chose Schoenberg, and I think it was right, because toward the end of his life Stravinsky also turned to twelve-tone music.

I worshipped Schoenberg—I saw in him an extraordinary musical mind, one that was greater and more perceptive than the others.—Paul Hertelendy (1982)

Schoenberg was a magnificent teacher, who always gave the impression that he was putting us in touch with musical principles. I studied counterpoint at his home and attended all his classes at USC and later at UCLA when he moved there. I also took his course in harmony, for which I had no gift. Several times I tried to explain to Schoenberg that I had no feeling for harmony. He told me that without a feeling for harmony I would always encounter an obstacle, a wall through which I wouldn’t be able to pass. My reply was that in that case I would devote my life to beating my head against that wall—and maybe that is what I’ve been doing ever since. In all the time I studied with Schoenberg he never once led me to believe that my work was distinguished in any way. He never praised my compositions, and when I commented on other students’ work in class he held my comments up to ridicule. And yet I worshipped him like a god.—Calvin Tomkins (1965)

Anyway, Schoenberg lived in a dark, quasi-Spanish house, and he had no grand piano, just an upright. He wasn’t tall, and he had very poor taste in clothes. He was almost bald and he looked as though he was haunted. As far as I was concerned, completely he was not an ordinary human being. I literally worshipped him. I tried to do my work as well as I could for him, and he invariably complained that none of his pupils, including me, did enough good work. If I followed the rules too strictly he would say, “Why don’t you take a little more liberty?” and then when I would break the rules, he’d say, “Why do you break the rules?” I was in a large class at USC when he said quite bluntly to all of us, “My purpose in teaching you is to make it impossible for you to write music,” and when he said that, I revolted, not against him, but

against

what he had said. I determined then and there, more than ever before, to write music.—Jeff Goldberg (1976)

He refused to look at my compositions (in class). When I came up with a long fugue subject, he’d simply say, “Put it in your next symphony.”—Paul Hertelendy (1982)

Someone asked Schoenberg about his American pupils, whether he’d had any that were interesting, and Schoenberg’s first reply was to say there were no interesting pupils, but then he smiled and said, “There was one,” and he named me. Then he said, “Of course he’s not a composer, but he’s an inventor—of genius.”—Jeff Goldberg (1976)

You had the good fortune to study with two people who were extremely important for twentieth-century music: Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg. With Schoenberg, ther...