Vinholes and Cage: Theories, indeterminacy and silence

The subject of this study is the intersection points of music and fine art, demonstrated by the example of the creative interaction of the conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp and composer John Cage. The possibility of reformatting creativity from the visual to the sound field is considered as a role rotation, within which Duchamp appears as a composer, and Cage as an artist. An attempt is made to explain the motivation for such a choice. What is the meaning of this, and what do people mean when they choose this or that image for themselves, and create this or that image for themselves. How important it is to change the artistic image and creative image for the master. The methodology of the research consists in a comparative analysis of these concepts using already known works on this topic and personal observations of the author. In conceptualism, an idea is valued above the process of its materialization in a work of art, and therefore, the technique of execution is not a decisive factor. In such a creative paradigm, the artist's tools themselves become not so essential, which can be paints, a brush or other means of visual representation of the concept, as well as sheet music or a graphic score. The means of artistic expression - sounds or visual elements – also turn out to be equivalent. All of them focus around the concept - the dominant point of any kind of creativity. This conclusion becomes the key for the conducted research in this article.

The subject of this study is the intersection points of music and visual art, demonstrated by the example of the creative interaction of conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp and composer John Cage. The possibility of reformatting creativity from the visual to the sound field is considered as a role rotation, within which Duchamp appears as a composer, and Cage as an artist. An attempt has been made to explain the motivation for such a choice. What is the meaning of this, and what do people mean when they choose this or that image for themselves, and create this or that image for themselves. How important it is to change the artistic image and creative image for the master. The research methodology consists in a comparative analysis of these concepts using already known works on this topic and the author's personal observations. In conceptualism, an idea is valued above the process of its materialization in a work of art, and therefore, the technique of execution is not a decisive factor. In such a creative paradigm, the artist's tools themselves become not so essential, which can be paints, a brush or other means of visual representation of the concept, as well as sheet music or a graphic score. The means of artistic expression – sounds or visual elements – also turn out to be equivalent. They all focus around the concept – the dominant point of any kind of creativity. This conclusion becomes the key to the research conducted in this article.

This essay has two premises: first, that written lyric poems by convention record the performance of a speaking or singing voice, and second, that these performances of speech and song cannot but engender silences of the voice before, between, and after the words that comprise them. These silences need not hold significance; that is, they may arise strictly as the incidental concomitants of the performance of the audible voice. In certain instances, though, poets imbue the silences of their works with the force of intentionality, positing the absence of speech and song as an integral element of the lyric poem. The twentieth century in American poetry witnessed the explicit problematization of silence in the works of the poet and composer John Cage (1912–1992), whose lecture “Nothing to Say” (1949) and whose musical composition 4’33” (1952) present just two of the many examples of Cage’s intellectual engagement with performed restraint from speaking, singing, and playing. Paul Zukofsky, the son of the modernist poet Louis Zukofsky and an artistic collaborator of John Cage, asserted that Cage’s work “elevated silence to a place of importance equal to non-silence.”1

The article focuses on the ideological, theoretical and experimental foundations of the work of one of the most radical composers of the American musical avant-garde of the 20th century, John Milton Cage (1912—1992), covering the embodiment field of the idea of free musical composition, where sound and noise, as well as sound and silence, are in equal position. There are also revealed Cage’s experiments, which influenced the world of dance, fine arts, theater, opera, alternative rock, as well as his relationship with one of the leaders of the French musical avant-garde, Pierre Boulez, and with representatives of the American avant-garde — the artist R. Rauschenberg, the choreographer M. Cunningham, and others. The composer’s creativity opened the innovative key of new stylistic changes that paved the way for the modern art of postmodernity, the artistic demands that arose in the late 1960s, when the very life of John Cage was determined by numerous and intense friendships with the artists of the avant-garde community. The composer also radically changed the perception of music. His musical ideas largely determined the development not only of new tendencies in music, but also of the culture of the postwar avant-garde, while the experimental musical creativity contributed to destruction of the barriers between various spheres of artistic production — such as music, painting, dance performance — allowing for a new interdisciplinary work between different arts. Cage sought to view all kinds of sounds as potentially musical, urging the audience to accept all sound phenomena as equal. He carried out a revolution in music, in such a way as to make it possible to compose and perform any imaginable music, and claimed that it was necessary to strive for the music in which sounds would not just sound.

Examining music therapy from a compositional, music analytical, and musicological perspective, Lee (2003) advo- cates for clinicians to explore theories of music to help influence theories of therapy, as well as for the development of new clinical methodology. For example, Curreri (2008) explored composer John Cage's concepts of experimental music wherein the term Aleatoric Music Therapy was used to describe the clinical use of chance and indeterminate procedures with an adult patient diagnosed with depression. Moreover, Cage's philosophy of disorganized sound (Cage, 1961) was used as a method for deconstructing the patient's habitual ways of thinking.According to composer John Cage (1961), ambient sounds interact in a nonlinear fashion, are void of any hierarchal musical function, purpose, or intention, and arise from the entire space surrounding the listener. This experience of disorganized sound was for Cage the basic music in which he interrupted when his chance or indeterminate compositions were performed (Wolff, 1996), placing the performer and listener alike in a situation where time ceases and all sonic events create an illogical and imperfect musical landscape, void of personal taste, likes, dislikes, and sentiment.John Cages' music is considered illogical because it is a departure from conventional organized composition (Retal- lack, 1996). Consequently, Cage never stopped finding unusual ways to compose his music (Kostelanetz, 1989, 1996), surprising his audiences with innovative musical departures, frustrating expectations by causing, for the purpose of this paper, aesthetic perturbation in the listener. Aesthetic perturbation is defined by the author as the act of challenging the patient's aesthetic system by engaging the group participants in an aleatoric/chance performance, catapulting the participants into a new, unusual, and illogical musical experience.Aleatoric/Chance MusicThe term aleatoric music derives from the Latin word alea, which means a game of dice or the throw of a die or dice, hence the term aleator, meaning dice-thrower (Rae, 1994; Revill, 1992). This method of composition can also utilize the tossing of coins, picking cards out of a hat, and so on, to determine how the piece of music will be composed and/or performed (Griffiths, 1981, 1995). Aleatoric methods used in musical performance can vary from composition to compo- sition depending on how the piece is to be shaped and/or arranged by the performer (Kostka, 1999). Twentieth-century classical composers, such as Pierre Boulez, Witold Lutoslaw- ski, and Karlheinz Stockhausen utilized aleatoric/chance procedures in their compositions (Griffiths, 1981, 1995). However, some composers, mostly John Cage and his supporters, wanted less control over their music to give more creative responsibilities to the performer by using chance operations/procedures as a form of composition (Kostka, 1999).Chance procedures used as a form of composition subjects the entire piece of music to indeterminacy (Kostka, 1999). By using chance operations, one is not concerned with order or personal taste, but is concerned with open experiences (Cage, 1961), attending to sounds as they materialize. The aleatoric composition is free from expectations because the music relies on chance and not on memory, likes and/or dislikes. The composer creates original performance paradigms that require both performer and listener to contribute to the musical outcome (Struble, 1995).Unsurprisingly, some practitioners of chance argue that the quality of music is not an important factor when creating aleatoric/chance compositions because quality equates stan- dards and judgments, which represent prejudice and conven- tional belief systems (Cage, 1961). Chance composition is viewed as a process of discovery through experimentation and open-experience (Cage, 1967, 1973) by creating pieces of music, not in terms of creating a musical object (Stravinsky, 1970; Vare` se, 1998), concerned with organized sound, quality, style, expression, hierarchically arranged pitches, rhythm, form, etc. …

Reviewed by: John Cage Sara Haefeli John Cage. Edited by Julia Robinson. (October Files, no. 12.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. [x, 240 p. ISBN 9780262016124. $35.] Illustrations, name index. In the digital age one must consider the value of reprinting a collection of articles that are easily available through services such as JSTOR. This small volume on the twentieth-century composer John Cage is such a collection of articles that were either originally printed (or, in two cases, printed in translation) in the journal October or are generally available elsewhere. The eight articles reprinted here address different aspects of Cage by authors from a number of different disciplines. If such a volume of divergent yet widely available work is to be of value to the reader, then the juxtaposition of articles must yield insights beyond those offered by the individual articles themselves. The series editors clearly elucidate the goal of each volume of the October Files series. Each book aims to trace the development of an important oeuvre as well as the construction of its discourse. In other words, when read together, the articles should construct a metahistorical or meta-critical picture of the field. The series preface (on p. vii of the book under review here) also adds that each volume should serve as a “primer” to each particular art practice, and that it should stand “in resistance to the amnesia and antitheoretical tendencies of our time.” Given these criteria, I assert that while there may be significant value to juxtaposing previously published studies in one volume, this volume is not entirely successful, despite the clear value of some of the individual articles. The volume is arranged chronologically and contains work by Heinz-Klaus Metzger, Konrad Boehmer, Yvonne Rainer, David W. Patterson, Branden W. Joseph, Liz Kotz, Rebecca Y. Kim, and Julia Robinson. The best articles in the collection are the ones that remind us how revolutionary Cage was at one point in time, and how his contemporaries found his work to be incredibly provocative––socially and politically––even long before he wrote some of his most overtly political pieces. The least successful articles in the collection are more about the myriad artists who were influenced by Cage than about Cage, or more importantly, Cage’s music. In her article “Looking Myself in the Mouth,” Yvonne Rainer points up the fact that what Cage and Merce Cunningham did was to open up “a veritable Pandora’s Box” that “launched in due course a thousand dancers’, composers’, writers’, and performance artists’ ships” [End Page 795] (p. 37). While this is an incredibly important notion to grasp for a deeper understanding of the avant-garde art world of the second half of the twentieth century, it also feels like territory well mapped. The most compelling articles in the collection are the ones that are snapshots of the time in which they were written. The oldest articles in the collection, Heinz-Klaus Metzger’s “John Cage, or Liberated Music” (1959) and Konrad Boehmer’s “Chance as Ideology” (1967) are excellent examples of the state of thinking on Cage and his oeuvre during that time period. Instead of dealing directly with Cage’s most infamous work, 4’33”, and his connection to “silence,” Metzger chose to focus on Cage’s approach to time. He asserted that Cage’s music is a challenge to the idea of time as paramount in music, constituting a “rebellion against music as the real passage of time” and the resulting body of work as a “musical utopia” (p. 5). By focusing on works such Music for Piano, Concert for Piano and Orchestra, Winter Music, and Variations I, Metzger seems to be postulating Cage’s position as a true composer, not as the charlatan who was known in the popular press to have made “that silent piece.” Boehmer’s article, on the other hand, is a pointed critique of what he identified as Cage’s most common and misguided tendency: the “isolation of sounds from one another” (p. 23). For the time period in which it was written this article is somewhat unique. Despite Boehmer’s position as a clear champion of serialism, he is not dismissive of...

As a reader of this journal it is possible that you attach a certain significance to sound. Maybe you are a musician, an audio engineer, an architect, a foley artist, a marine biologist, or a composer of sonic art. Maybe you have studied sound in built environments, used sound in performance, in film or video, or researched sound underwater and among animals. You may have noticed how important sound can be in communicating mood, meaning and context. Perhaps when listening to a “soundscape”—sound heard in a real or “virtual” environment—you have been transported to another time, another place. Conversely, maybe you have experienced the-here- and-now even more acutely as a result of listening intently. Your awareness of sound—specifically your level of awareness of the acoustic environment at any given time—is an issue central to the interdiscipline of Acoustic Ecology (also known as ecoacoustics). The philosophy underpinning Acoustic Ecology is simple yet pro-found: its author—R. Murray Schafer, a musician, composer and former Professor of Communication Studies at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Burnaby, BC, Canada—suggests that we try to hear the acoustic environment as a musical composition and further, that we own responsibility for its composition (Schafer 1977a, 205). Like many issues emerging from the explosion of ideologies in the late 1960s, the profundity of Schafer’s message is now hidden behind a single, soundbite-friendly issue: noise pollution. This is unfortunate since Schafer has far more to offer. However, some 22 years after his ideas were first fully articulated in print, they remain un-known to the general public and mostly unknown to environmental acousticians. Where Schafer is well known—within the contemporary music community—it is mostly for his large-scale, often site-specific, musical/theatrical work rather than his acoustic ecology. Composer John Cage was aware of both; when asked if he knew of any great music teachers, he replied “Murray Schafer of Canada” (Truax 1978, sleeve note).

In the 1950s, Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, and a handful of other young artists based in New York’s Greenwich Village set out to challenge the practices and principles of professionalized dance. Inspired by the groundbreaking work of choreographers Anna Halprin, Robert Dunn, and Merce Cunningham, as well as composer John Cage, they were determined to change what dance is and can be. In One Thing Follows Another, a boundary-crossing collection of ten experimental-poetic essays, poets Valerie Witte and Sarah Rosenthal explore the work of dancer-choreographers Rainer and Forti, both at various inflection points throughout their careers and in this particular moment. Through a combination of chance operations and intentional artistic choices that push the authors to unexpected places — including the zoo, the dance studio, the street corner — and via innovative forms and techniques, such as collage, erasure, and their own artistic inventions, they deconstruct the essay form to examine what they as poets, each with their own highly charged relationships to dance, can contribute to the conversation about these pivotal figures in postmodern performance art.

This chapter discusses the composer John Cage's interest in Muzak and his concept of “Muzak-plus”. Cage's long-lasting interest in muzak was not because he liked Muzak, or that he was sympathetic to its alleged power. On the contrary, Cage often stated his distaste and, to a certain extent, his fear of Muzak. But he perceived his aversion for muzak as something to be somehow overcome. Cage first alluded to the concept of Muzak-plus in a piece he wrote in 1962 for the collective publication Module, Proportion, Symmetry, Rhythm. Muzak-plus is a situation where being creative never seemed so natural and unnoticeable an act (fulfilled simply while going through the room). In itself, the principle of listeners–performers–composers activating the space by simply traversing it recalls Cage's remark that actually “no one means to circulate his blood.” With Muzak-plus, one could barely dream of a more integrated form of art as life.

The concept of silence is somewhat mercurial. Far from an absence of sound, various artists have explored the nuances of its construction, perhaps most famously by the composer John Cage in his seminal composition “4”33”. Despite this artistic exploration, examinations of silence as a feature of expression are scarce, as is an apt theorisation of what remains unspoken, and how this may be more powerful an expression than speech. By conceptualising silence through a political theory lens of power as social action upon boundaries, I argue that silence is used to establish, negotiate, and trouble social and political boundaries and as a vehicle for power as social action. Drawing upon Seamus Heaney’s poems “Whatever you say, say nothing” and “Clearances”, I apply a four-part framework to conceptualise silence as linguistic, epistemic, rhetoric and symbolic, concluding that silence is the conceptual glue that unites manifestations of power and demarcates action upon boundaries.

This exposition considers the use of mycology and chance operation as a method and material for arts-based research. The exposition details a series of mushroom hunting excursions designed to engage four artist-teachers in collaborative dialogue about their practice and identity. As participant and researcher converse, the hunts unfold as dérive-like encounters with a landscape interrupted through chance and embodied experience. The project draws from the work of artist and composer John Cage, who used fungi and mushroom hunting as one of many devices for exploring sound and its relationship to environment. Contextual research and documentation offer a glimpse into this process, while considering unstructured, kinetic, and uncertain ways of knowing in qualitative and arts-based research. The aim is to explore mycology as a post-formal lens for understanding the pedagogical and creative practices of the artist-teacher as a networked, fluid, and relational system.

The article focuses on Andy Warhol, a most renowned figure of the Rusin origin in the world popular culture. Initially, Warhol was a loner, but then he began to work with like-minded people. Warhol was most influenced by his parents, Andrew Warhola and Yulia Zavatskaya. It was Zavatskaya who gave her son movie magazines, comics, paper dolls, and coloring books. After resuming his studies at the University of Pittsburgh, Warhol actively attended the Film Club, lectures by avant-garde artist Maya Deren and composer John Cage. There are examples of Warhol’s creative collaboration with other outstanding figures in culture and art. The author emphasizes the influence of Warhol’s colleagues on him during his studies at the university in Pittsburgh (Philip Pearlstein, Brian Greene) and his life in New York (Edward Vollovich, Jasper Jones). The transitional moment in Warhol’s work was in 1963, when he abandoned the life-affirming theme. 1964 marked the beginning of a special period in Warhol’s work: the Factory collaboration, influenced by the camp aesthetic, produced a number of films (“Kiss”, “Sleep”, “Poor Rich Girl”); new exhibitions, the Interview magazine and a photo-Odyssey, when Warhol managed to take about one hundred thousand photographs in the last ten years of his life, documenting the formation of popular culture in New York, including “Studio 54.” Thus, Warhol’s Rusin family had a strong influence on the formation of his aesthetic taste.

This essay examines the politics of New York's Living Theater, from its founding in late 1940s to the mid-1960s. He will outline Julian Beck and Judith Malina's anarchist-pacifism, their involvement in anti-nuclear bomb protests during the 1950s and early 1960s, and the increasingly confrontational tenor of their theater productions. Topics to be discussed include the abstract expressionist paintings of Beck, Malina's interest in the Gestalt theories of Paul Goodman, and the group's collaborations with composer John Cage, poet Jackson Mac Low, and the artists of the No! Art! movement. The chapter will close with group's departure for Europe in1964.

One Sunday in fall 1953, Robert Rauschenberg placed a ream of paper on the road outside his studio in New York. He poured paint in front of a wheel of the Model A Ford belonging to his friend, the composer John Cage, and asked him to drive the car over the paper. The resulting Automobile Tire Print remains a remarkable work of art, which simultaneously questions the agency of the artist and the process of mark-making. It has been variously interpreted in the contexts of performance and conceptual art, printmaking, and semiotics. This article highlights the hitherto overlooked significance of the Model A for Rauschenberg. Parallels are drawn to Profile Airflow of 1969 by Claes Oldenburg, a relief multiple modeled on the Chrysler Airflow. In the course of exploring conditions of artistic collaboration and printmaking, both Rauschenberg and Oldenburg also activate icons of American car design.

The third and final examination of data focuses on the use of sound as data. I use audio, image and text to address the soundscape of the club, considering the affordances of taking such an approach to investigate lived experience. I provide a link to a short audio version of a compilation of sounds recorded during the fieldwork. I also provide a visual ‘map’ of the soundscape, inspired by the composer John Cage’s work around non-representational musical notation. This ‘map’ is deconstructed in the form of a non-chronological comic strip that demonstrates one possible reading of the club’s soundscape. This helps to reveal the noisy, lively and animated nature of the club, as sound is used as a means of marking territory and shaping space by imposing order, stability and exercising power though exuberant play.