Techniques of appropriation in music of John Cage

Abstract

Artists in the second half of the twentieth century, explained John Cage in 1965, have a unique opportunity to “think of past literature as material rather than art.” It is not surprising that Cage would welcome “borrowings” from the past, since he consistently advocated using the “entire field of sound.” Moreover, it is noteworthy that, in the 1960s, creative artists from a variety of disciplines began to work under similar aesthetic assumptions. During the same period, for example, Robert Rauschenberg created a series of paintings incorporating a vast array of contemporary images with photographic reproductions of classic works. Today such appropriations are a recurrent feature of much late twentieth-century art, music, film, and literature. Appropriation and its allied techniques of quotation, parody, and pastiche have also been a focus of postmodernist cultural theory. This paper places Cage's musical appropriations within this larger artistic and intellectual context. Through a study of Cheap Imitation (1969), the Songbooks (1970), Apartment House 1776 (1976), and his Europeras (1987–1991), it shows how appropriation played a crucial role in the development of Cage's musical style. Finally it suggests that the appropriation of music from the past allowed Cage to return to writing “expressive” music, a practice he had abandoned since the early 1950s.