John Cages All-Sound Music

Anthony J. Grande
MUH 3212: Music History and Literature II
14 April 2014
John Cage is an individual who is often disputed for his radical ideas about music, poetry,
philosophy, and the arts in general. Whether one agrees with his ideas or not, there is much to be
gained and understood about his effect on todays music. One way we see this impact is in a
lecture that Cage gave on 18 February, 1940, entitled The Future of Music: Credo.
1
This talk
claimed that percussion music would be a transition to the all-sound music of the future, and
firmly believed that the future will continue and increase until we reach a music produced
through the aid of electrical instruments.
2
Many years after this, after all of the Imaginary
Landscapes, after 433, and ultimately, after the death of John Cage in 1992, we may now be
able to claim that the future of music is firmly established not only in traditional live music, but
also that of the world of electroacoustics and electronic works, the all-sound music that he
believed was bound to happen.
To reach the all-sound music of todays age, one must first approach and understand how
John Cage himself came to strive for this as an ideal. One of the most pivotal events to happen in
his lifetime is quite simply his upbringing in California. John Cage was born in 1912 and was
raised in Los Angeles. His father, John Milton Cage Sr., was an engineer and inventor, while his
mother, Lucretia Henry Cage, was a working woman who changed jobs relatively frequently. At
the convincing of their son, Cages parents paid for him to live and self-educate in Europe,
originally going to try and pursue a career as a writer.
3
It was in Europe that Cage was
introduced to the avant-garde, studying all forms of art with his then partner, poet Don Sample.

1
David Nicholls, American Composers: John Cage, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
2007), 21.
2
John Cage, The Future of Music: Credo, Silence: Lectures and Writings, (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1967), 3-6.
3
Rob Haskins, Critical Lives: John Cage, (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 21-22.
This adventure through European modernist movements was to be short-lived, as the onset of the
Depression forced Cage to return home to California.
It was lucky for him, though, that much of the European avant-garde also came to
America. His mother, along with a select few other women whom he knew at the time, were able
to form connections with many of those who had travelled from Europe to escape from the
oncoming Nazi Regime. One woman, Galka Scheyer, was the self-proclaimed West Coast
representative of the Blue Four, a coterie of expressionist painters centered in Berlin
4
It
would be she who would introduce Cage to Oskar Fischinger in the future, the filmmaker (who)
led me (Cage) to percussion, and the first major life event that pointed to Cages future
pursuit of all-sound music.
5

Prior to Fischingers move to the United States (he was still living in Germany at the
time), John Cage was hired by his father to work as a research assistant in 1935.
6
Cage was given
the job of constructing an infrared device to be used in Cage Sr.s Invisible Ray Vision
System. Meanwhile, the young Cage had also begun his studies with Schoenberg, whose
lessons were somewhat dispiriting, Schoenberg claiming in a class at the University of
Southern California that his aim for his students was to make it impossible for you write
music.
7
It would have been sometime during this year that, while doing research for his father,
John Cage would envision the usage of what he was working on to create an electronic
instrument.
8


4
Richard Brown, The Spirit Inside Each Object: John Cage, Oskar Fischinger, and The Future
of Music, Journal of the Society for American Music 6, (February 2012): 89.
5
Ibid, 84.
6
Ibid, 90.
7
David Nicholls, John Cage, 17.
8
Richard Brown, The Spirit Inside Each Object, 93.
It would have been a little more than a year into his studies that Galka Scheyer would
introduce Cage to Fischinger, Fischinger having just arrived the month prior. Cage would request
and be given a position as an apprentice with Fischinger, assisting in the creation of a stop
motion film entitled An Optical Poem. It is possible that they had talked about percussion prior
to this apprenticeship, but what is known is that Cage would invite Fischinger to a lecture and
performance by the newly formed Cage Percussion Players.
During his time as apprentice, Cage got to examine Fischingers work, a process which
started with a large sheet of graph paper, the horizontal plane representing individual frames in
the film. Fischinger would sketch the lines of movement of individual figures in stop motion
filming, showing where and when objects would come in and out of frame, a process which
resulted in a document bearing a resemblance to a work by Cage allegedly finished in 1936, his
first work for percussion, Quartet. It is important to note that the date was added after the
composition was completed in a different ink, and that there are some who believe that this work
for percussion was written after Cages encounter with Fischinger, due to the resemblance of this
score and Fischingers sketches, making it more likely that it was composed in 1937.
9
The
apprenticeship would be short lived after an accident in which Cage attempted to put a small
fired started from Fischingers cigar, dousing the equipment which they had to use for filming.
10

It would be a year later that Cage would go to the Cornish School in Seattle to work as teacher
and accompanist, specifically for dance classes.
11

It would be while he was here that many milestones would be reached, the most
important of which would be his writing and presenting of his speech The Future of Music:

9
Ibid, 95-98.
10
Ibid, 96.
11
David Nicholls, John Cage, 21.
Credo.
12
Cage makes claims that the future of music will be all-sound music, one in which any
duration, timbre, and pitch will be possible. While it is proposed as a prediction, it very well may
have been in response to efforts he had already undertaken towards accomplishing these goals:
his essay was presented in the 1940s, and just a year earlier he had composed and premiered his
first work with electroacoustic elements, Imaginary Landscape No. 1.
13
This would be the first
example of striving for all-sound music, using test tone recordings he had borrowed previously
in the composition. In the same year, he composed a piece for percussion called First
Construction (In Metal). In this work, he would expand on another idea from his essay, rhythmic
structures.
14
This work would feature what has become called square-root form, a form in
which the larger sections of a work (the so called macrocosmic sections) would match the
number of phrases in each of these sections (the microcosmic sections).
15
There was one more
major innovation that Cage would come up with while teaching at the Cornish School: the
prepared piano. It is clear that his time in the Cornish school was spent fulfilling many of the
expectations placed in his Credo, reaching towards goals he had established for the future of
music.
While he was teaching at the Cornish School, he was also working part time at Mills
College in San Francisco. Here, during the 1940s, Cage tried to create a research laboratory for
the creative use of percussion and electronic instruments. This would ultimately be a failure, but
it would not be Cages last attempt at establishing a Center for Experimental Music.
16
He
would make another attempt in Chicago a year later.

12
Ibid.
13
Rob Haskins, John Cage, 43.
14
Ibid.
15
David Nicholls, John Cage, 23-24.
16
Rob Haskins, John Cage, 44.
Having thus far created the new piano, much of Cages upcoming works would be
written for it. Much of the music from this period, many historians note, point towards the
upcoming trials Cage was having with his then wife, their divorce happening years later in
1945.
17
It would be after his divorce and subsequent move to Manhattan that he would realize the
music he had been writing was being viewed as a joke. Cage himself would later say (referring to
his work The Perilous Night, which was described like a woodpecker in a church belfry by a
critic): I had poured a great deal of emotion into the piece, and obviously I wasnt
communicating this at all. Or else, I thought, if I were communicating, then all artists must be
speaking a different language, and thus speaking only for themselves.
18
This particular
sentiment would grow, leading itself even further when Cage would begin to study eastern
cultures.
Zen Buddhism would grow to be an important part in Cages life, using its teachings and
ideas within his music. As this aesthetic grew, he would be given a gift by friend and composer
Christian Wolff that would cement Buddhism in his life and music, the I Ching (Book of
Changes).
19
Cage would use this as a random-number generator, the book itself being a
rendering of symbols of opposites in nature into a divination system.
20
The first work to use the
Book of Changes in composition was his Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra.
This would highlight the split in his life as he separated himself from his works. He had written
the first two movements prior to receiving a copy of the I Ching, but all three were written using
various methods of indeterminate writing, the last movement with assistance from his Book of

17
Rob Haskins, John Cage 50.
18
David Nichols, John Cage, 35.
19
Rob Haskins, John Cage, 62.
20
Matthew Rogalsky, "Nature as an Organising Principle: Approaches to Chance and the Natural
in the Work of John Cage, David Tudor and Alvin Lucier," Organised Sound 15, (August 2010):
134.
Changes.
21
Even the layout of the concerto represented Zen Buddhism, the orchestra being set
against the piano in a sense of Zen master and pupil, rather than as opposing forces.
By the 1950s, Cage had moved away from subjective composition, making himself even
closer to his Credo than he had been before. It wouldnt be long after his Concerto for Prepared
Piano that Cage would move on to even more indeterminate forms than just what he did on his
end as composer. Cage had experimented earlier with pieces, such as his Quartet, that would use
music notation systems aside from the traditional five-line staves performers had become
familiar with. At this point in his life, Cage had been a friend of Morton Feldman for some time,
and the influence of this other composers graphic notation would eventually show itself in other
nontraditional forms of notation in Cages music. Written in 1952, Williams Mix is an entirely
electroacoustic work for magnetic tape. The score resembles a dressmakers pattern, from
which the tapes were cut to size and shape,
22
and was made up of tracks from many different
styles of music, popular and not. This work, and others influenced by it, were among the first of
their kind written in the United States. At the time, Williams Mix was the most extreme work of
tape composition assembled to that point, and also happened to be composed with help of the I
Ching.
23

1952 would continue to become one of the most important years for John Cage, as two
more major works would appear that will ultimately mean the end of striving for all-sound
music. First was the surprising, theatric work for prepared piano and a large number of other
objects called Water Music. This work combines theatre and pure music in a way that was
unfamiliar at the time, being a combination of instructions and musical notations with live clock

21
Rob Haskins, John Cage, 63-64.
22
David Nicholls, John Cage, 54.
23
Matthew Rogalsky, Nature as an Organizing Principle, 134.
time, rather than a pulse, in a graph format.
24
The next piece Cage worked longer on than I
worked on any other. He would be inspired to write this work in the summer of 1952 at Black
Mountain College. Cage organized the first happening here, where the spirit of accepting
whatever comes was brought to life as a number of independent activities took place
simultaneously. While he was here, he became familiar a series of all-black and all-white
paintings by Robert Rauschenberg.
25
It was after this experience that Cage, having been
considering this new composition for some time before, wrote and premiered 433. The idea
itself was not necessarily new, as it is possible that Cage began with the writings of Henry David
Thoreau, he having previously written that All sound is akin to Silence,
26
but regardless of
where it started, this was the first composition to acknowledge all sound AND non-sound as
music. In this manner, Cage created and achieved the ultimate of all-sound music.
As disputed now as it was then, Cage reached for and achieved the goal he saw for the
future of music, indeterminacy being what allowed him to reach that stage. In many ways, all-
sound music could not be reached without the inclusion of silence. From his earliest acceptance
of percussion as a medium, to his time at the Cornish School and the eventual usage of
increasingly more technology to add electroacoustic elements to his music, and ultimately,
through his abolition of music requiring sound be created by a performer, all-sound music
became reality to any and all who were willing to accept it.

24
David Nicholls, John Cage, 56.
25
Ibid, 58.
26
Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa,
(London: Yale University Press, 2005), 168.
Bibliography
Brown, Richard H. "The Spirit inside Each Object: John Cage, Oskar Fischinger, and The Future
of Music. Journal of the Society for American Music 6, (February 2012): 83-113.
Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1967.
Eisenberg, Evan. The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa.
2nd ed. London, UK: Yale University Press, 2005.
Haskins, Rob. Critical Lives: John Cage. London, UK: Reaktion Books, 2012.
Nicholls, David. John Cage. American Composers. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press,
2007.
Rogalsky, Matthew. "Nature as an Organising Principle: Approaches to Chance and the Natural
in the Work of John Cage, David Tudor and Alvin Lucier." Organised Sound 15, no. 2
(August 2010): 133-36.