Table Of ContentM U S I C A G E
JOHN CAGE
in Conversation with Joan Retailack
CAGE MUSE
o N
w
o
ART
D
MUSIC
Joan Retailack, editor
WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Published by University Press of New England/Hanover and London
Barnard
this book is dedicated to
Wesleyan University Press
Published by University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755
H C (W) E
© 1996 by Joan Retailack
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America 54321
cip data appear at the end of the book
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Conversations in Retrospect, Joan Retailack xiii
I. WORDS
Art Is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else / John Cage 3
Cage’s Loft, New York City:
September 6-7,1990 / John Cage and Joan Retallack
II. VISUAL ART
Cage’s Loft, New York City:
October 21-23,1991 / John Cage and Joan Retallack 83
III. MUSIC
Cage’s Loft, New York. City:
July 13-17,1992 / John Cage andJoan Retallack 169
July 18,1992 / John Cage, Joan Retallack, and Michael Bach 246
July 30,1992 / John Cage and Joan Retallack 291
Appendixes
A. . Selected Cage Computer Programs 31$
B. Mesostic Introduction to The First Meeting of the Satie Society 316
C. Writing through Ulysses (Muoyce II). Typescript Page from Part 17
based on the “Nighttown” section of Ulysses 319
D. Excerpts from Manuscript and Score of Two^ (1992.) 320
E. Notated Time Bracket Sheets for Thirteen (1992), Pages 14,13,16 328
F. Writing through Ulysses (Muoyce II), Part 3 331
G. IC Supply Sheet Marked by Cage with Red, Blue, and
Black Pencils 332
vii
H. Excerpts from Score for Europera 333
I. Europera at MOMA 34°
J. Letter Outlining Plans’ for Noh-opera 34^
Illustrations
K. Notated Time Bracket Sheets for ^8 Pages 2 and 4 342-
L. Project for Hanau Squatters ’ 344
M. First Page of One^ (1991) , ^45 Figure i. John Cage working at Crown Point Press, 1981 97
N. First Page of Ten (1991), Violin i 34^ Figure 2. John Cage, Changes and Disappearances, 1979-82, No. 17 98
Figure 3. John Cage working on Changes and Disappearances at Crown Point
Index ' ^47 Press, 1981 98
Figure 4. John Cage, Where There Is, Where There— Urban Landscape,
1987-89, No. 22 114
Figure 5. John Cage, Global Village ^7-48,1989 115
Figure 6. John Cage lighting a fire' on the etching press bed at Crown Point
Press, January 1992 117
Figure 7. John Cage with printers placing damp paper on fire at Crown Point
Press, January 1992 118
Figure 8. John Cage, Variations III, 1992, No. 10 119
Figure 9: Robert Rauschenberg, Automobile Tire Print, 1953 123
Figure 10. John Cage, New River Watercolor, Series II, 1988, No. 8 123
Figure ii. Mark Tobey, untitled, 1961 126
Figure 12. John Cage, Without Horizon, 1992, No. 46 130
Figure 13. John Cage, HV2,1992, No. 23 133
Fi^re 14. John Cage, “(untitled)” 193
Figure 15. Ryoanji drawing, excerpt from score, rocks and pencils 241
Figure 16. Working notes on which Losa had been lying 258
Figure 17. Mineko Grimmer Sound Sculpture 276
ix
viii Contents
Acknowledgments
John Cage was, and is, the raison d’etre and moving spirit of this book, but it has
been a complicated project involving many other people in ways both explicit
and obliquely indispensable. So many that it is impossible to fully acknowledge
even a fraction of my debt. The great-humored presence of Merce Cunningham
has been an encouragement'and a benevolent horizon throughout. It is no ex
aggeration to say that without the ongoing cheerfiil support, good sense, and
intelligence of Laura Kuhn, Director of The John Cage Trust—in all phases of
transcribing, writing, and editing—this book could not have been realized.
Neither would it have been possible to complete this project without generous
gifts of time and, in many cases, painstaking assistance from Michael Bach Bach-
tischa, Peter Baker, Charles Bernstein, Kathan Brown, Andrew Culver, Alan
Devenish, Tom Delio, Ulla Dydo, Gretchen Johnson, Gloria Parloff, Marjorie
Perloff, Henry Segal, Rod Smith, Juliana Spahr, Holly Swain, and Gregory Ulmer
—all of whom read, commented on, and corrected portions of the manuscript.
Kathan Brown, the Director of Crown Point Press, generously contributed the
photographs of John Cage and his prints that give this book much of its visual
interest. Andrew Culver was a constant and generous source of materials, infor
mation, and ideas.
William Anastasi, Elaine Avidon, Norman O. Brown, Clark Coolidge, Andr^
Gervais, Anne d’Harnoncourt, Robert Emrich, Mineko Grimmer, Mimi John
sen, Charles Junkerman, Ray Kass, David Krakauer, Julie Lazar, Lois Long,
Jackson Mac Low, Tom Moore, Nam June Paik, William R. Paulson, James
Pritchett, Robert Rauschenberg, Margarete Roeder, Susan Sheehan, Ralph Siu,
Paul Van Emmerik, David Vaughan, Brent Zerger, and many others, provided
essential information and materials. Anne Tardos compiled the extensive index
for this book and, in that process, helped in numerous and humorous and sur
prising ways.
I am grateful to Terry Cochran, former director of Wesleyan University Press,
who took this book on and guided it with equanimity through some early perils;
to Suzanna Tamminen, Administrative Director at Wesleyan, who became its
good-natured and helpful guide through later complications; and to the produc
tion staff at the University Press of New England for their patient handling of
the third wave of crises on the way to publication.
Art Is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else is used by permission of The
John Cage Trust and was previously published in Aerial 6I7 (1991). Excerpts from
John Cage’s music {Ryoanji for Bass, Owe®, Two^, Ten, and Europera 5) are used by
kind permission of the publisher, Henmar Press Inc. (C. F. Peters Corporation),
with special thanks to Don Gillespie, Vice President of C. F. Peters. All music
Introduction: Conversations in Retrospect
manuscript materials from The John Cage Trust are used by kind permission of
the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, which has acquired the Joan Retallack
collection.
The role ofthe composer is other than it was. Teaching, too, is no longer transmission of a
body of useful information, hut’s conversation, alone, together, whether in a place appointed or
not in that place.. . . We talk, movingfom one idea to another as though we were hunters.. ..
(By music we mean sound; but what’s time? Certainly not that something begins and
ends.) . . . (Hunted mushrooms in muskeg nearby. Got lost.) ... A teacher should do
something other than filling in the gaps. . . . What we learn isn’t what we’re taught nor what
we study. We don’t know what we’re learning. Something about society? That if
what happens here (Emma Lake) happened there (New York City), such thing as rights and
riots, unexplained oriental wars wouldn’t arise. Something about art? That it’s experience
shared?—j o h n cage. Diary: Emma Lake Music Workshop ip6f
Not long after John Cage died, I received a phone call from a scholar who was
writing an essay on Cage’s Europ eras. He told me it had just taken him two days
to put everything in the past tense. Through no fault at all of that very nice man,
I found this chilling. I vowed I would never put anything having to do with Cage
in the past tense. A vow I of course had almost immediately to break.
I had found myself shaken by the past tense before. There came a time in
my life as a reader—partly due to Cage—when I no longer wanted fictive time
machines to whisk me away from that resonant, chaotic here-and-now that is,
with all its entanglements, our only source of history. The chosen afterimages
of a narrative past are as removed from the complex real as a sci-fi future. They
are an exercise in past perfected, scything through the thicket of intersections
that constitute real life, clearing out complexity and possibility. How to present
the phenomenon of Cage now, without stopping time, stopping breath; without
falling into the narrative fallacy that the micrologic in. a string of sentences is the
wa^{imgs z4'^r£2,.Jn-philQsophy4;his,is-knowrL as.xKe.43r.Q.ble.rn of reference. For
me, a poet, it is a crisis of linguistic. lJfe.jagainst-death. I bring it up partly to
confess from the outset that I’ve found ho solution in this awkward prologue to
the real event, the transcripts of the conversations themselves. Despite my short
comings as Cage’s interlocutor, the conversations in their expansiveness impart a
sense of Cage’s everyday life. They do not fall into that category of “forms that
erase all trace of arbitrariness”—Adorno’s phrase for the kind of literature that
makes us impatient with signs of life.^ Many twentieth-century writers have felt,
xiii
xii Acknowledgments
like Adorno, that complex, fragmented, performative forms were the only hope over lunch, in taxi cabs, on the phone, and during non-taping encounters and
for retaining^vital principles, thinkingjiew thoughts, changing mmds. Cage in visits. My major editorial intervention has been in several instances to make a
hisow^{ittHgij^u^„a,cat^o^e^orsucRpo«^^^ continuous sequence of a line of discussion that left off and then came up again
conversation among them. in entirely unrelated contexts as further or afterthoughts and addenda. I have also
John Cage often acknowledged that his sense of poetry and prose style began omitted certain personal exchanges never intended to be “on the record.” On the
with the example of Genrude Stein. The writing collected in his early books other hand, during one of the conversations printed in this book, the one that
{Silence, A Year from Monday, M...) enadts the very process of forming a revolu included the cellist Michael Bach, I left the tape recorder on during lunch and'
tionary aesthetic with language that is both crystal clear and enormously complex transcribed everything thattfranspired.'* This particular interview captures a hefty
in its implications. It is language whose radically reorienting energies register slice of the life of John Cage, cook, solicitous host, and composer. He begins a
graphically and syntactically on the page. In mentioning the debt to Gertrude new composition as we talk.
Stein I’m not referring to that misleading tag “continuous present.” What one My friendship with John Cage was for me so large and diverse in its impli
might call cheap imitations of Stein (and early Hemingway) demonstrate the cations that it’s been difficult to know how to begin and middle through an
limits of a pure and simple use of this device. It produces literary artifacts in introduction. Ultimately, I have taken to heart (once again) something Cage said
which a terrifying purification has taken place—history obliterated in a gram in response to my mentioning the same problem years ago, during one of our first
matical disaster whose aftermath is a single glistening strand of narrative events. conversations in the sixties. He said simply, “You know, you can always begin
Cage appreciated the odd and wonderful fact that we don’t live our lives in anywhere.” So too a narrative.-in_the.jnidst-ef-timevwhich~aeither.begins.jior
orderly tenses or monotonic modes.’ 'V^liye injnessy conversationJocated at ends, can in principle begin anywhere. But perhaps what we most urgently learn
lively inters^ections. of present, past, future—where. futurcis_not just_a.hypotheti- rrom Cage is,that thenarratiYes wense-as nur, -history ..begin.m some potent and
cal, but is-alwaysL-actively enjergijjg put.j3£,auL.e!xhangejwith jJje.wQild. One generativejsense. in rhe-future. Whether we call it teleology, utopianism, vision,
learns this from Cage’s work. He saw the past as exigent and instructive resource, hope, curiosity, or the simple force of “There must be more to life than this!?”
future promise is what draws human events on. Later, in beginning an attempt
the future as his now.
Cfloyersatioo necessitates what it etymologically denotes—living with (con), on what led to what, we participate in that metamorphic retrospect where every
(yetse) toward—turning, that is, away from self alone. The verse of poetry thing suddenly seems prescient. Particularly things having to do with those who
and the verse in conversation are related lnjustJ:haLJffiay,-a5.AJlt£aLgi™ii^S~ were to such an unusual degree “on time” they seemed to be way ahead of the
at best, unexpectedly, toward our many pasts, presents, futures—that is, toward rest of us.
possibiljjdeSrJiQXUiQgencisSj^recp^nitioos, uiiinte^ There is as much un The name “John Cage” denotes such a figure, and much of this is no doubt
spoken in conversation as enters the realm of what can be s^d. Both parties must an illusion. But if it is possible to distinguish between worse and better illusions,
o be comfortaHI^with^lence. Silence is the one thing that can be counted on. those that are forms of nostalgia versus those that function as a kind of oracle, the
Silence is the authoritative presence. rapidly forming Cage mythos is surely the latter. I use “oracle” here, as I think
During the taping of our conversations there were numerous silences, pauses, Cage did when he referred to his use of chance operations as an oracle, to mean
and interruptions. Most are noted in parentheses, though it would have tried ^acriye-j2iincjRl^^^^
readers’ patience beyond all reasonable bounds to have noted every one. I did oy an opening-out of inquiry into a suggestive dialogue with life principles not
feel, however, that it would be of interest to those wanting to better understand unlike the selective intersections with chance that are the morphology of culture
Cage’s thought processes to preserve the distinctive(rhythms\of the interchanges
that occur in the course of thinking things through aloud. The pleasure of con
versation is as strange and humorous as any form of life by virtue of its empty
words as well as full, its digressions and improbabilities as well as strenuous efforts US worn-invention—m do. They also serve as the kind of impetus we might
to make sense. It is not most honestly and productively about filling in all gaps, Ssbddtfi'Wltli tKe J^irairSincZinJTWfw or swerve—the collision with contingency
pinning things down so terminally they will never wiggle out of discursive traps. that dislodges us from enervated patterns into a charged apprehension of some
Cage and I had wanted, insofar as we could, to tape “real conversations” rather thing new. I have a feeling it’s this kind of thing that is meant when people say.
than formulaic interviews. Though the shadow format of the interview always Meeting John Cage changed my life.” Of course everything changes one’s life
remains, the conversations did begin to overflow our taping sessions, continue to some degree or other, no matter how minuscule. But Cage’s life/work, itself
xiv Introduction Conversations in Retrospect xv
functioning as oracle and clinamen for others, seemed to enlarge the range and them “the irrelevant accompaniment for Merce Cunningham’s cheerful dance.”
He goes on, “I tell one story a minute, letting some minutes pass with no stories
scale of the possible,
I first met John Cage in the fell of 1965 when the Merce Cunningham Dance in them at all. Some critics say that I steal the show. But this is not possible, for
Company came to perform in a dance festival being held at the Harper Theater stealing is no longer something one does. Many things, wherever one is, whatever
in the Hyde Park section of Chicago. It was Merce Cunningham I was eager to one’s doing, happen at once. They are in the air; they belong to all of us. Life is
see for the first time out of a general curiosity about “modern dance,” but also abundant. People are polyattentive.”® Few if any of us in the audience had had
because I had heard from friends that Cunningham was “really something com the opportunity to think about all this. We were experiencing it “cold,” as some
pletely different.” At the time, though I had a taste for adventure, my interests in might have put it. I prefer “out of the blue.” It came with the pristine sensuality
dance and music were relatively conservative. George Balanchine was my favorite of “out of the blue.”
choreographer, and my Very intense preferences in music were largely Baroque In the mode of Diaghilev’s “Astonish me!” (to Cocteau), I too relished sur
and pre-Baroque. I was in feet hardly aware of John Cage. And, looking now at prise, and wanted more. The experience from the very first moment had been
the program for what was billed “dance festival: The most important dancers riveting—fascinating, humorous, mysterious. During that opening performance,
performing in America—ballet, modern and ethnic,”’ I notice to my surprise I had seen and heard more acutely and complexly than ever before during a pro
that Cage, though listed as Musical Director of the Cunningham company and grammed aesthetic event. Very little of what had taken place was in a descriptive
performing (as did David Tudor) in every event, was really not featured in the or referential relation to the natural world, but when I thought of how it had
program. Neither he nor Tudor was given a bio. engaged my attention I could only liken it to watching ocean waves in infinite
The series of five performances was for me a sudden education in what I variety spuming against rock on the coast of Maine, or sky and water becoming
had never dreamed dance could be, as well as in new music—mostly by John one in the heat and stillness of a South Carolina low-country afternoon, or even
Cage, but also by La Monte Young, Morton Feldman, and Bo Nilsson. (There moving through the endlessly interesting medias race of humanity in downtown
was one piece by Erik Satie.) I saw Cage preparing a piano, heard both Cage Manhattan. These associations were familiar from my past. What was completely
and Tudor play. Many of the events involved complex multimedia components new, what I could not connect with anything I had ever been consciously aware
with theater-wide sound sources emitting constant surprises—words and noises. of before, was what seemed to be a radical alteration in my experience of the rela
tion between visual events and sound—space and time. (As a philosophy student
Proeram notes included “Let me tell you that the absurd is only too necessary
I knew that this was truly profound, since according to Kant space and time were
on earth. Ivan Karamazov”—something familiar to me from my own reading
O
of Dostoevsiiy. But then there was the more enigmatic and, as I subsequently the fundamental aesthetic categories.)
learned, quintessentially Cagean “The events and souiidS-af .this. dance^Kyolvc When the performance was over, literally shaking with excitement and fright,
around a quiet center which, though silent and unmoyiflgx..«.jhe..5OW.C.eJ&am I went backstage, where I came upon Merce Cunningham. I told him that this
whiciTthey happen.” This, along wimThe sensibility structuring the conjunctions had been the most stunning, puzzling experience of dance and music I had ever
had, that I didn’t understand what had happened, that I was intensely curious
and disjunctions of sound, silence, film, and movement, completely astonished
me. What occurred had not turned out to be dance accompanied by music in to find out. Were rehearsals by any chance open to the public? Cunningham was
any way I had experienced before, but a strange intermingling of the visual and friendly and welcoming. He said, “Oh yes, of course,” and told me what their
auditory glancing off one another’s energies, never cohering or congealing within rehearsal schedule would be.
a familiar logic of relations. Over half of the audience left early, a consider The next afternoon when I arrived at the theater, the dancers—Carolyn
able number exiting during the last piece. Variations V, a simultaneity of dance, Brown, Gus Solomons, Sandra Neels, Valda Setterfield, Barbara Lloyd, Peter Saul,
electronic sounds, VanDerBeek film, and “remarks” read by Cage. and Albert Reid—were beginning to arrive for ■warm-up exercises. I was struck
The next night the audience became even more restless, with the premiere again, as I had been the night before, by the exquisite discipline and precision of
of How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run. Many stomped out angrily, shouting their their movement—a rigor I had in my ignorance not expected outside the ethos
disgust over their shoulders. This was the piece in which Cage, seated at a small of ballet. Sitting alone in the dimly lighted auditorium was the man in the black
table to one side of the stage, equipped with microphone and sound-sensitive suit, white shirt, and tie I recognized as the composer-performer from the night
collar, performed a repertoire of noisy activities—smoking, drinking a bottle of before, John Cage.
wine with gulps and swallows broadcast over loudspeakers, and reading a series When he saw me come in, he nodded and smiled, ■walked over, introduced
of short humorous texts which he later published in A Year from Monday, calling himself, and sat down. He asked me about my interest in dance and music.
Conversations in Retrospect xvii
xvi Introduction
wanted to know what I did. Was I involved with either? I told him that I was coincidence of events in space and time meaning something more than mere chance,
namely, a peculiar interdependence of ob jective events among themselves as as with
painting, writing poetry, and studying music (cello), all more or less “on the side.”
the^subjectiye. (psychic) states of the observer or observers. —(Jung, p. xxiv)
I was a graduate student studying philosophy at the University of Chicago. “Oh,”
he said with a smile, “I’m involved in the study of philosophy too. What kind So, qbanccj though “mere,” is all pervasive, and coincidence turns out to_haye
of philosophy do you study?” I told him I had been studying ethics and phi as much relational glue as causality, if not more. Attention to synchronicity allows
losophy of science, and was primarily interested in the methods of philosophy one to notice relationships between disparate elements minus the compulsion
of language, particularly the work of Wittgenstein. Cage said he was interested to absorb them into a progressively homogenizing system. I read the following
in Eastern philosophy, particularly Zen Buddhism, and that he didn’t much care passage from Jung’s foreword—knowing nothing about Cage’s use of the I Ching
for Wittgenstein—“too many rules.” But he was curious what I found of value in in his music—as having somehow to do with Cage’s account of Cunningham’s
Wittgenstein, and I was'curious about Buddhist philosophy, so we talked about movement away from story bailees to the coincidences of sound and movement
those things and about my sense of something unfamiliar having happened the
that-structured the performances I had seen:
night before to my perception of space-time.
Cage was buoyant, charming, expansive. He explained the way in which he The causal point of view’ tells us a dramatic story about how D came into existence: it
took its origin from C, which existed before D, and C in its turn had a father, B, etc. The
and Merce Cunningham worked together—each composing and choreograph
synchronistic view on the other hand tries to produce an equally meaningful picture of
ing independently, having agreed beforehand only on the length of time of a
coincidence. How does it happen that A', B’, C', D', etc., appear all in the same moment
given piece. This meant that the relation between the dance and the music was and in the same place? It happens in the first place because the physical events A' and B'
not causality, but only that they happened to occur in the same space over rhe are of the same quality as the psychic events C' and D', and further because all are the ex
same period of time—“synchronicity.” Cage said neither he nor Merce Cunning ponents of one and the same momentary situation. The situation is assumed to represent
a legible or understandable picture. —(Jung, pp. xxiv-xxv)
ham could bear to see dancers “Mickey Mousing” to the rhythm of the music.
He then told me, rather shyly, that he had recently published a book of writings
Of course what is “understood” will not meet criteria of traditional Western
on some of these matters. It was called Silence. When I told him I would look for
logics of discovery and understanding unless the conceptual framework within
it, he said that he hoped I would find it interesting, but he was sure I would be
which those logics operate expands to include psychic phenomena, or forms of
interested in the / Ching, the “Chinese Book of Changes.” He said to get the Bol-
spirituality, or ecological or environmental views, or the kind of modeling of
lingen, Wilhelm/Baynes edition with the essay on synchronicity by Jung: “That
complex systems (like turbulent fluids and gases and the weather) that goes under
may help.”
the rubric of “deterministic chaos.” Going back to the Jung foreword now, I am,
I ordered Silence the next morning and bought a copy of the 1 Ching. Jung’s
despite its dated assumption of absolutes and essences, startled that he wrote
foreword was both helpfuband puzzling'':
it in 1949. Another mind that had managed in certain very interesting respects
We have not sufficiently taken into account as yet that we need the laboratory with its the difficult trait of being “on time.” In the twentieth century, bogged down
incisive restrictions in order to demonstrate the invariable validity of natural law. If we by enduring nineteenth-century forms, the present has always looked downright
leave things to nature, we see a very different picture: every process is partially or totally
futuristic.
interfered with by chance, so much so that under natural circumstances a course of events
Cage and I continued to talk the next day, about “ordinary language philoso
absolutely conforming to specific laws is almost an exception. —(C. G. Jung, p. xxii)
phy,” art, and “ordinary life.” I told Cage I thought he should give Wittgenstein
This confirmed the importance of chance; and/but then there was this: another chance, particularly after reading the Jung. And I don’t clearly remember
the relevance I thought I saw then, but it had something to do with Wittgen-
Whoever invented the I Ching-vt^s convinced that the hexagram worked out in a certain
stein’s connecting meaning and use within activefornt§..c£life, which I probably
moment coincided with [that momenjj in quality no less than in time. To him [sic] the
hexagram was the exponent of the moment in which it was cast—even more so than the visualized as a series of contexts radiating out from the linguistic event like a series
hours of the clock or the divisions of the calendar could be—inasmuch as the hexagram of synchronic concentric circles. Focus on any moment and you would have syn
was understood to be an indicator of the essential situation prevailing in the moment of chronic, concentric contextuality. . . . Whatever it was that I said. Cage looked
its, origin. This assumption involves a certain curious principle that I have termed syn-
doubtful, smiled, and probably changed the subject. He told me the art that he
chronicity[,1 a concept that formulates a point of view diametrically opposed to that of
valued was not separated from the r^t of life. (I think he may have mentioned
causality. Since the latter is a merely statistical truth and not absolute, it is a sort of work
ing hypothesis of how events evolve one out of another, whereas synchronicity takes the Duchamp’s readymades.) The so-called gap between art and life didn’t have to
xviii Introduction Conversations in Retrospect xix
