Reflecting on Some Words of John Cage

Earlier this year, when it was still possible to wander around San Francisco without worrying about others or even having any particular goal in mind, my wife and I made one of our visits to the City Lights Bookstore. I always enter that place thinking that I am not going to do anything other than browse, but I always seem to leave with a new acquisition. On this particular occasion I finally succumbed to purchasing The Selected Letters of John Cage, which my wife had been persuading me to buy simply because my name was in the index.

Since then I have been taking my time in progressing through the book. However, COVID-19 has allowed me to spend more time on it, simply because I feel it necessary to focus on doing productive things. More recently, I have been following the dates of the letters more closely to see which of them address circumstances I knew or had involved my (usually modest) contribution. One of my favorites had to do with Cage complaining about how hard it had been, when he was at the University of Illinois, to have a computer program that would implement his coin-tossing procedure for consulting the I Ching. To hear him tell the story, it took months before the program had been "debugged" enough to be useful.

I was there to hear that story. When the Merce Cunningham Dance Company was visiting Boston on one of their tours, I arranged for both Cage and Gordon Mumma to give a seminar in the Technology Square building that housed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. When Cage gave his punch line about the amount to time it took to get a working program, one of my colleagues left the lecture hall and went upstairs to the room that housed our PDP-6 computer. By the time the talk had concluded, my friend had created the program and gave Cage a page of its output!

Today I encountered a letter written many years after that incident. It included a sentence that probably would have rolled through my mind at the time:

Music has to do with mind, opening it again and again + more and more.

Back in 1979, when the letter was written, I would have simply filed it away as the usual injunction that we should be as open to electronic synthesis, chance techniques, and microtonality as we usually are to composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Johann Sebastian Bach. These days, however, I realize that the scope of this injunction extends far beyond the immediate present.

In 1979 I tended to revel in my dislikes as much as I waxed enthusiastically over my likes. For example, as a result of my fanatical interest in the music of Gustav Mahler, I found it easy to dismiss Anton Bruckner with my personal motto that "Bruckner tried where Mahler succeeded." Similarly, I had little regard for any opera written after Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and before Alban Berg.

Back when I was writing about dance performances, my mentor emphasized that my first goal should be to provide an objective account of the experiences. If there were any "column inches" remaining for my article, only then could I take the liberty to express my opinion. When I first began to shift my attention to writing about the performance of music on this site, those words returned to me. I realized that I had an obligation to provide description, even if I was writing about compositions that I had disliked or simply chosen to ignore on grounds of insignificance.

I take this as a turning point in how I approached the task of listening itself. I realized that the very task of listening to a new performance, even one of music that I felt had been performed to death, was a matter of opening the mind. These days I do not have to worry about whether or not I have enough "column inches" to voice my own opinions. However, that obligation to describe has done more than I can imagine to the ways in which I have refined my listening practices. My guess is that Cage could have cared less if that process of opening provided me with a new way to approach on old Beethoven favorite; but, as is always the case, the principle is more important than the substance that has been selected for both description and subsequent exercises of judgment!