John Cage, or Liberated Music

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Both before and after World War I, reproaches against the first radical works of the New Music were occasionally formulated out of ignorance, reproaches that came down to saying that in such music the tones are combined arbitrarily, simply according to chance. Within this cacophony, for instance, it becomes impossible to distinguish what is correct from what is wrong and even whether the musicians of the ensemble play together according to a larger plan at all, or whether they are free to strike out on their own instead, performing more or less in the absence of external control. Those anecdotes from the 1920s belong in this connection, anecdotes still peddled today, according to which this or that famous modern composer failed, during a rehearsal of one of his own works, to notice that the second clarinetist had played in an incorrect transposition throughout or that the third trombone had at one point played in the wrong clef. Such tales were favorites among orchestral musicians for whom this type of dereliction would have been common practice. Hardly ever in its entire history have such uninstructed arguments against the most legitimate consequence of composing been formulated-without even the benefit of the most cursory glance at the score or the most minimal listening experience. Nevertheless, such opinion seems to have shaped the character of the public situation strongly enough to have dictated, as in counterpoint, the terms of the more serious theoretical treatments of New Music. Whether it is a question of technical analysis or of aesthetic commentary, these-when intended apologetically-flow together indistinguishably into a single tendency; the perceptible chaos of this music is identified as a kind of higher organization, as a more difficult musical articulation (often, incidentally, as though these were identical), in short, as conventional. This is not even actually false, but rather resembles the mule in Schiller's rhetorical question