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These pages contain program notes written for Redwood
Symphony. You are free to use the information in your own program
notes. If you quote me directly, please attribute it. Thanks!
These notes were edited, amended, and otherwise
improved by Eric Kujawsky, Peter Stahl, and Doug Wyatt.
Barbara Heninger
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John Cage
4' 13"
John Cage spent his career as a composer and lecturer challenging all
assumptions about music, sound, composition, and their meaning. The son of an
inventor, Cage studied with Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg and published his
first works, written using an atonal scale of his own devising, around 1934.
Influenced by his interest in Zen Buddhism and the principles of the I Ching,
by 1939 he had begun to espouse a music of "indeterminacy," predictable only
by its unpredictability. To encourage such randomness, his composition methods
included tossing coins to determine the number of lines or notes, according to
rules defined by the I Ching for the obtaining of oracles, or blackening
imperfections on a piece of paper to represent notes, then having the performer
place a lined transparency over the sheet to assign each note a category of
sound corresponding to one of the lines. The performer decided which line
represented which category of sound and how to place the transparency.
Cage's sense that sound and music should be what he called "purposeless
play" led him to compose works that were equal parts humor and theater. Such
works include Imaginary Landscape No. 4, 1951, consisting of twelve
radios tuned to whatever is being broadcast at the time, and Cartridge Music,
1960, amplifications of recordings of typical household sounds. He wrote several
works for "prepared piano," with strings set to strike items that had been
placed against the soundboard.
His musical compositions often depend for their meaning, if they have any, as
much on how they exist in time as on what sounds are made. The title of the work
performed today, 4' 33" (Four Minutes and Thirty-three
Seconds), entirely summarizes the composition's content. The piece was
premiered in 1952 by pianist David Tudor.
Cage's own writings perhaps best illuminate his musical work:
Very frequently no one knows that
contemporary music is or could be
art.
He simply thinks it was irritating. (Clap)
Irritating one way or another
that is to say
keeping us from ossifying.
[45' for a Speaker, 1954]
" For in this new music nothing takes place but sounds: those that are
notated and those that are not. Those that are not notated appear in the
written music as silences, opening the doors of the music to the sounds that
happen to be in the environment. … There is no such thing as an empty space
or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In
fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.
[This] seems at first to be a giving up of everything that belongs to
humanity — for a musician, the giving up of music… [but] one sees that
humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world together; that nothing
was lost when everything was given away. "
[Experimental Music 1957]
"I have nothing to say and I am saying it. "
[Composition as Process 1958]
November 21, 1999
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