Listen to This (36 page)
Authors: Alex Ross
At the podium was the pianist and conductor Ignat Solzhenitsyn, who grew up in Cavendish, forty miles to the north of Marlboro. His father, the novelist, had died the week before, and he had just returned from the funeral, in Moscow. The orchestra was a mixture of Marlboro-ites junior and senior, with Arnold Steinhardt sitting uncomplainingly in the back row and Soovin Kim serving as concertmaster. (Steinhardt wore a sign on his back: PROPERTY OF DAVID SOYER) In trading Beethoven’s ideas back and forth, the musicians were recapitulating in musical terms ties that had formed over the summer. Uchida smiled or wiggled her eyebrows when different players took up the principal melody, as if resuming conversations that she had begun over Eggs McMarlboro at the coffee shop.
“It’s great,” Rebecca Ringle said to me during a break in the rehearsal. “You know everyone. Romie gets the theme, then James gets the theme.”
The hall was packed for the performance, with many longtime friends of Marlboro in the crowd. Uchida assumed concert mode, unleashing the full strength of her mighty left hand in the portentous C-minor chords that open the piece. Throughout, she allowed herself a bit more Romantic flamboyance than is her custom. She also issued a smattering of wrong notes, as if in tribute to Serkin’s philosophy of seeking the perfection beyond precision—the truth of the noblest, most honest effort. The great moment for the chorus comes in the insistently joyous setting of the line “When love and strength are wed”:
“Und Kraft! Und Kraft! Und Kr-a-a-a-a-ft!”
I had the feeling of being carried along by an enormous wave, and, however approximate the sound coming from my throat, it added to the force of the mass. And I reflected on the fact that even the most exalted music-making comes from an accumulation of everyday labor, inextricable from human relationships.
“Und Kraft! Und Kraft! Und Kr-a-a-a-a-ft!”
I had the feeling of being carried along by an enormous wave, and, however approximate the sound coming from my throat, it added to the force of the mass. And I reflected on the fact that even the most exalted music-making comes from an accumulation of everyday labor, inextricable from human relationships.
“It was at least inspired,” Uchida said afterward. “Not the cleanest, but bloody inspired.”
On my way home, driving toward the interstate, I took a detour and stopped at a little white church in Guilford. Rudolf Serkin is buried in the churchyard there, a few feet away from Adolf Busch. The violinist’s name is almost hidden by thick-growing bushes, which metaphorically suggest what Busch and Serkin achieved when they came to America. At a time when Hitler was dragging German music into the mire, these pure spirits succeeded in transplanting their tradition to Vermont. In a wider sense, Marlboro represents the migration of tradition across centuries and continents: a Japanese-born woman passing along her understanding of Mozart and Schoenberg to new generations of American kids. Marlboro is an enchanting place, but, in the end, there is nothing especially remarkable about it. The remarkable thing is the power of music to put down roots wherever it goes.
THE END OF SILENCE
JOHN CAGE
On August 29, 1952, David Tudor walked onto the stage of the Maverick Concert Hall, near Woodstock, New York, sat down at the piano, and, for four and a half minutes, made no sound. He was performing 4’33”, a conceptual work by John Cage. It has been called the “silent piece,” but its purpose is to make people listen. “There’s no such thing as silence,” Cage said, recalling the premiere. “You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.” Indeed, some listeners didn’t care for the experiment, although they saved their loudest protests for the question-and-answer session afterward. Someone reportedly hollered, “Good people of Woodstock, let’s drive these people out of town!” Even Cage’s mother had her doubts. At a subsequent performance, she asked the composer Earle Brown, “Now, Earle, don’t you think that John has gone too far this time?”
In the summer of 2010, the pianist Pedja Muzijevic included 4’33” in a recital at Maverick, which is in a patch of woods a couple of miles outside Woodstock. I went up for the day, wanting to experience the piece in its native habitat. The hall, made primarily of oak and pine, is rough-hewn and barnlike. On pleasant summer evenings, the doors are left open, so that patrons can listen from benches outside. Muzijevic, mindful of the natural setting, chose not to use a mechanical timepiece; instead, he counted off the seconds in his head. Technology intruded all the same, in the form of a car stereo from somewhere nearby. A solitary bird in the trees struggled to compete with the thumping bass. After a couple of
minutes, the stereo receded. There was no wind and no rain. The audience stayed perfectly still. For about a minute, we sat in deep, full silence. Muzijevic broke the spell savagely, with a blast of Wagner: Liszt’s transcription of the Liebestod from
Tristan und Isolde
. Someone might as well have started up a chain saw. I might not have been the only listener who wished that the music of the forest had gone on a little longer.
minutes, the stereo receded. There was no wind and no rain. The audience stayed perfectly still. For about a minute, we sat in deep, full silence. Muzijevic broke the spell savagely, with a blast of Wagner: Liszt’s transcription of the Liebestod from
Tristan und Isolde
. Someone might as well have started up a chain saw. I might not have been the only listener who wished that the music of the forest had gone on a little longer.
Cage’s mute manifesto has inspired reams of commentary. The composer and scholar Kyle Gann, in his 2010 book
No Such Thing as Silence
:
John Cage’s
4’33”, defines the work as “an act of framing, of enclosing environmental and unintended sounds in a moment of attention in order to open the mind to the fact that all sounds are music.” That last thought ruled Cage’s life: he wanted to discard inherited structures, open doors to the exterior world, “let sounds be just sounds.” Gann writes, “It begged for a new approach to listening, perhaps even a new understanding of music itself, a blurring of the conventional boundaries between art and life.” On a simpler level, Cage had an itch to try new things. What would happen if you sat at a piano and did nothing? If you chose among an array of musical possibilities by flipping a coin and consulting the
I Ching
? If you made music from junkyard percussion, squads of radios, the scratching of pens, an amplified cactus? If you wrote music for dance-Merce Cunningham was Cage’s longtime partner—in which dance and music went their separate ways? If you took at face value Erik Satie’s conceit that his piano piece
Vexations
could be played 840 times in succession? Cage had an innocent, almost Boy Scout—like spirit of adventure. As he put it, “Art is a sort of experimental station in which one tries out living.”
No Such Thing as Silence
:
John Cage’s
4’33”, defines the work as “an act of framing, of enclosing environmental and unintended sounds in a moment of attention in order to open the mind to the fact that all sounds are music.” That last thought ruled Cage’s life: he wanted to discard inherited structures, open doors to the exterior world, “let sounds be just sounds.” Gann writes, “It begged for a new approach to listening, perhaps even a new understanding of music itself, a blurring of the conventional boundaries between art and life.” On a simpler level, Cage had an itch to try new things. What would happen if you sat at a piano and did nothing? If you chose among an array of musical possibilities by flipping a coin and consulting the
I Ching
? If you made music from junkyard percussion, squads of radios, the scratching of pens, an amplified cactus? If you wrote music for dance-Merce Cunningham was Cage’s longtime partner—in which dance and music went their separate ways? If you took at face value Erik Satie’s conceit that his piano piece
Vexations
could be played 840 times in succession? Cage had an innocent, almost Boy Scout—like spirit of adventure. As he put it, “Art is a sort of experimental station in which one tries out living.”
Many people, of course, won’t hear of it. More than half a century after the work came into the world, 4’33” is still dismissed as “absolutely ridiculous,” “stupid,” “a gimmick,” and the “emperor’s new clothes”—to quote some sample putdowns that Gann extracted from an online comment board. Such judgments are especially common within classical music, where Cage, who died in 1992, remains an object of widespread scorn. In the visual arts, though, he long ago achieved monumental stature. He is considered a co-inventor of “happenings” and performance art; the Fluxus movement essentially arose from classes that Cage taught at the New School, in the late 1950s. (One exercise consisted of listening to a pin drop.) Cage emulated visual artists in turn, his chief idol being the master conceptualist Marcel Duchamp. The difference is that scorn for
avant-garde art has almost entirely vanished. A New York Times editorial writer made an “emperor’s new clothes” jab at Duchamp’s
Nude Descending a Staircase
when it showed at the 69th Regiment Armory, in 1913. Jackson Pollock, too, was once widely mocked. Now the art market bows before them.
avant-garde art has almost entirely vanished. A New York Times editorial writer made an “emperor’s new clothes” jab at Duchamp’s
Nude Descending a Staircase
when it showed at the 69th Regiment Armory, in 1913. Jackson Pollock, too, was once widely mocked. Now the art market bows before them.
The simplest explanation for the resistance to avant-garde music is that human ears have a catlike vulnerability to unfamiliar sounds, and that when people feel trapped, as in a concert hall, they panic. In museums and galleries, we are free to move around, and turn away from what bewilders us. It’s no surprise, then, that Cage has always gone over better in nontraditional spaces. In 2009, MACBA, in Barcelona, mounted a remarkable exhibition entitled The Anarchy of Silence, which traced Cage’s career and his myriad connections to other arts. The day I was there, the crowd was notably youthful: high schoolers and college students dashed through galleries devoted to Cage’s concepts and contraptions, their faces wavering between disbelief and delight. Like it or not, Cage will be with us a long time.
Morton Feldman, another avant-garde musician with an eye for the wider artistic landscape, once said, “John Cage was the first composer in the history of music who raised the question by implication that maybe music could be an art form rather than a music form.” Feldman meant that, since the Middle Ages, even the most adventurous composers had labored within a craftsmanlike tradition. Cage held that an artist can work as freely with sound as with paint: he changed what it meant to be a composer, and every kid manipulating music on a laptop is in his debt. Not everything he did was laudable, or even tolerable. Even his strongest admirers may admit to sometimes feeling as Jeanne Reynal did when, in 1950, Cage recited his “Lecture on Nothing” at the Artists’ Club: “John, I dearly love you, but I can’t bear another minute.” Yet the work remains inescapable, mesmerizing, and-as I’ve found over months of listening, mainly to Mode Records’ comprehensive Cage edition-often unexpectedly touching. It encompasses some of the most violent sounds of the twentieth century, as well as some of the most gently beguiling. It confronts us with the elemental question of what music is, and confounds all easy answers.
Cage’s high-school yearbook said of him, “Noted for: being radical.” His radicalism was lifelong and unrelenting: he took the path of most resistance.
As much as any artist, he enjoyed receiving applause and recognition, but he had no need for wider public or institutional approval. The one time that I saw him up close, he was delivering the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, at Harvard. Eminences of the faculty had gathered in Memorial Hall, possibly laboring under the illusion that in such august company Cage would finally drop his games and explain himself. Unease rippled through the room as Cage began reciting a string of mesostics—acrostics in which the organizing word runs down the middle instead of the side. The opening sounded like this: “Much of our of boredom toward talks in it misled him diplomatic skill to place to place but does it look at present most five Iranian fishermen cutbacks would not …” And it went on like that, for six lectures, the verbal material generated randomly from Thoreau, Wittgenstein, and
The New York Times
, among other sources. Later, when Cage was asked what he thought of being a Harvard professor, he commented that it was “not much different from not being a Harvard professor.”
As much as any artist, he enjoyed receiving applause and recognition, but he had no need for wider public or institutional approval. The one time that I saw him up close, he was delivering the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, at Harvard. Eminences of the faculty had gathered in Memorial Hall, possibly laboring under the illusion that in such august company Cage would finally drop his games and explain himself. Unease rippled through the room as Cage began reciting a string of mesostics—acrostics in which the organizing word runs down the middle instead of the side. The opening sounded like this: “Much of our of boredom toward talks in it misled him diplomatic skill to place to place but does it look at present most five Iranian fishermen cutbacks would not …” And it went on like that, for six lectures, the verbal material generated randomly from Thoreau, Wittgenstein, and
The New York Times
, among other sources. Later, when Cage was asked what he thought of being a Harvard professor, he commented that it was “not much different from not being a Harvard professor.”
Carolyn Brown, a founding member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, offers a winning portrait of Cage in
Chance and Circumstance
, her 2007 memoir. “He was open, frank, ready to reveal all his most optimistic utopian schemes and dreams, willing to be a friend to any who sought him out,” Brown writes. In the early days of the Cunningham company, Cage served, variously, as tour manager, publicist, fund-raiser, and bus driver; Brown recalls him behind the wheel, chattering away on innumerable subjects while taking detours in search of odd sights and out-of-the-way restaurants. He had a sunny disposition and a stubborn soul, and was prone to flashes of anger. When he learned, in 1953, that he had to give up a beloved home—his tenement on Monroe Street, on the Lower East Side-he was crestfallen, and Brown made matters worse by reminding him of the Zen Buddhist principle of nonattachment. “Don’t you ever parrot my words back at me!” Cage roared. His indefatigable optimism carried him through periods of frustration. Gann writes, “He was a handbook on how to be a non-bitter composer in a democracy” The dance critic Jill Johnston called him a “cheerful existentialist.”
Chance and Circumstance
, her 2007 memoir. “He was open, frank, ready to reveal all his most optimistic utopian schemes and dreams, willing to be a friend to any who sought him out,” Brown writes. In the early days of the Cunningham company, Cage served, variously, as tour manager, publicist, fund-raiser, and bus driver; Brown recalls him behind the wheel, chattering away on innumerable subjects while taking detours in search of odd sights and out-of-the-way restaurants. He had a sunny disposition and a stubborn soul, and was prone to flashes of anger. When he learned, in 1953, that he had to give up a beloved home—his tenement on Monroe Street, on the Lower East Side-he was crestfallen, and Brown made matters worse by reminding him of the Zen Buddhist principle of nonattachment. “Don’t you ever parrot my words back at me!” Cage roared. His indefatigable optimism carried him through periods of frustration. Gann writes, “He was a handbook on how to be a non-bitter composer in a democracy” The dance critic Jill Johnston called him a “cheerful existentialist.”
Cage was born in Los Angeles in 1912. His father, a brilliant, intermittently successful inventor, devised one of the earliest functioning submarines; his mother covered the women’s-club circuit for the
Los Angeles Times.
The art of publicity was hardly unknown in the Cage household, and the son inherited the ability to get his name in the papers, even when
he was delivering an unpopular message. In 1928, he won the Southern California Oratorical Contest with a speech titled “Other People Think,” which he delivered at the Hollywood Bowl:
Los Angeles Times.
The art of publicity was hardly unknown in the Cage household, and the son inherited the ability to get his name in the papers, even when
he was delivering an unpopular message. In 1928, he won the Southern California Oratorical Contest with a speech titled “Other People Think,” which he delivered at the Hollywood Bowl:
One of the greatest blessings that the United States could receive in the near future would be to have her industries halted, her business discontinued, her people speechless, a great pause in her world of affairs created … We should be hushed and silent, and we should have the opportunity to learn what other people think.
Cage’s passion for silence, it seems, had political roots. He was a lonely, precocious child, mocked by classmates as a sissy. “People would lie in wait for me and beat me up,” he said, in a rare comment on his personal life, shortly before his death. In 1935, when he was twenty-two, he married a young artist named Xenia Kashevaroff, but it soon became clear that he was more strongly attracted to men. His most sonically assaultive works might be understood, at least in part, as a sissy’s revenge.
Cage dabbled in art and architecture before settling on music. He studied with Henry Cowell, the godfather of American experimental music, and then took lessons with none other than Arnold Schoenberg, the supreme modernist, first at USC and then at UCLA. Although Cage was not a disciple, rejecting most of the Germanic canon that Schoenberg held dear (Mozart and Grieg were the only classics he admitted to loving), he fulfilled Schoenberg’s tenet that music should exercise a critical function, disturbing rather than comforting the listener. Cage was to the second half of the century what Schoenberg was to the first half: the angel of destruction, the agent of change. Some commentators later tried to dissociate Schoenberg from his most notorious student, claiming that the two had had little contact. But scraps of evidence suggest otherwise. When, in 1937, Schoenberg invited friends to his home for a run-through of his Fourth Quartet—the guest list included Otto Klemperer and the pianist Edward Steuermann—Cage seems to have been the only American pupil in attendance.
Schoenberg told Cage to immerse himself in harmony. Cage proceeded to ignore harmony for the next fifty years. He first made his name as a composer for percussion, following the example of Cowell and Edgard Varèse. He transformed the piano into a percussion instrument—the
“prepared piano”—by inserting objects into its strings. He brought phonographs and radios into the concert hall. He famously declared, “I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard.” Yet most of his early music—from the mid-thirties to the end of the forties—speaks in a surprisingly subdued voice.
Music for Marcel Duchamp,
a prepared-piano work from 1947, never rises above mezzo-piano, offering exotic tendrils of melody, stop-and-start ostinatos, and, at the end, eighth-note patterns that drift upward into some vaguely Asian ether. “When the war came along, I decided to use only quiet sounds,” Cage later said. “There seemed to be no truth, no good, in anything big in society. But quiet sounds were like loneliness, or love, or friendship.”
“prepared piano”—by inserting objects into its strings. He brought phonographs and radios into the concert hall. He famously declared, “I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard.” Yet most of his early music—from the mid-thirties to the end of the forties—speaks in a surprisingly subdued voice.
Music for Marcel Duchamp,
a prepared-piano work from 1947, never rises above mezzo-piano, offering exotic tendrils of melody, stop-and-start ostinatos, and, at the end, eighth-note patterns that drift upward into some vaguely Asian ether. “When the war came along, I decided to use only quiet sounds,” Cage later said. “There seemed to be no truth, no good, in anything big in society. But quiet sounds were like loneliness, or love, or friendship.”
Beneath the plinking of junkyard percussion and the chiming of the prepared piano was an unsettling new idea about the relation of music to time. Cage wanted sounds to follow one another in a free, artless sequence, without harmonic glue. Works would be structured simply in terms of durations between events. Later in the forties, he laid out “gamuts”-gridlike arrays of preset sounds—trying to go from one to the next without consciously shaping the outcome. He read widely in South Asian and East Asian thought, his readings guided by the young Indian musician Gita Sarabhai and, later, by the Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki. Sarabhai supplied him with a pivotal formulation of music’s purpose: “to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences.” Cage also looked to Meister Eckhart and Thomas Aquinas, finding another motto in Aquinas’s declaration that “art imitates nature in its manner of operation.”
Audiences were initially unaware that a musical upheaval was taking place. More often than not, they found Cage’s early work inoffensive, even charming. When he gave an all-percussion concert at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943, a year after he moved to New York, he received a wave of positive, if bemused, publicity. By the late forties, he had acquired a reputation as a serious new musical voice. After the premiere of his prepared-piano cycle
Sonata and Interludes
, in 1949, the
Times
declared the work “haunting and lovely,” and its composer “one of this country’s finest.”
Sonata and Interludes
, in 1949, the
Times
declared the work “haunting and lovely,” and its composer “one of this country’s finest.”
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