Augustus Arnone — Journal

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.

John Cage: “in other words, you would go to a concert and you would hear these people playing without a conductor, hmm? And you would see this group of individuals and you would wonder how in hell are they able to stay together? And you would realize that they were really together, rather than because of music made to be together. In other words, they were not going one two three four, one two three four, hmm? But that all the things that they were sounding were together, and that each one was coming from each one separately, and they were all together. The togetherness was from within rather than imposed, hmm? They were not following a conductor, nor were they following an agreed-upon metrics. Nor were they following an agreed-upon … may I say poetry? — meaning feeling or expression, hmm? They were not doing that either.” (Musicage, p. 50)

Cage here is referring to his chamber works from the numbered series, which he was working on very late in his career. In those works the individuals are playing parts where the only time indications are brackets indicating ranges of possible start and end times. So there is a degree of variability in possible timings, happening in numerous parts at the same time, naturally the music will never come out the same way twice. The players thus are not together in the conventional sense then, simply because they are not each adhering to one uniform metric orientation. As Cage puts it “the one thing they would be in agreement about would be something that everyone is in agreement about … they would agree that the clock is correct.” When Cage uses the word “together” in the above passage what he really means is happening simultaneously, sounding at the same time.

This is yet another example of art in the electronic age that avoids the individual fixed point of view — in this case that which would’ve been manifested in the form of a conductor, or barring that a uniform metric pulse — in favor of the panoramic field of simultaneous multiple, and contradictory, perspectives. It is, like the music of Milton Babbitt and Iannis Xenakis among others, exactly the kind of art that Marshall McLuhan declared made inevitable by the advent of electronic technology, but at the same time unique in that Cage was directly influenced by McLuhan’s writings. It is an aesthetic that shares a great deal in common with Schoenberg’s non-uniform harmonic procedures and the rhythmic techniques employed by the Grateful Dead, both of which I discuss in my post Schoenberg is a Gothic Cathedral.

The revolutionary artistic hypthesis embodied by this approach, and by the countless other artists working in countless other genres and mediums who consciously or unconsciously seek out ways of relating ideas in a non-linear a non-uniform fashion, is that the fixed, singular viewpoint, as a psychological/perceptual habit in the contemplation of an artwork or any other form of media, is not in fact a necessary, let alone unavoidable, condition for psychic organization. Yes, private expression, the sacred cow of Classical art, might be dispensed with altogether, in favor of another kind of perceptual bias. This is the great divide which separates even contemporary art in this day and age, and certainly the gulf that isolates a great deal of that art in the domain of the unapproachable, save by the handful of dedicated adepts who undertake a scholarly obsession with it (another sacred cow).

Speaking of the intense chromaticism that characterized melodic sequences in the third movement of his Opus 10 quartet, arguably his first truly atonal movement. Schoenberg describes a unique contrapuntal environment wherein simultaneous individual voices are free to move without consideration of the vertical harmonies that they form.

“Evidently melodic progressions like [these] from the third movement [of Opus 10] cannot be accompanied by tonal triads, and if at all by chords, they would have to be transformed by alterations. Instead, one finds accompanying voices whose purpose is not harmonic at all; they even do not aim for chord production. Their function and derivation might, in the near future, be discovered as its author found them psychologically comforting when he wrote them. (Schoenberg CD 43)”

Interestingly, Schoenberg had evidentally not abandoned the idea that the resultant vertical structures might be construed as a series of functional harmonies, though this consideration was lacking in their composition. It seems to have not occurred to him that he was working within a non-linear medium. Nevertheless, at the same time that he was moving away from reliance on functional harmonic progressions he became ever more concerned with unity and inter-reference between parts, which took the form of continual transformation and reformulation of motives. His own self-admitted aesthetic aim at the time was
“how to create variety out of unity; how to create new forms out of basic material; how much can be achieved by slight modifications, if not by developing variation, out of often rather insignificant little formulations.”
This concern with interrelation would only intensify over the course of his career, taking the form of the inversions and retrogrades in his 12 tone rows, and eventually his combinatorial hexachords.

Heightened emphasis on pattern formation is precisely the result that Mcluhan declares as inevitable following from that dissolution of linear logic brought on by electric media’s ascent and proliferation.

“Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay.”

Mcluhan is emphasizing a dichotomy here between two different modes of psychological organization, one that separates and groups elements into contained areas or concepts (hence classes), and one that apprehends the various elements of a given environment as integrated and interrelated. The earlier quote by Schoenberg belies the fact that he was intuitively wandering, seemingly unawares, away from the habit of classifying his harmonic materials within contained, functional chord structures. When one studies Mcluhan’s extensive research and commentary on the nature of these two modes of thought, it becomes obvious that Schoenberg’s drive towards unity and interreference was intrinsically linked to his abandonment of vertical considerations.

Mcluhan deals with the question of containment as an organizational principle in a discussion of cathedrals during the first several centuries of the second millenium as contrasted with those of the Baroque. Bear in mind that he explains the tendency towards specialized parts rather than integration as an effect of the proliferation of printed media, and so the centuries prior to the Gutenberg press did not exhibit the same perceptual bias. The fact that Gothic cathedrals have more in common with Schoenberg’s or Babbitt’s music than even nineteenth-century cathedrals stems from the overthrowal of print’s visual bias by twentieth-century electric media.

Mcluhan opens this discussion in The Gutenberg Galaxy with the statement: “Scribal Culture and Gothic Culture were both concerned with light through, not light on.(105).” With regard to the Gothic cathedral he’s referring to the use of stained glass and only partial walls to circulate light throughout the whole of the interior, rather than walling it off into separate rooms. In the words of Medieval scholar Otto von Simson:

The Gothic wall seems to be porous: light filters through it, permeating it, merging with it, transfiguring it … Light, which is ordinarily concealed by matter, appears as the active principle; and matter is aesthetically real only insofar as it partakes of, and is defined by, the luminous quality of light.(105)

Thus, in the Gothic cathedral the special objects, activities, and content pertaining to the various areas of the interior were not separated from each other, one did not wander from room to room taking in each specialized space one at a time. Rather, one took in the entire space as a panoramic whole, observing the interplay among the various contents scattered throughout the whole interior. “After Gutenberg,” Mcluhan explains, “the new visual intensity will require light on something. And its idea of space and time will change to regard them as containers to be filled with objects or activities. But in a manuscript age …space was not a visual container.(107) So by “light on” as opposed to “light through” he’s referring to the literal example of the use of light in these spaces, but really he’s talking about principles of apprehension and imagination that separate the age of print’s dominance from the ages before it, and from our own age dominated by electric media. The ramifications of this example can be extraordinarily illuminating when approaching contemporary aesthetics, musical or otherwise.

The Schoenberg example deals specifically with the organization of pitch. It very much demonstrates the principle of light through rather than light on in that groups of pitches are not “walled off” from each other and situated within functional harmonies. A chord itself is a kind of container, an exclusivity if you will – these pitches, not those pitches. His twelve-tone system of composing decimated the notion of pitch exclusivity, and thus of specialized harmonies or key areas, just by virtue of the fact that all the pitches were present all the time. Individual voices were free to infiltrate any part of the pitch spectrum, much like the latticework of light through the gothic cathedral, rather than coming together with the other voices to form specialized pitch content.

“Perfect adaptation to any environment is achieved by a total channeling of energies and vital force that amounts to a kind of static terminus for a creature. Even slight changes in the environment of the very well adjusted find them without any resource to mmet new challenge. Such is the plight of the representatives of ‘conventional wisdom’ in any society. Their entire stake of security and status is in a single form of acquired knowledge, so that innovation is for them not novelty but annihilation.“ (Marshall Mcluhan, Understanding Media, 69)

I’m sure this passage speaks to a lot of different people on a lot of different levels. I myself find it profoundly relatable to the deeply conservative musical environment I encountered during my conservatory/university years. Musicians coming of age in this time are faced with the challenge of having to enter into this environment and then deciding to what extent they will let the sightlines of their musical development be shaped by the demands placed on them by the environment. In a musician’s life of uncertain place or position, perfect adaptation to the institutionalized musical world can certainly have its appeal,  and so the struggle for artistic development becomes the struggle for anticipating and realizing the ideologies of whatever professors and panels/committees/adjudicators to whom they’ll apply for conferral of legitimacy and status. And for those that go through it and do adapt, their position as a kind of musical leader will depend on the acquired values and conventions which were the product of that adaptation. Naturally such a person will be quite hostile to any kind of innovation or change, for it will amount to the renunciation of precisely that accrued ‘knowledge’ which is the foundation of their claim to musical merit. Those panels and committees aggressively promote shared values, as anyone coming up in the academic music world can attest.

A person can become so preoccupied with optimal functioning within this environment so as to really have no aspirations or direction, or even value (if I may be a little unkind) apart from it. What is an artist really if not an expeditionary? There’s a Kafka parable which gets right at the heart of it, the one where the people have a choice to be kings or else to be couriers of kings. They all choose to be couriers and so go around shouting meaningless messages to each other.

Economics is a good word for it, It’s a bit like investing in stock, if everyone invests in something it has great value, if people stop investing in it then the holders find themselves with very little. I encountered this when I started to study 18th and 19th century performance practice and learned that many of the performance conventions that overwhelmingly predominate in our time are based in habits that formed around the mid-point of this century, and seem not to resemble much of what we can know about the musical cultures in which these classical works were spawned. Naturally, those venerable professors whose sole source of acquired knowledge rests in the perfect absorption of mid-century performing conventions are incredibly hostile to such sentiments, or to any suggestion that we (the people) should stray the slightest bit from prescribed and collectively accepted performance concepts. Of course, predictably a new economy has sprung up around the acquired knowledge of performance practice, with values just as deeply conservative as any more traditional conservatory example.

It’s why so many people admire Bob Dylan actually, the quintessential example of avoiding at all cost any kind of static terminus. How does the song go…. “you must leave now, take what you need, you think will last.” The kind of adaptation Mcluhan talks about precludes the possibility of any thought of “leaving.” In a letter to Milton Babbitt I found myself saying “I realize I’m speaking to the original Magi captain himself.” Gosh, we need people like this!

I discovered a debate concerning Babbitt on a facebook forum page dedicated to composition. You can see the discussion here at:

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=2232851732&topic=5133&start=30&hash=831d6293aaa93c755262652421e324d5

I’m glad somebody posted a link to my podcast, though I thought I’d add my own response here as I don’t think I want to join Facebook yet.

I have to say, people had some insightful and interesting things to say, both Babbitt advocates and detractors, but generally I can’t relate to this kind of discussion – whether X is a ‘great composer’ or not. I will say that when people invoke ‘theory,’ with regard to Babbitt’s music, they are referring to a collection of technological innovations through which Babbitt was able to synthesize musical environments wherein patterns and associations emerge at rates and dimensionalities inaccessible through other means. Just as ultra-powerful telescopes and electron microscopes allow us to tune in to proportions of space and action wildly different than those environments accessible through the medium of the eye, Babbitt’s rhythmic and pitch operations thrust us into a musical evironment with a scope and dimensionality wildly different than any arising through linear/sequential mediums, such as ‘chord progressions’ or ‘motivic development.’ The technology is the music, I don’t see how one could think of Babbitt as a great theorist, acknowledging the sophistication and intricacy of his technological achievements, without appreciating the effects this technology works in application.

I suppose Babbitt himself may have encouraged this kind of discussion through his own published attitudes towards the supposed inaccessibility of his music. There’s that famous article, which far too many people refer to without having actually read.  As a means of defense, he proposes that we should not be surprised when lay people who are unfamiliar with, or incapable of comprehending, the most recent and complex developments in musical composition are subsequently incapable of understanding the music. Naturally, this implies that some familiarity with the technical precepts of his work is critical to proper aesthetic apprehension.

I feel this is less true of Babbitt’s music than any other music I can think of and I don’t care if MB himself would disagree. Understanding the technological processes and their enactment within one of his works is about as integral to the experience of that work as understanding the chemical composition of tungsten is integral to experiencing the electric light. My initial experiences performing his music were the most shattering and awe-inspiring occasions in my musical life to date, and these took place without having the slightest idea what his methods were. After subsequently studying the theoretical/scholarly literature pertaining to these works, including MB’s own writings, perhaps I have become more fluent in discussing the works (in one particular way!), but I don’t believe this endeavor affected or informed my appreciation or performance of these works at all. In fact, while I am deeply impressed and respectful of the achievements of scholars in describing Babbitt’s technological initiatives, and thereby facilitating rational understanding of complex compositional methods in easy and general terms, I have been wholly unable to relate to the ‘listening models’ and aesthetic commentary emerging from the theorizing — they simply don’t resemble my experience of the music, nor touch on the reasons I’m devoted to it.

We have to start again with this music, discarding the notion that one needs a ‘listening guide.’

This is a good place to recall Marshall Mcluhan’s admonitions — “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future. … We approach the new with the psychological conditioning and sensory responses of the old.” I believe the biggest obstacle to actually hearing the effects of Babbitt’s music is the inflexible reliance on listening and conceptual habits that are simply not relevant or applicable to these particular environments. Theorizing a listening ‘path through the music’ or combing through complex procedures for the purpose of getting close to the spontaneous workings of ‘the composer’s intent’ (ie ‘choices and contingencies’) reflects a visual/spatial bias that is deeply rooted in 19th century realities; but here I’m just paraphrasing Mcluhan, “Understanding Media,” for example.

On the other hand, it seems to me utterly impossible to hear this music other than exactly as it is meant to be heard. Anyone with a frontal cortex can tell that: the music moves very quickly through a great variety of registral densities, that it is far less productive to try to make linear connections between adjacent material than it is to make peripatetic connections between recurring configurations (whether pitch, rhythm, dynamic, or some combination of these), that there is a great deal of recurrence but whether one is able to hear 10,15, 25%, etc…  the lion’s share of these relations will go unnoticed. And if anyone can testify on this last point it’s me, as I have found it necessary to perform large portions of all of the works from memory so as to keep my eyes as much as possible on the keyboard. Even when able to reconstruct large portions of the music in memory, the complexity of interplay and relation is still far beyond what the rational mind can grasp in toto.

The best advice for listening that I have heard comes actually from that Hermetic psychonautical crackpot genius Timothy Leary. ‘Turn off your mind, relax, surf the chaos’ — sensory overload is beautiful, surrender to the ineffable. “Everything we do is neuro-ecology.”