WHY NOT BOTH?
By Tom Rizzuto
Last semester, towards the end of my American Music class, I started a session by playing a YouTube video of John Cage's famous 4'33" and silently watched my class wrestle with what they were watching. If you're not aware of 4'33'' it's a piece of music in which a pianist sits down at a piano, sets a stopwatch, and just sits there, doing nothing for just over four and a half minutes.
Less than a minute in, my class exploded. "When is he going to start?" "Is the video frozen?" "No look, he just moved." "Professor, what's going on?"
I waited quietly, answering none of their questions until the piece was over. After which, I walked in front of the room and explained that what they had just witnessed was a performance of one of the most famous works by one of classical music's most famous and influential composers. Just then, Kimberly, a student who was attending school on a volleyball scholarship, had no interest in music, and generally used my class as an excuse to catch up on text messages made her first relevant point of the semester, "Professor, if that's all it takes to be a famous classical composer, I'm going to become one."
I've been teaching music history in one form or another for nearly ten years now, and every year I struggle with the same question: How to deal with John Cage?
I struggle with this question because, as I suspect many others are afraid to admit, part of me believes that it's possible that Cage conned the entire world.
I don't say this with any sort of disrespect. Far from it. In fact, I whole heartedly believe that John Cage was one of the greatest artistic geniuses of the Twentieth Century. He was a pioneer of electronic music. He was a champion for the unconventionally creative. He heard music where the rest of the world heard only sounds. All of these statements are undeniably true, but they fail to mention that much in the same way that Cage took blenders, duck whistles, and all manner of electronic appliances and turned them into instruments, he may have also taken a much larger entity and played it like a violin as well: The Music World.
A look into Cage's personal history lends a fair amount of circumstantial evidence to this theory. After all, Cage grew up poor, raised by a father who was an inventor that never quite learned how to patent his ideas. Therefore, Cage senior, who could have gone down in history as the inventor of the color television and a radio that was powered by alternating current (among other things) was forced to move his family all over the country in search of an affordable place to live.
It's easy to see how this kind of upbringing could make a young man suspicious of the establishment, maybe even resentful of it. It's also easy to imagine that, as the son of an inventor, Cage would develop a desire to innovate, as well as a fascination for electronics. However, growing up poor and constantly being on the outskirts of society may have instilled something else in the young composer: A drive to make it...by any means necessary.
So after years of trying to break into music the conventional way and getting rejected by even the most avant-garde of the musical elite including Arnold Schoenberg himself, why wouldn't Cage take advantage of any foothold he could get? If the devotees of the new, atonal, and experimental sounds of modern music wanted to hear something they never heard before, he would give it to them. Armed with a box full of extension chords, electrical tape, and anything else he could get his hands on Cage continued to push the envelope and gain more and more fame and recognition as he did it. He even started teaching at several prestigious universities.
But was it music? Was it a scam? Does anybody really enjoy listening to this stuff? Does it matter? I believe these are all questions that every music lover has to wrestle with, and certainly questions that Cage may have wrestled with himself. I do believe that Cage believed that what he was doing was important. In fact, I agree with him about that. I also believe that pieces like 4'33'' show us that Cage had a sense of humor about the world of modern classical music, and he wanted to see how far he could push the boundaries of what people would accept.
In that way, he may have been closer to a performance artist than a composer. Either way, though, he was a genius at his art...though some might argue about what kind of art that actually was.
Tom Rizzuto is a freelance musician and writer working in New York. He has also taught guitar and music history at several local universities. He knows you're going to love this guy if you give him a chance.
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Cage wasn't rejected by Schoenberg - he studied with him. And the pieces which seem absurd come from a very specific and consistent way of thinking.
You may find his work uninteresting or trivial, but it was always sincere. Perhaps it's easier if we think of his work as "performance art" instead of music? (Cage didn't care.)
You might enjoy this:
https://www.amazon.com/No-Such-Thing-Silence-America/dp/0300171293
Posted by: Eric Grunin | Thursday, June 30, 2016 at 07:36 PM