Plannin Da Essaiz

8/20/2019 Plannin Da Essaiz

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Introduction - 250 words.

POINT 1: Cage - indeterminacy as an object of reflection

- Indeterminacy as a response to the development of the avant-garde to encompass all noise as sound- Allows music to now become a concept of reflection upon the American life and nature- The idea of a ‘composer’

- Listener perceptual questioning- Springboard into political and social thought- Art as a process- Focus on Cagean origins

ORIGINS OF INTRODUCTION: Morgan: 1937 talk entitled “The Future of Music: Credo”, he set forth two

basic principles of Varèsian origin that would shape his development over the following decade and

ultimately lead him to indeterminacy:- That music is an “organisation of sound” with “sound” defined in the broadest possible sense,

encompassing all types of noise as well as “normal” musical events- As a consequence, that the “present methods of writing music, principally those which employed harmony

and its reference to particular steps in the field of sound, will be inadequate for the composer, who will befaced wit the entire field of sound” p359-360

WHY HE INTRODUCED: Experimental Music, p10: Cage had come to believe that the only way a truly

purposeless music could be created was by doing away entirely with human intervention in the

compositional process:

removing the composer “from the activities of the sounds” so that they could simply “be themselves”

The composer must “give up the desire to control sound… and set about discovering means to let sounds be

themselves rather than vehicles for… human sentiments”

Kotik p140: Cage: “Our intention is to affirm this life [towards the world of nature and society], not to bring

order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we’reliving, which is so excellent once one… lets it act of its own accord” (1965)

Kostelanetz, p13, an anthology: Cage: “we are trying to identify life with art”

Kostelanetz p206 (Silence) Cage desires to “inculcate a psychology that will allow every man to appreciate

the ‘art’ constantly around him”

COMPOSER EGO: Cage, Indeterminacy, p37: “Morton Feldman said that when he composed he was dead”

COMPOSER: Cope p135 “Divorcing oneself from control of the compositional process through chance

operations continues to present philosophical challenges to the aesthetics, arts, and ego of history”

COMPOSER: Salzman p2 “Is John Cage a ‘composer’ or ‘musician’ in the traditional sense? He himself has

redefined the question so that it no longer means what it used to.”

Simms p346: John derived the idea that art must be part of a holistic reality, attributing his new viewpoint to

an intensified awareness of Zen, mystic philosophy, and Eastern patterns of thought

Art, a product of mankind, “must imitate nature”, since “humanity and nature are essentially one”

ART IN NATURE: Simms p346: Cage - “[Sound’s] deployment in music must reflect its reality in nature,

where it occurs with ceaseless abandon, unmotivated by the human will and not produced as a metaphor for

any other meaning”

Cage, Silence, Experimental Music, p12: “purposeful purposelessness”



Cage: Form is a language (silence) p135: “Emptiness of purpose does not imply contempt for society, rather

assumes that each person… is able to experience gifts with generosity, that society is best anarchic.

LISTENER: Simms p346: Cage: “composer as a creator of beautiful objects should be replaced in

importance by the listener”

Experimental Music, p 9: “the giving up of music”

“one sees that humanity and nature… are in this world together; that nothing was lost when everything was

given away. In fact, everything is gained”

Simms: p346: Cage “sought to efface his personality from his music by strategies of chance”

“renunciation of choices and the substitution of asking questions”

Cope p157: Cage’s concept and search was for the “possibility of saying nothing”

Cage in an interview with David Cope p159, in respect to Cartridge Music: “What you have to develop is an

indifference to whether your work is effective or ineffective; let happen what will”

AMERICAN LIFE: Cage, Cope p159 “it arises from the experience that is so frequent in American life…

and how to take it with what I call a sober and quiet mind, how to remain susceptible to divine influences”

Kotik, p13: Cage in the 1940s discovered an ancient oriental and medieval European statement about music:

“To quiet one’s own mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences”

Kotik p13: “it became clear that the romantic idea of self-expression had to be overcome, and that music

must align itself with the environment which it exists”

Simms p346: “not intended to be… destructive of art”

OBJECT OF REFLECTION: Williams p526 “as music becomes more referential and more willing to look

beyond its own internal configurations, so it creates a level of meaning that is more… pitched at a semiotic

level rather than a purely syntactic one”

“as music becomes more reflexive, so its components increasingly participate in an intertextual and

intercultural matrix”

Kotik, p13: “introduced an open musical environment in which the listener, instead of being bombarded by

composer’s intentions, can find his or her own center.”

CONCEPT: Cope p135 “is more a philosophical than an audible phenomenon”

PROCESS: Cope p136 “Indeterminacy implies art as process: no beginning, no middle, no end”

FORM: Indeterminacy, Cage p35: “for form unvitalized by spontaneity brings about the death of all the other

elements of the work”

Kostelanetz, Beginning with Cage p11: “no system of relations”

Negative:- Critiqued as the composer simply allowing performers to display their inventiveness- Masks composer weakness in compositional technique- No two performances are the same - issues within performance

- Result matching aim:

Cope p136 Hindemith refers to chance as “one of the ugliest modern musical diseases”



Cope p138, Boulez: “Composing by chance is not composing at all”

Reynolds: “theater as a substitute for self-sufficient sound is not defensible” p136

Reynolds: “Certainly the composer’s function should be more than providing… musicians with an excuse to

display their inventiveness”

“ultimately dispensable” p138

Salzman p4: “each new realization would be unforeseen by the composer himself”

Reynolds: “irresponsibility… arises from the use of these techniques to circumvent the lack of satisfying

invention” p139

Reynolds: “cannot, evidently, sustain itself”

Simms: “If extensively applied, it eliminates style” p343

Boulez, Alea (quotes by Simms, p354: “Chance… masks a basic weakness in compositional technique”

“protection against the asphyxia of invention”

“destroys every last embryo of craftsmanship”“Schematization… takes the place of invention; imagination… limits itself to giving birth to a complex

mechanism”

Boulez, Alea p44: “One transfers one’s choice to the interpreter’s. In this way one is protected,

camouflaged… What a relief!”

Boulez Alea p51: “consists in the composer’s running away from his own responsibility, in his shirking the

choice inherent in any kind of creation”

Osmond-Smith, p359: Acknowledging the interpretive panache of Severino Gazzelloni and David Tudor, he

derided the scores’ notational experiments “served only to incite these two virtuosi to improvise - therebylending the composers a borrowed glory that they scarcely merited”

Boulez Alea p53: “Why, what we wind up with is actually a glorification of the interpreter!”

Osmond-Smith: p454 “Boulez referred contemptuously to the ‘dreadful and regular epidemics’ that

seemingly created new fashions on an annual basis”

Low p283: Cage: “skillful means”

COMPOSER’S INTENTION: Cope p160: On indeterminate procedures (divorcing one’s self from the

process of creative control over the elements of a work): Cope: “This separation is intricate, some say as

intricate as that of trying to put one’s personal creative process into a composition”

COMPOSER: Cage, p37, Indeterminacy: the composer must be “identifying there with no matter what

eventuality [of the performers]”

Kostelanetz, an anthology p12: Cage: On achieving “the state of being disciplined” as a composer: It means

you must “give up the things closest to you… give yourself up… Your likes, your dislikes, etc.”

DIFFERENCES IN PERFORMANCES Cope p149: Bussotti’s Five Pieces:

Halsey Stevens (in regards to Bussotti): “If Mr Bussotti had wandered into the hall… he would not have had

the remotest idea that those three performances… might have been his own piece. They were so totally

different in every respect that the only thing he could lay claim to was having designed the score, not tohaving composed the piece”

“Aleatoric music… as it is frequently pursued, is an amusing parlor game”



Cage’s Cartridge Music in interview with David Cope, Cope p159: After hearing it in a house, Cage wasn’t

able to recognise the piece, even remarking that he “was pleased that [he] couldn’t recognize it”



POINT 2: Boulez - Aleatory as a reaction to indeterminacy, retaining the integrity of both composer

role and the work

- Allows an integration of chance with a continued Western focus on the composer role- Seen as fixing the issues of indeterminacy, creating a ‘superior’ way of involving chance in music- Spurning from the literary ideas of Joyce and Mallarmé- Fluidity of form - while still retaining the composer’s intention

- Allows performer to become more involved- Reconquer a new synthesis in his music

“Brave new worlds: experimentalism between the wars” - David Nicholls p210: The nineteenth-century

obsession with the subjective Romantic legacy of E.T.A. Hoffman of the “sublime master” whose “high self-

possession [is] inseparable from true genius” found its antithesis in the increasingly objective scientific

scrutiny to which music was subsequently subjected.

Charles (Silence) p185: “[Cage’s] productions are considered teratological in that they blindly deny… all

historicity, all relationships to contemporary musical ‘evolution’”

Charles (Silence) p185: Boulez: “the master of the evolutionary mode of thinking” - “one finds this concernover loyalty to the Western heritage… in the guise of an irrepressible penchant for craftsmanship”

“Everything must be structured, everything is finely chiseled in the end”

“forms themselves… the direct results of technical manipulations”

Charles (Silence) p185: In Boulez’s eyes “it would be inconceivable for the creator to descend from his

pedestal”

Osmond-Smith, p351: Although Boulez understood the implications and motivations of Cage’s position, he

“set his face squarely against the worship of ‘raw’ chance.”

Osmond-Smith, p351: The infiltration of Cagean influence into the European avant-garde was met with thestringent polemics of which Boulez was so effective a practitioner.

Nattiez, p461 Boulez: “chance… can only give you only one satisfactory solution out of the 10 million that

are possible; and this… is not the object of composition”

Osmond-Smith, p358 - Boulez, Alea: “But those routes… must remain the fruit of conscious choice”

Osmond-Smith p359: Nono who “insisted in neo-Hegelian fashion that ‘we do not live by chance, we don’t

do anything by chance’”

Reynolds: Indeterminacy “invade[s] some of the most tender areas of the artistic ego: craft, expressiveness,

and individuality” p136

Reynolds: “The difficulty in effectively projecting the core of a chance composition to the performer is

considerable” p137

Williams: p526 Chance operations “undermine traditional notions of authorial intention”

Watkins, p562: Boulez (on Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke XI: Element of risk which is “absolutely inimical to

the integrity of the work”

Boulez, Alea p42: “chance through inadvertence”

Boulez, Alea p46: “chance needs to be directly written into the score”

Boulez Alea p47: “necessity of chance in the interpretation - a directed chance"



Peyser p82: Boulez in a letter he wrote to Cage: “By temperament I cannot toss a coin… Chance must be

very well controlled. Il y a suffisamment d’inconnu. [There is already enough unknown]”

Peyser p219: Boulez’s Alea is a “complex discussion of ‘how to reconcile composition and chance’… his

recipe for ‘controlled chance’”

Nattiez, p178 Boulez Sound Word Synthesis: “not a mere gambling"

Simms, p353: “Europeans recognised that this ‘entropy’, as the phenomenon was often called, tended to

produce monotony…”

Simms, p345: European indeterminacy was inspired by trends in modern literature: Mallarmé’s free

distribution of lines in his poem ‘Un coup de dés’ (‘A throw of dice’) invites the reader to take different

routes about the page - this labyrinthine form was imitated by Boulez (eg. Third Piano Sonata)

Boulez, Alea (quoted by Simms p354): The form of the work should thus resemble a labyrinth “The work

must provide a certain number of possible routes”

“with chance playing a shunting role at the last moment”

Boulez, ‘Alea’: “We have respected the ‘finished’ aspect of the occidental work, its closed cycle, but we have

introduced the ‘chance’ of the oriental work, its open development”

Boulez, Alea (p11): “certain number of aleatory happenings inscribed in a mobile period of time - but having

a logic of development, an over-all sense of direction”

FLUIDITY OF FORM: Harbinson p16, Boulez 1955 - arguments for ‘open’ and ‘mobile’ forms “Fluidity of

form must integrate fluidity of vocabulary”

PERFORMER: Harbinson p20 - Alea, Boulez: “What a performer meets in the Third Piano Sonata is‘choice’ not ‘chance’: the former demands informed and carefully considered decisions (within controlled

boundaries) and allows the performer to become more involved in the creative musical process”

Nattiez p146, Boulez’s Sonate que me: Influenced by Mallarmé’s idea that: “the text imposes itself at varying

points… according to probability”

Nattiez, p178 Sound Word Synthesis Boulez: “conception of artistic creation in which ‘completion’ is no

longer something undertaken by the artist”

Negative:- Aesthetic responsibility counters initial notion of indeterminacy (lack of care of result)

- Despite aiming for ‘new synthesis’ he is grounded in the past- Result matching aim: seemingly coldly mathematical, unlike art, audience is unable to comprehend

concept

Reynolds: “If… a composer wants an indeterminate situation, there can be no preferred solutions”

AUTHORIAL INTENT Cope p137: Feldman: “This is true of Boulez. This is true of Stockhausen. You can

see this in the way they have approached American ‘chance’ music. They began by finding rationalizations

for how they could incorporate chance and still keep their precious integrity”

Kostelanetz, an anthology p10: Cage: “The question of the relation of this music to themselves and to society

never enters their mind. They just assume that a musical composition is made by… doing what the teacherstold you to do”

“Does it occur in their lives?… Now in this day and age, that music is obviously of no use whatsoever”



“Everything is determined to bring about what would presumably be the best result. I’d imagine that notions

such as unity and precision might enter into their minds”

Cope p138: Indeterminacy is a “pedagogical approach to erase control over compositional elements… that

must first transcend man’s loss of individual ego”

Cage, p37, Indeterminacy: This concern with “ideas of order, personal feelings, and the integration of these

[in Western music], simply suggest the presence of a man rather than the presence of sounds”

Bernstein, p556: Cage wrote about “his disinterest in being a composer, someone who ‘simply tells other

people what to do’”

CONCEPT CANNOT BE SEEN LIKE ART: Nicholls Brave New World p350 “But while the perceiver’s

eye can travel to and fro ‘all over’ the aggressive turmoil of a Pollock canvas without any threat to subjective

temporal continuity, the same is not the case when listening to Boulez: the ear is swept along without being

able to recuperate and integrate”

“much criticized for being ‘merely’ the cumulative consequence of a long series of actions”

“By contrast [to the critically acclaimed dynamism of Pollock’s canvas], Boulez… seemed to be inventing,

by techniques that were reputed by non-practitioners to be coldly mathematical, imaginary bodies… [of]aggressive action.”

Cope p139 Music of changes: “shows little trace of either the composer or the I Ching: it ‘merely’ sounds”

——

Boulez Alea p53: “Perhaps it is reckless… but isn’t it the only way to try to fix the Infinite?”



POINT 3: Both composers - the paradox (did their results match aims?)

- Indeterminacy in composition still has control at a higher level- Impossibility of total chance- Cannot completely evade author’s ego (as seen in Boulez)- Cage himself denounces his work- Eg: Cage’s Europeras

Silence Charles, p184: Path of indeterminate composers “is fraught with promises for a future that will have

to produce the integration of conscious and subconscious reason into a harmonious whole that has been lost”

Kostelanetz (Silence) p205: CAGE’S PURPOSE “he regards his music, which has always been about

changing peoples’ minds, as a springboard into political thought”

Peyser p70: Boulez: “We must expand the means of a technique already discovered… a destructive object

linked… to what it has wanted to destroy [tonality].”

Nattiez p143, Boulez Sonate que me: Evolution of musical technique which is “increasingly concerned with

the investigation of a relative world, a permanent ‘discovering’ rather like the state of ‘permanentrevolution’”

‘Despite the essential paradox of indeterminacy, both composers were able to transcend the Western

traditions, seeing the conceptual, political and social questions that indeterminacy was able to convey and

create within society… A perception of life reflected… and hence their resulting social input matched their

aim - concept over art. Despite their conflict, both the American line and European composers were able to

pave a way for the future modernist avant-garde (Fluxus etc)

—> Refer to positives and negatives overall!

Simms p347: “Despite its indeterminacy of composition, Music of Changes still reflects the composer’s

musical preferences. His choices are all made from among a limited and carefully preplanned range ofpossibilities… While Cage relinquished control over details of composition, his style is still evident at a

higher level of construction”

Low p291: “Cage assumes the Zen Buddhist psychology that considers all psyche, including the

psychoanalytic ‘unconscious’, to be ‘parts’ of the individual ego”

Therefore composers “exercise value judgment when any components of their minds make choices, even in

the course of…. activities supposedly proceeding from the psychoanalytic unconscious”

“Procedures operating from any level of the ego, in the Zen sense, I call intentional”

“Cage has often described his way of working as asking questions and abiding by the answers given to the

questions, usually by I Ching chance operations. However, it is clear that a certain degree of intentionality is

involved… in the choosing and framing of questions and of the gamuts of possible answers”

“The point is not that he ever entirely evades his individual ego and its predilections, but that he diminishesto some extent the value-judging activity of the ego that excludes possibilities, and thereby he lets in to that

extent ‘the rest of creation’”

David Cope, p138: “while nothing can be totally chance, nothing can be totally without chance”

Simms, p347: In later 1950s, “Cage became dissatisfied with this apparent contradiction of his aesthetic”

Cage, Indeterminacy p36: “The Music of Changes is an object more inhuman than human, since chance

operations brought it into being. The fact that these things that constitute it… have come to control… the

performer, gives the work the alarming aspect of a Frankenstein monster”

Simms, p348: “He eschewed this last “intolerable” circumstance by recourse to graphic notation” eg.

Concert for Piano and Orchestra



Cope p154: “The plasticity of the graphic notation allows for a free sound, every bit as complex as the

traditionally notated one, yet without the studied end result and… without the ‘performance-to-performance’

variability”

Cope, p136: Cage: “If one is making an object and then proceeds in an indeterminate fashion…. outside of

one’s control, then one is simply being careless about the making of that object”

“If art is process, however, then indeterminacy is a viable way to proceed”

Osmond-Smith, p357: Xenakis pithily asserted that “le hasard se calcule” (chance may be calculated), an

axiom which he put into aesthetic practice in his first stochastic orchestral work Pithoprakta.

Osmond-Smith, p361: p361 “What had unified them was a radicalism of aesthetic purpose. For the modernist

tradition of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the great sin against the human spirit was that of

boredom” definitively epitomised by Baudelaire in his poem ‘Le Voyage’

Williams p521: “formed this outlook in opposition to Romantic aesthetics, which associates music with

extra-musical ideas, but in so doing encountered the paradox that technical advancement is… an aesthetic in

itself, not an avoidance of aesthetics”

Williams p520: Cage’s Europeras 1 and 2:

“collages of independent events and components”

“because the quantity of chance decisions that fed them was so huge, a more technological solution than

Cage’s tried and tested coin-tossing procedures was required: a computer program was designed to simulate

the chance procedures of the I Ching on a large scale”

“The result was a typically Cagean paradox: a very precise set of instructions generated by random means

themselves derived from a computer”

Furthermore, the contradictions expand as “the Europeras are caught in a tension between a genre associatedwith intense expression and the automated procedures Cage applied in order to defamiliarize learned

responses”

PERFORMER: Nattiez p461, Boulez: “If he is not a composer… if you do not provide him with sufficient

information to perform a work, what can he do? He can only turn to information that he has been given on

some earlier occasion… what he has already played”

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Plannin Da Essaiz