Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[Herb Levy <>]

All of the earlier comments about Finnegans Wake seem relevant, but I have a couple of other thoughts on Cage’s relation to this work.

First, I think Cage’s interest in Joyce may be related to his interest in going “directly to the president”, a paraphrase of how he described studying composition with Schoenberg and Zen with Suzuki. Joyce is considered by many to be THE major Modernist writer and Finnegans Wake was his ultimate work.

Second, I don’t know the context of the quote that Jared Stewart cites about Norman Brown and the symbolic nature of Finnegans Wake, but the book is much  more complicated than “everything is a symbol for something else”. It would almost be more accurate to say that “everything is a symbol for everything else.” The content of the work is so over-determined that the text is nearly as indeterminate as anything by Cage.

Every sentence in Finnegans Wake is full of made-up compound words that function as multi-dimensional puns held together within a fractured grammatical structure. Many passages make little or no sense until you spend a lot of time working out possible meanings and reading the text out loud is often a useful aid in discovering some of the multiple meanings within the book. If you have a musical background, you will find many, many references to music imbedded in the text; if you are a doctor, you will find many, many references to medicine, anatomy, etc in the text; if you are well versed in European history, you will find many, many references to that subject in the text.

For those on the list who only know Finnegans Wake from Cage’s re-writings of the text, it might be useful to include a short paragraph picked at random from the seventh chapter:

Aint that swell, hey? Peamengro! Talk about lowness! Any dog's quantity of it visibly oozed out thickly from this dirty little blacking beetle for the very fourth snap the Tulloch-Turnbull girl with her coldblood kodak shotted the as yet unremuneranded national apostate, who was cowardly gun and camera shy, taking what he fondly thought was a short cut to Caer Fere, Soak Amerigas, vias the shipsteam Pridewin, after having buried a hatchet not so long before, by the wrong goods exeunt, nummer desh to tren, into Patatapapaveri's, fruiterers and musical florists, with his Ciaho, chavi! Sar shin, shillipen? she knew the vice out of bridewell was a bad fast man by his walk on the spot.

--- On Sat, 4/14/12, Jared Steward <> wrote:

From: Jared Steward <>
Subject: [silence] Fwd: Finnegans Wake
To:
Date: Saturday, April 14, 2012, 1:53 PM

Hi everyone,

I just read this from Richard Kostelanetz's John Cage. In the first interview of the book "Conversation with John Cage", Kostelanetz said, "He [Norman Brown] seemed to be entering the world of Finnegans Wake, where everything is a symbol for something else." This statement intrigues me. I've not (yet!) read Finnegans Wake, but it seems funny to me that Cage so much liked this book when he was not interested in having his compositions be symbolic of anything else. As he said often, he wanted sounds be heard simply as sounds, and not having any other meaning. Since Cage cataloged over 2000 different sounds mentioned in FW, I suppose that was part of what he liked about the book along with the writing technique that Joyce used. Do any of you have any thoughts on this?

Jared Steward

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