Aesthetic Value in Indeterminate Music

Abstract

or symbolical.2 Cage and his followers obviously treasure the uniqueness of the moment, a concept presumably influenced by his interest in Zen philosophy and the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes which Cage used to generate random processes for several of his compositions. This randomness no doubt guarantees that each moment in the composition will be unsullied by the intrusion of the composer's ego or the perceiver's intellect. It exists as an unplanned, unpredictable instance and gains its significance specifically from these factors. It is not difficult to be sympathetic to Cage's philosophy in many 1 Juilliard Lecture, in A Year from Monday (Middletown, Conn., 1967), p. 105. 2 Ibid., p. 98. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.163 on Fri, 18 Nov 2016 04:18:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 368 The Musical Quarterly respects since its roots are far from obscure. Although its debt to Oriental thought is clear, it is equally clear that Cage represents an aesthetic reaction to two more conventional but highly significant factors in contemporary Western music: the seeming exhaustion of traditional musical possibilities and the absolute determinism of the integral serialists which emerged with Cage in the early 1950s. Cage's early experiments with complex rhythmic organization show that his philosophy is not simply a reaction against the absolute control over materials espoused by the followers of Webern. Nevertheless, it remains true that he becomes more dogmatic in his insistence on freedom from control, just as the integral serialists become more insistent on the virtues of total composer, or computer, or process dominance over sound events. Furthermore, the suggestion that the sort of Western art which results from the assertion of the composer's ego has nothing to do with life is certainly not unique with Cage. Any number of conservative critics and commentators have asserted a similar notion, that is, that contemporary art in general is cut off from life. They generally mean that the traditional audience of music lovers is not much interested in a great deal of contemporary music. Cage's view, of course, would seem to be much more sophisticated than this, and yet both views suggest that the is not valid because