Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[Stefano Pocci <>]

On 02/13/2013 08:09 AM, Russell Goodwin wrote:

Dear Silencers,

This discussion has progressed along very rapidly, a little too rapidly for those of us on the antipodean :)

To answer Rod's initial question, I certainly found that composers and commentators, particularly those writing during the 60s, 70s and 80s, used their own definitions of Indeterminacy, Chance and Aleatory. While the terms weren't interchangeable in one writer's work, they were very often interchangeable with those of other writers with their own definitions of the three terms. For my own research, I found that using 'Indeterminacy' as an umbrella term, one that replaced 'Aleatory" and included 'Chance' within it, the most logical given that Cage used that term more than the others and that he was the most prolific exponent. 

Cage's own differentiation between 'Indeterminate with respect to its composition' (or 'composer Indeterminacy') and 'Indeterminate with respect to it's performance' (or 'performer Indeterminacy') is much more significant. These are two clear and distinct categories that locate 'Indeterminacy' in either the composing of the score (Music of Changes), the performing of the score (Variation VIII), or both (Imaginary Landscape IV). 

I would echo David Miller's position (posted in response earlier) that Chance enters as an approach to Indeterminacy, although Indeterminacy does not have to include chance. Most (if not all) examples of Composer Indeterminacy rely on some form of chance operation or chance determination. In fact, it is hard to envisage one that does not require chance (now, there's a challenge!). Regarding performer Indeterminacy, chance is not a necessary requirement because performer choice may indeed be just that, a deliberate act of choosing.

Cheers

Russell Goodwin

Hi there, funnily enough when I received Rod's email I was translating from Italian to English the press conference Simplicity and Chaos, given by Cage during his June 1992 presence in Perugia, Italy. This discussion happened really at the right time. I say funny because at one point, after John touches his latest compositional method, the time brackets, the interviewer asks

Q: Are the the beginning and the end of the time brackets random-based decisions?(in Italian he says "casualità" > which I rendered with random-based)

JC: When you say random (casualità) you mean chance (caso)?

Q: Chance (caso).

JC: These are questions I pose to myself each time I write a piece. And I decide...

It occurred to me then, that I needed to understand how to differentiate between the terms chance and randomness properly. Even if the interviewer was inaccurate or uninformed about the different nuances/meanings of the word chance, I think it's important to focus on Cage's question, because he clearly makes a difference between casualità (randomness?) and caso (chance?). I also realize it's quite odd to re-translate Cage in his mother tongue, but if the original Italian translator made a difference, presumably Cage did so too.


By the way, "Alea" in latin means dice (Alea iacta est > the dice has been cast). So if I'm not recalling wrong from statistics, aleatoric refers to chance as applied to a fixed number of possible results (such as the faces of a dice, 6) which theoretically must be equally probable within their 'universe' (that is, the set of the possible values/results). Cage's vision was much broader and blurred, I think, unlike the ideal scientific definition provided in statistics which did not match exactly how things are working in real life. But maybe I'm not too precise and correct on this point.


Nice topic anyway. Thanks.

Stefano