On Music

...Why only 12 tones when the ear easily distinguishes and the voice can sing many tones that lie between the conventional intervals...

...Here, rather than in Futurism, one discerns the genesis of musique concréte...

...This young musician, engineer and litterateur had been deeply impressed by certain experimental compositions of John Cage involving the electronic mixing of recorded and live sounds in radio broadcasts...

...Nevertheless, I am not particularly disturbed by the weakness of much of Cage's work...

...Or, if he is producing his music mechanically, he may turn on six loaded tape recorders and stand back to watch the results...

...Why it has taken musicians almost half a century to catch up with experiments begun in the visual arts before World War I is a question well worth considering...

...Like Schönberg, who had to invent a method to insure himself against writing tonally, Cage has adopted an elaborate strategy to inhibit his volition and to "provide a music free from one's memory and imagination...

...Yet merely extending the 12 tones to 24, 48 or 96 is no real answer to the question of acoustic limitations...

...The Art of Noise was doomed to failure, however, because the requisite technical means were not yet available...

...5.75), a recently published collection of his lectures and writings, Cage argues eloquently not only for the use of natural sound but, what is much more radical, for the composer's submission to the natural organization of sound, according to the laws of chance or probability...

...Included are "proto musique concréte," Imaginary Landscape No...

...All that remains of the Futurist ideal is contained in such relatively conventional works as Arthur Honegger's Pacific 231 (1923) and Alexander Mossolov's ingenious The Iron Foundry (1928...

...Cage first composes by chance, taking his orders from such varied sources as the ancient Chinese Book of Changes (I Ching), the mathematician's table of random numbers, the imperfections in his writing paper and, as a last resort, the toss of a coin...

...The techniques known variously as montage, assemblage, construction, collage and objet trouvé are, of course, basic methods in the contemporary visual arts...

...Utilizing the recently invented tape recorder and a battery of electronic devices for amplifying, combining and enrhythmicizing sounds, Schaeffer composed préexistent sounds of every description —noises as well as music—to make acoustic montages utterly unlike anything attempted before by either composers or sound-effects technicians...

...History provides at least two distinct answers: At the very time Picasso made his initial experiments, a follower of Filippo Marinetti published a Futurist manifesto, "The Art of Noises," calling for "symphonies" of industrial noise...

...1 (1939...

...Since Schönberg, no theory has opened up such an exciting prospect as musique concréte...

...For when the atonalists abolished the traditional system of key relations—the grammar and syntax of music—in effect they reduced a language of poetic implication to a mere collection of meaningless vocables...

...Generally speaking, Cage seems to lay too much emphasis on the idea of chance and not enough on the quality of the accidents themselves...

...I regard him as another, smaller Schönberg: not a great composer, but a courageous experimenter, a lucid theorist, and a founder of movements...

...To this demand Alois Hába responded with quarter-tones and John Cage with microtones...

...By a metaphorical identification of space with silence, junk with noise, and construction with composition, today's avantgarde composer seems to be recapitulating in music the recent history of the plastic arts...

...His work immediately attracted attention all over the Western world, and soon the possibilities of the new medium were being explored by composers in Paris, Cologne, Milan and New York...

...their history dates back to the year 1912, when Pablo Picasso glued together some scraps of discarded wood to make a work "neither sculpture nor painting nor architecture" titled "Mandolin...

...In serial composition, tones are no longer terms, they are simply sounds...

...full-blown tape recorder music, Williams Mix (1952...

...In a magnificent album, The 25-Year Retrospective Concert of John Cage (Avakian, JCS-1), produced by the veteran recording impressario, George Avakian, the entire range of Cage's art is delineated in the chronological sequence of its development...

...But whatever their character, they lead an intense life of their own, and their death is sometimes, like human death, tragic...

...In Silence (Wesleyan, 276 pp...

...Sooner or later someone was bound to say, "Why tones at all, when for purposes of abstract composition in sound the whole world of acoustic phenomena lies waiting for the appropriating hand of the composer...

...pages in type of various sizes counterpointing one line of thought against another...

...The Swiss machine-wrecker is a man of humor, energy and passion: his contraptions are droll or terrifying, creative or destructive, inhuman or all-too-human...

...Cage is fearful lest the use of sound in musique concréte end where it began, that is, with an abstract, systematic and predictable "art of music...

...Like most avant-garde artists, he assumes an enormous license and then produces rather tame results...

...plus a selection of pieces for prepared piano (bolts and bits of rubber and plastic set under the strings to modify the sound...

...The machines (or players) must be prepared in such a way that much of what they do by accident would be worth doing on purpose...

...He wishes to preserve the spontaneous life in his concrete noises and not reduce them in the electronic crucible to a synthetic and colorless art medium...

...But he does not allow the play of accident to stop here: He keeps the game going by allowing his performers to improvise and to select at random the parts they want to play...

...and the end-papers are facsimiles of the composer's fascinating notation: dots broadcast across the conventional double staves, with converging lines (like a construction by Richard Lippold) focussing all the sounds upon an implied acoustic center outside of time...

...Edgard Varése's experiments with percussion did anticipate a music of sounds, but they are an isolated phenomenon...

...Igor Stravinsky The international avant-garde movement known as musique concréte was initiated in 1948 with a series of now-famous experiments at Radiodiffusion Française by Pierre Schaeffer...

...But as sounds the 12 tones of the chromatic scale have no particular value, interest or authority...

...Williams Mix sounds like someone flipping the dial of a radio—dozens of identifiable sounds going by at high velocity and producing no effect, save for a little comic incongruity...

...Here are pages ruled in columns like Chinese poetry, with the words spaced for silences and acoustic interruptions...

...His argument, so clear and forceful in its uncompromising logic, is extracted with difficulty from his book, which is an astonishing and confusing exemplum of the avantgarde world...

...A pupil OF Schönberg and a disciple of Zen, Cage has sought to combine in his version of musique concréte the values of artistic objectivity and religious selfabnegation...

...An instructive parallel to Cage's work is afforded by the autonomous, self-destroying machines of Jean Tinguely...

...As I see it, the real art of chance composition lies in the technique of preparation...

...During the period between the wars, when painters and sculptors were experimenting vigorously with construction and collage, the experimental energies of composers were concentrated in the last major phase of traditional European music, Arnold Schönberg's atonalism...

...and a largescale composition determined by probability, Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1958...

...The symphonies were eventually performed in Paris, and pictures of the equipment, which included klaxon horns, sirens, airplane engines with propellers, etc., can be found in most histories of modern art...

...The quality of this music is very uneven: Imaginary Landscape is a lunar nightmare, dominated by a wailing siren figure that rises and falls over and over again in despairing repetition...

...And this someone, as it turned out, was Pierre Schaeffer—or perhaps it was really John Cage, for he inspired Schaeffer and, more important, he has now carried the theory of musique concrete to its ultimate level of sophistication...

...Probability composition is his shield against intention in art, and I suppose it is to his credit that he works the strategy of chance for all it is worth...