But are we *really* together?
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).