CHAPTER 16 | CLASSICAL MUSIC IN THE POSTWAR YEARS 393
music would “continue and increase until we reach a music produced through
the aid of electrical instruments.” Cage’s Imaginary Landscape no. 1, premiered
in 1939, was scored for muted piano, suspended cymbal, and two phonograph
turntables—a hint that his imagination was taking a path blazed by ultramod-
ernists like Henry Cowell and others whose experimentalist bent would come to
be seen as another kind of American tradition.
Cage’s musical interests, like Cowell’s, extended westward to Asia as well
as eastward to Europe. A student of Arnold Schoenberg’s at UCLA, Cage found
more inspiration in resisting than in following his teacher’s precepts. In the
1930s Cage, along with his fellow Californian Lou Harrison, had begun writing
music for ensembles of percussion instruments as a way of exploring new tim-
bres and rhythms while sidestepping the vexed issue of tonality. Unpitched per-
cussion instruments allowed Cage and Harrison to avoid the Western tempered
scale, which for more Eurocentric composers had come to represent a stylistic
impasse.
While teaching at the progressive Cornish School in Seattle, Cage routinely
provided musical accompaniment for the school’s modern dance programs.
For one occasion in 1940, instead of writing for a group of conventional percus-
sion instruments, Cage devised a sort of one-player percussion orchestra, the
prepared piano: a grand piano into whose strings are wedged objects made of
metal, wood, rubber, and other materials. The added objects not only mute the
piano but also radically alter the pitch and timbre of the affected strings. Cage
went on to compose several works for prepared piano, most notably the large-
scale Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).
Most of the sixteen sonatas in this hour-long work are in binary form, recall-
ing the keyboard sonatas of the eighteenth-century composer Domenico Scarlatti,
and all of them use a structural strategy that Cage explored extensively in his
earlier music, square root form, using a durational proportion that shapes both
small-scale and large-scale divisions. In Sonata no. 2 (LG 16.1), for example, the
two parts of the binary form approximate the proportion 1½:2 3 ⁄8 (or, taking the
half-beat as a time unit, 93:147). The A section subdivides into two sections con-
sisting of 62 + 31 half-beats (creating the proportion 1:½), each dividing further
into two phrases, the fi rst pair fi lling 24 + 38 half-beats (1½:2 3 ⁄8) and the second
pair 12 + 19 (1½:2 3 ⁄8). The B section operates similarly, but with its two main sub-
divisions creating the proportion 2: 3 ⁄8. The silences that end most sections and
many subsections make the structure easy to follow.
Cage’s square root form provides a durational scheme to be fi lled with musi-
cal sounds and silences. The somewhat cold rationality of the scheme contrasts
with the playful, colorful sounds of the prepared piano. Inspired by Ananda
Coomaraswamy’s writings on Indian art and philosophy, Cage stated that his
goal in the Sonatas and Interludes was “to express in music the ‘permanent emo-
tions’ of Indian tradition: the heroic, the erotic, the wondrous, the mirthful,
sorrow, fear, anger, the odious and their common tendency toward tranquil-
ity.” A lthough it is diffi cult to state exactly which emotion is expressed by any
given sonata, their varied emotional qualities all resolve into the tranquility of
the durational scheme.
Cage’s interest in music built entirely on durations of sounds was at fi rst based
on the polarity of sound and silence. Then, in 1951, Cage realized that he could
embrace unintended sounds that were always present, even during silence.K John Cage (1912–1992),
composer and explorer of
unintended sounds.LG 16.1172028_16_386-411_r3_sd.indd 393 23/01/13 10:56 AM