Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

["Daniel Wolf" <>]

Please consider the environments in which Cage had or exercised actual
power.

First of all the Cunningham Company, where he held various positions in
addition to music director, including manager and Board President.
Artistic leadership was in the hands of Cunningham. I imagine that Cage,
as music director, could have, in principle, asserted the right to compose
all the music used, and I am certain that he played an essential role in
the selection of composers, but the practice was for Cunningham alone to
formally make the request for music and it was requested of a large roster
of composers.  In this, the record was decidedly mixed, but typical of the
new music scene: for all the musical diversity, there were too few women
and too few minorities represented.* There is no evidence of negative
discrimination in the selection of music, but there is certainly a
discussion to be had about a question of discrimination within the new
music scene at large, and within which context it would be useful to
discuss the question of whether Cage's clear aesthetic position of an
non-assertion of personal expression was connected to this passive
discrimination. (Certainly, there is nothing in Babbittonian 12-tone
technique that should lead to a particular racial or sexual profile of
composers using the technique, but one finds a very similar demographic
among 12-tone composers.)

Most concretely, as a manager of the institution, working constantly in
financial crisis mode, Cage was responsible for an employment practice
that was effectively progressive, hiring women and minorities in
management and labor positions without discrimination.  And, it is not to
be discounted, although often perilously close to folding, the Cunningham
Company consistently found ways to optimize income and benefits within the
prevailing labor system.

A more subtle environment in which Cage operated was within the community
of composers at large. Here, he had and executed influence and could be
persuasive (as apparently was the case with the Journal *(Asterisk) which
ceased publication after one (iirc) issue which had an interview with Cage
which had not been sent to him in advance for editing as agreed;
similarly, he withheld endorsement of Geoffrey Barnard's little book
Conversations without Feldman), but it is important to keep in mind that
his position within the larger community was always marginal, in that his
opinion might have a negative value.  He wrote many letters of
recommendation, but an LOC from Cage was definitely not always useful to
someone seeking a job at a musically unadventurous institution!

Cage has been criticized for operating within a restrictive network of
composers but again this is systematic of new music in general and one
suspects is inevitable within any such self-selecting community, or social
network as the phrase now goes.  He was not above using his taste and
personal experiences to make negative recommendations as well, famously in
his critique of Julius Eastman, or in the case of a Cardew memorial, which
Cage signed to support but, because of his personal hurt at Cardew's
critique, refused to suppport financially.  He coudl also be very
judicious about the use of his name, as when one younger composer was
arrested on a drugs charge, Cage helped to organize a petition on the
composer's behalf, helping to obtain Aaron Copland's signature, but
refrained from signing himself on the advice that his signature would do
more harm than good, should anyone reading the petition recognize his
name! (One thing that I find surprising, with so much biographical
research on Cage going on, is that it appears no one has made a FOIA
request for Cage's FBI and other government files.  As a public persona
who identified himself as an anarchist who traveled frequently abroad,
including into Soviet-block countries, I would be surprised if he didn't
have a paper trail there.)  I believe it was Olivia Matthis who reported
here that the composer Lucia Dlugoszewski felt that Feldman had intervened
and kept her out of the Cage-Feldman-Wolff-Brown group;  I suspect,
however, that her aesthetic closeness to Varese and her personal and
professional relationship to Erick Hawkins — a competitor to Cunningham,
after all — were more critical factors.

The only anarchist joke goes:

Q: How many voters does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. Because voting doesn't change anything.

As to real politics, Cage was inconsistent about voting, usually
refraining but I believe that he made exceptions depending on the
immediate situation.  IIRC, he took the opportunity to vote against
Reagan's reelection, as he had watched the Iran-Contra proceedings on TV
with considerable fascination and shock.  Cage refrained from partisan
politics, but he was a card-carrying member of several organizations
involved with environmental protection.

Finally, the question of Cage's temporary enthusiasms for Mao's Cultural
Revolution-era China should be addressed.   We have all the benefits of
hindsight in recognizing how misplaced this enthusiasm was.  However, it
has to be put in the context of how unknown China was at that juncture.
Trade and communications to and from China were, for an American, nil.
The US has relations only with Taiwan.  With the exception of the
Soviet-supported CPUSA, there was more or less universal recognition on
the radical left in the US that the Soviet Union had been a disaster**,
particularly on issues of human rights, but increasingly in terms of
economic success, cultural policy, and basis democracy and the measure of
the catastrophes of WWII and the Gulag system were increasingly apparent,
thus there was a tremendous eagerness on the left for evidence of a
functioning socialist state.  Suddenly, after two decade of radio silence
  from China, a very few, very selective reports (most prominently,  
perhaps,
that of Jan Myrdahl, later an apologist for the massacre at Tiananmen
Square) appear describing Mao's apparent successes in creating, if not a
utopia, at least a China that was said to be feeding, clothing, housing
its people, providing health care, educating peasants, and creating
spectacular cultural events (i.e. stadium shows and revolutionary opera).
I never had the opportunity to ask Cage about China or his refusal to
withdraw his earlier statements about China, but I did speak with
N.O.Brown about it.  As recorded in the _Diaries_, Brown was someone who
pointed Cage towards China and Mao, and when I asked him about it, he
simply said, "we didn't know enough, we didn't know anything about
China."  As to Cage's reluctance to indicate a revision of his opinion of
China, I can only speculate: (1) Cage did not revise his works, musical or
otherwise; each score or article is left as an accurate record of its
moment. Once he figured out how a piece was to be made, he did not revisit
chance operations to optimize results. (That said, Walter Zimmermann has
found at least one example of possible "cherry picking" of results.) (2) A
possible dislike for the constant revisionism and self criticism on the
left.  Instead of going on to new work, clearly asserting new concerns,
lessons learned etc., in the new work, the left's (particularly
Marxist-Leninist left's) obsession with self-criticism and theorizing can
definitely test one's patience.  (As David Graeber points out, anarchism
(as opposed to Marxism, the only social movement invented by a PhD) has
little affinity for the University and its style of formal discourse;
anarchy is, untimately, pragmatic and happens, spontaneously, all the
time, every time people initiate forms of organization or interaction
neither foreseen nor supervised by some state; leaving a proper paper
trail is, for anarchists, beside the point.) (3) Once burned, best leave
it alone.  Once committed in print to positions that have become untenable
because they were based on wrong or insufficient information, it is an
entirely reasonable proposition to simply let the topic drop, which Cage
did with regard to China.


Daniel Wolf
composer
Frankfurt


______
* Cage's record of working with women and minority artists dates as early
as his collaboration with the African-Amertican dancer Syvilla Fort on
_Bacchanale_, the first prepared piano piece, in 1940.
** Although Cage toured in some East Block countries, his official status
in the Soviet Union — as reflected in his Great Soviet Encyclopedia entry
— was not that of a welcome western personality and he did not travel to
Russia until the Gorbachev era.
        In a conversation with Robert Duncan some 30 years ago, Mr Duncan
indicated to me that a political identification with anarchism as a young
adult was not unusual for artists and gay men like himself for whom the
authoritarian Soviet system would have made their lives and work
impossible.  Although Richard Kostelanetz has made a case for Cage as an
"old leftie", although I am certain that Cage's anarchism, gnosticism and
artistic practice form a relatively coherent unit, I am altogether
uncertain as to when Cage's identification with anarchism came into form
or as to whether this was made in the context of any relationship, postive
or negative, to to the so called real exisitng socialist states.