CHAPTER 16 | CLASSICAL MUSIC IN THE POSTWAR YEARS 395
Once he dissolved the split between intention
and nonintention, he began avidly exploring
the latter. Much of his creative energ y went
toward setting up mechanical procedures
that would bring sounds into compositions
independent of his own will, hence with no
deliberate link to other sounds.
Cage created Williams Mix by collecting a
library of both studio-produced and environ-
mentally recorded sounds, then arranging
them by a process of random ordering involving charts, chance, and the coin-
tossing procedures of the I Ching (The Chinese Book of Changes, which he had
encountered when he began to study Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s). The result
sounds random and unintentional, which is just what Cage intended. Williams
Mix united Cage’s interest in technology with a new philosophical outlook he
adopted in the early 1950s. The philosophy, religion, and art of the West assumed
that humans, created in the image of God, were destined to rule over nature.
From a non-Western perspective, however, human beings were simply one of
many species of life, and nature itself tended more toward randomness than
order. Cage’s music from the 1950s on—chance music or aleatoric music (from
the Latin word for dice)—refl ects the randomness of natural processes, inspired
by a principle found in Indian philosophy: “Art is the imitation of Nature in her
manner of operation.”
Cage’s most famous work, 4'33" (“four minutes thirty-three seconds”), was
composed in 1952, the same year as Williams Mix, but copied nature’s manner of
operation in an entirely different way. Conceived as three movements for piano
whose durations—30", 2'23", and 1'40"—were determined by chance methods,
4'33" prescribed no intentional sounds at all; the pianist sits silently at the key-
board. Cage’s “silent” piece invited listeners to pay attention to random sounds in
the environment, in effect emptying themselves of expectations. Among other
things, 4'33" could be viewed as a spiritual exercise, a means of quieting the will
so that an infi nite realm of possibilities may be experienced.
Concert-hall audiences rejected these ideas. Still, Cage had never counted on
the concert hall for much support. Nor did he enter academia. From early in his
composing career he managed to scrape together a living by collaborating with
other artists, chiefl y dancers. In the 1940s he served as accompanist for a dance
company headed by Merce Cunningham, later becoming its music director
and Cunningham’s life partner. The early 1950s found him collaborating with
other composers, including Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, Earl Brown, and
David Tudor, all of whom assisted him in preparing materials for Williams Mix.
Meanwhile, Cage had also become a friend and champion of the painters Robert
Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, whose rise to fame as abstract expressionist art-
ists of the New York School helped indirectly to further Cage’s own work.
Cage’s ideas won him a reputation during the 1950s, if not as a composer, then
as either a satirist or a musical anarchist. These opinions persisted well into the
1960s and in some quarters even up to his death in 1992. Yet though often scorned
and attacked, Cage also found himself in increasing demand as a lecturer and
performer. In Europe, under Cage’s infl uence, the German composer Karlheinz
Stockhausen began in the mid-1950s to experiment with chance operations.Aab cdef gh ij112 B(^112238112238112238112238112238)
(^121238)
(^238)
K The “square root form”
of John Cage’s Sonata
no. 2 for prepared piano
expresses the durational
proportion of 1½:2⅜ on
both the large scale and the
small scale. (The letters a
through j correspond to
the sections in Listening
Guide 16.1.)
Cage’s infl uence
4'33"
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