John Cage’s Etudes Australes reflects to a remarkable degree exactly how entrenched in the ideas of Marshall McLuhan he had become, and the profusion of aesthetic directions that opened up to him as a result. Cage had used spatial notation as early as the Music of Changes set, though in that work the spatial notation perhaps serves more as a convenience to avoid overly laborious layers of relational tuplets. In reality, the MOC never really escapes the relation of all durational values to a single uniform temporal metric, though numerous simultaneous bits of music are overlaid which relate to that metric in contradictory ways. At any rate, the use of unstemmed, spatially represented attacks and durations became a truly standout innovation in his work, even among such a staggering and ceaseless flood of innovations, and persisted all the way to his late chamber works.
By doing away with the presence of a single uniform and continuous temporal metric, Cage was in all likelihood seeking out exactly the kind of sacralized perceptual orientation, and what the psychedelic generation might celebrate as expanded consciousness, that Marshall Mcluhan wrote had been suppressed by the invention of the mechanical clock. As always, reinforcing his claims that modern electrical man is ever becoming more psychically attuned to habits characteristic of tribal man, rather than industrial/mechanical man, Mcluhan theorized that the mechanical clock had the effect of relating all phenomenon to repeatable, uniform units. Whereas tribal man experienced time as the durations between a plethora of often unrelated events, mechanical man learned to relate all events to a single ‘tempo,’ as it were. And as Cage dismissed the very notion of a tempo, along with it necessarily went the division of the music into salient, discrete units. This is another departure from the earlier Music of Changes.
If one is able to imagine the host of perceptual/aesthetic consequences that go along with the dismissal of a unifying metric, and if one is able to similarly dismiss the completely unrelatable bias that artists obligatorily represent autocratic, privately-expressive viewpoints, than one can celebrate Cage for being the tuned-in psychonautical expeditionary that he was. Moreover, in Etudes Australes the dismissal of a unifying centrist orientation goes far beyond merely the temporal aspect. Cage, in a late interview with Joan Rettalack, expressed his preference during the early decades of his career towards all notes existing in their own dynamic strata, in other words not related to a common unifying dynamic orientation. The Etudes don’t contain a single dynamic marking, but if one understands the principle of non-centrist art than one will automatically situate each note on different levels. And even if one doesn’t understand that principle, and insists on remaining a simpering, obsequious servant to notions of authority and artistic legitimacy, thoroughly un-Cagelike as it is, one can at least soothe the paranoia about doing something wrong because Cage himself recommended that particular kind of performance practice – as he put it, “this way each note is at its own center.” Though if one is leaning on authority that way, that person is caught in a center-to-margins relationship with whoever he thinks is supposed to be some kind of authoritative viewpoint, that person should really be playing more industrial-oriented music anyway.
Now, the replacement of center-to-margins relationships with the simultaneous inter-referential neural network of differentiated information is in fact the very crux of Marshall McLuhan’s life’s work, and I would argue of Cage’s as well.
