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Sound-on-film: John Cage and avant-garde cinema
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Sound-on-film: John Cage and avant-garde cinema
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SOUND-ON-FILM: JOHN CAGE AND AVANT-GARDE CINEMA by Richard H. Brown A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (HISTORICAL MUSICOLOGY) August 2012 Copyright 2012 Richard H. Brown ii EPIGRAPH What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity. -Henry David Thoreau, “Sounds,” from Walden; or, Life in the Woods, 1854. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS That is finished now. It was a pleasure. And now this is a pleasure. – John Cage This dissertation would not have come about were it not for the generous support and encouragement from scholars, artists, and family guiding me down the path to completion. First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor Joanna Demers for running with the topic from day one and pushing me along at every step of the way with brilliant editorial critiques and kind words of encouragement; David James, for sparking my interest in experimental film through his courses at USC, thus fueling the trajectory of this topic, and Bryan Simms, for his guidance in the process of writing and researching about twentieth century music. In addition, I owe a great debt to Robert Moore for his many courses on twentieth century music analysis at USC, and for his unwavering advocacy for all things Zen, as well as George Wilson for his guidance with the history of film philosophy, and finally Brian Head for taking time out from our many private guitar lessons over the years at USC to discuss the esoteric world of John Cage, cathode ray tubes, and anything else that hid the obvious fact that I had spent the week researching and not rehearsing. This dissertation would not have taken its current shape without the guidance of many archivists, most notably the encouragement and zeal of Laura Kuhn at the John Cage Trust, Cindy Keefer and Barbara Fischinger at the Center for Visual Music, and Augusto Morselli at the Richard Lippold Foundation. Many other archivists have aided this research along the way, including Nancy Perloff at the Getty Research Institute, Jonathan Hiam and Bob Kosovsky at the New York Public Library, Music Division, D.J. iv Hoek and Jennifer Ward at Northwestern University Music Library, Jennifer Hadley at the Wesleyan University Special Collections Library, David Vaughan at the Merce Cunningham Dance Company Archives, Robert Haller and Andrew Lampert at Anthology Film Archives, Marisa Bourgoin at the Archives of American Art, Bill O’Hanlon at the Stanford University Special Collections, Charles Silver at the Museum of Modern Art Film Study Center, and Tom Norris at the Norton Simon Museum. In addition to the guidance of my dissertation committee, this research has benefited from the many detailed comments and critiques of scholars within the world of Cage Studies, and I would like to extend a special note of thanks to all that were willing to guide my thoughts through the process of writing and revising: Gordon Mumma, Kenneth Silverman, James Pritchett, David Bernstein, David Nicholls, David Patterson, Christopher Shultis, Leta Miller, Suzanne Robinson, John Holzapfel, Mark Swed, Mina Yang, Benjamin Piekut, Olivia Mattis, Joseph Hyde, Josh Kun, Brian Kane, Tim Page, Douglas Kahn, Paul Cox, James Tobias, Emile Wennekes, Tobias Plebuch, and Margaret Leng Tan. This research would not have been possible without the generous support of the Thornton School of Music and the Graduate School Provost Fellowship program at the University of Southern California, including a Louis D. Beaumont Fellowship for dissertation research and a Dissertation Completion Fellowship for the final year of writing. I have had the privilege to present a great deal of this research at academic conferences, including two presentations of portions of Chapter 1 and Chapter 3 at national meetings of the American Musicological Society (2009 and 2011) and an v additional paper on John Cage and philosophy at the national meeting of the Society for Music Theory in 2010; portions of Chapter 4 were presented at the “Interrogating the Music Documentary” conference in Manchester, UK in 2010, and several portions of Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 at the annual “Music and the Moving Image” conference at New York University in 2010 and 2011. My research on John Cage and Oskar Fischinger was honored with the Ingolf Dahl Award for best graduate student paper read at the joint meeting of the Pacific Southwest and Northern California Chapters of the American Musicological Society in April 2009. Portions of Chapter 1 recently appeared in the Journal of the Society for American Music (February 2012), and portions of Chapter 3 will appear in a special edition on Cage in Contemporary Music Review in the fall of 2012. As John Cage once said, “an error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality,” and thus, all errors that remain in this study, whether a potentiality or an actuality, are wholly my own. To my many roommates and friends in the Los Angeles entertainment industry that puzzled over my strange, foreign, and oftentimes hermetic academic life, while still generously providing some firsthand observations on the realities of filmmaking that a scholar could never anticipate; to my cousins Maria Dyer and Christine Troshynski for providing free couch space in Chicago and New York for my many extended archival visits, and finally, a special note of gratitude to my sister Vanessa, who ran alongside me in our race to the finish line for our doctorates (she won by a year…), and to my mother, Bonnie, for her years of support and encouragement down the long and winding road that is graduate school. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS EPIGRAPH .................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................iii LIST OF EXAMPLES AND FIGURES..........................................................................vii ABSTRACT .....................................................................................................................ix INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................1 Audiovisuology: Sound on Film and Sound in Film CHAPTER 1 ....................................................................................................................19 “The Spirit Inside Each Object”: Early Technological Advancements in Sound Synthesis and “The Future of Music.” CHAPTER 2 ....................................................................................................................98 “Dreams that Money Can Buy”: Trance, Myth, and Expression, 1941-1948. CHAPTER 3 ....................................................................................................................168 Losing the Ground: Chance, Transparency and Cinematic Space, 1948-1958 CHAPTER 4 ....................................................................................................................255 Post-Cagean Aesthetics, Intermedia, and Experimentalism CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................321 “Through the Looking Glass”: Poetics and Chance in John Cage’s One 11 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................331 APPENDICES .................................................................................................................360 vii LIST OF EXAMPLES AND FIGURES Figure 1.1 .......Fischinger in Berlin studio with mock publicity Ornament Sound scrolls, c. 1932. ©Fischinger Trust, courtesy Center for Visual Music ............................................................30 Figure 1.2 .......Examples of “ornaments” from Fischinger’s c. 1932 Ornament Sound experiments ©Fischinger Trust, courtesy Center for Visual Music ............................................................31 Figure 1.3 .......John Cage, schematic diagram, ca. 1935, Series V, “Ephemera,” folder “Experimental Music and Percussion,” John Cage Collection, Northwestern University Music Library, Evanston, Ill. ............................................................................................49 Figure 1.4 .......John Cage, Postcard Invitation to Oskar Fischinger, 1937 Fischinger Collection, Center For Visual Music .....................................55 Figure 1.5 .......Fischinger in studio working on An Optical Poem. Hollywood, California, 1937. ©Fischinger Trust, courtesy Center for Visual Music ............................................................56 Example 1.1 ...Oskar Fischinger, Graphic Notation Sketch for An Optical Poem. ©Fischinger Trust, courtesy Center for Visual Music ............................................................57 Example 1.2 ...John Cage, Manuscript for Quartet, Movements I-IV, ca. 1937. John Cage Music Manuscript Collection, New York Public Library, Music Division, JPB 95-3, Folder 175. Used by permission of the John Cage Trust. ...........................................60 Figure 1.6 .......Axis Motivic Structure for First Construction in Metal (1939) ..............70 Example 3.1 ...Works of Calder, systems 1-4, Written vs. Sounding ..............................185 Example 3.2 ...Works of Calder shot list and score, John Cage Music Manuscript Collection, JPB-95-3, Folder 175, New York Public Library, Music Division Special Collections, New York, NY, Courtesy The John Cage Trust. .....................................188 Example 3.3 ...Shot analysis of opening scene of Works of Calder John Cage Music Manuscript Collection, JPB-95-3, viii Folder 175, New York Public Library, Music Division Special Collections, New York, NY, Courtesy the John Cage Trust. Works of Calder (1951), Herbert Matter and Burgess Meredith, Music by John Cage. Film stills courtesy the Museum of Modern Art Film Study Center. .............................................................................191 Example 3.4 ...Works of Calder, Magnetic Tape Score, John Cage Music Manuscript Collection, JPB-95-3, Folder 175, New York Public Library, Music Division Special Collections, New York, NY, Courtesy The John Cage Trust. ................................................................199 Figure 3.1 .......Richard Lippold, Variation Within A Sphere No. 6, 1948, Stainless steel, brass and enamel wire 8 x 8 inches. Collection of Anni Albers, Connecticut. Photo: Sasha Hammid. Courtesy The Richard Lippold Foundation. ............................................................229 Figure 3.2 .......Richard Lippold, Full Moon, Variation Within a Sphere No. 7, 1949-1950. Brass Rods and Nichrome Wires. 120 x 36 x 36 inches. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: John D. Schiff. Courtesy the Richard Lippold Foundation. ..................................230 Figure 3.3 .......Richard Lippold, New Moonlight, 1948. Nickel-silver and stainless steel, wires, beads. Collection of Louis Lippold. Photo: Sasha Hammid. Courtesy The Richard Lippold Foundation........233 Figure 3.4 .......Richard Lippold, Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner (1953). Gold-plated brass rods and stainless steel wires 38 x 12 inches (base included) Image courtesy The Richard Lippold Foundation. ..................241 Figure 3.5 .......Richard Lippold, The Sun, Variation Within a Sphere No. 10. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image courtesy The Richard Lippold Foundation. ............................................................243 Example 3.5 ...John Cage, The Sun, Manuscript Realization, 1 v. (22 p.) + paper bag. The Getty Research Institute Special Collections, 2005.M.4. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA. Courtesy The John Cage Trust. ...245 Example 3.6 ...John Cage, The Sun, Manuscript Realization, 1 v. (22 p.) + paper bag. The Getty Research Institute Special Collections, 2005.M.4. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA. Courtesy The John Cage Trust. ...247 Example 3.7 ...John Cage, The Sun, Manuscript Realization, 1 v. (22 p.) + paper bag. The Getty Research Institute Special Collections, 2005.M.4. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA. Courtesy The John Cage Trust. ...249 ix ABSTRACT This dissertation examines John Cage’s interaction with experimental and avant- garde filmmakers, highlighting key points in Cage’s career where film either informed or transformed his philosophy on the nature of music and the ontology of the musical artwork. I approach the sound-image amalgam in film from the perspective of audiovisuology, exploring the implications of sound in film as well as sound on film. Chapters are divided according to case studies in which the audiovisual experience of film had theoretical implications for Cage’s aesthetic. The first, sound on film, examines Cage’s interaction with German abstract animator Oskar Fischinger in the 1930s in conjunction with Cage’s proclamations on the “Future of Music.” I present heretofore unacknowledged documentation on research Cage undertook for his father, John Cage Sr., an inventor and engineer. Chapter 2 examines Cage’s interaction with Maya Deren, Joseph Campbell, and Hans Richter in the 1940s, and reviews their theories of poetic and cine-dance aesthetics. Chapter 3 examines the idea of transparency in film and visual media and its relationship to acoustics. I review two films on Alexander Calder and Jackson Pollock that highlight the conceptual divide between indeterminacy and abstract expressionism, as well as the formulation of Neo-Avant-Garde aesthetics in the postwar period. The Chapter concludes with an examination of a newly-discovered film conceived by Cage documenting sculptor Richard Lippold’s construction of his monumental sculpture, The Sun, from 1952-1956. Chapter 4 reviews Cage’s stance on silence and indeterminacy in the context of theories of intermedia in the 1960s, x particularly through the interpretive lenses of Stan Brakhage and Stan VanDerBeek, and concludes with a reading of Korean video artist Nam June Paik’s 1973 documentary A Tribute to John Cage in the context of television and documentary theory. In the conclusion I examine Cage’s final work One 11 (1992), a feature-length film for “solo camera” that explores the phenomenal relationships between a television studio space and lighting effects. 1 INTRODUCTION Audiovisuology: Sound on Film and Sound in Film This dissertation examines John Cage’s interactions and collaborations with avant-garde and experimental filmmakers, and in turn seeks out the implications of the audiovisual experience for the overall aesthetic surrounding Cage’s career. As the commercially dominant media form in the twentieth century, cinema transformed the way listeners were introduced to and consumed music. In film, music became stratified, exposed in fragments, and devoid of any sort of unity that a traditional concert setting provided. In addition, the effacement of music within the larger context of narrative further diminished individualistic musical expression. Cage’s quest to redefine music, intentionality, and expression reflect the similar transformation of music within the larger audiovisual experience of sound film. I examine key moments in Cage’s career where cinema either informed or transformed his position on the nature of sound, music, expression, and the ontology of the musical artwork. This is not an exhaustive history of Cage’s influence on filmmakers’ approaches to filmmaking, nor is it a complete history of Cage’s work with filmmakers throughout his career. 1 The examples I have chosen to highlight point to moments of rupture within Cage’s own consideration of the musical artwork, and I argue that these instances have a significant and heretofore unacknowledged role in Cage’s notions of the audiovisual experience and the medium- specific ontology of a work of art. Current studies of audiovisual history, commonly 1 For an exhaustive list of films related to or involving Cage, see Paul van Emmerick’s Cage Compendium listing: http://cagecomp.home.xs4all.nl/films.htm. 2 referred to as audiovisuology or audiovisuality studies, have laid the groundwork for a new approach to interdisciplinary studies in multimedia arts and practice, and my dissertation complements this growing field of inquiry. 2 Combining qualitative, historical, systematic and theoretical approaches, audiovisuology studies transplants the familiar metaphorical use of language to describe musical form, structure and content not from a “purely” musical consideration, but rather within the context of a complex aesthetic experience of both listening and seeing. Western civilization has for centuries given primacy to the visible as the measure for the general ontology of experience, while the audible has been relegated to the notion of “hearsay,” a form of communication and evidence that is prone to subjectivity and falsity. In recent decades, universities have rushed to establish visual studies as an academic discipline, yet few have advocated for a comparable field of inquiry into auditory studies. 3 Measurement as a scientific tool has relied on the concreteness of visual examples, and while theories of the mathematical ratios between musical overtones provided a general consideration of musical form and structure, its varied application in 2 Recent research groups and clusters have approached audiovisual studies from a variety of lenses. The 2009 research initiative, “See This Sound,” directed by Dieter Daniels and Stella Rollig, in collaboration with the Lentos Art Museum and Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Media Arts Study, and funded by Linz 2009, approached the topic from the dual poles of historical and systematic musicology, providing an online platform in conjunction an exhibition, symposium and accompanying compendium, Audiovisuology Compendium: An Interdisciplinary Survey of Audiovisual Culture, ed. Dieter Daniels and Sandra Naumann (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute, 2009). This methodology is additionally indebted to the guidance of the Music and Media (MaM) study group of the International Musicological Society, headed by Emile Wennekes, director of the group and professor at Utrecht University, to which I have presented this research in various guises. In addition, I have followed the lead of interdisciplinary approaches to media studies within my home institution at the University of Southern California, particularly research stemming from the USC Institute for Multimedia Literacy (IML), both from a pedagogical and analytical lens, and from the Interdivisional program in Media Arts and Practice (iMAP). 3 See for example, Michael Bull and Les Back, Eds., The Auditory Culture Reader, (New York: Berg, 2004). 3 tuning systems throughout history and the inherent subjectivity of individual methods of the structuring of the octave have made this system an unreliable method of measurement or scientific proof. Form, structure, and content were measured (at least in Western music) according to subdivisions of the octave, the most dominant being the twelve note organization of the octave in equal temperament, which allowed for the organization of learned formal harmonic structures and “tonal” relationships of succession. These models of harmonic unity were then translated to the large-scale, where harmonic relationships were stretched over time to project the fundamental relationship between tension and resolution, projecting a dichotomy between consonance and dissonance. The standard musicological narrative of Western Art music theory history, from Monteverdi to Schoenberg, traces the establishment and immediate disillusionment of this harmonic/melodic structure, and it was this arbitrary consideration of the nature of sound organization that Cage considered anathema to the experience of hearing, listening, and audition. 4 To postulate that the formal organization of sound into a teachable and recognizable syntax of communicable material was anathema to the modern listening ear, however, was a step that most in Cage’s lifetime, and still today, were understandably not willing to take. This dissertation is not primarily concerned with the arguments for or 4 Visual graphic models of harmonic-melodic relationships for tonal form arguably provide a similar means of articulating visually the complex interaction of sonic events. Schenkerian analysis in particular has evolved as one of the most sophisticated yet problematic means of graphing sonic texture over time, analyzing small and large scale relationships among harmonic voice leading procedures. While this model provides a framework for understanding the basic relationship between harmonic tension and resolution over time, its limitations as an analytical model are both its greatest strength and greatest weakness, for rather than providing a statistical evaluation of the sonic events occurring over time, it presents just one element of the complex sonic experience of tonal music, namely a series of contrapuntal models for tonal form considered fundamental to classical Western art music. 4 against the destabilization of a culturally specific form of musical discourse; its focus is rather on the implications of the audiovisual experience and its concomitant role in twentieth and twenty-first century modes of listening. Following the narrative of audiovisuology studies, I argue that the cinematographic experience, 5 from its earliest incarnations in sound film and visual music animations to interactive media in the 1960s, gradually engendered a greater framework for understanding sound and listening than the traditional relationship between memory or notation of the sonic event, and that the implications of this relationship are just beginning to be felt among sound artists, visual music artists, and those exploring interactive and multimedia artworks’ concomitant role in audiovisual studies in general. 6 To place Cage at the center of this transformation in audiovisual culture would perhaps steer this study toward a familiar hagiography that has long beleaguered Cage 5 I use the term “cinematographic” here to encompass the entire audiovisual filmic experience as well as the theoretical and philosophical investigation into the nature of the cinematic experience as it relates to reality and philosophy. This model in the philosophy of film has many guises, and I lend toward those espoused by philosopher Gilles Deleuze in this study, while many other contested models provide an equal means for questioning the nature of the cinematic experience. For an overview of current approaches, see: Richard Rushton, The Reality of Film: Theories of Filmic Reality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011); for current approaches to applying Deleuzian theories of the movement-image and the time-image to sound and music in narrative film, see: Amy Herzog, Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), and Gregg Redner, Deleuze and Film Music: Building a Methodological Bridge Between Film Theory and Music (Bristol: Intellect, 2011). 6 Among the numerous theoretical texts on sound art and new media, Cage’s name appears in various guises. In each, the notion of audiovisual culture and mixed audiovisual listening are prevalent. To cite a few examples: Seth Kim-Cohen, In The Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art (New York: Continuum, 2009), 149-174; Frances Dyson, Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2009), 59-72; Salomé Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (New York: Continuum, 2010), 79-119; Brandon LaBelle, Background Noises: Perspectives on Sound Art (New York: Continuum, 2006), 3-45. Equally, as I contend, terminology and theory stemming from audiovisuology studies is enmeshed within the discourse surrounding the journal Organised Sound: An International Journal of Music and Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), and the accompanying theoretical text by Leigh Landy, Understanding the Art of Sound Organization (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007). 5 studies in the past. Nonetheless, Cage’s consistent proximity to major movements in American art and technological innovation lends some truth to the statement that he was, if not essential, at the least central, to this transformation. 7 Cage’s uncanny ability to present an ideological stance on listening and sound under various guises during his career sparked a diverse range of interpretations regarding the nature of listening, sound, and silence that moved far beyond the specific scientific speculations espoused in his writings. Cage’s calculated use of a variety of South Asian and Eastern heuristics to demonstrate his conception of listening further problematized any straightforward reading of his artistic program. 8 To say that Cage even advocated a specific “aesthetic” in the traditional sense would perhaps be an overstatement; he at times advocated for a radical bohemianism that sought to usurp the power structures of corporate and political economies of music, and at others retreated into a transcendental metaphysics. 9 However, 7 I address the problems within Cage studies regarding hagiography and cultural mythologies in chapters 3 and 4 in particular. For a good overview of the current state of this research, see Rebecca Y. Kim, In No Uncertain Terms: The Cultural Politics of John Cage’s Indeterminacy (PhD Dissertation, Columbia University, 2008), 1-29, and Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2011), 1-19; 49-64. 8 Cage’s colorful and creative prose often veiled rather traditional observations between expression and the musical object, musical time, and the scientific structure of soundwaves. David Patterson’s definitive study on Cage’s appropriation of Eastern and South Asian philosophy highlights many of these veiled connections: David Patterson, Appraising the Catchwords, c1942-1959: John Cage’s Asian-Derived Rhetoric and the Historical Reference of Black Mountain College (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1996). See also, Edward James Crooks, John Cage’s Entanglement with the Ideas of Coomaraswamy (PhD Dissertation, University of York, 2011). 9 As one comparative example, Douglas Kahn characterized Cage’s aesthetic of silence in terms of familiar political modernist critiques, tracing the ideological goals of silence and silencing to Cage’s 1948 lecture at Vassar College and the history of musician unions in New York: Douglas Kahn, Noise Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 158-199. In contrast, Christopher Shultis reads Cage’s artistic program purely in terms of American transcendentalism, positing a dichotomy between Emersonian ethics and the anarchic leanings of Henry David Thoreau, and highlighting the lineage between Cage’s thoughts and those of Charles Ives. Christopher Shultis, Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the American Experimental Tradition (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998). 6 one element that remained consistent throughout his career was the fundamental notion of sound empirically categorized according to scientific observations regarding soundwave structure, duration, and lastly, audition. The final element of audition and its relationship to recording is perhaps the closest link one can make between subjectivity and experience, elements that were carefully removed from Cage’s aesthetic. This could alternately be read as a pacifism reflective of the homosexual subculture of artists and intellectuals living through the McCarthy-era in the United States, as many have posited, or alternately as a retreat into the purely metaphysical relationship between idea and object. 10 Most recently, theoretical discussions stemming from art history, primarily through the work of Branden Joseph, have situated Cage’s aesthetic within the postwar American Neo-Avant-Garde, and I address the relationship between audiovisuology and this theory in detail in Chapter 3. 11 As I argue in this dissertation, Cage’s empirical categorization of sound was brought about by a number of interactions with scientists and engineers, the most notable being his father, John Cage Sr., who for the majority of his career focused on the 10 Phillip Gentry and Jonathan Katz have followed the criticism of Moira Roth by situating Cage’s aesthetic of silence within McCarthy-era political discourse, where silence is a political act reflective of the homosexual subculture in New York, stemming from similar acts of historical avant-garde predecessors, particularly Marcel Duchamp. These criticisms are examined in Chapter 3. Philip Max Gentry, “The Cultural Politics of 4’33”, in The Age of Anxiety: Music, Politics, and McCarthyism, 1948-1954 (PhD Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2008), 165-232. Jonathan Katz, “John Cage’s Queer Silence; or, How to Avoid Making Matters Worse,” in Writing Through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art, ed. David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 41-61. Moira Roth, “The Aesthetic of Indifference,” in Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp, and John Cage, ed. Jonathan D. Katz, (Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 1997), 33-48. 11 Branden W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003). 7 development of inventions involving infrared-vision and sonar technologies, cathode-ray tubes for television, and later in life, particle propulsion systems for interstellar travel. That Cage Jr. truly understood the specific mathematics or scientific application of his father’s research is doubtful; I argue that his understanding of these and other technologies was purely in service of his compositional and aesthetic goals. However, transplanting the inventor’s mindset, whereby one applies established methods of scientific research to creative ends, provides an apt metaphor for experimental music in general, and this dissertation examines a few instances in which this metaphor applies to Cage’s aesthetic goals. 12 The audiovisual experience is predicated on the integration of visual and acoustic means for articulating ideas and information, and the experience of the sound film was fundamental to this transformation of the audible into concrete measurable evidence in the twentieth century. The motion picture filming apparatus and the audio recording mechanism followed parallel paths for the first fifty or so years of their existence, and it was not until the two merged in the late 1920s in the sound film that the audiovisual experience was given concrete and definable parameters for artists and theoreticians to measure. While multimedia performances in opera and theater arguably presented a similar audiovisual experience that cinema merely mimicked, sound film allowed for a transformation of the audiovisual experience to worlds far beyond the capacity of stage productions, bringing about new relationships between sound and image. What silent cinema lacked as a 12 This metaphor is examined in detail in Chapter 1. See also: Dieter Daniels and Barbara U. Schmidt, eds., Artists as Inventors, Inventors as Artists (Ostfildern, Germany : Hatje Cantz, 2008). 8 medium-specific form was a concrete sense of temporality. The standard theoretical discussions of sound in film argue that sound temporalizes the cinematic experience, grounding it in a reality in sync with the temporal audiovisual experience of reality, and thus pointing to the necessity for sound in the general ontology of the cinematographic experience. 13 In addition, sound spatializes the two-dimensionality of cinema by projecting the emotive, narrative, and cinematographic content into space, providing, as many have argued, a moment of empathy and identification with the artificial celluloid imagery on the screen. 14 Sound projected vibrations into the cinematic space that reverberated within the cavity of the audience member, allowing for a nuanced and emotive connection to the distant and fantastical imagery in front of them. This points to the deficiencies of any single medium to fully generate a sense of reality independently, and to the importance of considering the cinematographic experience as a whole when discussing general ontologies of art. 15 This dissertation explores the implications of the cinematographic experience in constructing fictional realities, as well as the modes of defamiliarization that alternative, 13 A great deal of contemporary theoretical discussion of film sound stems from Michel Chion’s seminal studies: Audio-Vision, Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), and Film, A Sound Art, trans. Claduia Gorbman, New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). Historical documents and manifestos, which are examined in Chapter 1, supplement Chion’s discussion of film sound: See Elisabeth Weis and John Belton, Eds., Film Sound: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), and more recently, Jay Beck and Tony Grajeda, eds., Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008). 14 See in particular, Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Press, 1987). 15 For this theoretical discussion I am indebted to the work of George Wilson, whose courses on film philosophy at USC have guided my theoretical reading on the topic. See: George Wilson, Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), and most recently, Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 9 experimental, and avant-garde cinema practitioners advocated in opposition to industrial modes of storytelling typical of studio motion pictures. I begin first with the question not of sound in film, but sound on film, that is, the optical imprint of sound in the recording mechanism of the sound film. Chapter 1 examines early theories of audiovisuology within the realm of visual music studies. Visual music studies has vastly expanded in the last decade as composers and sound artists have explored the nature of digital signal processing and audiovisual software. 16 Visual music history is a scattered and contested ground in this theoretical debate, and Chapter 1 clarifies the historical and chronological details of one of the most-cited interactions in the history of visual music between John Cage and German abstract animator Oskar Fischinger in the 1930s and 40s. Cage often recalled his brief interaction with Fischinger as the primary impetus for his early percussion works. In interviews Cage repeated a phrase he attributed to Fischinger describing the “spirit inside each object” as the breakthrough for his own move beyond tonally structured composition toward a “Music of the Future” that would encompass all sounds. Further examination of this connection reveals an important technological foundation to Cage’s call for the expansion of musical resources. Fischinger’s theories and experiments in film phonography (the hand manipulation of the optical portion of sound film to synthesize sounds) mirrored contemporaneous refinements in recording and synthesis technology of electron beam tubes for film and television. On the audio portion of a sound film a clear visual representation of sound 16 I provide a general review of contemporary visual music studies in Chapter 1. See also, James S. Tobias, Sync: Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010). 10 wave structure appears. The visual nature of this phenomenon inspired numerous theories on the indexical relationship between sound and image and its implications for a composite visual music. Technological innovations such as these empowered composers to explore new methods of temporal organization of sound in a tactile visual interface. New documentation on Cage’s early career in Los Angeles, including research Cage conducted for his father John Cage Sr.’s patents, explain his interest in these technologies. Concurrent with his studies with Schoenberg, Cage fostered an impressive knowledge of the technological foundations of television and radio entertainment industries centered in Los Angeles. Adopting the term “organized sound” from Edgard Varèse, Cage compared many of his organizational principles in percussion music to film editing techniques. An examination of his earliest percussion work, Quartet (1937), reveals one possible connection. Cage’s manuscript for this work bears a distinct resemblance to the animation scripts Oskar Fischinger used on the set of his films. Written in a unique form of graphic notation, Fischinger’s scripts represent one of the earliest examples of approaching music from its sonic structure. Applying his knowledge of the indexical structure of sound waves, Fischinger plotted musical patterns over time and according to frequency, enabling him to map out correlating animation shapes in strict temporal synchronization with the musical structure. As Cage proclaimed in his 1940 essay “The Future of Music: Credo,” advancements in technology not only allowed for an expansion of musical resources and compositional techniques, but also demanded that music itself be redefined. Film phonography and, later, magnetic tape provided the conceptual foundation for many of Cage’s aesthetic views, including the inclusion of all 11 sounds, the necessity for temporal structuring, and the elimination of boundaries between the composer and consumer. These two originary points in the Cage narrative point to the primacy of the audiovisual in Cage’s ontology of the musical artwork, and cinema as a medium embodied this concept both through the physical observation of soundwave structure and through the audiovisual experience of temporally animated sound and image. Temporality was paramount for Cage’s conception of music in general, and duration remained central to Cage’s conception of musical form throughout his compositional career. Chapter 2 examines the transformation of Cage’s temporal- mathematical compositional strategies in light of the audiovisual experience of the accompanied dance, and its relationship to early theories of cinematographic reality in American avant-garde cinema. This Chapter begins with Cage’s interaction with Hungarian polyartist László Moholy-Nagy at the newly established School of Design in Chicago. Like Fischinger, Moholy-Nagy advocated a tactile, interactive approach to the audiovisual experience, and his theories on the figure-ground relationship between photography, film and kinetic sculpture were predicated on the notion of a “space-time accentuated visual art” that projected cinematic light into three-dimensional space in an effort to replicate the auditory experience of delineating spatial proximity and distance. During his tenure in Chicago, Cage developed a theory of sound “effect” in his “Landscape” series of compositions that played on the mimetic reflections of visuality in radio, epitomized by his commission for the Columbia Workshop production of The City Wears a Slouch Hat (1942). I examine this production in light of the issue of temporality 12 in radio narrative, where the lack of visual stimuli de-temporalizes the narrative flow of Kenneth Patchen’s surrealist noir script. This interplay within temporalized and de- temporalized narrative space was later explored by filmmaker Maya Deren. Maya Deren’s silent films from the 1940s de-temporalized the cinematic experience by removing the sonic bond of an audio track, and replaced this reality with an aesthetic of cinematic space based on theories of poetry and dance. As I argue, this approach was part of a larger dialogue among artists and intellectuals within the artistic enclave of Greenwich Village in New York. Cage was enmeshed with this community starting in 1942, and his interaction with Deren was largely facilitated through comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell. I outline a debate on the concept of “Significant Form” in the journal Dance Observer from 1944-1945, which culminated in Cage’s first theoretical essay on form as it relates to bodily articulation of space, “Grace and Clarity,” and its implications for Deren’s influential 1944 film At Land, in which Cage played a supporting actor role. Finally, this chapter culminates with an examination of German filmmaker Hans Richter’s feature-length avant-garde film Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947). Cage’s music for a section of the film conceived and shot by Marcel Duchamp presents another configuration of the audiovisual experience in the cinematographic setting that projects the acoustic palate of timbral alterations in the prepared piano, creating an audiovisual experience that parallels Duchamp’s rotoreliefs. Acoustic projection and cinematic space are the central concern of Chapter 3, which continues with an examination of two additional films: Cage’s score for the Herbert Matter documentary on sculptor Alexander Calder in 1950, and colleague 13 Morton Feldman’s score for the Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg documentary on Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock the following year. Both artists saw these commissions as opportunities to formalize connections between their compositional approaches to sound and the visual approach to space, kinetic movement, and ground revealed in the time-based poetics of the moving image. Examination of archival documents from these film commissions, including original scores and correspondence, reveals numerous parallels between the New York schools of music and visual arts. Cage’s prepared piano and magnetic tape composition bridged the gap between micro-macrocosmic form and the architectural structure and kinetic movement of Calder’s mobiles, while Feldman hoped to capture the temporal essence of “action painting” through the violent texture of a pointillist cello duet. In both films, transparency and kinetic movement in space are foregrounded. In Matter’s film, Calder’s mobiles are shot in motion against a backdrop of movements in nature, and in Namuth’s film the painterly act of Pollock’s pour technique is seen through the dramatic repositioning of the camera beneath Pollock as he paints on a sheet of glass. Both films predate the radical shift in Cagean aesthetics by only a year, and the commissions provided a self-conscious examination of the artistic “intermedia” connections between auditory and visual approaches to a work of art. In the final portion of Chapter 3 I examine a film I discovered during my research on the Wisconsin-born sculptor Richard Lippold (1915- 2002). Best known for commissions such as Orpheus and Apollo (1961) at Avery Fischer Hall in Lincoln Center, and Flight (1963) at the Pan Am Building in New York, Lippold’s work represents the postwar revitalization of large-scale installation sculpture, 14 a period that favored abstract metallurgical reflections on public interaction with architectural spaces. Following the principles of Russian Constructivist theories of kinetic light and rhythm, Lippold’s approach to “open sculpture” focused on themes of transparency and space rather than mass and dimension by seamlessly integrating his intricate constructions of bundled polished wire and tubing into the surrounding architecture. This portion of Chapter 3 explores recently recovered archival documentation on the relationship between the two artists, including a film conceived by Cage and Lippold utilizing chance procedures. 17 Their mutual concern for geometric abstraction, elaborate mathematical structures, and an open-ended spiritual discourse on the nature of the work of art sparked an important dialogue leading to the period of Cage’s most dramatic artistic gestures in the early 1950s. Lippold’s freestanding sculptures delicately articulated three-dimensional space, and the kinetic energy of their complex lattice arrangements mirrored Cage’s compositions for the prepared piano. Cage’s dislocation of the harmonic-nodal structure of the piano in turn projected acoustic simulacra with the same metallic shimmer of Lippold’s wire formations. 17 As of writing, I have secured a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation to restore the original prints of Cage’s edits. In addition to being unique and original artifacts, these materials provide an opportunity to directly engage with the artwork through the reediting of any number of realizations according to Cage’s score - performances if you will - of the film, each with a unique perspective on the construction of Lippold’s sculpture. Through the digital capture of the numerous outtakes not used in the final film, and through the input of Cage’s score into a computer modeling program, a number of alternate versions of the film can be easily assembled. Once this digital transfer is complete, I plan to construct a digital realization of the additional material that follows the score provided by Cage. This will be presented alongside the original film as an automated version that would randomize the various shots of the sculpture in perpetuity, providing an endless series of realizations of the original film. 15 Cage’s film on Lippold leads to the final chapter of this dissertation, which examines Cage’s multimedia works in the 1960s. Framed around a conference panel in 1967 at the University of Cincinnati, Cinema Now, in which Cage discussed the current state of Underground Cinema in the United States, this Chapter outlines Cage’s interaction with the “two Stans,” Stan Brakhage and Stan VanDerBeek, culminating in a detailed critique of Cage’s 1965 immersive interactive multimedia work, Variations V. I first begin with a detailed reading of the fundamental tenants of Cage’s negative aesthetic set forth in his seminal publication, Silence (1961), exploring its implications for multimedia and intermedia theories in the 1960s. Two competing poles of interpretation of Cage’s theories surrounding chance and indeterminacy emerged from the first post- Cage generation. The first sought out a reduction of the artwork to its base materials in an act of contraction, while the second reached for the opposite, a total expansion of individual medium-specific artworks in a monumental Gesamtkunstwerk, epitomized by Stan VanDerBeek’s theories of expanded cinema and intermedia. This Chapter engages the current state of research surrounding experimentalism in the 1960s, primarily through the recent critique by Benjamin Piekut, which looks at Cage’s artistic program under the lens of hegemonic liberalism. Finally, I conclude with a close reading of Fluxus and video artist Nam June Paik’s 1973 documentary, A Tribute To John Cage. Paik’s video homage part of the expanding “Guerilla Television” network of alternative new media spaces that emerged from the influx of public support for independent cable television programming in the early 1970s. Featuring an amalgam of footage of Cage performances, interviews and 16 lectures, Paik’s video assemblage was the precursor to his most famous work of single- channel video art, “Global Groove,” from the same year. I examine Paik’s documentary in the context of identity politics and technological discourse surrounding video technology. In Paik’s tribute, Cage is seen less as a commanding figure of the American Neo-Avant-Garde than as the solitary sage witnessing the post-1968 transformation of his aesthetic by a new generation of artists and composers. Paik had witnessed Cage’s rise from “gadfly to guru” in the New York Downtown music scene during the 1960s, and his documentary perspective personifies the confusion with Cage’s late-modernist utopian aesthetics. Featuring performances by cellist Charlotte Moorman, interviews with fellow composers, and two stagings of Cage’s 4’33” (1952) in the streets of Boston and New York, Paik celebrates the spectacle of performance art while posing difficult questions regarding the cultural consumption of Neo-Avant-Garde aesthetics and eastern philosophy. In conjunction with “Global Groove,” Paik’s approach to video subverted the traditional codes of commercial documentary television. Sharp cuts between interview segments and live “in-studio” performances by Paik and Moorman are loosely connected through the narrative voice-over of the “host” and commercial “breaks” of Japanese and Korean advertisements. The dizzying confusion of the narrative flow functions as a critique of culture industry appropriation and as an ominous prediction of its destructive power. By foregrounding the video apparatus in the documentary, Paik intervenes within the technology itself, tearing apart the veiled suture of documentary realism and, in the process, destroying the mediation boundary of video itself. Paik’s critique of “television” 17 was part of a larger expansion of the role of communications technology in the 1970s, and was the subject of a series of debates on “Art and Technology” with Cage. Subverting the mechanical apparatus of the cathode-ray tube through synthesis elements such as degaussing and the Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer, Paik projected a utopian vision of television technology in his series of video-installations that rejected the role of the passive viewer in the television experience, and his vast library of documentary footage of artists and performances became a fluid part of a series of evolving remixes for these installations. While Cage’s interaction with filmmakers continued into the following decades, most notably with artists such as Peter Greenaway, Elliot Caplan, and Emile De Antonio, I choose to conclude with Paik’s documentary, as this moment demarcates the boundary between Cage’s “heroic” period of influence, and the emergence of the first of many “post-Cagean” generations that either worked in conjunction with or in direct opposition to Cage’s ideas and compositional techniques. A study of these additional documentaries on Cage and their effect on the cultural assimilation of Cagean notions of indeterminacy fall outside the parameters of the specific concerns of this dissertation, namely the audiovisual relationships that the cinematographic experience might engender within the context of Cage’s artistic platform. 1969 also marked a significant moment of retreat from Cage’s Wagnerian multimedia extravaganzas and a move toward a late period of composition that explored themes of American transcendentalism. In the conclusion I briefly review one particular collaboration at the end of Cage’s career with filmmaker Henning Lohner on a work for solo camera, One 11 (1992). 18 Accompanied by the orchestral piece, 103 (1992), this work applied chance procedures to determine the parameters for installing, lighting and filming a television studio. The final result, which consists purely of light and dark shadows reflected within the studio space, represents the summit of Cage’s notion of audiovisual “unimpededness and interpenetration,” while highlighting many of the conceptual and political problems with the Cage aesthetic outlined in Chapter 4. This dissertation marks the first step in my ongoing investigation of the implications of Cage’s artistic program in the history and theory of technology and audiovisuology in the 20 th century, highlighting what I consider some of the key aspects within Cage’s scattered aesthetic tenants. Current calls for an interdisciplinary perspective on film music are numerous, particularly with the complex formulation of basic theoretical and analytical terminology on temporal relationships between sound and image within narrative structure. But these calls have gone largely unanswered, and an expansion of vocabulary for this study is essential to the ongoing development of media discourse and musicology. 18 I believe that this analytical approach will remain central to a growing field of interdisciplinary studies in sound, music, and cinema, and will provide a clear foundation for studying sound-image relationships in multimedia environments. 18 See, for example, Claudia Gorbman’s review, “Aesthetics and Rhetoric,” American Music 22/1, (Spring 2004): 14-26. 19 CHAPTER 1 “The Spirit Inside Each Object”: Early Technological Advancements in Sound Synthesis and “The Future of Music.” One day I was introduced to Oscar [sic] Fischinger who made abstract films quite precisely articulated on pieces of traditional music. When I was introduced to him, he began to talk with me about the spirit which is inside each of the objects of this world. So, he told me, all we need to do to liberate that spirit is to brush past the object, and to draw forth its sound. That’s the idea which led me to percussion. - John Cage, interview with Daniel Charles, 1968 1 I have become convinced that percussion and the use of mechanical instruments are a transition to the electrical music of the future. With electrical means and with film means composers will have the entire field of sound available for musical purposes. -John Cage, “Brief History of this Field of Music,” c.a. 1940 2 In the summer of 1937 the young John Cage arrived at Oskar Fischinger’s temporary animation studio in Hollywood, recently hired as the filmmaker’s assistant. Cage’s brief apprenticeship—by all accounts lasting no more than a few days—soon became a recurring subject in the composer’s personal history, retold in interviews and 1 John Cage, For the Birds: John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles, Trans. Richard Gardner, Ed. Tom Gora and John Cage (Boston: Marion Boyars, 1981), 68. 2 John Cage, “Brief History of this Field of Music,” undated manuscript draft, ca. 1940, John Cage Collection, Northwestern University Music Library, Series V, “Ephemera,” folder: “Experimental Music and Percussion.” 20 articles. 3 It is well known that Cage composed his first works for percussion around the same time as his interaction with Fischinger, leading critics, scholars, and artists to speculate on the implications of Cage’s claim that his time with the filmmaker “led me to percussion.” Although eureka moments make for excellent memoirs—and Cage’s biography is full of such examples—determining any direct lineage or influence for Cage’s intellectual or compositional breakthroughs is difficult, given Cage’s proclivity for colorful personal narrative that both simplified and obscured the complex web of influences that shaped his career. 4 In the first decade of John Cage’s career as a composer, the United States and Los Angeles in particular witnessed a series of technological advancements in sound and image recording, manipulation, and broadcast that laid the groundwork for postwar consolidation of mass media and entertainment industries. This Chapter examines Cage’s early career in relation to the social, artistic, and technological dimensions of West Coast culture in the 1930s. Throughout this period, roughly spanning the introduction of sound film technology in the late 1920s and the consolidation of radio and film industries at the 3 Along with the comments to Daniel Charles, mention of Fischinger emerged in several other prominent essays and lectures. See, for example, John Cage, “A Composer’s Confessions,” [1948] reprinted in John Cage: Writer, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight, 1993), 31, and Calvin Tompkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: The Heretical Courtship in Modern Art (New York: Viking Press, 1965), 86. Noticeably, it did not arise in the “anecdote” sections of his two major publications of the period, Silence (1961) or A Year from Monday (1967). After Fischinger biographer William Moritz interviewed Cage and reprinted this anecdote in Film Culture (“The Films of Oskar Fischinger,” 58–60 [1974–75]: 37–188) it was repeatedly cited in interviews, including one conducted by Moritz for his biography of Fischinger: Moritz, Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 77–78 and 165–66. 4 See Leta E. Miller, “John Cage and Henry Cowell: Intersections and Influences, 1933–1941,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 59/1 (Spring 2006): 97. Miller’s extensive study on the interaction between Cage and Cowell during this same period demonstrates the complexity involved with questions of influence, particularly with Cage. 21 outset of the American engagement in World War II in the early 1940s, Los Angeles offered economic opportunities and refuge from the strife of world events. The sudden influx of artists and intellectuals from war-torn Europe fostered an unprecedented dialogue on the potential of film and radio; implicit in this dialogue was the belief that rapid advances in audio and visual technology would enable radical new approaches to the work of art. Immigrating to Los Angeles in 1936, Fischinger brought with him both the theoretical and technical knowledge of a practice broadly defined as “visual music” and laid the groundwork for aesthetic discussions on the relationship between sound and image. 5 Fischinger’s notion of the “spirit inside each object” was inspired by his research in sound phonography in film. On the audio portion of a sound film a clear visual representation of sound wave structure appears; the visual nature of this phenomenon inspired numerous theories similar to Fischinger’s on the indexical relationship between sound and image and its implications for a composite visual music. 6 Such technological 5 Recent exhibitions on “Visual Music,” and the accompanying critical literature on the subject have blossomed in the last decade. Most notable was the 2005 exhibition organized by Kerry Brougher, Jeremy Strick, Ari Wiseman, and Judith Zilczer, and co-curated by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, along with the accompanying catalog: Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music since 1900 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2005). 6 The optical sound recording process operates on the principle of inscribing a beam of light onto a strip of photoelectric material. This smaller track runs alongside the photographic image in sound film, thus synchronizing sound and image in motion pictures. The two primary means of inscribing sound on film in the 1930s were known as (1) variable density, fixed area and (2) fixed density, variable area. In the former, sound is translated into an electric current wired to a light source. The fluctuations in intensity of the beam of light are projected on the soundtrack, creating an image that inscribes the variations in current. The intensity of the image is proportional to the sound pressure, and thus the gradient of light inscribes the original sound source. In the second method, the electric current is transmitted to a mirror that vibrates according to the intensity of sound. A fixed beam of light is projected on the mirror and is reflected onto the soundtrack. With this method, a clear “shape” is inscribed, as the light source is consistent, while the variations in sound pressure cause the electric current to fluctuate, creating an oscillographic curve. When the film is projected, this process is reversed, and the inscribed light patterns are converted to electric current and projected via loudspeakers in the theater. For two detailed explanations of this process, see Jan 22 innovations empowered composers such as Cage to explore new methods of temporal organization of sound in a tactile visual interface. However, as most artists and engineers soon discovered, the economic foundations of this new media economy were propped by a regional economy allied with the burgeoning military-industrial complex. Having established an industrial model of film production beginning in the silent-film era, Hollywood projected a national image of artistic and creative freedom while quietly consolidating its cultural power into a unified local image. During this period Cage underwent a series of struggles with the compositional approaches to “music” as defined generally, as well as personal struggles with identity in an increasingly conservative social climate. Cage’s early study fluctuated between the American experimentalism of Henry Cowell and a new series of contacts with émigré artists in Los Angeles orbiting around Arnold Schoenberg. Under the oppressive social politics of Hayes-era Los Angeles, Cage’s interaction with eclectic theories of mystic belief, such as the often-quoted connection to German abstract animator Oskar Fischinger mentioned above, reflect a compositional turn toward the metaphorical abstraction of sound found in the concept of “visual music.” Cage simultaneously deepened his understanding of the technological aspects of recording and synthesis technology. This knowledge was fostered by a heretofore unacknowledged aspect of his early career: Thoben, “Technical Sound-Image Transformations,” in See this Sound: Audiovisiology Compendium: An Interdisciplinary Survey of Audiovisual Culture, ed. Dieter Daniels and Sandra Naumann with Jan Thoben (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, 2010), 425–26, and Richard James, “Avant-Garde Sound-on-Film Techniques and Their Relationship to Electro-Acoustic Music,” Musical Quarterly 72/1 (1986): 75–78. 23 research Cage undertook for his father, John Cage Sr., on a series of patents on developments in television and infrared technology. Cage’s knowledge of sound recording and synthesis formed the basis of his approach to a time-based structuring of musical composition that mirrored technological developments in film sound recording. In his early electro-acoustic works, the metaphor of electronic abstraction of sound structure prompted proclamations on the future directions of music. Cage’s later desire to establish a center for experimental music led to a series of dialogues between engineers and artists that formed the basis for the often- cited and influential proclamation, “The Future of Music: Credo,” edited for his 1961 publication, Silence. Examining the many archival sources for this document clarifies the aesthetic and social climate of technological innovation in pre-war American experimental music. Cage’s dialogue with Edgard Varèse on fundamental concepts to this new electronic compositional approach were centered on the concept of “Organized Sound,” a term broadly outlined in a series of polemic articles and correspondence from the two artists between 1940-1941. For both Varèse and Oskar Fischinger, the struggle with powerful economic forces in industrial film, particularly through the dominance of Walt Disney Studios, stifled any potential large-scale multimedia works that Hollywood seemed to promise. With the onset of American engagement in World War II, public support for New-Deal era projects like Cage’s dwindled in favor of a consolidation of media towards the international war effort. Cage’s father eventually moved his research to the War Department for the development of radar technology, while the television and 24 radio industries underwent a series of mergers that virtually ensured the rejection of expensive projects like Cage’s. “The Spirit Inside Each Object”: European Precedents for “Visual Music” Cage first encountered precedents for visual music during his travels to Europe in 1930 and 1931. The journal transition, devoted to U.S. artists living in Europe, functioned as a cultural guidebook for Americans abroad and was repeatedly cited by Cage as an important source of information and ideas. 7 During its European period, transition promoted the search for radical and revolutionary innovations in the base syntactical structure of literature, with the centerpiece of the early editions being the serial premiere of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Several articles, echoing the manifestos of early filmmakers and theorists such as Sergei Eisenstein, Germaine Dulac, and Dziga Vertov, extolled the revolutionary potential of the new art form of the sound film. 8 These 7 While a fellow at Wesleyan’s Center for Advanced Studies, Cage was asked for a list of the ten books most influential on his thought, and his first reply listed transition, specifying “the twenties,” a period leading up to 1930 when the journal was published in Europe. John Cage, “List No. 2,” [1960] reprinted in John Cage: An Anthology, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Da Capo, 1970), 138. See also Cage’s 1967 interview with Irving Sandler: Irving Sandler Papers, Getty Research Institute, 2000.M.43, Box 4, f. 12, 1. Cage later identified Don Sample, his earliest partner, whom he met while traveling in Europe, as the one who introduced him to the magazine. John Cage interview with Thomas Hines, 21 and 23 May 1992, Getty Research Institute, 2002.M.40, 59. For more on Cage and the journal transition, see Branden W. Joseph, “‘A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers’: The Development of John Cage’s Early Avant-Garde Aesthetic Position,” in John Cage: Music, Philosophy, and Intention, 1933–1950, ed. David W. Patterson (New York: Routledge, 2002), 135–76. 8 See, for example, Samuel Putnam, “Leopold Survage, Colored Rhythm, and the Cinema,” transition 6 (September 1927): 180–84; George Antheil, “Music Tomorrow,” transition 10 (January 1928): 125; Elliot Paul and Robert Sage, “Artistic Improvements of the Cinema,” transition 10 (January 1928): 127; László Moholy-Nagy, “The Future of the Photographic Process,” transition 15 (February 1929): 289–91. Dziga Vertov’s proclamations and his lectures at the Scientific Experimental Film Institute in Leningrad were widely distributed and later published in the journal Film Culture: “The Writings of Dziga Vertov,” in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), 353–75. Eisenstein’s joint proclamation in 1928 with Pudovkin and Alexandrov merged theories of montage with sound practice: 25 early issues of transition found a vocal proponent from the writings of composer George Antheil, whose numerous manifestos called for a restructuring of musical-temporal form as the vehicle for a truly modernist music. 9 Antheil pointed specifically to his faith in new technologies as the impetus for this change, proclaiming, “I believe that soon there will be electrical machines which can automatically reproduce every sound wave, and which will not only replace the old orchestra, but create every sound on the earth the ear is capable of hearing.” 10 Antheil put this theory into practice with his futurist score for the film Ballet Mechanique (1924) by Ferdinand Leger, which foregrounded the tension between images of real and mechanical through the clanging of factory noise set against the violent juxtapositions of pistons in motor motion with the female mouth. The transition to sound in commercial narrative film posed a number of theoretical and artistic challenges. As Claudia Gorbman observes, the introduction of sound, particularly the voice in narrative film, drastically altered the temporal organization of film. The very mystification of sound technology during this period by animators and visual artists paralleled a new diegetic space where listeners exercised a new auditory voyeurism, overhearing rather than hearing, and thus establishing the reprinted in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (Columbia University Press, 1985), 83–85. Germaine Dulac specified the medium-specific potential of the two forms in several essays, see “The Avant-Garde Cinema,” [1928] reprinted in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 43–48. 9 The central text celebrating Antheil was the volume written by poet Ezra Pound in 1927, George Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (New York: Da Capo, 1968). 10 Antheil, ”Music Tomorrow,” 126. 26 foundation for narrative film structure. 11 At the same time, the calls within transition for experimental approaches to the sound film formed a distinct opposition to the hegemony of narrative film. Implicit in this alternative narrative was an engagement with the materiality of the medium itself and an active participation in the cinematic experience, two elements strictly under control in the industrial model of diegetic passive participation of spectacle. Throughout the 1920s, Oskar Fischinger and other artists answered the calls in transition. A school of abstract film formed around several venues, particularly in Berlin, and included artists such as Viking Eggeling, Walther Ruttman, and Hans Richter. 12 Eggeling, along with filmmaker and artist Hans Richter (who would later collaborate with Cage in his first feature length avant-garde film, Dreams that Money Can Buy (1947)), formulated a theory based on the temporal visual experience. By crafting what they described as “scroll” paintings, Richter and Eggeling outlined the progression of an image over a broad horizontal space. These works could not be viewed as a whole from any one perspective: their very horizontal breadth forced a successive viewing that reduced the essence of a “moving” picture to the perceptual act of viewing. 13 11 Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1987), 44-47; Gorbman attributes the concept of overhearing versus hearing to David Cook, History of Narrative Film (NY: Norton, 1981), 240. 12 For a brief history of this movement, see Christine Noll Brinkman, “Collective Movements and Solitary Thrusts: German Experimental Film, 1920–1930,” Millennium Film Journal 30–31 (Fall 1997), http://mfj- online.org/journalPages/MFJ30,31/NBrinckmannCollective.html. 13 Hans Richter, “Easel-Scroll-Film,” Magazine of Art (February 1952): 80-3. 27 Richter’s scroll paintings led directly to his earliest film experiments, including Rhythmus 21 (1921), which proved a difficult venture, as neither Richter nor Eggeling had any background in filmmaking. 14 In 1926 Fischinger toured with Hungarian composer Alexander László, presenting a series of Farblichtmusik (Color-Light-Music) concerts consisting of simultaneous projections of Fischinger’s abstract 35 mm films, colored lights, and the color organ. Fischinger soon parted with László and continued to present multiple projection shows, which combined five 35 mm film projectors and slide projectors in one of the earliest immersive cinematic environments. 15 By 1930 there were regular screenings of light-music films, such as Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy’s “Light Display: Black, White, Gray,” which filmed shadows cast from the light reflection of a sculpture of rotating panels. 16 Interest in Fischinger’s animations prompted a series of “Farbe-Ton-Forschung Kongresses” (Color Music Congresses), organized by Dr. Georg Anschütz, featuring scholarly presentations on synaesthesia, color music, and the color organ. 17 While in Berlin in the summer of 1930, Cage attended the Neue Musik Berlin festival, which showcased innovative technological experiments in music. The program for that summer included some of the earliest experiments in overdubbing 14 Richter’s radicalism found a place in Berlin, particularly his more subversive films such as Vormittagsspuk (1928) and Rennsymphonie (1928-29), summarized in Marion Von Hofacker, “Richter’s Films and the Role of the Radical Artist, 1927-1941,” in Hans Richter: Activism, Modernism, and the Avant-Garde, ed. Stephen C. Foster (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 123-159. 15 Cindy Keefer, “'Raumlichtmusik' - Early 20th Century Abstract Cinema Immersive Environments,” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 16/6-7 (October 2009): 1-5. 16 Richard Kostelanetz, ed., Moholy-Nagy (New York: Praeger, 1970), 12-13. 17 Cindy Keefer, “Space-Light-Art, Early Abstract Cinema and Multimedia, 1900-1959,” in White noise, ed. Ernest Edmonds [exhibition catalog], (Melbourne: Australian Center for the Moving Image, 2005), 4. 28 techniques with phonograph records by Paul Hindemith (a close friend of Fischinger, who himself was quite possibly in attendance) and Ernst Toch. 18 In an article concerning the event, Ernst Toch commented that “the concept arose from the attempt to extend the function of the machine… …thereby changing the machine’s function and creating a characteristic music of its own.” 19 Cage was particularly captivated by the performance, and referred to the event repeatedly as a prime example of the experimental potential for recording technology. 20 A devout attendee of the semi-annual Color Music Congress, Fischinger befriended several scholars and artists, and continued to refine his technique in works such as Studie Nr. 11(1932), a work accompanied by Mozart’s “Divertimento in D,” (K. 334, 1779-80), which reduced rococo architectural motifs to geometric abstractions. 21 Fischinger had often strived to correlate his geometric abstractions to specific musical sounds, and his realization that these visual “ornaments” bore a substantial resemblance to the patterns generated by sounds on the optical soundtrack led to his notion of a “spirit” within each object. By drawing images directly onto the optical soundtrack, Fischinger experimented with a variety of sound shapes and their corresponding sounds. 18 These festivals are outlined in detail by Josef Häusler, Spiegel der neun Musik: Donaueschingen (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1996), as well as in Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music (Berkley: University of California Press, 2004), 100. 19 Ernst Toch, “Über meine Kantate ‘Das Wasser’ und meine Grammophonmusik,” Melos 9 (May June 1930), 221-2, trans. in Katz, Capturing Sound, 102. 20 Cage recalled the event years later to Toch’s grandson Lawrence Weschler, “My Grandfather’s Last Tale,” Atlantic Monthly 278 (December 1996), 96. 21 Artists from the Congress included Hans Stoltenberg, who had published a theoretical book Pure Color Art in Space and Time (1920), and Josef Voltz, whose paper “Psychophysiological Basis of Film and Sound-Film Production” sparked a close friendship with Fischinger. Mortiz, Optical Poetry, 28. 29 His early Ornament Ton (Ornament Sound) experiments received international press, and he noted the implications of this new technique in a widely publicized article, “Klingende Ornamente” (Sounding Ornaments). “Now,” he proclaimed, “control of every fine gradation and nuance is granted to the music-painting artist, who bases everything on the primary fundamental of music, namely the wave-vibration or oscillation in and of itself. In the process surface new perceptions that until now were overlooked and remain neglected.” 22 Fischinger converted his studio to explore this new technique, and photos of mock examples of geometric shapes were widely publicized across Germany (see Figure 1.1). 23 The actual geometric shapes used in the experiments (Figure 1.2) produced a variety of sounds, some so disturbing that the technicians feared that it might damage their equipment. Although scholars continue to debate the relationship between Fischinger’s work and several contemporaries, central to the theoretical discourse of sound-on-film was the sudden realization of an entirely synthetic, virtual environment of musical space. 24 Much like the grooves of a phonographic record, the images on the soundtrack were directly linked to the original sound, and this indexical relationship was 22 Oskar Fischinger, “Sounding Ornaments,” Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung 28 July 1932, reprinted in Moritz, Optical Poetry, 179–80. 23 As Moritz notes, the oversized scrolls in the photos were hastily painted on butcher paper for publicity purposes. These were much larger than the actual ornaments on the optical soundtrack and were purposefully simplified to make the concept clear to a general audience and to deceive anyone who would try to imitate the process for profit. Moritz, Optical Poetry, 44. 24 As Richard James has noted, Arseni M. Araamov conducted similar experiments at the Scientific Experimental Film Institute in Leningrad and was able to create a limited polyphony, whereas his colleague N. V. Voinov even went so far as to resynthesize excerpts from Rachmaninoff’s C-sharp minor Prelude and Schubert’s Moments Musicaux; James, “Avant-Garde Sound-on-Film Techniques,” 81. More recently this debate has emerged in the work of Thomas Y. Levin, “‘Tones from Out of Nowhere’: Rudolph Pfenninger and the Archeology of Synthetic Sound,” Grey Room 12 (Fall 2003): 32–79. 30 clearly demonstrated and easily understood. Central to the theoretical discourse on sound- on-film was the sudden realization of an entirely synthetic and thus virtual environment of compositional space. As Cage would later discover, the true revolutionary aspect of sound phonography and its relationship to abstract animation lay precisely in its liberating effect on the entire spectrum of sound in a virtual environment, a true abstraction that allowed the incorporation of all sounds, beyond the limitations of realism and tradition that photographers and painters sought to defy through technological resources. Figure 1.1: Fischinger in Berlin studio with mock publicity Ornament Sound scrolls, c. 1932. ©Fischinger Trust, courtesy Center for Visual Music 31 This brief flowering of experimentation in Weimar Germany could have easily been lost on the young and naïve Cage during his travels. However, when Cage returned to his native Los Angeles in 1931 to begin his musical training, the European avant-garde soon followed. In the increasingly tumultuous Nazi era Germany, experimental artists flocked to America, particularly to the blossoming exile population surrounding the Hollywood industry in Los Angeles and the West coast in general. As Cage would soon discover, almost all of the artists and theorists thus far mentioned would come into contact with an artistically mature Cage on the West Coast, each providing a small push for his evolving theoretical and aesthetic discourse on the nature and materiality of sound itself. Figure 1.2: Examples of “ornaments” from Fischinger’s c. 1932 Ornament Sound experiments ©Fischinger Trust, courtesy Center for Visual Music 32 “Exiled in Paradise,” Cage and Los Angeles Émigré Culture I think, with reference to contemporary music, that, in view of the relative absence of academic discipline and the presence of total freedom, there is a determining necessity for specific forms given assigned values in order to solve special problems. “Counterpoint” (1934) 25 Cage’s first formal writing on music, “Counterpoint,” highlighted numerous mixed opinions on the future of his approach to composition. After returning from Europe and settling in Los Angeles, he began a series of lectures on modern music to Santa Monica housewives. 26 As Catherine Parsons Smith observes, Cage’s early Los Angeles career was influenced by the middle-class and primarily female music audiences of Los Angeles, particularly Cage’s mother, Lucretia. 27 His music from this period included a number of songs, several of which set text from writings in transition with Bauhaus-style staging and costume. 28 The two surviving manuscripts from this period, 25 John Cage, “Counterpoint,” Dune Forum 2 (February 1934). Cage submitted this article to Pauline Schindler, associate editor of Dune Forum (Oceano, CA) and former wife of Los Angeles Architect Rudolph Schindler, in response to an article by Roderick White entitled “Modern Music, a critical summary.” As Cage notes on the margins of the typescript sent to Pauline, the article was prompted by a mutual friend “Gavin,” with no date. Judging from the publication date and the immediate response in the next issue from Cowell, the letter must have been received in the fall of 1933; Carbon copy, ”John Cage letters sent to Pauline Schindler, 1934-1964,” The Getty Research Institute Special Collections (hereafter “GRI”), Accession No. 980027. 26 Cage popularized this anecdote in his lecture “Indeterminacy,” published in Silence (Middletown: Wesleyan, 1961), 273. The Santa Monica Evening Outlook chronicles the lecture series. As Catherine Parsons Smith observes, many of these “housewives” were members of the Los Angeles Times social club, (whose editor was Cage’s mother Lucretia), and the friends of Cornelia Maule, daughter of a wealthy Los Angeles steel magnate. Catherine Parsons Smith, “Athena at the Manuscript Club: John Cage and Mary Carr Moore,” The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 2 (Summer 1995), f.11. 27 Catherine Parsons Smith, “Athena at the Manuscript Club,” 355. David Nicholls takes this thesis further in his biography, John Cage (Chicago: Univ. of Illinois, 2007). 28 Christopher Shultis, “Cage and Europe,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, ed. David Nicholls (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), 23. 33 Greek Ode (1932), and First Chapter of Ecclesiastes (1932) were performed during Cage’s lecture series in Santa Monica with Harry Hay, an early gay rights activist and partner of Cage. Both of these works, in which Cage improvised at the piano, display an interest in theatrical production and experimentation. 29 In stark contrast, the extant works which Cage repeatedly cited later in life, such as the Sonata for Clarinet (1933) and Sonata for Two Voices (1933), show a young Cage working to master the musical techniques of more “serious” composers such as serialism and dissonant counterpoint. Cage’s conflicting desires were reflected in both his musical exploration and his personal life. After returning from Europe, Cage maintained a number of relationships with both men and women, including his longtime partner Don Sample, whom he met in Europe, and Pauline Schindler, former wife of architect Rudolf Schindler. Like his mentor Henry Cowell, who would later be imprisoned for his sexuality, Cage felt a strong obligation to marry and pursue a “regular” artistic career that conformed to societal expectations of the time. 30 This pressure led Cage to seek a formal classical musical education, which included his introduction to Cowell, who directed him to the 29 David Nicholls, John Cage (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2007), 13. These surviving manuscripts are held in the collection of Harry Hay, a high school classmate of Cage, and only later in life did Cage acknowledge their existence. 30 Scholars have continued to struggle to characterize this period in Cage’s life, particularly in the number of interviews in which Cage was quite uncomfortable in discussing the matter. A prime example comes from Los Angeles architectural historian Thomas Hines’ interview with Cage in 1992, where Cage comes nearly to a breaking point, noting that contemporary musicologists are “actually devoted to the relation of art and homosexuality and take it very, very seriously, and I have not; I still start to forget about sex once I’m doing something serious.” Thomas Hines, interview with John Cage May 21, 23, 1992. (GRI) 2002.M.40, p. 64. 34 Schoenberg pupil Adolph Weiss. 31 In both these initial contacts, Cage was explicit in outlining his compositional approach, particularly his precompositional choices of serial limiting techniques. 32 Cage had stated his goal of studying with Schoenberg clearly to Weiss in his introduction, and he was now prepared to enter to upper social strata of the Los Angeles émigré culture. Los Angeles during the mid-1930s had formed a complex relationship with the industrial entertainment system. By 1935 the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association, under the direction of William H. Hays, revived its political clout amid Depression-era conservatism, consolidating the “classical” model of production with the infamous Motion Picture Production Code. Nevertheless, a number of alternative cinemas existed in Los Angeles, and Cage was immersed in this community, particularly through his acquaintance with Harry Hay. While Cage and Hay performed their songs for the Santa Monica Women’s club, just a short distance away Busby Berkeley was singlehandedly saving Warner Brothers with his massive musical productions such as Footlight Parade, 42 nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, Dames, and Gold Diggers of 1935. Combining hackneyed narrative with extended musical numbers, Berkeley extended musical diegesis into a surrealist plane. The visual abstraction of synchronized dancers in 31 Cage recalls first meeting Cowell after submitting his Sonata for Clarinet for publication in Cowell’s New Music, which he rejected, suggesting instead that Cage perform the work at a workshop for the society in San Francisco, where Cage made his first in-person contact sometime in mid-April 1933. Miller, “John Cage and Henry Cowell: Intersections and Influences, 1933–1941,” 51, f.10-11. 32 Cage explained his in-progress Sonata for Two Voices in a letter to Cowell in October 1933; (NYPL Cowell Collection, Box 2, Folder 44), cited in Miller, “John Cage and Henry Cowell,” f.12; His revealing correspondence with Weiss began around the same time with the introductory letter to Weiss, n.d.(but likely 1934), transcribed in William George, “Adolph Weiss” (PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1971), 267- 268. Several scholars, including Miller and Michael Hicks, have debated the date, as the evidence in the letters mentioning compositions (which have dates on the manuscripts) provide contradictory information. 35 the extended interlude sections borrowed heavily from abstract animation techniques of artists like Fischinger, creating a unique dialogue between contemporary art and industry. Concurrently, independent productions of short films profited in a number of small theaters, such as the Filmarte theater on Vine St., only a short distance from Cage’s residence at 1207 Miramar St., where Dudley Murphy, primary cinematographer for Ballet Mecanique, often showed his personal copy of the film, and where Harry Hay was often in attendance. 33 Like Pauline Schindler, the art dealer Galka Scheyer was an important female contact within the Los Angeles émigré culture. As the self-proclaimed West coast representative of the “Blue Four,” a coterie of expressionist painters centered in Berlin which included Lyonel Feininger, Alexej von Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, Scheyer, along with other German émigrés such as Salka Viertel in Santa Monica and Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger in Pacific Palisades, sustained a community of intellectuals and artists under the economic refuge of Hollywood. Scheyer’s infamous residence at Blue Heights Drive off Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills formed the core of the upper class Los Angeles artistic community, and the guest lists of her many lavish parties included virtually every important artists working or visiting Los Angeles. 34 Cage first met Scheyer through Pauline Schindler in February of 1935, when he visited 33 William Moritz documents many of these theaters in: Moritz, “Visual Music and Film-As Art Before 1950,” On the Edge of America: California Modernist Art, 1900-1950, ed. Paul J. Karlstrom (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1996), 211-12. 34 Vivian Endicott Barnett and Josef Halfenstein, eds., The Blue Four: Feininger, Jawlensky, Kandinsky, and Klee in the New World (Cologne: Dumont, 1997), 9. 36 Blue Heights Drive to view recent works by Kandinsky and Jawlensky. 35 Cage was clearly enamored by both artists, as Scheyer later recounted, and he purchased one of Jawlensky’s heads, the Meditation N. 160 (1934) at the “very low price of $25.00,” for which he made a down payment of $1. 36 Cage exuberantly wrote to Pauline about the paintings, and began composing a new work, “on the sly,” amidst his contrapuntal studies with Schoenberg. 37 He enthusiastically wrote a short note to Jawlensky stating, “I can’t write German or speak it, but I’m overjoyed because I’ve bought one of your pictures: Now it is in me. I write music. You are my teacher. I want to write more I can’t give in German all I want.” 38 Cage’s rapture makes sense in the context of the specific Jawlensky “picture” that he purchased. Cage’s “head,” as Scheyer referred to them, was part of an extended series of more than 1,300 variations on the abstract image of a human face. The successive viewing of these heads functioned as a larger visual parallel to the genre of scroll paintings mentioned above. Jawlensky entitled one of the first paintings in this series as the Fore-Form, out of which the rest of the Abstract Heads was based. The series 35 Maria Müller has speculated that Cage may have first met Scheyer through the mutual acquaintance of Louise and Walter Arensberg, a wealthy couple whose extensive art collection, which included a number of Duchamp works, was openly available for viewing in their home. More likely it was through Pauline Schindler, close friend of Scheyer that Cage first made the acquaintance, as he recounted later. Maria Müller, “’It is a Long, Long Road,’ John Cage and Galka Scheyer,” in Vivian Endicott Barnett and Josef Halfenstein, eds, 273. John Cage interview with Thomas Hines, 21, 23 May 1992. Transcript, (GRI), 2002.M.40, p. 71. 36 Galka Scheyer to Jawlensky, February 8, 1935, (Galka Scheyer Papers, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA, J1935-2), p.2. Müller identified the painting in the Bequest of Xenia Cage. Müller, “It’s a Long, Long Road,” f.1. 37 John Cage to Pauline Schindler, 8 February 1935 (GRI Special Collections). 38 John Cage to Alexej von Jawlensky, n.d. [ca. 1935], (Alexej von Jawlensky-Archiv, Lorcano), facsim. and trans. in Müller, “’It’s a Long, Long Road,’” 273-4. 37 provided a clear visual parallel to Schoenberg’s serial technique of twelve tone composition, as well as his concept of “developing variation.” Both artists stressed the mystical origins of a universal structure that is maintained in the “deep background” of surface variation in texture and expression. 39 Scheyer was quick to note in her letter to Jawlensky that Cage was “a very talented composer who is to be a Schoenberg student,” and she was well aware of Schoenberg’s upcoming extension courses being offered at UCLA and USC. 40 By this point, Cage had developed an understanding of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique, particularly during his studies with Weiss, where he worked closely on an Allemande for solo clarinet. 41 However, his early studies provided little guidance other than a disconnected and ultimately fruitless examination of the fundamentals of classical contrapuntal technique. 42 It is clear from correspondence that Cage was attempting to assimilate into a traditional musical practice by developing a basic musical education, yet the subtext of these letters show an alternate picture of a young student torn between two 39 Scheyer’s remarks were intended as a private commentary, and were published after her death. Clemens Weiler, Alexej Jawlensky (Cologne, 1959), 106. 40 Scheyer maintained an active correspondence with Schoenberg, and one item in particular points directly to his courses: an announcement for his 1935 summer courses at the University of Southern California, signed by Schoenberg with a note in the margins asking “Is she interested in this?” [Interessiert sie das? Sachliche Frage. Arnold Schoenberg] Galka Scheyer Papers (Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA), folder “Arnold Schoenberg,” doc. 6. 41 Michael Hicks, “John Cage’s Studies with Schoenberg,” American Music 8/2 (Summer 1990), f.14. 42 Cage first joined in Schoenberg’s UCLA course on March 18, 1935, and while his initial opinion was optimistic, he soon realized, as he confided in Weiss, that “although I am not really prepared for the class, I manage to keep my ears open and absorb what I can.” Cage to Weiss, March 1935, repr. William George, “Adolph Weiss,” 309. 38 social worlds. 43 Cage repeatedly referred to his marriage to Xenia Cage, a circumstance that seems to have emerged to address his desire to assimilate his sexual identity in much the same fashion as his desire for a “formal” musical education. 44 “The Rape of Common Sense” There is little doubt that, to a certain extent, Cage’s move away from classical harmony and towards percussion was a result of his frustration with his Schoenberg tutelage. Cage soon realized that, in accordance with his strict European pedagogical history, Schoenberg had no intention of discussing his serial technique or any other advanced compositional theory beyond the pedantic introduction of contrapuntal variation and basic musical technique. As a result, the ultimate impetus for his turn away from tonal composition came from everywhere but Schoenberg. At this point Cage was poised to make a conceptual breakthrough in his basic artistic mindset. And Hollywood had a solution. The research John Milton Cage Sr. conducted was directly related to the two economic pillars of the Southland economy: the entertainment and military-industrial conglomerates. President of Cage Submarine and Boat Company, Cage Sr.’s earliest achievements focused on submarine ventilation and propulsion technology, and later he 43 Cage to Schindler, 24 May 1935 (GRI Special Collections). 44 The subtext of Cage’s letters to Schindler evince the most troubling evidence of this difficult circumstance, including the remark in his final letter (prior to his marriage to Xenia a few days later) where he states: “Xenia is very happy now in an excited way and this is good; so am I. I am on edge and can’t sleep. Everything is fitting properly and I am very lucky. I think you are right about those emotional “nows” – (forever). But it is ground that plants grow in. Capacity must be had.” Cage to Schindler, May, 1935 (GRI Special Collections). 39 contracted his engineering skills to several international syndicates, including the automobile industry, where for a number of years he struggled to refine a highly wrought and overly complex six-stroke engine. 45 In the early 1930s Cage Sr. opportunistically shifted his efforts from mechanical to electrical, and his focus for the next twenty years became the perfection of a key technological element for Hollywood’s newest entertainment media: the cathode ray television tube. Inventors like Cage Sr. worked in tandem with these industries in an atmosphere of intense competition, where the “rush to the patent office” was a harsh Depression-era reality. In the entertainment industry, the cathode ray tube was the central focus of industrial development. The effective manipulation of the three dimensional scanning properties of an electrostatic mosaic plate was a critical technology for the practical realization of television. The competing poles of independent inventors and corporate laboratories fueled the debate on an effective apparatus that could overcome the signal-to-noise ratio needed to provide a clear image on the screen. Early pioneers of television, such as John Logie Baird, Charles Jenkins, and Philo Farnsworth worked, like Cage Sr., independent of corporate funding, until the electricity conglomerate General Electric spun off its business in wireless communication through the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in 1919. Founded at the behest of the U.S. Navy in 1919 by Owen Young, RCA found a new measure of commercial success 45 Robert M. Stevenson has found a number, though not all, of these early patents. His chronology is largely inaccurate, as he often cites the date of patent approval rather than submission. Robert M. Stevenson, “John Cage on His 70 th Birthday: West Coast Background,” Inter-American Music Review 5/1(Fall1 982), 4-5. For a complete listing of all US patents filed by John Cage Sr., see Appendix IV. 40 through the visionary entrepreneurial skills of vice president David Sarnoff. 46 Basing his East Coast operations in Schenectady, NY, Cage Sr. likely noticed the general commercial shift in corporate funding, and his move from submarine technology to commercial electronics reflected this trend. His entry into the field began in 1933, where, working under General Electric, he submitted a number of refinements to the electron beam tube until 1939, when he shifted to the war effort under the U.S. Naval Department. 47 The head engineer at RCA was the Russian-born inventor Vladimir Zworykin, and it was his prototype apparatus for cathode ray tube projection, the “iconoscope,” that eventually proved to be the most commercially viable method for television recording and reproduction. In the basic form of this technology, the electron beams emitted from the cathode-ray tube are directed through magnetic fields at the end of the cathode. To control the “sweep” of the beam, oscillators directed the electric current across the screen in rapid successive passes on the horizontal and vertical panes to form the image on the screen. 48 While Cage Sr. worked in part with commercial interests for these new technologies, he clearly fell into the latter category of inventors that preferred to work 46 For a brief history on the emergence of television technology, see: Alexander B. Magoun 2007, Television: The Life Story of a Technology (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press), and Richard C. Webb 2005, Tele-Visionaries: The People Behind the Invention of Television (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons). 47 Between 1933 and 1939, Cage Sr. filed six patents under General Electric. For a complete list of these patents, see appendix IV. Cage Sr.’s 1938 patents, “Ultra Short Wave System,” along with the “invisible Ray Vision System” discussed below, were the likely impetus for his move to the Naval Department for work on Radar technology during WWII, where, as he later claimed in life, he first proposed the idea for a sonobouy system for underwater submarine detection. For details on these inventions, see Appendix III.2.1, letter, Herbert Sturdy to General Quesada, Nov. 23, 1957, John Cage Papers: I.2.3.16. 48 This brief description of a complicated technology is drawn from: Michael Noll 1988, Television Technology: Fundamentals and Future Prospects (Norwood, MA: Artech House), 9-24. 41 outside of the corporate laboratory environment. His study of the fundamental properties of electron beam tubes led to a period of intense research on electrons, leading to the drafting of a number of polemic treatises on the emerging theories in physics surrounding Einstein’s theory of special relativity. In one such publication, a short essay entitled “The Rape of Common Sense,” Cage Sr. assembled an illustrated pamphlet debating the corpuscular versus wave theories of light. Cage Sr.’s playful pamphlet was likely assembled as a personal intellectual keepsake for his circle of associates. During the first half of the twentieth century, scientific debates were within the grasp of most intellectuals, publicized through popular journals, and easily proven with simple experimentation. Moreover, it was primarily Cage Sr.’s experimentation with cathode-ray tubes that would have led to his interest in the contemporary debate on the nature of matter and electricity, for it was within the vacuum-sealed apparatus of a glass tube that the first scientific observations on waveforms and X-rays were initially observed and tested. Perfected by the English chemist William Crookes in the 1870s, vacuum tubes provided a means for studying the conductance of electric particles. Cathode rays could be generated between the cathode (negative terminal) and anode (positive terminal) within the tube with the application of an electrical current. These rays however, were unable to penetrate the glass of the tube, and it was speculated, and later confirmed, that they were streams of negatively charged particles, later identified as electrons. This led to a number of discoveries on subatomic particles, including the identification of high frequency electromagnetic current, or X-rays, by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen in 1895, and 42 the formulation of the corpuscular theory of electrons by Sir J. J. Thomson in 1897. 49 In Cage Sr.’s essay, he is explicit in declaiming a radical rejection of many of the current theories, stating bluntly: I do not believe that “all matter is electrical in constitution.” I do not believe that there is such a thing as an “Electron.” I do not believe in the Quantum Theory nor in the theory of Relativity nor in the Newtonian Gravitational Theory, nor in the Kinetic Theory of Gases. I do not believe that molecular bombardment is the cause of Newtonian Movement, nor that the interior of an atom bears any resemblance whatever to our solar system. I do not believe in the Electromagnetic Nature of Light, nor in the Corpuscular Theory of Light, nor that there can ever be any correlation between “particles and waves.” 50 What Cage Sr. proposed instead was what was commonly referred to during the period as the “cloud” theory of electrostatic energy. Cage Sr.’s ideas emerged from numerous “ether” theories from the period, which attempted to account for the vast amount of empty space that rests between the atomic particles and the surrounding electron field. Over the next twenty years, this theory would continue to preoccupy his scientific curiosity. In personal correspondence, space travel and the nature of interplanetary gravitational forces were a personal hobby of Cage Sr.’s, and its bearing on his son’s aesthetic is examined further in Chapter 4. 51 49 On Röntgen’s discoveries, see W. Robert Nitske, The Life of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, Discoverer of the X Ray (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1971). 50 John M. Cage Sr. c.a.1930, “The Rape of Common Sense,” private publication, manuscript held by The John Cage Trust. 51 For example, in 1956 Cage Sr. predicted the failure of the United States Naval Research Laboratory’s first attempts to launch an orbiting satellite for Project Vanguard. Cage Sr. cited his electrostatic field theory as a clearer explanation of satellite orbiting than that of Einstein, but ultimately the failures of this project were unrelated to his eclectic claims. See: John M. Cage Sr. to Dr. John P Hagen, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington D.C., October 6, 1956. John Cage papers, Northwestern University, Series IV, Correspondence, Box 2, Folder 3, Item 13, reproduced in Appendix III.2.2 43 While the technical implications of this theory may have been beyond the younger Cage, an intuitive artistic connection between Cage Sr.’s scientific interests and contemporary theories of visual perception would have been apparent with the introduction of the artworks of another major figure of the European historical avant- garde: Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp would have a dramatic effect on Cage’s mature neo- avant garde aesthetic in the 1950s, and the scientific implications of Duchamp’s play on perception are examined further in Chapter 2. In the 1930s Cage would have been exposed to a number of Duchamp’s earlier works of analytic cubism, such as the Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912), on display at the private collection of Louis and Walter Arensberg in Los Angeles, where Cage often visited. 52 As scholars have revisited the diffuse output of Duchamp’s early career, many have noted the technological commentary within his work. 53 Examination of one such example provides the framework for further discussion of the technological rhetoric inherent in visual and auditory perception, a framework that would begin to preoccupy Cage during his early scientific research. In the case of Nude Descending a Staircase (No.2), the perceptual experience of cubist abstraction paralleled scientific observations on the successive 52 As Cage later recalled, he not only visited with the Arensbergs, but, as he was still interested in pursuing a career in painting, he reported having discussed his art with Walter Arensberg; see Alan Gillmor, “Interview with John Cage,” contact 14 (Autumn 1976): 18. 53 This recent trend of scholarship has revisited the many technological underpinnings to Duchamp’s output, primarily with the posthumous publication of his personal notes and correspondence. See, for example: Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the “Large Glass’ and Related Works (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998); Dawn Ades, Neil Cox, and David Hopkins, Marcel Duchamp (NY: Thames and Hudson, 1999); Craig E. Adcock, Marcel Duchamp’s Notes from the “Large Glass,”: An N-Dimensional Analysis (Ann Arbor MI: UMI Research Press, 1983); and John F. Moffitt, Alchemist of the Avant-Garde: The Case of Marcel Duchamp (Albany, NY: State Univ. of New York Press, 2002). 44 viewing of movement over time, as well as the penetrating aspect of X-ray photography in then-current scientific observations. As the singular work that shocked the American art world at its premiere in the International Exhibition of American Art in 1913, later known as the “Armory Show,” this work introduced Americans to analytic cubism. 54 Providing a composite sense of viewing, this work demanded a sense of perspective that encapsulated durational intensity in a single viewing plane, much to the opposite effect of the “scroll paintings” of Richter and Eggeling, yet much in the same way that television and film brought together successive imagery into a composite frame. Furthermore, the clear reference to a “stripped” nude model gave a skeletal reference to the penetrating vision that X-ray photography had on the anatomical human figure. The sequential motion of Duchamp’s nude, as many scholars have noted, bears a distinct parallel to French photographer Etienne-Jules Marey’s “chronophotographie géometrique.” In Marey’s work, the sequential movement of a human figure is traced through an early form of time-lapse photography that captured the human movement in a single frame by tracing lines reflected by the flash photography on dots placed at joints throughout the human figure. 55 The American origins of time photography were deeply rooted in the American drive toward standardization of nature, as is clearly demonstrated in the parallel work of Eadweard Muybridge exposure shots of human and animal figures 54 For a history of the Armory Show, see: Milton Wolf Brown, The Story of the Armory Show (NY: Abbeville Press, 1988); for a history of the Arensberg’s and Duchamp, see Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, Marcel Duchamp’s “Silent Guard” : A Critical Study of Louise and Walter Arensberg (PhD. Thesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1994). 55 For more on Marey, see: Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Works of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and François Dagognet, Etiennce-Jules Marey: A Passion for the Trace (NY: Zone, 1992). 45 in motion. 56 Muybridge’s early experience in motion photography were conducted in nearby Palo Alto, where clock time and scientific observation of human motion emerged out of the American drive for standardization, particularly in communication and transportation technologies. Railroads necessitated the lockstep of American industry, and it was the profits of that very industry, through railroad tycoon Leland Stanford’s genteel wager of equestrian physics, that Muybridge was given the first opportunity to transplant the lock step of industry into the realm of the visual. 57 As fate would have it, just 50 years later, a new race for between the emerging Silicon Valley industry of commercial electronics and the burgeoning entertainment industry of Los Angeles would further push this drive to the patent office all the way to the international conflict of World War II. “Invisible Ray Vision” With a background in industrial manufacturing and a newfound interest in the attributes of electromagnetic energy, Cage Sr. was poised to discover a new application for television technology. Beginning with the discovery of X-rays emitted from cathode ray tubes, the simple apparatus functioned as the primary scientific testing ground for the properties of electromagnetic waves beyond the visible spectrum, and Cage Sr. realized 56 For a brief overview, see: Brian Clegg, The man who stopped time : the illuminating story of Eadweard Muybridge : pioneer photographer, father of the motion picture, murderer (Washington, D.C., Joseph Henry Press, 2007). 57 Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Penguin, 2003), see also: Wolfgang Schivelbush, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 46 the potential of combining the peering lens of a cathode ray tube with another military technology: infrared vision. The prospect of “seeing through clouds” was a preoccupation of Cage Sr. beginning with his interest in underwater submarine detection after the failure of his earlier projects with gasoline powered submarine engines, which, as Cage Jr. often recalled, was rejected by the US Navy because the exhaust emissions emitted bubbles to the water surface and clearly gave away the location of the submarine to any potential enemy. 58 In 1935, Cage Sr. filed for articles of incorporation with the partnership of Los Angeles lawyer Herbert-Sturdy under the appropriately punned title “Sturdy-Cage Projects, Inc,” to develop this new vision machine. Working in the garage of the family home at 1207 Miramar St. in Los Angeles, Cage Sr. began patent preparations for his detailed apparatus. 59 In need of employment, Cage was hired by his father in March of 1935, and it was this patent that he worked tirelessly on during his early counterpoint studies with Schoenberg. With forty different claims, the massive document (his largest individual application yet) was clearly the centerpiece of Cage Sr.’s work, with the goal of skyrocketing “Sturdy-Cage Projects, Inc.” Cage Jr. wrote confidently to Weiss that “my father has hopes of becoming wealthy and instituting everything that you want. You would have only to whisper a wish and it would be amplified materially.” 60 Documents 58 Cage recalled this humorous anecdote often, such as the footnote in Silence to the essay “Experimental Music,” John Cage, Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 12. 59 John M. Cage Sr. 1946, “Invisible Ray Vision System,” US Patent No. 2,395,099, Filed July 6, 1935, and Issued Feb. 19, 1946. This patent, heretofore unacknowledged, is not mentioned in Stevenson. 60 Cage to Weiss, 1935, repr. William George 1971, p. 312 47 Cage retained from this research reveal his extensive knowledge of electrical engineering and his deftness for scientific inquiry. 61 Cage was assigned to construct the device that would allow the set of mirrors to deflect light in synchronicity during the surface sweep. As he learned, in order for an image to appear on a television screen, the electron beams emitted from the cathode-ray tube are directed through magnetic fields at the end of the cathode. To control the “sweep” of the beam, oscillators directed the electric current across the screen in rapid successive passes on the horizontal and vertical planes to form the image. 62 Cage Sr.’s device followed this principle, directing the cathode ray tube beam onto a photoreactive plate that highlighted wavelengths beyond the visible spectrum. He assigned his son to construct one version of the machine that deflected a beam of light on mirrors vibrated on two axes at right angles to one another to perform the sweep. As Cage Sr. described in the patent application, the deflecting plates were controlled by oscillation generators of any suitable conventional type, such as the well- known sawtooth oscillator. Cage Sr. devised the precise engineering of exactly such an oscillator, calculating even the cost of individual components of the segment, which totaled around $225, a modest sum for what at the time was a commonplace but expensive piece of industrial electronics. Coincidentally, just north in Palo Alto, a young engineer by the name of William Hewlett was finishing his master’s thesis at Stanford on a similar apparatus. Teaming up with David Packard, a colleague of Cage Sr. at General 61 John Cage Papers, Northwestern University, Series V: Ephemera, folder: “Exptl Music and Percussion” A special thanks to Gordon Mumma for assisting in the “decoding” of this document. 62 This brief description of a complicated technology is drawn from Michael Noll, Television Technology: Fundamentals and Future Prospects (Norwood, Mass.: Artech House, 1988), 9–24. 48 Electric, Hewlett-Packard began manufacturing a variation of this apparatus for commercial testing purposes at the low sum of $54.50. Hewlett-Packard’s first customer for the new apparatus was Walt Disney, who purchased the first eight units for the “Fantasound” surround-sound system in 1940, a technology that would have a direct bearing on Cage and Cage Sr.’s later research and experimentation. 63 Cage Sr. continued to work with David Packard until the end of his life, filing his last patent jointly with the company in 1957. 64 Despite the lucrative commercial applications of this research, Cage Jr. discovered something much different in this apparatus. Among the surviving working notes from the project, Cage sketched out a number of soundwave structures, including a sine wave with plotted points of frequency, and a combination signal of sine and triangle waves that the frequency oscillator would have generated. (see Figure 1.3) 63 William R. Hewlett, “Variable Frequency Oscillator,” U.S. Patent No. 2,268,872, filed 11 July, 1939, patented 6 Jan., 1942. 64 William R. Hewlett and John M. Cage, [ass. to Hewlett-Packard Co.], “Direct Current Amplifier and Modulator Therefor,” U.S. Patent No. 3,014,135, filed 4 Mar, 1957, patented 19 Dec., 1961. 49 Figure 1.3: John Cage, schematic diagram, ca. 1935, Series V, “Ephemera,” folder “Experimental Music and Percussion,” John Cage Collection, Northwestern University Music Library, Evanston, Ill. The notes outline the mechanics of the scanning apparatus, but Cage noticed something else. In the margins Cage wrote: “Sawtooth oscillators, reflector plates in tubes,” and finally, “electric musical instruments,” an idea he would return to five years later in 1940. Next to these notes is a detailed three dimensional plot of the visual layout of a sine wave vibrating at 440 Hz, which would sound as concert “A” according to American tuning standards. These observations bear a striking similarity to a Fourier analysis of a sine wave over time, and his observations clearly stuck with him many years later. Discussing Rauschenberg’s conceptual work in the late fifties, Cage recalled the “device made of glass which has inside it a delicately balance mechanism which revolves 50 in response to infrared rays.” 65 In another essay from the same collection, “Composition as Process,” Cage gives an explicit interjection regarding Fourier analysis, noting: Here’s a little information you may find informative about the information theory: Fourier analysis allows a function of time (or any other independent variable) to be expressed in terms of periodic (frequency) components. The frequency components are overall properties of the entire signal. By means of a Fourier analysis one can express the value of a signal at any point in terms of the over-all frequency properties of the signal; or vice versa, one can obtain these over-all properties from the values of the signal at its various points. 66 Real-time three dimensional Fourier analysis provided a concrete visualization of the science of soundwave structure, and during the 1930s the practical applications for the algorithm were only beginning to take shape. While engineers like Cage Sr. and William Hewlett were beginning to see these implications, Cage Jr. seemed to float in and out of the work with a quixotic air of curiosity. In one particularly revealing note to Pauline, he playfully danced around the fundamental concept of the machine with a sensual exuberance: I am luminous. There is a marvelous extension around me like the things continents have around them in atlas maps. I am on the topmost peaks of sensitivity. I am convex and then I’m concave. I include and exclude. I simmer. I purr. I shall be fired from my job. My father’s like a character out of Moliere. Stubborn, one faced like imitation-college short story. He’s become an idea, a dissension, a unit molecule taking up position. But I am on top. 67 65 John Cage, “On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work, Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1961), 106. 66 John Cage, “Composition as Process,” Silence, 47. 67 Cage to Pauline Schindler, n.d. (GRI Special Collections), reproduced in Appendix III.1.2. 51 Blending technological and scientific discourse with his playful spiritual bent, this brief literary aside glimpses at the foundation of Cage’s blossoming interest in an alternative artistic career. Instead of following his father’s footsteps into a lucrative industrial application of the research, Cage turned to a primitive, perhaps regressive technological approach to the “spirit inside objects” through the simple kinetic- mechanical act of percussion. As a mechanical act, the percussive strike of an object is the simplest application of a technology in the reproduction of sound. As a visceral, sensual act, percussion brought forth an intimate connection with the compositional materials that Cage could not find in serialism. This move away from tonal music and towards percussion marked a shift in his approach to the materials of musical composition, aggressively providing not an alternative, but a solution to the definition of music as encompassing the entire spectrum of sound. Cage’s understanding of the concept was based primarily in the technological advances in recording technology of both the visual and the auditory spectrum and their commonality in oscillating electric current. Although Cage likely did not realize it at the time, the fundamental concept behind the mirror apparatus he was assigned to construct was quite similar to the technology behind film phonography, priming him for his interaction with Fischinger the following year. Visualizing Music: Oskar Fischinger and Cage’s “Quartet” It was somewhere during this period of exploration that Cage began working on his first percussion works in earnest, composing “on the sly” during his Schoenberg 52 studies. In contrast to the flood of works surviving from 1934 (all of them experimenting with serialism), Cage completed only five works from 1935-1937, two of them for percussion. A set of rather pedantic flute duets display Cage’s frustration in chromatic writing, and a pair of piano works utilize a twelve note row simplistically. 68 A third work entitled Quest (1935) was Cage’s first dance accompaniment, set to the choreography of Martha B. Dean, with an impressive premiere in Royce Hall at UCLA on April 28. Only the second movement survives, a dramatic piano accompaniment in contrast to his previous works. For the first movement Cage assembled a microphone and amplifier, slowly moving across a table of sound producing objects such as a watch, mechanical toys and other items. 69 Surviving documentation for this piece is inconclusive, but if this event did in fact occur as reported, it would have been one of the earliest “musical” uses of sound itself and the act of amplification of sound as a musical composition. Another event in April was the central focus of Cage’s efforts. As part of his new music series, Cage organized a concert for Shakuhachi at the Schindler’s Kings Road House on April 13 th . 70 The work was a large undertaking for Cage, and he expressed an interest to 68 Three Pieces for Piano (1935) are purely chromatic, and Two Pieces for Piano (1935, rev. 1974), was essentially a set of motivic variations on the row, played in prime form at the beginning and end. 69 The origins of this performance are still unclear, and the speculation for the first movement was never mentioned by Cage, and remains only a speculation. Paul van Emmerik cites one document chronicling the event, a brief report almost eleven years later. Doris M. Hering, “John Cage and the Prepared Piano,” Dance 20/3 (March 1946): 21, 52-3. Cage does not mention the experiment or the premiere to Weiss or Schindler. 70 Cage outlines this concert in detail in a letter to Pauline: Cage to Pauline Schindler, 15 April, 1935 (GRI Special Collections). 53 Pauline in living at Kings Road with Xenia, although the plans never came to fruition. 71 Highly publicized, the percussion accompaniment of the concert was an inspiration for the instrumentation for his second percussion work, Trio (1936 or 1937), which called for bamboo sticks and bass drum. While Cage fostered his interest in alternative musical practices, Oskar Fischinger’s situation in Berlin had reached the breaking point. Even though his popularity garnered him official censor permits for his films, he was forced to resort to a series of complex tactics that redefined his films as outside the purview of “abstract” art. Around the same time an agent for MGM brought several of his films to Hollywood for a test screening at the Filmarte Theater, where they were greeted with riotous approval by a large audience. 72 Paramount quickly offered a lucrative contract for a short piece to be included in their feature Big Broadcast 1937, and Fischinger arrived in Los Angeles in February 1936. Fischinger immediately encountered the usual frustrations of émigré artists attempting to assimilate into the industrial model of film production. Paramount’s refusal to spend money on color film stock for Fischinger’s portion of the project heightened these tensions, and he left the project by the middle of the year. Fischinger 71 Thomas Hines initially speculated, as the result of his interview with Cage, that Cage lived in the Kings Road house with Don Sample, and this remains an often quoted anecdote in the Cage literature. However, in the interview Cage never specified when or how long he lived in the house, stating merely that “that I had the experience is what is important,” and his several letters of inquiry to Pauline are proof that the plans never came to be. See Thomas Hines, “’Then Not Yet ‘Cage’: The Los Angeles Years, 1912-1938,” in John Cage: Composed in America, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman (Chicago, Chicago Univ. Press, 1994), 81-85, versus Cage’s statement in Hines’ interview on 21, 23 May 1992. Transcript, (GRI), 2002.M.40, 70, and Cage’s letter to Pauline 3 June, 1935 (GRI Special Collections). 72 Moritz, Optical Poetry, 62. 54 managed to get by with the help of his many friends in the émigré population, including Galka Scheyer. In December 1936 Fischinger received a small contract from MGM for an animated film, and he rented a small studio space for the animation scaffolding. Galka Scheyer introduced Cage to Fischinger sometime before March of the following year. Cage and Fischinger likely discussed percussion music prior to his apprenticeship, because he sent Fischinger a complimentary ticket to a lecture on percussion music at the home of bookbinder and musician Hazel Dreis in March 1937. Cage’s note on the ticket (see Figure 1.4) promised a performance of several compositions on new percussion instruments by the “John Cage Group.” 73 In early 1937 Fischinger received a small contract from MGM to complete an animated short entitled An Optical Poem, and in hope of a possible future commission, or perhaps out of his own interest in sound phonography, Cage apprenticed briefly for the project (see Figure 1.5). 73 The year is confirmed by an announcement for the series: “Lecture Series to Be Given,” Santa Monica Evening Outlook, 27 February, 1937, 4. The article notes that both the lecture on percussion music and on contemporary music were by Cage, despite the typographical error for the 17 March lecture in the postcard invitation. It is unclear from the announcement if any of the music was Cage’s, but if so, this is the first documented public performance by Cage of his early percussion music. 55 Figure 1.4: John Cage, Postcard Invitation to Oskar Fischinger, 1937 Fischinger Collection, Center For Visual Music “Mr. Fischinger and Friends” [Herr Fischinger und Freunde]; “As a guest” [als Gast]; “brand new instruments, various compositions by other composers!” [ganz neue [I]nstrumenten, verschiedene Kompositionen, von anderen Komponisten!] 56 Figure 1.5: Fischinger in studio working on An Optical Poem. Hollywood, California, 1937. ©Fischinger Trust, courtesy Center for Visual Music An Optical Poem was shot using stop motion animation; dozens of individual paper cutouts of geometric shapes were arranged on the shooting stage and then repositioned after each frame of film was exposed. To outline the animation, Fischinger sketched a graphic-temporal notation of the movement of individual figures across the screen (see Example 1.1). He used a large scroll of graph paper, where the horizontal 57 plane represented the individual frames. The graph paper was subdivided into individual lines where Fischinger sketched the general movement of the figures over time. The curved lines and straight lines in the example specify a few of the many movements across the screen of the paper cutouts. Example 1.1: Oskar Fischinger, Graphic Notation Sketch for An Optical Poem. ©Fischinger Trust, courtesy Center for Visual Music With these details one can get a sense of the animation process Cage witnessed. Fischinger knew the specific attack points in which each image would appear. In later sections a myriad of figures move across the screen, each corresponding with different attack points, and the coordination of each of the figures within the set was a complex 58 endeavor. As Cage recalled later in life, during his apprenticeship Fischinger looked on, cigar in hand, in the corner of the studio while Cage carefully moved the large paper cutouts of colored geometric shapes a few fractions of a millimeter for each successive frame shot with a large feather attached to a stick. At one point Fischinger fell asleep, dropping ashes from his cigar into a pile of papers and rags and starting a small fire. Frightened, Cage rushed to splash water on the flames, dousing Fischinger and the equipment in the process. 74 Years later, Cage wrote a mesostic in memory of the encounter: when y Ou Said eaCh inAnimate object has a SpiRit that can take the Form of sound by beIng Set into vibration i beCame a musician it was as tHough you had set me on fIre i raN without thinkinG and thrEw myself into the wateR 75 74 This anecdote was provided to William Moritz in an interview with Cage in the 1980s, and transcribed in his biography of Fischinger. Moritz, Optical Poetry, 165–66. 75 John Cage, Mesostic for Elfriede Fischinger, 8 May 1980, Center for Visual Music, Elfriede Fischinger Collection, Los Angeles, Calif. 59 According to all surviving documentation, Cage’s work lasted no more than a few days, and likely ended after the fire incident. Despite the brevity of Cage’s apprenticeship, the influence of Fischinger’s animation method can be seen in the manuscript for Cage’s first percussion work, Quartet, which displays many similarities to Fischinger’s graphic sketches. Although Cage dated the work to 1935—before his first encounter with Fischinger—there is reason to think the date incorrect. 76 Cage’s Trio (1936), used conventional notation and was written for specific instruments, whereas his Quartet does not specify instrumentation and is written in a unique graphic notation. Each movement of the manuscript is written in a progressively strict type of proportional notation, beginning with the first movement in loosely drawn lines (see Example 1.2a), followed by the second movement, which attempts to align measures among systems (Example 1.2b), followed by the third movement, “Axial Asymmetry,” with a strict uniformity of 60 bars per system (Example 1.2c), and culminating with the final movement, written on graph paper (Example 1.2d). With this evidence in mind, I would argue that Cage was attempting to create a score that would align with Fischinger’s animation method. Given the timing of Cage’s interaction with Fischinger, I suggest that the Quartet was in fact composed in 1937. 76 As has been noted by Leta Miller, the dating on this manuscript seems to have been added later and is written in red ink on the corner of the first page. It is likely that Cage recalled this date later when he secured his publishing contract with Henmar Press and, like many dates from his early career, was misstated. Miller, “John Cage and Henry Cowell,” 59. 60 Example 1.2a: John Cage, Manuscript for Quartet, Movement I, ca. 1937. John Cage Music Manuscript Collection, New York Public Library, Music Division, JPB 95-3, Folder 175. Used by permission of the John Cage Trust. 61 Example 1.2b: John Cage, Manuscript for Quartet, Movement II, ca. 1937. John Cage Music Manuscript Collection, New York Public Library, Music Division, JPB 95-3, Folder 175. Used by permission of the John Cage Trust. 62 Example 1.2c: John Cage, Manuscript for Quartet, Movement III, “Axial Asymmetry”; ca. 1937. John Cage Music Manuscript Collection, New York Public Library, Music Division, JPB 95-3, Folder 175. Used by permission of the John Cage Trust. 63 Example 1.2d: John Cage, Manuscript for Quartet, Movement IV, graphic notation details, ca. 1937. John Cage Music Manuscript Collection, New York Public Library, Music Division, JPB 95-3, Folder 175. Used by permission of the John Cage Trust. Cage’s blocking of individual instruments bears a distinct similarity to the animation “staging” in Fischinger’s graphs, and it is here that the notion of a “spirit inside each object” has clear scientific and practical artistic implications. Cage had discovered the specific scientific nature of sound-wave structure through film phonography and scientific research for his father, giving him a sense of the indexical relationship between sound and object. In Fischinger’s studio he witnessed a miraculous blending of scientific precision with brilliant artistry in the synchronization of sound and image over time. Thus, in just one short encounter, Cage for the first time noticed the connection between sound, object, and duration. There is no documentation indicating that Cage had further contact with Fischinger until the fall of 1940. However, in the intervening years Cage’s interest in 64 electroacoustic composition began to blossom. Cage Sr. continued with his research on electron beam tubes with patents in 1938 and 1939, research Cage assisted on until his departure for Seattle in 1938. 77 During his brief tenure at the Cornish School in Seattle from the fall of 1938 to the spring of 1940, Cage entered into his first period of compositional maturity. He completed several percussion and electroacoustic works, “invented” the prepared piano, and fostered several key artistic relationships with visual artists based in the northeast. In the process, Cage began to codify a mature aesthetic that would blossom in the postwar period. As his first venture away from his family and the social confines of Los Angeles, Cage found refuge in the small artistic community of the Cornish School. Like his later experiences at Black Mountain College and Stony Point, New York, Cage’s close, daily interaction with like-minded liberal artists and intellectuals engendered an environment of both artistic and social freedom paralleled only by his time in Europe and pre-Hayes era Los Angeles. Transcendent Radio: Imaginary Landscapes and the “Inner Eye” In Seattle, Cage encountered two artists that would provide an important transition from the spiritual theories of Fischinger: Mark Tobey and Morris Graves. Wisconsin native Mark Tobey introduced Cage to many tenants of Zen Buddishm and Bahá’í Faith, a connection that Cage repeatedly referred to as a key juncture in the 77 Cage Sr. filed patents in 1938 and 1939. See John M. Cage, Sr., U.S. Patent No. 2,190,511 (Schenectady, N.Y., assigned to General Electric Co.): “Ultra Short Wave System,” filed 1 March 1938, issued 13 February 1940; John M. Cage, Sr., U.S. Patent No. 2,225,330 (Schenectady, N.Y., assigned to General Electric Co.): “Electron Beam Tube,” filed 22 April 1939, issued 17 Dec. 1940. 65 development of his early aesthetic. 78 While scholars have observed many of these connections in the context of Cage’s later turn toward eastern philosophy, Tobey’s technological discourse on the transformation of modern mediated perception has gone unnoticed. 79 Tobey’s artistic sense of immediacy and phenomenological awareness led to Cage’s often repeated encounter with the artist one evening in Seattle: Though I loved the work of Morris Graves, and still do, it was Tobey who had a great effect on my way of seeing, which is to say, my involvement with painting, or my involvement with life even. I remember in particular a walk with Mark Tobey from the area of Seattle around the Cornish school downhill and through the town toward a Japanese Restaurant – a walk that would not normally take more than forty-five minutes, but on this occasion it must have taken several hours, because he was constantly stopping and pointing out things to see, opening my eyes in other words. Which, if I understand it at all, has been a function of twentieth-century art – to open our eyes. 80 In Mark Tobey Cage found, as in Marcel Duchamp’s earlier work, a particular blend of geometric abstraction and temporal gesture that effectively portrayed a sense of duration on the canvas plane. Tobey, an amateur musician and composer, was personally concerned with the visual representation of music, evinced in his correspondence with another “Blue Four” composer, Lyonel Feininger. 81 In 1939 Tobey was commissioned by 78 See for example, Cage’s recollections to Irving Sandler: John Cage interview with Irving Sandler, before 1967 Irving Sandler Papers (Getty Research Institute), 2000.M.43, Box 4, f. 12, p. 3; as well as John Cage 1981, For the Birds (NY: Marion Boyars), 158. 79 David W. Patterson, “Cage and Asia: History and Sources,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Cage ed. David Nichols, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), 41-59; On Cage and Tobey, see Branden W. Joseph, “’A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers’: The Development of John Cage’s Early Aesthetic Position,” 135-138. 80 John Cage Interview with Irving Sandler, 1967. Box 4, folder 12, Irving Sandler Papers, Getty Research Institute, 2000.M.43. 81 See: Mark Tobey and Lyonel Feininger, Years of Friendship, 1944-1956: The Correspondence of Lyonel Feininger and Mark Tobey, ed. Achim Moeller (Ostfildern : Hatje Cantz, 2006). 66 the Works Progress Administration for a mural painting that was never installed. The work he produced, his largest canvas to date, entitled Science, brought together a number of prescient technological motifs. Balancing historical scientific observations on celestial bodies and anatomy with modern communications, Tobey’s canvas blends the spiritual and technological imagery in a personal expression of his Bahá’í faith. The centerpiece of the canvas, a Star of David in the palm of a hand, connects to other anatomical elements of the body via a network of lattices that resemble power lines and radio towers. These beacons of communication link the human psyche to the natural surroundings of electromagnetic energy that emanates from prominent energy zones of the human body: the palm, the fingernail, and the heart. The symbols for Mars and Venus, and the Star of David float along the periphery with animal motifs found in other contemporary works. In this and many other works by Tobey, a connection between the invisible spaces of surroundings is captured in abstractions of human perception, linking unconsciousness with the experience of reality. In contrast to the passive receptivity of Tobey, Morris Graves’ confrontational interaction with Cage resulted in a more tumultuous relationship between the two artists. Graves’ activist Dada antics within the Cornish School garnered him a reputation as the community agitator, such as his first interaction with Cage at a concert of his percussion works in 1939. Arriving at the concert with a bag of peanuts and a box of weighted doll eyes, Graves prepared to heckle Cage. Cracking peanuts and using a pair of doll eyes as pretend-lorgnettes, Graves reached a furor at the end of the third movement of Cage’s 67 Quartet, when he threw back his head and screamed “Jesus in the Everywhere!” 82 After the event the two became close, eventually sharing a townhouse near the Cornish School. Cage would later recall this encounter in his essay on Graves in the publication Empty Words (1973). Arranged in his unique spatial typescript, Cage’s essay highlights the interactive element of Graves’ painting style and the shock of their first meeting. 83 Juxtaposed within the essay are reminiscences and anecdotes with nonsyntactical dance- chants arranged to follow metrical patterns of motivic groups from the fourth movement of the Quartet, a reference to one of the many “percussive” instrumentations that Cage proposed for the performance of the work. One section in particular juxtaposes a key technological element of Graves’ work with the memory of the encounter: CHAI yaCHAI TANyaCHAITANyaCHAITANyaTANyaCHAITANyaTAN yayaCHAITANyaCHAIyaCHAITANyaCHAICHAITAN yaCHAIyaCHAITANyaCHAIyaCHAITANyaCHAICHAI Finally, the master himself sends various things to the house, such as a carpet, a hubble-bubble for smoking, and the like. Friedman-Kein saw thirty Instruments for New Navigation, elements for forty more. Told Duncan Phillips how marvelous they were. NASA invited Graves to Goddard Space Flight Center and Cape Kennedy to discuss aesthetics of orbital travel. Came to the concert with friends, a large bag of peanuts, and lorgnette with doll’s eyes suspended in it. “If he does anything upsetting, take him out.” After the slow movement, he said: 82 Accounts of this interaction vary, such as that by William Cumming: William Cumming, Sketchbook: A Memoir of the 1930s and the Northwest School (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1984), 116. 83 John Cage, preface to “Series re Morris Graves,” in Empty Words (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1973), 99. 68 Jesus in the Everywhere. That was taken as the signal. 84 The works in reference were a series of Graves’ sculptures entitled Instrument for a New Navigation from the early 1960s made in response to the rapid advances during the period in space travel. The navigation tools caught the interest of NASA, which arranged for Graves’ participation in a project to include art works on the early lunar exploratory missions. Graves’ fascination with the seemingly endless void of the cosmos paralleled his lifelong concern with the visual motive of the “inner eye.” These “instruments” often included a biomechanical orifice capable of peering into the cosmos, reflecting his ambiguous relationship with technological advancements. His earliest use of this symbol was in the 1934 work Untitled Night Scene, in which a surrealistic amalgam of items surrounds the central object: a cross between a streetlight and a clock where the dials are removed and replaced with a transparent space with a floating cathode-ray tube in the center. As Graves later recounted, the relationship between inner and outer modes of space was reflected in this series: The observer must be mindful of the simple fact that there are three ‘spaces’: phenomenal space (the world of nature, of phenomena), the space ‘outside’ of us; mental space, the space in which dreams occur, and the images of the imagination take shape; the space of consciousness…[within which the origins, operations and experiences of consciousness are revealed]. 85 Reading Cage’s compositional development during his Seattle years within this discourse thus reveals a particular concern with the ramifications of spatial and temporal 84 John Cage, “Series re Morris Graves,” 104. 85 Morris Graves, letter to Mel Kohler [1950], in catalogue Morris Graves (University of Oregon, 1966), 41. 69 perception in the artwork, and the mediation of technology in the perception of inner and outer existence. Cage’s three major innovations during the period included the development of a temporal-lattice structuring of his percussion works, the intervention in the sounding apparatus of the piano with “preparations” that altered the perceived normalcy of piano sounds, and the inclusion of electronic and broadcast technology in his early electroacoustic works. For Cage, the physical movement of the body was central to understanding rhythm. His early work with Eurhythmics at the Cornish school led to a number of creative methods for visualizing music as physical movement. Writing the musical rhythms of a work in chalk on the floor, Cage would instruct students to walk the size of beats, and then to subdivide these rhythms according to precise delineations of space. 86 During the same period, Cage began to develop a compositional approach that stressed part-whole relationships in strict ratios. With an engineering perspective for mathematical proportioning, Cage’s works employed what he described as “micro-macrocosmic” form. Within this structure, phrase groupings were arranged in proportion to larger sections in a repeating sequence of ratios on both levels. For example, in his First Construction in Metal (1939), the overall schema consists of 5 sections in the sequence 4-3-2-3-4. Within each section, this structure is repeated on the smaller scale. 87 The first section of 4 86 Dance instructor Bonnie Bird recalled Cage’s unique teaching methods, as well as the origins of the set design for Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939). Bonnie Bird, Interview with Rebecca Boyle, Laban Center, London, Dec. 7, 1993, repr. in CageTalk: Dialogues with and about John Cage, ed. Peter Dickenson (Rochester, New York: University of Rochester Press, 2006), 68-80. 87 This work has been analyzed many times, beginning first with Cage’s description to Pierre Boulez in their series of correspondence from 1949-1952, repr. in The Boulez-Cage Correspondence ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, trans. Robert Samuels (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993); additional analysis articles 70 contains four subsections that repeat the same pattern of 4-3-2-3-4, while the second section of 3 contains three subsections built on the same structure, and so on to the end of the piece. Within these units, Cage was free to choose from a limited amount of smaller motives, and his choices were determined through a rotational axis in which the following choice must follow a neighboring point on the circle. 88 For example, with the following axis, one could repeat motive 1, or could move on from 1 to 2 or 1 to 4, but not 1 to 3 (Figure 1.6): 1 4 1 2 3 Figure 1.6: Axis Motivic Structure for First Construction in Metal (1939) The origins of micro-macrocosmic form emerged from two concerns: the necessity of coordinating dance steps with music in choreographed works, and the structuring of open-ended modules of phrase structure. These “frames” as Cage would later identify them, provided an open-ended temporal space for the sounding bodies. 89 Stemming from include David Nicholls, American Experimental Music (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), p. 206- 9; David W. Bernstein, “Music I: To the Late 1940s,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, ed. David Nicholls, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), 71-74; James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 16-17; and Brenda Ravenscroft, “Re-Construction: Cage and Schoenberg,” Tempo 60/235 (January 2006): 2-15. 88 Cage explicitly outlined this to Pierre Boulez: John Cage to Pierre Boulez, 17 January, 1950, repr. in The Boulez-Cage Correspondence, 46-51. 89 Cage made this connection in his essay “The Future of Music,” discussed below, when he notes “The ‘frame’ or fraction of a second, following established film technique, will probably be the basic unit in the 71 initial concerns found in his Quartet, which did not specify instrumentation for performance, Cage’s works became increasingly removed from the traditional notation of western-tuned instruments. Even in his early prepared piano scores, the relationship between notation and aural result was immediately stratified by the mechanical interjection of items on the strings. As he developed these techniques, Cage began to create complicated harmonic relationships by placing preparations on specific nodal points along the string body that created a secondary melodic aural result that contradicts the written notation. 90 The traditional notation for these works was in essence a form of tablature, dissolving the relationship between notation and sound, and instead focusing on the relationship between mechanical action and sounds. At the same time as his first interventions in the piano, Cage’s first electroacoustic compositions began to take on themes of dislocation and defamiliarization of modern technological advancements in radio. While one of Cage’s primary interests in first moving to Seattle was the expansive inventory of percussion instruments, at the Cornish School he soon found another outlet for experimentation: the newly built radio broadcast studio housed on campus. Often described as a discovery rather than an invention, radio provided a technology that could measurement of time,” John Cage, “The Future of Music: Credo,” Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1961), 5. 90 This concept became an explicit compositional strategy in later works, explored further in Chapter 3. This analytical approach was only briefly mentioned in Richard Bunger’s study: The Well-Prepared Piano (San Pedro: Litoral Arts Press, 1981), and further developed in the recent work of Jeffrey Perry; Jeffry Perry, “Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano: Performance, Hearing and Analysis,” Music Theory Spectrum 27/1 (Spring 2005): 35-66. This approach closely aligns with Jonathan Bernard’s approach to pitch in the music of Edgard Varèse; see Jonathan W. Bernard, The Music of Edgard Varèse (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1987), 217-56. 72 “tune in” to the celestial realm, transporting listeners through the experience of auditory perception into the abstractness of music. However, rather than merely instilling a sense of optimism in the new medium, the disembodiment of sound furthered the amnesic sense of perception, defamiliarizing listeners from the traditional context for sounds in the aural environment and foregrounding questions of individuality and reality, a theme Cage would explore in his first electroacoustic composition, Imaginary Landscape #1 (1939). Within this new realm of perception came the possibility of new relationships between sounds and their environment, provoking much of the initial curiosity of the compositional potentials of the new medium. German psychologist and critic Rudolf Arnheim’s 1936 treatise on radio provided one of the earliest compositional hints of this potential, noting that: Certainly music is the purist embodiment of the essence of broadcasting, but at the same time it is also the richest field of wireless effect, only because in the field of pure and no longer representational sound the whole depth of harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic relations can be employed, and it is these things which constitute the inexhaustible mine of expression in music. 91 Composed to accompany the dance by choreographer Bonnie Bird, Imaginary Landscape No. 1 features two sets of test tone recordings that could modulate frequency through the use of a foot-operated clutch mechanism that altered the speed of the records. Along with the records, Cage employed a Chinese cymbal and “string piano” (in reference to Cowell’s earlier works such as The Banshee (1925)), with particular instructions to mute the piano with the palm of the hand and to sweep the bass strings with a gong beater at various points in the piece. The composition was written to be 91 Rudolf Arnheim, Radio (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1936), 196-7. 73 performed in a radio studio, where two microphones are to broadcast the sounds, with the dynamics controlled by an assistant in the control room. 92 In the original premiere of the work, Cage broadcast the work from the Cornish studio to the nearby concert stage, where loudspeakers at the ends of the stage accompanied the dance. Cage’s use of sliding tones was similar to earlier experiments with the glissando slides in acoustic instruments, such as Henry Cowell’s Composition for String Piano and Ensemble (1925), which he discussed in his treatise New Musical Resources (1930). 93 Susan Key arguers that Cage’s broadcast stipulation created a new sense of perception that foregrounds the interaction between private and public spheres of listening patterns, where disengagement of the sounds mirrored the dislocation of the twentieth century aural environment. 94 Integrating the transcendent themes of the radiophonic apparatus with a new sensibility of musical sounds, Cage’s work went even further than Key’s observations, foregrounding themes of dislocation by the defamiliarization of the object of perceptual experience through the reuse of scientific technologies in his musical production. Nowhere is this theme more evident than in the context of the original concert premiere. Featuring an eclectic variety of works, the March 24/25 1939 program included Imaginary Landscape No.1 to accompany the Bird 92 John Cage, Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939) (New York: Henmar Press, 1960), 1. 93 Cage outlined this connection in a letter to Galka Scheyer after the premiere, noting that: “The music is played by 2 phonographic records of constant and variable frequency operated on turntables having clutches that can be slowly or rapidly changed from 33 1/3 to 78 R.P.M. (result = sliding tones),” John Cage to Galka Scheyer, Mar. 1939, Galka Scheyer Papers, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, Calif. See appendix II.2.1; this connection is also explore by Leta Miller, see: Leta Miller, “Henry Cowell and John Cage: Intersections and Influences, 1931-1941,” 85, f. 106. 94 Susan Key, “John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 1: Through the Looking Glass,” in John Cage: Music Philosophy, and Intention: 1933-1950, ed. David Patterson (New York: Routledge, 2002), 112. 74 choreography, which featured the dislocation of body parts through the creative use of stage blocking, hiding individual dancers and their identities behind a series of geometric shapes. Evoking a surrealistic patterning of the dream state, the choreography provided a clear visual metaphor to the abstract dream-state of the radiophonic apparatus. In counterpoint to the theme of dislocation was the other feature of the program, a new production of Jean Cocteau’s Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel (The Marriage at the Eiffel Tower, 1921), which featured musical contributions by Cage, Cowell, and George McKay. The plot of Les Mariés parallels the Imaginary Landscape audiovisual production. Throughout the work the actors are silent, being supplanted by two large cardboard phonographs on opposite ends of the stage, each harboring an unseen person to relay the action and dialogue. The play follows the surrealistic events surrounding a photographer, who, after giving up on his pursuit of an ostrich being chased by a hunter, moves on to a wedding party as they convene under the tower for a celebratory breakfast. Following a string of surrealistic montages, a general makes a speech, a mirage of a girl on a bicycle materializes, and from the camera emerges a bathing beauty and a lion. The lion eats the general, and the ostrich materializes, now invisible. The play concludes with a modern art dealer debating the monetary value of the image of the wedding party pose. The camera regurgitates the general, and the photographer finally succeeds in capturing the group on film, after which the camera turns into a train, carrying off the wedding party. 95 95 Summary provided by Lynette Miller Gottlieb, “Images, Technology, and Music: The Ballets Suédois and Les maries de la Tour Eiffel,” The Musical Quarterly 88/4 (Fall 2005): 528. 75 Lynette Miller Gottlieb has described the work as a complex interweaving of the doubling effect of the photographic image. By staging a play about one of the most cliché photographic situations (under the Eiffel Tower), combined with a delicate play on the identity of the camera as subject or object, Les maries foregrounds the act of “focalization” of the camera as it provides a double imagery of the situation, alternating between a meta-narrative on the image of the play and the technological act of capturing the situation on camera. Evoking Carolyn Abbate’s notion of “double exposure,” Gottlieb argues that the camera actively participates in the play’s self-reflexively, ironically mimicking the photographic act and foregrounding its symbolism. 96 Abbate’s argument, in her article “Outside Ravel’s Tomb,” provides a fitting parallel to the music in Cage’s Landscape No. 1. Discussing Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortileges [The Child and the Spells] (1925), Abbate points out numerous instances of an acoustic double exposure, where Ravel’s delicate scoring techniques alternates between fantasy images and reality through the on- and off-stage presentation of harp sounds. 97 Like the camera double in Cocteau, Cage’s live broadcast foregrounds the doubling effect of the musical experience, presenting multiple levels of electroacoustic simulacra in his structuring of the performance. Cage’s interpretation of the European surrealist reflections on mechanical reproduction maintains certain features of the Cocteau counterpart, however it is the particular blend of technological pragmatism and scientific calculability that are unique 96 Lynette Miller Gottlieb, “Images, Technology, and Music: The Ballets Suédois and Les maries de la Tour Eiffel, 10-11. 97 Carolyn Abbate, “Outside Ravel’s Tomb,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 52/3 (Autumn 1999): 511-18. 76 to his landscape. Presenting the radiophonic double both as an experimental scientific probing of the apparatus through the test tone records, and as an image of the transcendent radio space of broadcast and amplification technology, Cage’s composition works in opposition to the surrealist goals of technological dislocation in an effort to project a clear vision of acoustic space. Ironically, this was the original scientific goal of the records themselves. Cage’s frequency records were acquired from Ralph Gundlach, a professor of Psychology at the University of Washington and husband of Bonnie Bird, who had for the last decade been conducting psychological experiments on the perception of specific frequencies of tones, and the records were used to measure subject perceptions. One experiment in particular, outlined in an article by Gundlach for the Journal of Experimental Psychology, posed an interesting scientific parallel to Cage’s composition. For the experiment, Gundlach played two sets of test tones for a group: one tone was held constant, while the other modulated toward the frequency of the first. The subjects were then measured on their accuracy in perceiving the synchronization of tones. 98 Cage later discovered another parallel to his composition in an earlier experimentation in stereophonic broadcast by conductor Leopold Stokowski. In 1933, under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, Stokowski assembled an electroacoustical system to broadcast a performance of the Philadelphia orchestra to a separate theater with a large 98 This proved to be quite difficult, as the study noted that “the report of equal may have been in part unintentionally aimed at stopping the painfully loud noises.” One observer, in fact, at first refused to come back for a further series, saying the previous sitting “had made her hysterical.” Ralph Gundlach, “Tonal Attributes and Frequency Theories of Hearing,” Journal of Experimental Psychology XII/3 (June 1929): 193. 77 audience of music lovers and scientists, while carefully controlling the dynamics at the back of the theater with dial controls. 99 Stokowski’s connection to Cage continued with his later work in Los Angeles, where he first met Oskar Fischinger at Paramount. While Fischinger and Stokowski quickly became close friends, Fischinger later contended that it was during this time that he first proposed to Stokowski many of the animation ideas that would eventually become the feature length animated film Fantasia. After completing An Optical Poem in early 1938 to critical acclaim, Fischinger spent much of the fall in New York, where he came into contact with the Baroness Hilla Rebay, who, with the generous resources of Solomon R. Guggenheim, was laying the foundation for the Museum of Non-Objective Art, later to be renamed the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Rebay encouraged Fischinger to live a bohemian lifestyle in New York by leaving his family and living at her estate, but Stokowski and Hollywood soon called him back to work, this time at Disney studios as a “Motion Picture Cartoon Effects Animator” for the recently greenlighted Fantasia. 100 Fischinger’s ideas did not sit well with Disney’s industrial animation methods and were repeatedly dismissed as too “abstract.” Frustrated with the lack of artistic freedom at Disney, Fischinger left the project and requested his name be removed from it. Meanwhile, Stokowski had impressed Disney enough with his ideas for stereophonic sound that they decided to create a highly advanced recording method for 99 Leopold Stokowski, “New Horizon’s in Music,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 4/11 (July 1932): 11-19. Cage cited this article in a 1940 bibliography of articles on electronic music discussed below. 100 As Moritz explained, this particular title was much lower than the esteemed “Animator” positions held by long-term union employees; Mortiz, Optical Poetry, 78–87. 78 the orchestral score to Fantasia: the Fantasound system. This eight-channel system utilized film phonographs to capture the full orchestral texture of the orchestra, and Stokowski worked closely with Disney throughout the process. In order to test the system in theaters, Disney purchased the first eight Variable Frequency Oscillators offered by Hewlett-Packard—the same unit similar to the one manufactured by Cage Jr. just five years earlier—thus bringing the critical initial profits to their new enterprise. 101 The Future of Music By 1940 Cage’s experiments with electroacoustic music had led to a new focus on the bridge between percussion music and an electronic “music of the future,” leading eventually to the essay “The Future of Music: Credo.” In recent years this essay has been the subject of several critical investigations, the most notable being the discovery by Leta E. Miller that the essay was not delivered until early 1940, in contrast to the 1937 date in the published version found in both the liner notes for Cage’s Twenty-Five-Year retrospective concert recording in 1958 and in the 1961 publication of Silence. 102 Cage’s manifesto thus came after his initial investigations in electroacoustic composition at the Cornish School in Seattle and should be thus viewed more as a summary rather than a prophecy. In addition, the various observations in the essay on contemporary 101 “HP Timeline – 1930s,” http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/histnfacts/timeline/hist_30s.html. 102 Leta E. Miller, “Cultural Intersections: John Cage in Seattle (1938–1940),” in John Cage: Music, Philosophy, and Intention, 1933–1950, ed. David W. Patterson (New York: Routledge, 2002), 54–56. Despite Miller’s clarification, Wesleyan University Press provided the same 1937 date in their 2011 50 th Anniversary reprinting of Silence: John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50 th Anniversary Edition (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 3. 79 technological advances were the result of Cage’s extensive research for a letter-writing campaign in 1940 to establish a center for experimental music. A transcription of many of the sources discussed here is included in Appendix II. As many scholars have noted, the text layout of the printed edition of “The Future of Music: Credo” mimics Luigi Russolo’s Futurist manifesto “L’arte dei rumori” (1913). In Russolo’s text two separate narratives are juxtaposed: a shorter manifesto written in capital letters set against commentary with regular punctuation. Cage’s essay follows the same format by offsetting the primary credo, written in capital letters, with commentary on the various uses of music synthesis technologies and electric musical instruments such as the theremin, solovox, and novachord. 103 Cage acknowledged the precedent of Russolo’s manifesto and went so far as to commission his wife Xenia and another member of their percussion ensemble, Renata Garve, to translate the essay. 104 A side-by- side comparison of this translation with the widely-distributed translation in Nicholas Slonimsky’s Music since 1900 is included in Appendix II.5.1. 105 Cage’s explicit division of the text, following Russolo, also sheds light, however, on the origin and purpose of the commentary. 103 David Nicholls provides a side-by-side comparison of several convincing passages, in his American Experimental Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 189–91. 104 This document was found in the David Tudor collection, along with a note from Renata Garve on several translation issues. Renata Garve to John Cage, 25 August 1941, David Tudor Papers, Getty Research Institute, box 62, folder 1. 105 Luigi Russolo, “The Art of Noises,” from Nicholas Slonimsky, Music since 1900, 1rst ed., 1938, trans. Stephan Somervell; Translation by Xenia Cage and Doris Dennison, handwritten and typescript draft: David Tudor Papers, Getty Research Institute, Series IV: “Articles and Reviews, Music Related 1941- 1959,” Box 62, Folder 1. 80 The two surviving manuscripts for the essay, a handwritten draft with the date 1940 and an undated typescript draft, contain only the primary capitalized text with several stricken passages. Although the typescript version of the essay does contain footnotes for the appropriate interjections in the primary text, there are more footnote numbers than there are comments in the printed edition. In the manuscript Cage placed a total of twenty-six footnotes compared to only eight text interjections in the published edition, leading one to assume that Cage had considered several alternate versions of the text. 106 There are no other complete versions of the essay except for the corrected typescript submitted to Wesleyan University Press in 1960. 107 However, numerous documents in the voluminous “ephemera” files in the John Cage Collection at Northwestern University contain similar versions of the supplemental text. With this evidence in mind, it could reasonably be argued that the essay itself represents a culmination of a series of research projects and proposals Cage had assembled between 1938 and 1940 in anticipation of establishing a center for experimental music. 108 These materials highlight Cage’s knowledge of contemporary developments in sound recording and synthesis technologies, and the closest influence on, and instigator of, this research 106 John Cage, ca. 1940, Manuscript Draft “Credo,” John Cage Collection, Northwestern University Music Library, Evanston, Ill., series V, “Ephemera,” folder “1940.” 107 John Cage, “The Future of Music: Credo” [1961], corrected typescript, John Cage Papers, Wesleyan University Special Collections and Archives, Middletown, Conn., series 1, box 5, folder 13. 108 David Nicholls has recently argued that the original text could be considered an “ur-credo” and that the additional footnoted material could well have been improvised. David Nicholls, “Cage and the Ultramodernists,” 496. 81 was undoubtedly his father Cage Sr., whose patent research during the time mirrored many of the same technologies. The primary narrative of the essay was most likely for an address to the Seattle Artists League that Cage delivered on Feb. 18, 1940 entitled “What Next in American Art?” Established in 1938, the league focused on interdisciplinary discussion of the arts and humanities, while simultaneously promoting a number of leftist political agendas. After the Second World War, several members, including Ralph Gundlach, were summoned to the Un-American Activities Committee on of the Washington State Legislature. Gundlach’s refusal to cooperate with the board led to his eventual dismissal from the University, as well as a brief jail sentence. 109 In Cage’s original essay, the final passage—a passage later omitted from Silence—points to this subtext of the meetings. Here he proclaims: Some composers today are writing music of a conventional nature, but with the purpose of helping to bring about a better state of society. When this better social order is achieved, their songs will have no more meaning than the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ has today. We will then realize our need for the new music which will have been written by composers who didn’t help fight, but who were aware in a general way of, and sensitive to, the continual series of world events. 110 Several other passages are not included in this original text, including the second sentence that proclaims “photo-electrical, film and mechanical mediums for the synthetic 109 Leta E. Miller, “Cultural Intersections: John Cage in Seattle (1938-1940),” in John Cage: Music, Philosophy, and Intention, 1933-1950, ed. David Patterson (New York: Routledge, 2002), 57. 110 John Cage, ca. 1940, Manuscript Draft “Credo,” John Cage Collection, Northwestern University Music Library, Evanston, Ill., series V, “Ephemera,” folder “1940.” 82 production of music will be explored.” Equally absent anywhere in the text is the term “Organized Sound,” the critical terminology of Cage’s first theoretical debates later that year. Several earlier versions of the phrase were included in percussion programs, but the impetus for this new terminology and Cage’s newfound interest in electronic music were to be found later that year during his summer residency at Mills College. After the spring semester in 1940 Cage resigned from the Cornish School and began a furious letter campaign to drum up funding for a center for experimental music. The material surviving from this project comprises the majority of the “supplemental” commentary to the capitalized credo. Later that year Cage taught at the summer session at Mills College, where he had ample opportunity to work with the former Bauhaus director László Moholy-Nagy. 111 Cage’s dialogue with Moholy-Nagy on Bauhaus-derived theories led to a more nuanced perspective on the theoretical implications of sound synthesis and recording technology, and concepts from his seminal textbook on Bauhaus theory, “The New Vision,” remained central to Cage’s emerging thesis on the use of technology in composition. 112 The six-week summer session at Mills attracted national attention, adding momentum to Cage’s fundraising campaign. However, by August 1940 he found himself again unemployed, and he spent a good part of the fall in Los Angeles working on several research projects for Cage Sr. Ever willing to help his son in the pursuit of new musical resources, Cage Sr. devised a 111 For details on the summer session, see Leta E. Miller, “The Art of Noise: John Cage, Lou Harrison, and the West Coast Percussion Ensemble,” in Perspectives on American Music, 1900–1950, ed. Michael Saffle (New York: Garland, 2000), 234–39. 112 László Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision: Fundamentals of Bauhaus Design, Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (New York: Norton, 1938). 83 primitive frequency oscillator of his own that August with the help of engineers at the Federal Radio Co., so that he might use the instrument in a similar manner to the frequency records from Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939). As Cage described it in a letter to Henry Cowell, the instrument would be able to vary the waveform, frequency, and amplitude, as well as do “some very interesting things with duration”; unfortunately, no other information survives from this project. 113 From the description, it may have been an instrument like the one devised for the “Invisible Ray Vision System,” and quite similar to the affordable version offered by Hewlett-Packard. Aware of the innovative technology emerging from Fantasia, Cage rather ambitiously attempted to set up meetings with Leopold Stokowski and Walt Disney to propose a center for experimental music. 114 Throughout August and into September Cage continued with library research on new developments in sound synthesis. He submitted his first Guggenheim fellowship application with the hope of establishing a center at Mills College for “research in the field of sound and rhythms formerly not considered musical,” with the ultimate goal of creating “electric instruments capable of producing any desired frequency in any desired duration, amplitude, and timbre.” 115 In the application Cage reworked the credo from the “Future of Music” essay in the personal statement, and compiled a bibliography of 113 John Cage to Henry Cowell, 16 August 1940, NYPL Cowell Collection, box 2, folder 5. 114 John Cage to Henry Cowell, 27 September 1940, NYPL Cowell Collection, box 2, folder 5. 115 John Cage, 1940, “Guggenheim Application and Bibliography,” John Cage Collection, Northwestern University Music Library, Evanston, Ill., series V: “Ephemera,” folder “Exptl Music and Percussion.” 84 relevant books and articles on electrical and synthetic music. 116 In this section Cage recalled his work with sawtooth oscillators: The use of film-sound libraries confined to the production of sound effects in the film and radio industries has precluded the use of these means for serious musical purposes. Some inventors have made compromises with the musical past in their inventions of electrical ‘violins’ and “cellos.” From my point of view, this does not constitute a basic advance. On the other hand, certain electric instruments intended not for musical purposes but for testing or other purposes prove the existence of the electrical musical future which has been prophecied [sic]. I refer to a square-wave generator used to test amplifiers which I had the pleasure of hearing demonstrated recently in Los Angeles. Outstanding among the sound engineers who understand, from an uncommercial point of view, the practical possibilities of the future is Burton Perry, president of Recording Equipment, Inc., Hollywood. He has been connected with Edgar [sic] Varese and I enjoy his close cooperation at present. 117 It is clear from the bibliography that Cage was interested in the potential for sound phonography experimentation. One source, a highly technical volume from 1935 by John Mills entitled A Fugue in Cycles and Bels, described in detail several of the leading innovations Cage was interested in, including a thorough examination of sound synthesis techniques in film. With the Mills book one can find the thread of logic that constituted the first portion of the footnoted text to Cage’s credo. In the opening line Cage exclaims, “Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.” In Mills, one finds a parallel passage in the final chapter: a series of analyses of noise levels in public workplaces, 116 John Cage, 1940, “Guggenheim Application and Bibliography,” John Cage Collection, Northwestern University Music Library, Evanston, Ill. 117 John Cage, 1940, “Guggenheim Application and Bibliography,” John Cage Collection, Northwestern University Music Library, Evanston, Ill. 85 measured in decibel levels, of various loud items such as a busy city street, steamship whistle, a lion or tiger in a zoo, and a subway station platform. On the opposite page of the same chapter, Mills shows a sound phonography recording of a variable density soundtrack of a pure tone of 100 cycles per second recorded at its maximum volume level, while the bottom example is of a variable area soundtrack recording of the word “Joe.” Mills describes in detail the process for editing soundwaves, and suggests that “libraries of templates could be constructed covering all desired combinations of tones.” 118 Situated in the heart of the film industry, Cage immediately set out to find a facility that could assemble such a library. Cage was tipped off by a September article in the LA Daily News about composer Hanns Eisler’s progressive film scores for MGM, and he sought out the head engineer for the studio, Douglas Schearer, who gave him a brief tour of the facilities. Here he was able to witness firsthand the complex sound editing techniques for feature films. 119 Cage’s experience with Douglas Schearer and Mills were clearly evident in passages discussing film phonography. Cage mentioned this occasion in his 1948 lecture at Vassar College, “A Composer’s Confessions,” noting that with this equipment “a composer could compose music exactly as a painter paints pictures, that is, 118 John Mills, A Fugue in Cycles and Bels (New York: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1935), 254-55. 119 Bruno David Ussher, “Music in the Films, LA Daily News, 16 September 1940. Cited in “Bibliography of Articles etc., on Percussion Music, Electrical Music, Synthetic Music, or Composers Thereof,” John Cage Collection, Northwestern University Music Library, Evanston, Ill., series V: “Ephemera,” folder “Exptl Music and Percussion.” 86 directly.” 120 The “footnoted” portion of Cage’s credo contains several passages describing this use of film phonography, such as the often-cited observation: Every film studio has a library of ‘sound effects’ recorded on film. With a film phonograph it is now possible to control the amplitude and frequency of any one of these sounds and to give to it rhythms within or beyond the reach of our imagination. Given four film phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heartbeat, and landslide.” 121 New to this portion of the essay, however, is the introduction of the other key element to Cage’s thesis: the term, “organization of sound.” The origins of this term resulted in Cage’s first interaction with composer Edgard Varèse in Los Angeles. Ironically, just as Cage left for Seattle in 1938, Varèse arrived in Hollywood with the hope of finding interest in his large-scale multimedia work Déserts. As Olivia Mattis discovered, Varèse’s initial ideas for the work emerged from another uncompleted project, Espace, which was part of a utopian vision of an all-encompassing artwork that would combine theater, cinema, and light projections. The final version of Déserts completed in 1954, which included the first demonstration of “organized sound” on magnetic tape, was only a small fraction of the initial multimedia version that emerged from his mystical 120 John Cage, “A Composer’s Confessions,” [1948] reprinted in John Cage: Writer, 37. 121 John Cage “The Future of Music: Credo,” [1940] in Silence, 3. Cage’s ideas echo earlier observations by Moholy-Nagy, and although he likely did not encounter the following essay written in 1928, it is probable that these observations came up in discussion at Mills College earlier that summer. In an essay entitled “problems of the Modern Film,” Moholy-Nagy argues that, with the completion of a basic “alphabet” of sound waves and structures, “the sound-film composer will be able to create music from a counterpoint of unheard or nonexistent sound values, merely by means of opto-acoustic notation.” László Moholy-Nagy, “Problems of the Modern Film,” [1928] in Moholy-Nagy, An Anthology, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), 137. 87 revelations in the deserts of the Southwest. 122 Varèse was already familiar with Fischinger’s earlier films from Europe, and like Fischinger, he struggled to find support for his project, which was largely ignored by the Hollywood industry. 123 In 1940 Varèse introduced Cage to the ideas behind “organized sound,” a theory he formally outlined in his published essay in December of the same year “Organized Sound for the Sound Film,” a document that Cage typed out word-for word for his own bibliography. 124 In early incarnations of the term, Varèse was primarily concerned with the creative uses of sound effects and sound design in film as a way of effectively articulating narrative, but he eventually adopted a more encompassing idea of sound organization following the invention of magnetic tape in the postwar period. In the immediate context of their discussions, however, Cage found a fitting description for his essays that he appropriated in a series of articles. 125 Cage’s dialogue in 1940 with Los Angeles composer and concert impresario Peter Yates has been well documented in recent years, particularly the debate surrounding the term “Organized Sound” in a short article drafted by Cage and edited by Yates for the magazine California Arts and Architecture, eventually titled “Organized Sound: notes on the history of a new disagreement: between sound and tone.” 126 Cage 122 Olivia Mattis, “Varèse’s Multimedia Conception of ‘Deserts,’” Musical Quarterly 76/1 (Winter 1992): 557–83. 123 Mattis, “Varèse’s Multimedia Conception of ‘Deserts,’” 560. 124 Edgard Varèse, “Organized Sound for the Sound Film,” The Commonweal, 13 December 1940, 13. John Cage transcription of “Organized Sound for the Sound Film,” John Cage Papers, Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill. series V: “Ephemera,” folder “1940.” 125 Miller, “The Art of Noise,” 242–43. 126 Peter Yates, “Organized Sound: Notes in the History of a New Disagreement: Between Sound and Tone,” California Arts and Architecture (March 1941): 18. Cage agreed to the article but balked at the first 88 quickly ran into conflict with Varèse regarding his appropriation of the term “Organized Sound.” In 1941, he sent a recording of Lou Harrison’s Simfony #13 to Varèse, with the note that this was “The first recording of Organized Sound.” 127 Varèse quickly sent a telegram demanding he desist in using the term, and he later wrote a particularly scathing letter to Galka Scheyer regarding both the record and the article. 128 In the letter to Yates Cage noted for the first time the Fischinger anecdote, and the rekindling of this connection to his percussion music likely resulted from a meeting Cage had with Fischinger in the fall of 1940. While touring Los Angeles with several records of his percussion works, Cage visited Fischinger and played some examples, discussing once again the possibility of a film commission. A number of graphs similar to the one used in An Optical Poem in the Fischinger Collection at the Center for Visual Music indicate percussion sounds, although it is unclear from the surviving fragments the specific piece of music in mind. In the coming years, after Cage and his parents moved away from Los Angeles permanently, Fischinger did not lose sight of his potential Cage film. After reading the draft written by Yates on the history of percussion and electronic music. After struggling through several drafts of the article on his own, he eventually submitted all of his material to Yates in January 1941. Included in these materials was a handwritten draft similar to the “Future of Music” essay, along with a typescript draft littered with notes and emendations. Cage stressed in the cover letter to these documents to emphasize “organized sound” whenever possible, and to publish under Yates’s name. John Cage to Peter Yates, 24 December 1940; 13 January 1941, Peter Yates Papers, Mandeville Special Collections, University of California at San Diego, MSS 14, box 3, folder 1. John Cage, Manuscript, n.d., Peter Yates Papers, mss. 14, box 3, folder 2. For transcription of the 24 December letter, see Michael Hicks, “John Cage’s Letter to Peter Yates, December 24, 1940,” American Music 25/4 (Winter 2007): 507–15. 127 Leta E. Miller, “The Art of Noise: John Cage, Lou Harrison, and the West Coast Percussion Ensemble,” Perspectives on American Music, 1900-1950 (NY: Garland, 2000), 242-243. 128 Edgard Varèse to Galka Scheyer, 15 Dec., 1941 (Galka Scheyer Papers, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA, J1935-2). 89 impressive Life magazine review of Cage’s February 1943 percussion concert at the Museum of Modern Art, Fischinger wrote to Cage, in care of the museum, requesting his newest recordings of percussion music in order to include the commission as part of a new application for Guggenheim support later that summer. 129 In the letter, Fischinger noted, “I have a clear feeling how fertile, expressive, how rich in color your percussion music is, especially on the screen. Please help me to get your music on the screen, and please do everything possible because it is so important.” 130 However, Fischinger’s struggles with a severely limited budget and his constant personal and artistic battles with Hilla Rebay cut this project short, and it is doubtful that Cage ever received the letter. As these documents reveal, Cage’s anecdote about Oskar Fischinger and the “spirit inside each object” provides an insight into several aspects of Cage’s emerging ideas on the scientific nature of music. As Cage repeatedly stated in his writing, percussion music was an important transition to the electric music of the future, where recording and synthesis technology required a new approach to the compositional process. The ability to visually interpret sound-wave structure in film phonography provided a tactile medium for creating a time-based structure of sound organization and required new notational approaches in order to coordinate sound and image. As an important by-product of Cage Sr.’s electrical engineering projects, the simple audio 129 This contract explicitly indicates that Fischinger was “to use your best efforts to produce a film with percussion music by John Cage.” Oskar Fischinger, contract with Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 18 June 1943, The Hilla Rebay Non-Objective Film Collection, Guggenheim Museum Archives, acc. no. 786445, folder 10. 130 Oskar Fischinger to John Cage, 20 May 1943, Fischinger Collection, Center for Visual Music, Los Angeles. 90 frequency oscillator would later form the basis of complex sound synthesis, and the close pairing between industrial and artistic application of technology would continue to be a driving force in Cage’s application of new technological resources for experimental music in the postwar period. Finally, as David Nicholls and others have proposed, it seems fitting to view Cage’s seminal essay “The Future of Music: Credo” not necessarily as a definitive text (because none survives), but rather more as a summary statement of contemporary developments culled from Cage’s own efforts to establish an experimental music center. Reading this document as two different items, the shorter “Credo” and the detailed examples in the “footnoted” text, makes sense in the chronology of events that unfolded in Cage’s career in 1940. The second portion contains many similarities to Cage’s various project proposals, and it could even be argued that the additional text functioned more as a patent “claim” worded with the legalese Cage was intimately familiar with, a strategy he explicitly used in his later essay “Forerunners of Modern Music” (1949). In a fitting postlude to Cage’s early career, in 1976 Cage’s ex-wife Xenia hinted at the long-term ramifications of Cage’s time in Los Angeles and his patent research for his father. After attending the controversial premiere of Cage’s Apartment House 1776 and Renga, she passed along the following note: “I guess I am no different from you in that I didn’t know what to expect. I found it dazzling, positive, full of wit and good humor. I think you have achieved what your dear father always hoped—to see through fog.” 131 131 Xenia Cage note card to John Cage, 22 November 1976. John Cage Trust. A special thanks to Laura Kuhn at the John Cage Trust for pointing me to this poignant aside. 91 “A date which will live in infamy” Throughout 1941 Cage continued to seek support for a center for experimental music, but to little avail. However, his earlier contact with Moholy-Nagy led to a small position at the School of Design in Chicago beginning in the fall of 1941. Cage’s knowledge and interest in Bauhaus-derived educational methods of spatial perception and integrated industrial design led to yet another brief but critical educational juncture in his developing aesthetic, a connection examined in the following Chapter. Just months after Cage’s arrival in Chicago, the United States officially entered into World War II after the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor. With this new wartime atmosphere, radio and television broadcast industries in America underwent a series of corporate mergers and reorganizations in preparation for a unified national front in media and communications. Since 1926, RCA had enjoyed an effective monopoly in the broadcast industry with its dedicated commercial broadcasting wing, the National Broadcast Company, which dwarfed the under-funded Columbia Records spinoff, the Columbia Broadcasting Company. In 1943, antitrust legislation forced a third major competitor for the national market, the American Broadcasting Company, leading to the industrial triumvirate of the postwar era in national broadcasting and commercial entertainment programming. However, since its inception in 1919 at the impetus of the Naval Department, the national airwaves maintained an implicit alliance with governmental and, especially after 1941, wartime interests, and the efforts of the parent companies of all three broadcasting wings 92 were immediately shifted to hardware production of military communications technologies and electronics. 132 Cage Sr., undoubtedly aware of the larger implications of this corporate shift through his connections to General Electric (which, in the larger corporate schema, was the parent of all three broadcasting networks), was confronted with a new professional opportunity. His research into electron beam tubes and electrostatic theory had closely followed corporate interests during the 1930s, and his patent application for infrared vision clearly had a military application. Thus in 1942, Cage Sr., like his son, begrudgingly left the West Coast to be near the consolidated headquarters of General Electric and RCA, both based in the New York metropolitan area. Basing himself in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, Cage Sr. was contracted again by the Navy to continue work on radar and infrared technologies. Culling from his earlier experiments with submarine technology, Cage Sr. worked toward developing sonobouy technology for underwater detection of objects via the measured distance between soundwave reflections. 133 While it is unclear just how involved Cage Sr. was in this project, his involvement in developing this military technology in World War II is notable. Alongside radar and long-range radio, the sonobouy was a key communications technology that gave the Allied forces an advantage in the military battle of the sea. The devastating effect of German U-boats during the war could easily have shifted many strategic battles had this technology not been refined as an effective method of enemy detection. 132 For a brief history of this series of mergers, see Michael Chanan, Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and its Effects on Music (New York: Verso, 1995), 60-62. 133 See again, the summary letter from Herbert Sturdy to General Quesada, Appendix III.2.1 93 Compared to Cage Jr.’s innocent appropriation of radio broadcast technology in the artistic enclave of Seattle, Cage Sr.’s contributions to military defense clearly had greater repercussions in the wartime era. However, the parallel between the two applications of sound technology to articulate and detect space provides a fitting metaphor for the larger artistic program of the postwar American Neo-Avant-Garde. While Cage Jr. was able to avoid military service during the war thanks to further research he conducted for his father in the Naval Department, the broader implications of his work on the next generation of American composers and artists had an equally drastic effect on the nature of auditory and visual perception as any military application. Cage’s interest in the temporal articulation of space, whether through the electrical transmission and interpretation of reflecting wavelengths or through the bodily interaction within that space through dance or theater, was predicated on a technological understanding of the nature of physical reality and the overwhelming desire to probe deeper into the environment, either through the bodily faculties of perception or the mediated amplification of that reality to, as he would often later quote, understand “nature in her manner of operation.” Coda: The Birth of American Avant-Garde Cinema in Hollywood, c.a. 1943 Just months before Cage’s final departure from the West coast, the Russian-born Eleanora Derenkowsky arrived in Los Angeles. A Trotskyite and political activist with the Young People’s Socialist League in New York, Derenkowsky had recently finished a M.A. in English at Smith College with a thesis on French Symbolism and Anglo- 94 American poetry, and was in many ways a striking parallel to Cage’s wife Xenia Kashevaroff. Touring as a publicist and personal secretary to the choreographer Katherine Dunham, Derenkowsky quickly befriended Galka Scheyer, and it was at one of the many Blue-Heights Drive parties that she met the Czechoslovakian filmmaker Alexander Hammid. They quickly married and settled in Los Angeles, and Eleanora changed her name to Maya, the Sanskrit word for “illusion,” while dropping the end of her family name in favor of the anglicized Deren. Absorbing the unique cityscape of a burgeoning Los Angeles, Deren and Hammid conceived a short film: a collaboration between newlyweds that would encapsulate the creative spirit that Hollywood seemed to project on foreign refugees. Made for $260 in 1943, the eighteen-minute 16 mm film, Meshes of the Afternoon, has been regarded by historians and critics as the single most important and pivotal film in the history of American independent cinema. 134 Set on a quiet street in the Hollywood Hills not far from the Schindler residence on Kings Road, Deren’s film would inaugurate a new era of independent filmmaking in America during the postwar period that advocated a purely filmic poetics of space and illusionism in opposition to the hegemony of narrative film. Combining her passion for the poetics of dance, movement in space, and visual rhythm, Deren’s work sought, like Cage, a new application of the tools of industrial production that actively engaged the technological apparatus. 134 Scholars have generally been unanimous on this conclusion, beginning during Deren’s career with film critic Parker Tyler, and continuing with P. Adams Sitney and others. See: Parker Tyler, The Three Faces of Film: The Art, the Dream, the Cult (South Brunswick, New Jersey: A. S. Barnes, 1967), 96; P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), 15; and David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 170. 95 The intricately layered plot of Deren’s film depicts a series of repetitions of a domestic scene of Deren and Hammid in their home through what appear to be various subjectively inflected viewpoints. In the first series, a first-person subjective viewpoint from Deren, she enters her home from the street to a seemingly disordered room, the camera focusing on several objects, including an unattended phonograph player playing a record, a telephone with the receiver off, and a knife that jumps from a loaf of bread. After turning off the record player, she relaxes on the couch, and the scene transitions into the next series. In the second cycle, the same series of events begin with Deren observing a black-clad figure in the street, whose face is covered with a mirror. The same items are similarly displaced throughout the house, as Deren struggles to navigate through a vertigo-induced dislocation of space that disorients both the spectator and the character. Reaching again to stop the phonograph record, the second series ends with an acceleration of activity that heightens the ominous tension of the black-clad character, the knife evoking an impending act of violence. Deren is juxtaposed in the same frame, sitting with herself at the table, and later moving through a montage of scenes with the knife in an attempt to stab her sleeping self. After the fourth cycle, the film ends with a double coda: Alexander Hammid enters to awake his sleeping wife in what apparently was a series of spiraling dreams. After reorganizing the items in the house, he places her in bed, and she suddenly lurches at him with a knife. His face becomes a mirror, which, along with the camera frame, shatters, and the scene suddenly shifts to a beach, where the pieces fall into the ocean. In the second coda, Hammid walks into the house again to find 96 his wife laying on the couch with a slit throat, the shards of mirror glass scattered on the floor. As P. Adams Sitney argues, Deren and Hammid’s film inaugurated a new method in independent filmmaking that directly engaged the cinematic apparatus as an extension of the individual consciousness. In contrast to the surrealist usage of cinematic effects to demonstrate the fleeting sense of unconsciousness, Meshes created a fluid linear space where the main protagonist, often played by the filmmaker, undergoes a process of self- realization through a psycho-drama. In this “trance” film, Sitney argues that the articulation of space within this filmmaking tradition was a direct effort to transplant the cinematic mode of perception into the eye of the filmmaker. This direct and personal engagement with the apparatus was in stark contrast to the industrial mode of narrative filmmaking that attempted to create a unified aura of illusionism. 135 While it seems that Cage would reject such a direct and autonomous engagement with the art work, his earlier aesthetic positioning was in many ways allied with such a utopian technological discourse. Comparing Meshes with Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 1, there are many similarities in the approach to the technological apparatus as a means of articulating spatiotemporal relationships between the self and environment. Even on a structural level, Cage’s work follows the same general schematic of Deren’s film, with four large repeated sections interconnected with a short transition, and ending with a Coda. In addition, Cage’s concept of micro-macrocosmic structure functions much in the same way that synecdoche does in film. Most importantly, however, both artists stressed a new 135 P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film, 3-15. 97 mode of American avant-garde artistic practices that were in contrast to their counterparts in the “historical” avant-garde of their European counterparts. In 1943 Deren moved from Hollywood to New York to, like Cage, establish a permanent residence in what would become the centerpiece of postwar art in the Western hemisphere. Bringing with her the theories of poetic space and cinematic construction, Deren quickly integrated within the burgeoning New York art world, working tirelessly to establish a community of filmmakers and intellectuals that would promote a new vision on the role of cinema in the art world. Her contact with Cage emerged from a mutual concern for dance, a collaboration that would inaugurate Cage’s first interactions with the newly established institutions that supported American avant-garde cinema in New York. It is to this topic that we now turn. 98 CHAPTER 2 “Dreams that Money Can Buy”: Trance, Myth, and Expression, 1941-1948. 1942 marked a significant boundary in Cage’s career. During this period Cage’s personal identity struggles sparked a psychological and artistic investigation into the nature of expression and the fundamental tenants of musical composition. But Cage’s artistic transformation was not entirely unique. Early Abstract Expressionist works similarly reflected the psychological toils of a wartime America and the postwar environment of nuclear threats and economic disarray. Myth and Existentialism provided alternate outlets for investigating social and personal themes of identity. In cinema, film noir emerged as a cultural response to the need for a social identification with the internal struggles affecting individuals. The convergence of societal pressures affected American intellectual culture as well, with a retreat toward social conservatism that would peak in the McCarthy-era. This Chapter examines Cage’s work on a series of projects that reflect this transformation. His brief tenure in Chicago brought him into contact with the educational model of László Moholy-Nagy’s School of Design, a program heavily influenced by the pragmatic social philosopher John Dewey. At the same time, his “Landscape” series moved toward introspection, culminating in the noir radio play, The City Wears a Slouch Hat (1942). A failed promise to work in commercial radio brought him initially to New York, where he became enmeshed with a social circle surrounding the wealthy art patron Peggy Guggenheim. Cage’s interaction with the mythologist 99 Joseph Campbell affected his psychological and compositional outlook on the ontology of the musical artwork, leading to a year-long discourse in the journal Dance Observer on the nature of expression in dance. Dance poetics initially brought Cage into contact with filmmaker Maya Deren. Deren’s concern for a medium-specific model of filmic poetics foregrounded temporal structuring in a way similar to Cage. New York provided a host of European influences that would affect Cage’s work, most notably Marcel Duchamp. Cage’s personal and artistic relationship with Duchamp marked an important bridge between the historical avant-garde and an emerging subgroup of American artists in the postwar period that constituted the American Neo- Avant-Garde. At the same time, a growing network of independent experimental filmmakers emerged in New York. Filmmaker Hans Richter’s 1947 release of the first feature-length experimental film, Dreams That Money Can Buy, inaugurated independent cinema in America, and Cage’s composition for a segment featuring the work of Marcel Duchamp engaged a number of themes within Duchamp’s work that would significantly affect Cage’s aesthetic position on the nature of art and expression. The New Bauhaus As mentioned in Chapter 1, Cage’s interest in the work of László Moholy-Nagy was sparked by their interaction at the Mills College summer session in 1940. Cage’s efforts to establish a center for experimental music brought him into contact with the educational model of the Bauhaus school, which centered on a process-oriented humanist educational model similar to his experience in Seattle, and later at Black Mountain 100 College in North Carolina in 1948 and 1952. In 1931 Cage had brought back from Europe several Bauhaus catalogs, and his early theatrical experiments with Harry Hay in 1933 were supposedly reminiscent of the Bauhaus style. 1 However, his direct interaction with Moholy-Nagy’s theories of photorealism and multimedia came to the foreground during his tenure at the School of Design in 1942. In the process, the role of technological mediation in film, radio, and television shifted toward an aesthetic of subversion, where the traditional models of artistic expression, narrative, and progress were replaced with a model of contradiction, difference, and irony. When Cage arrived in Chicago in the fall of 1941, he was surprised to find that Moholy-Nagy’s grand educational design was on the verge of bankruptcy for the second time in just three years. Situated in one large downtown loft in Chicago, Moholy-Nagy’s nascent experiment in design education was but a small shadow of the once powerful German industrial design college it was based upon. Under the leadership of Walter Gropius, the original Bauhaus stressed a process model whereby students underwent an individual exploration of materials and space via an innovative series of preliminary courses and workshops. When Moholy-Nagy joined the faculty in 1923, the school promoted an educational system that united craft and industrial design under the utopian banner of technological progress. Gropius characterized this approach as a scientific probing into the “laboratory of modernism” that presented a new pathway towards design education. Under the manifesto, “Art and Technology: A New Unity,” Gropius’ 1 Stuart Timmons, The Trouble With Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement (Boston, Alyson, 1990), 58. 101 educational philosophy focused on an integrated pedagogical course structure of process- based education. Moholy-Nagy, along with Gropius, resigned from the Bauhaus in 1928 due to rising political pressures. In 1937 he was offered the directorship of the New Bauhaus in Chicago, founded by the Association of Arts and Industries. Living in exile in England as a freelance designer, Moholy-Nagy eagerly accepted the opportunity to extend his educational philosophy in America. Unfortunately the stock market crash of 1938 forced the association to withdraw its support the following year, leaving Moholy-Nagy and his colleagues to raise private support for a smaller venture, the School of Design, in 1939. The American model of vocational training for architecture and design leaned heavily toward technological and scientific integration, and Moholy-Nagy took the opportunity to integrate this mandate in his school by expanding the curriculum to include nonvisual arts such as music and poetry, social science courses, and visual media such as film and photography. 2 Thus Cage’s percussion and electronic music courses were not geared toward a traditional music curriculum, but were rather an extension of materials and fundamental classes. Cage’s percussion course was structured to engage the materiality of sound in an open framework much like the modeling and textiles courses. Despite these promises for an innovative curriculum, his only course at the school consisted of just five students, all of them participating free of tuition. The class consisted primarily of 2 The position was first offered to Walter Gropius, who, having already accepted a position at Harvard, offered Moholy-Nagy as the next logical candidate to extend the Bauhaus philosophy in American industrial design education. This aspect of the curriculum was coordinated with the University of Chicago under the direction of Charles Morris, who was an important advocate the school during its infancy. For further information on the origins of the School of Design see: Alain Findell, “Moholy-Nagy’s Design Pedagogy in Chicago (1937-46),” Design Issues 7/1, Educating the Designer (Autumn, 1990): 4-19. 102 constructing instruments and improvising small pieces, much to the annoyance of the rest of the students in neighboring classes separated by thin partitions in the open loft. 3 Moholy-Nagy’s unwavering advocacy for a multidisciplinary and multimedia artistic practice led to a number of proclamations on the relationship between media art forms. As he explained in The New Vision (1938). “present-day efforts are tending to subordinate even paint (pigment), or at least to sublimate it as far as possible. The aim is to produce pictorial space from the elemental material of optical creation, from direct light.” 4 Relegating the pictorial plane to a base materiality implied a new spatial conception, toward what Moholy-Nagy described as a “kinetic, time-spatial existence,” that would then lead toward an “awareness of the forces plus their relationship which define all life and of which we had no previous knowledge and for which we have as yet no exact terminology.” 5 In his reading of modernist painting, Moholy-Nagy identified the endpoint of representation as a “literal reflectivity.” Depth of the pictorial plane extended beyond the boundaries of figure and ground in perspective painting, leading to an artistic space that included environmental and site-specific materials. Film captured the interplay of light in Moholy-Nagy’s experiments with kinetic light sculptures, noted explicitly in a later text, Vision in Motion (1947): Amongst the media thus far developed, motion pictures could fulfill more powerfully than any other the requirement of a space-time accentuated visual 3 John Cage to Doris Dennison, 8 September, 1941, John Cage Collection, Northwestern University, Series I: Correspondence, Box, 2, Folder 6. 4 László Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision: Fundamentals of Bauhaus Design, Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (New York: Norton, 1938), 85. 5 László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1947), 268. 103 art…Light must be used according to its basic characteristics and the film architect will have to conform to its new orientation. The film stage of the future will be conceived as a structure for the production of motion, light and shadow effects either with skeleton constructions or walls, planes, surfaces and textures for absorption and reflection, for the organized distribution of light. 6 In 1930 he fabricated a “Light-Machine” to demonstrate his ideas on the relationship between space and movement. Constructed of a dizzying array of reflective materials set atop a rotating platform, Moholy-Nagy cast beams of light against the apparatus. The reflections projected changing chiaroscuro and luminous effects within the walls of the room. Shadows interpenetrated on the surrounding walls in an automatic rhythm set to motion with the grinding gears of the apparatus. 7 Extending the notion of the Light-Machine to commercial film, Moholy-Nagy’s continued with a brief tenure as a set designer for the William Menzies film Things to Come (1938), adapted from the novel by H.G. Wells. Things to Come presented a contemporary diffusion of the conflicts with social progress and technological utopianism. Set in contemporary London in a city coined “Everytown,” the film traces a thirty-year world war that gradually reduces the population to a few nomadic tribes. A legion of scientists and engineers are all that remain of society, and they return to Everytown with technocratic enthusiasm, eliminating the warlords that ravaged the city. Under the dictates of efficiency and progress, Everytown moves underground into a controlled environment in a cascading series of concentric Bauhaus-inspired glass buildings reminiscent of Vladimir Tatlin’s 6 Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 271-4. 7 For more on Moholy-Nagy’s “Light-Display” experiments, see: “Light Display, Black and White and Gray,” in Moholy-Nagy, An Anthology, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Da Capo, 1970), 148-50. 104 constructivist tower, Monument to the Third International (1917). Moholy-Nagy designed many of the towering glass façades, where climate-controlled environments house the new civilization in a symbiotic model of efficient existence. The surviving fragments from Moholy-Nagy’s ideas are among the most innovative cinematic moments in the film, combining the dazzling chiaroscuro effects of light projection and the sharp angular themes of Bauhaus modernist design. In what seems to be a climactic ending to the film, Everytown is now transformed in the year 2036, and the great-grandson of John Cabal, Oswald, leads the new city with his friend, Passworthy, again played by the same actors. Everytown has constructed a new rocket to propel a man to the moon, and society seems to have embraced the march of progress. However, a collective of Luddites emerge behind a sculptor named Theotocopulos, and the final scenes of the film surround a conflicting debate among the group and their leader Cabal, who rushes to send his own daughter, along with her boyfriend, Horrie Passworthy, on a potential death mission in the new spacecraft. The final dialogue between Theotocopulos and Cabal reflects this tension: OSWALD CABAL: We have a right to do what we like with our own lives. THEOTOCOPULOS: No OSWALD CABAL: We do not grudge your artistic life. You have safety, plenty – all that you need. THEOTOCOPULOS: Except freedom. OSWALD CABAL: No one compels you. THEOTOCOPULOS: We want to live the common ancient life of man. OSWALD CABAL: No one prevents you. THEOTOCOPULOS: How can we when your science and inventions are perpetually changing life for us – when you are everlastingly rebuilding and contriving strange things about us? When you make what we think great, seem 105 small. When you make what we think strong, seem feeble. We don’t want this expedition. We don’t want mankind to go to the moon and the planets. We shall hate you more if you succeed than if you fail. 8 While Wells’ film seems slightly removed from Cage’s compositional and aesthetic interest, Theotocopulos’s agnostic retreat epitomizes Cage’s conflicting utopian outlook on the role of technology, commercialism, and society. In American wartime culture, the radical appropriation of technological media towards societal acts of mass violence, such as Cage Sr.’s reuse of television technology for radar and sonobouy detection, brought forth an ideological conflict within American intellectual culture. On the one hand, the social pragmatism of philosophers and educators such as John Dewey (who worked closely with Moholy-Nagy to establish the School of Design curriculum) sought to define a humanist social structure of scientific and technological progress, and on the other, an emerging social conservatism known as “Modern Gnosticism” began to attack the positivistic outlook of a secularized and materialistic popular culture, favoring an aesthetic retreat to an ideological naturalism and transcendentalism. 9 The role of technology and media within this context thus took on a new definition that focused less on the actual technological artifact than on the role of human action, knowledge, and social process. 8 H.G. Wells, ”Whither Mankind, a Film of the Future,” [1934], in Leon Stover, The Prophetic Soul: A Reading of H.G. Wells’s “Things to Come” Together with His Film Treatment, “Whither Mankind?” and Postproduction Script (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1987), 175. 9 I take the term “Modern Gnosticism” from the work of Robert Ellwood, discussed further below. Robert Ellwood, The Politics of Myth, A Study of C.G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999), 8-14. 106 During Cage’s tenure in Chicago, his “Imaginary Landscape” series reflected this atmosphere. Like the first landscape work, Imaginary Landscape No. 2 (1940) was a work for phonograph records, piano, and cymbals, with similar performance instructions. However the context of its premier in 1940 was of an entirely different vein. While the performance ensemble and structure of the piece was nearly identical to the first piece, the dance complementing the work entailed a “humorous interpretation of trees,” and was presented in a program centered around the recitation of a poem by the American poet Archibald MacLeish, America Was Promises (1939). 10 MacLeish’s poetry represented the centrist position emerging during the war period, which rejected the poetics of high modernism in favor of a form of public speech engaged with contemporary sociopolitical existence. 11 Faced with the psychological trauma of the international war, Cage’s final percussion pieces began to reflect a darker and at times overtly programmatic mode of reflexive thought that emulated the material transformation of industrial society toward the war effort. When he returned to composing in the early months of 1942, Cage rejected his second landscape composition, and gave the title instead to a new work, Imaginary Landscape No 2 (March). 12 In the composition, along with a third piece in the series, Imaginary Landscape No.3 (completed March, 1942), the electronic equipment is 10 Leta E. Miller, “Cultural Intersections: John Cage in Seattle (1938-1940),” 67. 11 John Timberland Newcomb, “Archibald MacLeish and the Poetics of Public Speech,” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 23/1 (Spring 1990): 10. 12 Leta E. Miller, “The Art of Noise: John Cage, Lou Harrison, and the West Coast Percussion Ensemble,” in Perspective on American Music 1900-1950, ed. Michael Saffle (New York: Garland, 2000), 248. 107 now appropriated as a mimetic reflection of war. The programmatic elements of these compositions could easily have been inspired from letters such as the following from Cage’s mother Lucretia: As usual am way behind with Dad’s work. He is at the lab this evening. It is not far from our place…I was alone two nights ago when we had our first black out which was a surprise. I thought it was a real air raid for there were so many sirens in the street in front of our place. Never have I seen such blackness. Before I knew what it was all about, I automatically shut off all the lights and actually calmly decided just which doorway I should stand in to wait for bombs. Can you imagine doing a thing like that cooly [sic]? 13 In both landscape compositions, the innocent probing of the frequency records found in Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No 1 now have become siren calls, slowly oscillating toward the upper range, and in several sections, performing a cold duet that conjures images of an impending invasion. The structure of both works is nearly identical: each begin with a choppy rhythmic ostinato for tin cans punctuated by muted gong booms, buzzers, and telephone ringers, and both times the texture reaches an early climax, followed by a slow central section that seems to reflect the tension of oncoming invasion. In the second landscape, the duet for tin cans slowly and rather awkwardly moves along until a telephone begins to ring repeatedly followed by the sound of a conch shell bellowing in alarm, to which a climax of muted gong “explosions” ends the piece. In the third landscape, the opening tin can ostinato is broken by a duet for frequency oscillators, who continue through the central section without any accompaniment to create a penetrating sense of impending doom. In the final third of this piece, the tin can duet is 13 Lucretia Cage to John Cage, June 3, 1942, John Cage Collection, Northwestern University, Series V; Ephemera, Folder: “CBS Workshop Letters and Script.” 108 more pronounced and hectic, and the variable frequency oscillator entrance in the final minute of the piece (the same one designed by Cage Sr.) is used clearly to reflect a siren call as it oscillates rapidly among the explosion sounds of muted gongs. Ironically, Cage’s cold reflections of war are among his most advanced uses of sound “effects” in the percussion orchestra, and all of these techniques would be translated to his final work that summer for the Columbia radio workshop. In this context, the same dark character of sound effects is translated into Cage’s first narrative drama, a radio play. Visionary Mystics: Cage and the American Rebel Poets In October of 1941, Cage wrote to his colleague Doris Dennison of a new novel he had just finished reading, The Journal of Albion Moonlight by the American author Kenneth Patchen. Inspired by the book, Cage wrote to Patchen that fall to inquire about a possible commission for a radio drama for the Columbia Workshop in Chicago. 14 Patchen’s semi-autobiographical narrative is built around the scattered journal entries of the character Albion Moonlight, who leads a band of pilgrims across a war-torn America in search of Galen, a place of presumed peace and sanctuary, and the home of Roivas (read: savior), who sends cryptic messages to the group, leading to a number of violent murders and grotesque sexual acts among its members. The journal begins to break down a third of the way into the book, when Albion begins a novel that parallels the journal entries, followed later by a novella, and in the final third of the book, a series of 14 John Cage to Doris Dennison, 16 October, 1941, John Cage Collection, Series I: Correspondence, 2.6.2. 109 incoherent journal doodles and notes, lists, chapter headings and footnotes that culminate in the revelation that the author (Patchen himself) may never have left his loft in New York to set out on the journey at all. Sexual violence, pedophilia, and gruesome murders pepper the narrative tirades against the atrocities of war, mankind, and sexuality. The journal unfolds in a clipped non-literary form, jumping between locations and travels across the United States in a matter of seconds, with surrealistic encounters among places and events. The embedded novel attempts to reconcile time and place, but temporality is shattered as Albion himself undergoes a number of mystical seizures followed by violent tirades against war, humanity and society. Albion’s moments of existential awareness were part of a larger theme among Patchen’s work, where the individual undergoes a mystical identification with other people and surroundings, creating a sense of unity between individual and nature. With a strong moralistic bent, Patchen’s character exhortations are almost exclusively reliant on first person accounts. Albion’s failed attempts at fictionalizing his experiences by structuring a third-person narrative summarize a personal conflict within Patchen’s own work on the separation between poetic utterance and human experience. Patchen’s “visionary mysticism,” as described by Raymond Nelson¸ provides an important precursor to the visual poetics in postwar avant- garde cinema. As Nelson describes the work: The Journal of Albion Moonlight is about itself, its growth, and its own authorial narrative consciousness. It systematically destroys the conventional responses readers bring to fiction in order that Albion Moonlight (who is simply the poetic aspect of Kenneth Patchen) may expose the reader to his moral perception without the intermediary stages of meaning fiction usually employs. His attacks on traditional literary form are meant to explode the audience-consciousness that 110 distinguishes books from other realities and force us to accept him, rather than our usual authorities, as our guide. 15 Patchen’s overt references to the external war-ravaged world in relation to the individual was in clear dialogue with two of the most influential novels of the period, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, (1940), a dialogue that, in turn, outlines the differences between accepted cultural norms for narrative in literary works and cinema. In both works, the protagonist undergoes a period of self-realization influenced by the crippling world events surrounding them. For Steinbeck, it is the unfair labor practices in California’s burgeoning agriculture business, and for Hemingway the political struggles of revolutionary Spain. Patchen’s extreme disdain for Hemingway was evident even in the journal, describing him as an author who “writes I suppose as a bull would – big chest and spindly legs,“ and his subversion of the narrative journal is a clear provocation of mainstream epistolary journalistic form. 16 Hemingway’s war novel, which would later be lionized by American critics and literary historians in the postwar period, epitomized the wartime chronicle, and the narrative authority is firmly in check with conventional method of third-person semi-autobiographical. Meanwhile, Patchen’s subversive literary form would be squashed by the formalist academic criticism under the watchful eye of McCarthy-era politics. The protagonist of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan, an American patriot who fought alongside the Republican opposition in the Spanish Civil 15 Raymond Nelson, Kenneth Patchen and American Mysticism (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 55-6. 16 Kenneth Patchen, The Journal of Albion Moonlight (New York: New Directions, 1961), 7. 111 War, outlines the atrocities and violence of war in a harsh, journalistic language that speaks directly and without reservation, yet maintains a narrative distance and temporal reality in check with Hemingway’s terse prose and journalistic writing style. On the other end, Steinbeck’s novel, which chronicles the journey of a depression-ravaged family from Oklahoma more readily engages the spiritual struggles of the protagonist, Jim Casey, whose mystical revelations closely mirror Albion’s journey across the American West in search of a safe-haven. Cage seemed to have displayed no direct interest in the mainstream literary terms of Hemingway (although he was a close reader of Gertrude Stein), and his direct connections to the interwar group of American leftist writers like Patchen and Steinbeck place his interests firmly in the oppositional camp of American literary form, a connection that would have a clear bearing on his collaboration choices. A Sound-Effect Orchestra: The Columbia Workshop Cage’s development of a vocabulary of percussion sound effects was beginning to take on its own sense of narrative structure, particularly in the “Landscape” compositions. Cage had been given some small opportunities to work with radio equipment at Northwestern for a small “radio orchestra,” but his ultimate goal was to compose a full- length commercial production, to which he was given the opportunity in May of 1942 for the Columbia Workshop. Shortly after reading Patchen’s novel and inquiring about a script for the project, Cage scheduled a meeting with CBS programming director Davidson Taylor in New York. Because of the war, Davidson tentatively offered Cage 112 and Patchen a slot for May. 17 According to his later recollection, Cage’s first choice for the play was novelist Henry Miller (who had already completed several successful plays for the Workshop), but after reading a few of Miller’s books (which likely would have included his accounts of Paris in the 1930s such as Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939)), Cage decided that the material was too explicit for a major audience and opted for Patchen instead. 18 Taylor’s reluctance to secure a date for Cage’s radio play was due to the sudden loss of funding for what, from the beginning, was touted by Columbia as a non-profit and educational venture meant to comply with the educational regulations for airwaves set for by the Federal Communications Commission. 19 During its twenty-year tenure, (cut short during the war years shortly after Cage’s production) the Columbia Workshop provided an opportunity to experiment with the technology for producing sound effects. The programmers stressed that the workshop meant to explore the idiomatic, medium-specific forms of radio techniques. Press releases, such as the following for Cage’s program, promised a venue for unchecked experimentation: 17 John Cage to Doris Dennison, October 26, 1941; Xenia Cage to Doris Dennison, 7 January, 1942, John Cage Collection, Northwestern University Music Library, Evanston, Ill. Series I: Correspondence, Box, 2, Folder 6. 18 Kenneth Silverman, Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 48. 19 Founded in 1936, the Columbia Workshop set the foundation for the programming format of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1967, providing a wide variety of educational programming, classical music, and experimental “workshop” half-hour segments of radio drama and documentary shows on radio technology. Far from a gesture of corporate altruism, the workshop was the result of early regulatory measures set up by the nascent FCC in an effort to provide equal opportunity on the airwaves. To comply with these regulations, CBS provided an open-ended format of programming unrivalled in commercial radio. The Sunday workshop was both a political and business move, since the weekly half- hour program was scheduled against the highly popular NBC comedy review, the “Fred Allen Show.” For a brief history of the Columbia Radio Workshop, see: Robert Kosovsky, Bernard Herrmann’s Radio Music for the Columbia Workshop (PhD Dissertation, City University of New York, 2000), 38-47. 113 For quite a few years Columbia Broadcasting System has given Columbia Workshop producers and writers carte blanche. Some of the most interesting experiments ever conducted on the air have featured the program. The premise of the half hour is simply this: radio is a comparatively new and exciting medium and its potentialities haven’t begun to be explored. Let this program experiment and lead the way…you may not like it, but you’ll have to admit it is something new and strikingly different. 20 The program met with early success after the star CBS orchestra conductor Bernard Herrmann began contributing in late 1936 until he left for Hollywood to work with Orson Wells on the feature film Citizen Kane in 1941. 21 The programmers stressed the experimental nature of radio drama as a new way to experience the diegesis of narrative action. Rather than relying on traditional narrative description, the Columbia Radio dramas sought ways to internalize the action, placing the listener in the midst of events. To do so they developed many of the techniques that would later become stock “effects” in the narrative codes of not only radio, but film and television media as well. Early programs were meant to be “educational” for the listener as they slowly introduced new and strange sounds and then carefully explained their origin and method of reproduction. 22 The radio play in particular benefitted uniquely from this new vocabulary. Radio’s inherent, three-dimensional amorphous environment enabled writers and composers to portray a surrealistic sense of time and space in a way much more advanced during the period than that of film montage. Cage’s role in the project vacillated between 20 Wauhilla La Hay, “Radio’s Pioneers Air ‘Columbia Workshop’ WBBM Originates Novel Program Today for Ultramodern Ears,” Chicago Sun Times Sunday, May 31, 1942. 21 Robert Kosovsky, Bernard Herrmann’s Radio Music for the Columbia Workshop, 146-7. 22 Robert Kosovsky, Bernard Herrmann’s Radio Music for the Columbia Workshop, 57-66. 114 that of sound designer and composer, and his deliberate blurring of this distinction sets his project apart from the more traditional division of labor in commercial radio. Thus, the combination of Cage’s interest in new technological reappropriations of percussion and electronic equipment, and Patchen’s non-discursive, and in ways overtly subversive, literary-poetic style resulted in an amalgam of contemporary practices that formed an important precursor to the filmic techniques of the American Neo-Avant-Garde in the postwar period. Radio Noir: “The City Wears a Slouch Hat” Cage’s CBS commission was the first opportunity to provide a clear example of “the future of music,” and he approached the project with a mind for new approaches to sound diegesis. He visited “The Loop” in downtown Chicago to sketch ideas for sound combinations and brought the requests to the sound engineer for CBS, who scoffed at the overly complex and expensive ideas. 23 In the end Cage was forced to compose, at the last minute, a simplified version of his original ideas for familiar percussion instruments along with the currently available library of phonograph sound effects. 24 Patchen meanwhile finished the script nearly penniless and in the midst of a debilitating back 23 Richard Kostelanetz, John Cage (ex)plain(ed) (New York: Schirmer, 1996), 65. 24 Cage later recalled bringing a 250-page score to the engineer full of sound requests, although no traces of this supposed manuscript survive, and the final written score itself, along with the recording of the broadcast, was thought to have been lost. However, Robert Kosovsky, curator at the New York Public Library Music Division, discovered the score while working on his dissertation, and Mode records was able to release a performance of the broadcast in 1996. John Cage: The Lost Works, Mode 55, 1996. 115 injury, and the bitter resolve of the play’s protagonist, “The Voice,” clearly reflects Patchen’s psychological struggles with pain and extreme poverty. The play follows the narrator, “The Voice,” who alternates between first- and third-person narrative, alternating between moments of surrealistic introspection and violent reality. Set in a dark noir landscape, “The Voice” travels through alleyways and side streets in an increasingly violent series of encounters with characters. Patchen plays with the narrative voice, and it becomes unclear whether he is speaking with another person or a fictive imagination. For example, the following dialogue unfolds like an awakening consciousness: MAN: You ever been in Mellyberg? VOICE: Where’s Mellyberg? MAN: I’m not sure…think it’s somewhere along the Dan. VOICE: The Dan…What’s the Dan? MAN: It’s a lake near Blodget City…up near the border. … MAN: You ever been in any of them creameries near Mellyberg? VOICE: Yes, I went all through one about a week ago. MAN: The Johnson boy still work there? VOICE Which one? Tom? MAN: No, Freddie. VOICE: Freddie quit the day before I went there. MAN: Was that a Wednesday? VOICE: Friday. MAN: Mmm…(Pause) You ever plant any rice? VOICE: No, I never did. All of the characters are nameless, and the narrator confronts their surrealistic identities: he knows their names, but then the characters realize they are not their names after all; a woman appears in a dark alley lamenting a gross disfiguration of her face from an accident with a mirror, to which the narrator calls her bluff—she is in fact beautiful; a 116 baby cries in several scenes, and its proclaimed dead by a sudden phone call, only to be returned in a hurried car chase scene that drops the narrator back where he started. A new rhythm picks up as the narrator encounters a strange machine with large golden pipes, a “mirthogram” capable of recreating laughing sounds. The disheartening cackle of the machine is drowned by the rhythmic intensity of Cage’s soundscape. Giving up on the machine, the narrator suddenly burst into an impromptu poetry recitation of the 16 th century love poem by Christopher Marlowe, “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love.” Accompanied by a dizzying array of city sounds, the scat singing declamation of the text floats through the texture of police whistles and tin cans. The street corner crowd pleas for more, and the narrator continues, this time with the bizarre recitation of a sonnet by another 16 th century English poet John Donne, “Death, be not proud.” After the recitation, the narrator drifts into the final moment of apotheosis. Looking toward the ocean, he swims to a rock to get away from the noises. Arriving in solitude, he encounters another man, possibly his own self, who commences a tirade against the noises of the city, “Always the same…men and women doing the same stupid things over and over…and the noise of the city.” He then begins to sing the praises of the ocean, and the two begin to howl a guttural response to the cries of the wind. The waves diminish to silence, and the narrator steps forward with a final benediction, accompanied by muted gongs and cymbal rolls: VOICE: I thinks we need more love in the world…more understanding…I want to know you…what you believe…what you feel…what things among all the things you’ve heard about and known mean something to you…we were not meant to be strangers to each other…we have the same fears, the same hopes, joys and sorrows…We must not be suspicious…we must learn to love each other…If 117 one man fails to believe, then there can be no faith in the world – for all men are finally one man, you, me – we cannot stand apart from each other. I am coming into your house with my hand outstretched. I am your friend. Do not be afraid of me. Patchen’s mixture of pulp, noir, gangster, detective, and radio evangelism exudes a visceral amnesia of the nascent codes of commercial radio plays. The narrator’s dream- like circular travel through the cityscape gives off a sense of auditory surrealism. Within the genre itself, radio invites narrative juxtapositions between time and place without the need for visual explanation. Even the narrative “Voice” is intertwined with the other characters, particularly the encounters with a series of solitary wanderers like himself. In a section cut from the final production, the narrator enters a movie theater to catch a brief moment of a torrid love triangle about to erupt on screen. 25 It is unclear from these encounters whether the other man is indeed a separate person, or merely a narration within the consciousness of the protagonist himself. It is at this point that the narrative voice and the sounds of Cage’s percussion ensemble meet. Reducing the indexical print of even familiar nouns, the characters and interactions are stripped of their narrative vocabulary, reducing them to acoustic phenomena on the same associative plain as “sound effects” in the musical score. With both artists, the role of “music” in the context of a theatrical multimedia artwork is suspect. There is not a single melodic phrase in Cage’s radio play except for the diegetic humming of the protagonist, and yet the entire score was composed using traditional notation for percussive instruments. Cage description of the ensemble as a 25 This section was crossed out in the final script, but reproduced in the later volume: Patchen’s Lost Plays, ed. Richard G. Morgan (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1997), 88-91. 118 “sound orchestra’ is notable, for it necessitates a new paradigm for the boundary between the simplistic use of sound for narrative effect and the maintenance of diegesis. The familiar noises in the orchestra function as auditory anchor points for a scattered time and space narrative, and the dynamism between a coded narrative space and the protagonist’s mystical journey began to dissolve the mechanisms of identifiability with the familiar, usurping the auditory codes through the misdirection of linguistic clues. Patchen’s literary style mixes the somnambulistic character of a dream with the ecstatic revelation of the mystic journey of the individual, creating a narrative and artistic tension that closely mirrors the cinematic efforts of Maya Deren that would come to form the basis of the American avant-garde cinema poetics of the next generation. The literary precedents of such a style were firmly rooted in an opposition not only to the narrative force of industrial film, but also to the limitations of narrative form in the literary exposition of ideas, emotions, place and time. The immediate reception of Cage’s radio play seemed promising, with letters pouring in from the Midwest of praise for the inventive score of sound effects. 26 Lucretia Cage wrote her son with what seems to have been an ongoing familial pressure only amplified by the commercial success of his project: The “special score” as the announcer termed your work John, could not have been more real. It visualized and accented the entire story and did what I have always believed your work would do –magnified the message being portrayed. I still adhere and am more convinced than ever since hearing the program yesterday, that the greatest field for your work will be in the motion picture world. I told John Steinbeck and Ed Rickets that and they laughed at me. Ed said, “John is 26 “Letters from the Columbia Workshop,” Series V: Ephemera, Folder, “CBS Workshop Letters and Script.” John Cage Collection, Northwestern University Music Library, Evanston, Ill. 119 staying out of Hollywood,” meaning John Steinbeck. But you see he was wrong for that is where John Steinbeck is reaping his harvest. 27 Riding on this wave of optimism, Cage and Xenia packed their belongings and what little savings they had and moved to New York in the summer of 1942. Despite the listener ratings, Cage’s grand ambitions were cut short by another looming factor affecting nearly every working-professional in the country. By the fall of 1942, Columbia discontinued the workshop on account of the war effort, since it was a zero-profit subsidized venture and the FCC was content to allow the lapse, provided the major networks devoted the time to public news broadcast (which incidentally, became for the first time a profitable venture). Only one other radio play with music was broadcast after Cage’s: an arrangement of Couperin by Bernard Herrmann for the July 20 th broadcast. 28 Greenwich Village and the Poetics of the Avant-Garde Arriving in New York penniless, Cage and Xenia quickly integrated within the cultural milieu of the New York art world. Staying first with Peggy Guggenheim and Max Ernst, they quickly befriended the artistic elite of a burgeoning community and were privy to a number of intimate gatherings under the auspices of Guggenheim. At the same time, Cage supplemented his income through his father, starting on a series of research projects for the Navy Bureau of Ships intelligence office. 29 Living briefly with Kenneth 27 Lucretia Cage to John Cage, June 2, 1942, John Cage Papers, Northwestern University, Series V: Ephemera, Folder, “CBS Workshop Letters and Script.” 28 Robert Kosovsky, Bernard Herrmann’s Radio Music for the Columbia Workshop, 262. 29 “John Cage Jr.: Secret Navy Research,” Series I: Correspondence, Box 4, Folder 7, Item 1, John Cage Collection, Northwestern University Music Library, Evanston, Ill. 120 Patchen, then with comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell, and later with Cage’s parents in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, Cage and Xenia eventually settled on Hudson street in Greenwich Village. 30 Shortly after completing Meshes of the Afternoon in 1943, Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid also moved to New York. Hammid secured a position as film director with the Office of War Information. In response to the escalating war effort, the need to document the national front sparked a cottage industry of filmmakers in New York surrounding 16mm documentary film, prompting many filmmakers to center their efforts in the city. The fringes of this work, the scattered remnants of industrial production, thus fell into the hands of creative artists. Deren and Hammid settled into the Greenwich Village enclave, and their fifth story studio on Morton street quickly became a social hub of the avant-garde in wartime New York. This geography of creative artists has been well documented by historians in certain respects, particularly in regard to the origins of Abstract Expressionism. 31 However, the parallel strategies of Deren and Cage, both intertwined within this community, have been largely ignored in favor of medium-specific arguments. Both artists worked within a dominant social structure of wealthy art patrons, particularly Peggy Guggenheim, who established the first major modern art museum in New York, the Museum of Nonobjective Painting, with her inaugural “Art of this Century” exhibition in 1942. Picking up from the failed projects of Hilla Rebay, who continued to struggle with Oskar Fischinger and other abstract artists, Guggenheim’s 1942 showing of 30 Silverman, Begin Again, 54. 31 See for example, Irving Sandler, Abstract Expressionism and the American Experience: A Reevaluation (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2009), 67-105. 121 171 pieces of modern painting and sculpture along the celebrated “Museum Row” on Fifty-Seventh Street inaugurated New York as the new cultural hub of modern art. Ironically, both Cage and Deren launched failed projects under the auspices of their new supposed heiress patron. Guggenheim had agreed to pay for the transportation of Cage’s instruments to New York for a concert at the “Art of the Century” gallery, which would have provided an opportunity to forge additional connections between the percussion “sound orchestra” and the movement in kinetic sculpture just then in its infancy. However, Cage took another opportunity to present a concert with support of the League of Composers and Museum of Modern Art. While the 1943 program was a success, it quickly alienated Cage from the temperamental Guggenheim, who pulled support for the transport of his instruments from Chicago. 32 Maya Deren took a similar opportunity to connect the importance of the “Art of this Century” gallery with her burgeoning ideas on filmic poetics, and she convinced Peggy Guggenheim to allow her to film a short study, Witches Cradle, within the space. Starring Marcel Duchamp, the film was meant to reflect the surrealistic effect of Duchamp’s opening installation, “16 Miles of String,” which connected one continuous length of string between paintings throughout the gallery, creating a web of references and indexical prints among the surrealist landscape. Referring alternately to the children’s game of “Cat’s Cradle” and the pagan torture device used in ceremonial magic, whereby a ceremonial space is constructed by tying strings around a specific arrangement of pegs struck in the ground (often in the shape of a 32 David Revill, The Roaring Silence: John Cage, A Life (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992), 80. 122 talisman such as the familiar pentagram), Deren’s film was meant to invoke a cabalistic surrealist journey similar to Meshes, but the project was never completed. As Hammid suggested, this was due in part to Deren’s lack of proficiency in orchestrating a large- scale film project, as her earlier undertakings had been organized primarily by Hammid himself. 33 As a result, Deren’s next projects, the completion of a thesis An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film (1946), and the large-scale collaboration, At Land (1944), moved again toward the introspective questions sparked by Meshes along with medium- specific formulations of filmic poetics and expression. Despite the success of Cage’s Museum of Modern Art concert, which received extensive reviews in The New York Herald Tribune and Life magazine, the concert was to be his last for the percussion orchestra. 34 For the next several years he devoted his skills exclusively to the prepared piano and small ensemble. At the same time, his personal relationship with Xenia quickly deteriorated. During this period, Cage embarked on an extensive aesthetic and intellectual investigation on the nature of expression and the poetics of music. This undertaking was largely influenced by comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell, who also became a close mentor of Deren. Central to the entire discourse was, coincidentally, an extensive theoretical discussion on the poetics of 33 VéVé A. Clark, Millicent Hodson, and Catrina Neiman, The Legend of Maya Deren: A Documentary Biography and Collected Works, Vol. I Part Two, “Chambers” (1942-47), (New York: Anthology Film Archives/Film Culture, 1988), 150. 34 “Percussion Concert: Band Bangs Things to Make Music,” Life magazine, 15 March, 1943; “League Giving Novel Program Sunday Feb. 7,” New York Herald Tribune, 31 January 1943; Robert Bagar, “Percussion Concert Produces Cacophony,” New York World-Telegram, 8 February1943; H.S., “It Comes in a Flowerpot, But They Call It Music,” PM, 8 February 1943. For an extensive review of this and other concerts by age in the 1940s, see: Suzanne Robinson, “A Ping, Qualified by a Thud”: Music Criticism in Manhattan and the Case of Cage (1943-58),” Journal of the Society for American Music 1/1 (2007): 79- 139. 123 modern dance. Dance discourse during the period was increasingly concerned with the establishment of a multimedia theory on the relationship between spatial gesture, depth and perspective, and musical-temporal relationships. In the following outline, a particular thread of discourse, heretofore unacknowledged, on the poetics of dance, emerged in the journal Dance Observer, to which nearly all the artists discussed contributed to a two- year debate. This debate situated artists, theorists and scholars on a number of positions regarding the expressive possibilities in dance, the choreomusical relationship between dance and music, and, in turn, the troubling questions of medium-specific theory and generalist, oftentimes gestalt-inspired, theories of artistic expression. “Significant Form”: Campbell, Cage, and the Dance Observer Cage had contributed to the pages of Dance Observer in earlier proclamations on percussion music and modern dance. 35 In the ensuing years a number of articles continued to explore relationships between form, dance, and bodily articulation of space and environment. 36 Juana De Laban outlined the theories of her father, the dance theorist 35 This was the subject of a series of articles under the title “Percussion Music and Its relationship to the Modern Dance, among which are the following contributions: John Cage and William Russell, 1. Introduction, 2. Hot Jazz and Percussion Music,” Dance Observer (hereafter “DO”), 6/8, (October 1939): 266, 274 ; John Cage, Henry Cowell, “3. East Indian Tala Music, 4. Goal: New Music, New Dance,” DO 6/10 (December, 1939): 296, 297; Franziska Boas, “5. Fundamental Concepts,” DO 7/1 (January 1940): 6- 7; Lou Harrison, “6 Statements,” DO 7/3 (March 1940): 32, and continued later by Henry Cowell, “New Sounds in Music for the Dance,” DO 8/1 (May, 1941): 64, 70. 36 See, for example: Louis Horst, “Modern Forms,” DO 6/9, (November 1939): 285, continued in Vol. 6/10 (December 1939): 298-299 and 8/2 (February, 1941): 23; L.T. Carr, “The Modern Dance Faces A Practical Problem,” DO 6/9 (November 1939): 286; Elsa Jordan and Vere L. Mathews, “The Art of Movement- Dance/Dance Movement in Art,” DO 7/9 (November 1940): 125-7; Mary Phelps, “Poetry and Dance,” DO 8/4 (April, 1941): 52-53; Mary Averett-Seelye, “Words and Dance as an Integrated Medium,” DO 9/8 (October, 1942): 104-5. 124 and instructor Rudolf Laban, and its relationship to harmony and space. 37 Laban’s method of notation for dance choreography highlighted the centering of the body in relationship to spatial awareness, providing a graphic representation of kinetic motion. Laban’s “Choreutics,” classified bodily movement according to a complex system of geometrical diagrams. 38 Throughout these discussion, theorists and dancers repeatedly turned to motion picture photography as the most effective means for capturing and articulating the relationships between dance, gesture, and bodily space. 39 The dance instructor Franziska Boas, daughter of the “father of American anthropology” Franz Boas, contributed some of the most direct speculative questions on these relationships. Cage taught briefly at the Franziska Boas School of Dance in New York in late 1942 and early 1943, and would have been intimately familiar with her theories on the anthropology of dance. In one of her more influential articles, published in the newly established Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (reviewed in the Dance Observer by Louis Bolcom), Boas outlined some of the central concerns of the anthropology of dance and its relationship to pedagogy. She begins by highlighting the phenomenological question of perception of the human body, noting that “we can never see our entire body as it is seen by others,” and that “the subjective conception of our body is fantasy based 37 Juana De Laban, “Harmony in Space,” DO 6/10 (December 1939): 297. 38 For more on Laban’s theory of geometric space, see Vera Maletic, Body-Space-Expression: The Development of Rudolf Laban’s Movement and Dance Concepts (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1987), and John Foster, The Influences of Rudolph Laban (London: Lepus Books, 1977). 39 Don and Ruth Hatfield, “Dance Photography,” DO 8/1 (January 1941): 4-6; Gerda Peterich, “Portraying the Dance,” DO 10/2 (February 1943): 18-19; Barbara Morgan, “Review of ‘The Film Sense,’ by Sergei Eisenstein,” DO 9/8 (October 1942): 103. 125 partly on reality and partly on the emotional and intellectual make-up of the individual, and is called the body image.” 40 To reconcile the “body-image” with bodily appearance, Boas proposes an “ego-ideal,” a “subconscious expression of his ideal body-image,” or a sort of Platonic ideal form. The tension in the dance, according to Boas, is the perpetual conflict in the expression of an inner Platonic form with the outward bodily expression of ideas in gesture and movement. This concern for an inner Platonic or mythical mode of expression and its interpretation in contemporary dance became the central debate on the pages of the Dance Observer for much of the next year. Joseph Campbell joined the editorial board of Dance Observer in 1943, followed shortly thereafter by the sculptor Richard Lippold, who would also become an integral part of Cage’s inner circle during the critical years of his aesthetic development. Campbell’s first article, “Betwixt the Cup and the Lip,” a play on the familiar proverb, was written in response to a previous statement by George W. Beiswanger, professor of philosophy at Georgia State College for Women. Lamenting the state of musical accompaniment, Beiswanger notes that contemporary composers “have been guilty all too frequently of what is known in literature as the ‘pathetic fallacy’…for example, that distorted feelings and emotions require for their musical accompaniment distorted rhythms and unusual dissonance.” Beiswanger’s critique positions canonical modernist works such as Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps (1913) against the modern 40 Franziska Boas, “Psychological Aspects in the Practice and Teaching of Creative Dance,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 2/7 (Winter 1942-3): 3-4. 126 composer who “too often merely takes up the clichés of the day,” 41 Campbell’s eloquent response to Beiswanger’s provocation provides an important glimpse into what would become the foundation of Cage’s philosophical inquiry into the nature of expression. Most importantly, Campbell’s dialogue slowly unfolds the central thesis of his monumental publication from 1949, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, that is, the “universal” notion of mankind’s archetypical storyline of life patterns and psychological self-awareness. Campbell had begun the project as early as 1942, when the Cage’s first moved to New York. Through the years Cage read the manuscript in various forms until its publication. Cage and Campbell also worked briefly on an opera together, Perseus and Andromeda, which remained unfinished. 42 Campbell’s critique set up a dichotomy between what he described in the first article as a sort of pure expression, the “fire of creation: the oxidizing fire of the interior of the living cell,” versus the technical intellectualization of “greatly exaggerated oratorical gestures” in “didactic and commiserative compositions,” that let “the insipidities of her unimpressive brain come between the fountain-source of her genius and the marvel of that all-expressive body on which she has been laboring.” 43 The expressive alternative that Campbell noted in the base mechanisms of dance was clearly related to his generalist theory of mythical cultural expression. His initial example of Martha Graham’s “dance play” presented a psychologism that is “strictly speaking, on 41 George W. Beiswanger, “Lobby Thoughts and Jottings,” DO 11/1 (January 1944): 4. 42 Stephen and Robin Larsen, A Fire In The Mind: The Life of Joseph Campbell (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 332-4. 43 Joseph Campbell, “Betwixt The Cup and The Lip,” DO 11/3 (March 1944): 30-1. 127 the timeless realm of dream, rather than the heart-rhythm of the jungle of life.” 44 Interestingly, one of the first critical examples in the debate was Cage’s first electroacoustic composition in New York, Credo in US (1942). Credo was the first collaboration between Cage and Merce Cunningham, and many have argued that the piece demarcates an important shift in Cage’s artistic career. Utilizing live recordings, radio, and percussion, Credo in US exuded a multifaceted critique on contemporary social norms, cultural appropriation, and radio drama in general. 45 Besiwanger’s initial response to the article, like many readers, was a sense of confusion with Campbell’s characterization of intellectualization versus innate poetic expression, and as Robert Horan responded, the general problem seemed to be between a central tenant of modern musical aesthetics: the relationship between textual “programmatic” elements of the theatrical, multimedia dance, and the poetic expression of a linguistic-based form of communication. Horan’s accusation that dances such as Credo in US suffered from “literary dependence” prompted Campbell’s response, his “napkin to the chin.” Here he noted that, “the Modern Dancer is being wrong-headedly advised to invoke a non-aesthetic, even anti-aesthetic principle to effect the work of amplification and coordination – namely, a “discursive,” didactic, intellectualistic, non- 44 Campbell, “Betwixt the Cup,” 30. 45 Recent research on this topic has revealed numerous archival materials that amplify the importance of this work. Paul Cox, “An Imaginary America: Cage and Cunningham’s Credo in US,” paper presented to the National Meeting of the American Musicological Society, 6 November, 2010, Indianapolis, IN, and Daniel Callahan, “Choreomusical Relationships in Merce Cunningham’s Second Hand and the Aesthetic of Indifference,” Paper presented to the National Meeting of the American Musicological Society, 15 November, 2009, Philadelphia, PA. 128 visual, non-joyous principle.” 46 In Campbell’s mind, the “Creative Idea,” was a “realization derived from full experience, and precisely, a realization of some form- giving principle.” Campbell described expression in a decidedly mythical terminology: The dancer, that is to say, is not a semaphorist, but a work of art in the flesh; her function is not to flash messages back and forth from brain to brain (that is the role of the discursive paragraph), but to embody Significant From. And what is Significant Form? It is the rhythm of life projected in design; the invisible pattern of the psyche reflected in time and space; a profoundly inspired disposition of feeling-charged materials stemming from, and addressed to, that creative center where human consciousness and the unconscious fruitfully touch. 47 “Significant Form” in this context thus seems to derive from Campbell’s artistic fashioning of the Jungian archetype theory of the collective unconscious. In his personal notes on the project, Campbell struggled with a hierarchical definition of the term, dividing it according to an abstract, mythical or theoretical principle, versus a local, empirical reference to specific craft problems. 48 Relying heavily on his meticulously annotated copy of Carl Jung’s The Integration of the Personality (1939), Campbell was attempting to find an aesthetic ground within Jungian psychology that would augment his comparative mythological enterprise. 49 Jung’s work implicitly sought to find an empirical foundation for the interpretation of psychological disorders, and Jung pointed specifically 46 George W. Beiswanger, “The Dancing in Dance,” DO 11/1 (April 1944): 40; Robert Horan, “Poverty and Poetry in Dance,” DO, 11/5 (May 1944): 52-3. 47 Joseph Campbell, “Text, or Idea?,” DO 11/6 (June-July 1944): 66. 48 Joseph Campbell ca 1944, “Notes to ‘Significant Form,’” Joseph Campbell Archive, Pacifica University, Carpinteria, CA. 49 C. G. Jung, The Integration of the Personality, Trans. Stanley Dell (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1939). Campbell’s personal copy is held at the Joseph Campbell Archives, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Carpinteria, CA. 129 to Gnosticism as a framework for interpreting the symbolism of dreams. 50 As Robert Ellwood has argued, the mid-century resurgence of universal myth stories and the subsequent attempt to establish an empirical psychological foundation to these projects was reflective of a cultural shift in modernism defined broadly as “Modern Gnosticism.” This reappraisal of the pursuit of knowledge, or gnosis, within a “monomyth” archetype replayed many of the same social anxieties of modernity by turning to the conversion experience and the division between empirical and mythical experience of hidden internal knowledge. 51 Campbell’s pursuit of a monomyth archetypical storyline, as Ellwood contends, was a reflection of the larger social struggle with external political and social strife pitted against internal questions of modern identity. 52 The divide between artistic and humanist gnosis and the empirical scientific goals of modern society created perhaps the greatest challenge of aesthetic identity for artists in Campbell’s social circle. Cage’s exposure to Campbell’s ideas during his most difficult period of personal struggles with sexual identity cannot be overstated. By 1944, Cage and Xenia were near the end of their relationship, especially after a highly publicized concert with Cage and Cunningham in 1944. 53 Campbell functioned throughout the period as an intermediary between Xenia 50 Jung, The Integration of the Personality, 28-9. 51 Robert Ellwood, The Politics of Myth, A Study of C.G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999), 8-14. 52 Campbell explicitly outlined this divide between modernity and war in his highly controversial essay “Permanent Human Values,” in 1940, which purported a moral equivalency between Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill. Ellwood, 138-39. 53 This concert, at the Studio Theatre on April 5, 1944, likely sparked much of the debate in the Dance Observer. The concert was reviewed in the May edition. “Reviews of the Month: Merce Cunningham, John Cage,” DO 11/5 (May 1944): 57-8. 130 and Cage, and his longstanding relationship with Xenia likely only exacerbated the ideological tensions among such an intimate group. 54 Cage’s contribution to the following issue of the journal, the article “Grace and Clarity,” thus reflected a larger shift not only in his own aesthetic and compositional techniques, it demonstrated the conflicting ideological discussions between empirically defined aspects of form, or “Clarity,” and the Gnostic-derived concept of spiritual awareness, or “Grace.” In his earlier proclamations, such as “Goal: New Music, New Dance,” Cage extolled in a war-like vigor, noting that “percussion music is revolution…Today we are fighting for their emancipation. Tomorrow, with electronic music in our ears, we will hear freedom.” 55 By 1944, however, the war march shifted toward a personal examination in the article. Cage opened by condescendingly declaring that the modern “insecure” dance suffers from accepting influences from other “more rooted art manners,” and that the older, “more mature personalities” have dominated younger proponents of a new dance aesthetic. Clearly, Cage’s concerns here were prodded by Cunningham, who by this point was beginning to separate from the overwhelming influence of Martha Graham, primarily through his collaborations with Cage and Erdman. Cage’s solutions to this dilemma, however, fall short of a full theory, and in many ways ignore the poetic debate in favor of more specific examples of choreomusical relationships. In following with his early proclamations on the necessity for temporal structuring, Cage posits a theory of “Grace” versus Clarity,” where “clarity” 54 Kenneth Silverman outlines in detail the close personal relationship between Xenia and Campbell. Kenneth Silverman, Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage, 62-5. 55 John Cage, “Goal: New Music, New Dance,” Dance Observer 6/10 (December 1939): 296-7. 131 is the clearly defined temporal structuring of events, while “grace” is “warm, incalculable, human play with and against the clarity of the rhythmic structure.” He goes on to explain that: A dance, a poem, a piece of music (any of the time arts) occupies a length of time, and the manner in which this length of time, and the manner in which this length of time is divided first into large parts and then into phrases…is the work’s very life structure. 56 Cage’s theory was met with understandable opposition, particularly its seeming relegation of dance to a secondary art form. 57 However, the claim for an indisputable temporal structuring of events as the base “life-structure” of a dance quickly became a central concern within the choreomusical aesthetic of future Cage/Cunningham collaborations. Sandwiched between this seemingly conventional discourse on choreomusical relationships, the dance instructor Rosalie Lyga took the debate in an altogether different direction, introducing some of the visual poetics that would become central to Deren’s thesis within the debate, but here in the context of television. In a program for the Chicago Dance Council, “Techniques for Television,” Lynga presented a dance with no musical accompaniment, the sounds of the dancers were coordinated to the television camera angles until “the rhythm created by the movement was related to the heard given musical signature that the movement gave rise to.” In this context then, Cage’s 56 John Cage, “Grace and Clarity,” DO 11/9 (November 1944): 108-9. 57 One respondent, Margery J. Turner, replied in the following issue with a critique of Cage’s hierarchical structure relegating dance as secondary. Margery J. Turner, “A Letter to John Cage,” DO 12/1 (January 1945): 10. 132 spatiotemporal musical structures were equated to a filmic poetics of camera angle and dance gesture, the result of which Lynga summarized: Thus mediums in visio and in audio became transformed into something else that lives a life of its own. What it retains in surface aspects of the originals is incidental demonstrated in this wise [sic] as “Television Tactics,” an art form with a dramatic medium all its own. 58 In the final portion of the published dialogue, Campbell and Lippold introduce what would become an important conflict within Cage’s own personal struggles with the question of expression and the content-form dichotomy. Campbell’s article, “The Jubilee of Content and Form,” is one of the earliest publications that introduces the central thesis of The Hero of a Thousand Faces, and the context of its introduction illustrates the importance among artists in the connection between dance and filmic poetics. Here, the dichotomy between a modern, technocentrist and empiricist secularization is perpetually confronted with the inherent mysticism of a veiled spirituality of Gnostic existence, and as Campbell posits, the “development of the modern, scientifically grounded disbelief in supernatural agencies left the dance without its original metaphysical support.” Citing Jung, he then concludes: Apparently, then, the archetypical figures of myth undercut the rational interests of our conscious life, and touch directly the vital centers of the unconscious,. The artist who knew how to manipulate these archetypes would be able to conjure with the energies of the human soul. For the symbols are as potent as they ever were…in this way, content is the source of form, the mother of form. Content, one might dare to say, is form. 59 58 Rosalie Lyga, “Dance Dynamite, Or Speech and Dance,” DO 11/8 (October 1944): 98-9. 59 Joseph Campbell, “The Jubilee of Content and Form,” DO 12/5 (May 1945): 52-3. 133 Contra to Campbell, Richard Lippold’s response to the statement, “On Saints and Buckets,” rejected the thesis of “significant form” squarely on the grounds of the “danger inherent in the self-consciousness of an intellectualized pattern for the succor of mankind.” Lippold’s attack against a positivistic historical narrative structure reflects the growing position among American mainstream philosophy that would have a direct bearing on Cage’s rejection of archetypical positivism in favor of a cultural pluralism, namely the pragmatic religious philosophy epitomized by John Dewey and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. As Lippold states, intellectual pluralism “takes the form of a long- range program of selective tolerance which externally denies the efficacy of any intellectual concepts of world unity which seek to direct man’s admittedly indirectable [sic] nature through the imposition of an “ideal” conception of man and his behavior.” 60 This direct attack on Campbell’s notion of unity through collectivity was grounded in Lippold’s concern for perception and space in his early sculptures. More importantly, Lippold’s statement echoed a growing sentiment among Americans that would blossom in the postwar period. While mythology and psychoanalysis would continue to grow in the popular front, the deeper “Two Cultures” debate between artistic and scientific inquiry in the subsequent Cold War-narrative would eventually dominate American discourse on the arts in the postwar period. 61 Lippold’s sentiment was clearly reflective of the contemporary polemical article by Niebuhr, “The Unity and Depth of our Culture,” 60 Richard Lippold, “The Natural Law,” DO 12/3 (March 1945): 28-9. 61 I refer here specifically to the 1959 lecture by C.P. Snow “The Two Cultures,” which sparked the cold war debate on the relationship between the arts and sciences in academics. For more on Reinhold Niebuhr, see Martin Halliwell, The Constant Dialogue: Reinhold Niebuhr and American Intellectual Culture (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2005), 169-172. 134 which he cites directly in his article. 62 Lippold’s plea for a pluralistic mode of artistic perceptivity is reflective of the intellectual trend among postwar American culture, and as he states, Niebuhr “consciously tries to bring about man’s transformation into the role of mediator, in which state the perceptions of artist and non-artist would become as one, and the very word “artist” would disappear in favor of the word ‘man.’” Again, Lippold’s concern for cultural pluralism seeks a different path, such as when he states that “the creative artist is the true anarchist who cannot make moral judgments or find good or bad to be significant himself. For him there are only the eternal facts of existence, “unchangeable, unchanging.” 63 Ironically, Campbell’s Hero would eventually become one of the most influential popular mythological texts in the twentieth century, spawning an slew of industrial narrative films that extrapolated epic dramas of individual struggle, characterized by the pinnacle work of George Lucas (a close friend of Campbell later in life), with the Star Wars Trilogy. 64 At Land (1944) Shortly after the completion of Hero, Campbell began to work closely with Maya Deren. An avid supporter of her film studies, Campbell’s relationship to Deren was much 62 Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Unity and Depth of Our Culture,” The Sewanee Review, 52/2 (Spring, 1944): 193-8. 63 Richard Lippold, “The Natural Law,” 28. 64 The pinnacle of Campbell’s late in life popularity is undoubtedly the PBS documentary series with Bill Moyer’s, The Power of Myth, later published as a transcript: Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988); for more on Campbell’s relationship with George Lucas, and the influence of Myth on the Star Wars Trilogy, see: Stephen and Robin Larsen, A Fire in the Mind: The Life of Joseph Campbell, 540-5, and Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on his Life and Works (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), 185-8. 135 like that with Cage: a scholarly mentor who provided source readings for their studies, and a supportive editor of their writings. Deren’s theories of cinema were initially formulated in her published volume on the subject, An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film (1946). Here one can see the outline of her theory of space-time in relationship to a number of topics, including a historical search for the cultural positioning of subjectivity as a backdrop for her anthropological viewpoint on ritual function and mythology. As Renata Jackson contends, Deren’s approach to cinema aesthetics and poetics outlined in Anagram can be traced to her master’s thesis at New York University, “The Influence of French Symbolist School on Anglo-American Poetry.” Jackson points out that one can see how the philosophy of the Imagist school of Anglo-American Poetry, adamant in the synthesis of emotional content with form, is now transplanted into the conceptual term of the “image” in film – which has become for Deren essentially the space-time manipulation of reality within any given succession of motion picture images. 65 Similar to her reading of imagist philosophy, Deren considered form in poetry as the unconscious expression of human values or morals. While dealing with the morality of poetic form, Deren gradually shifted during her career towards the model of social ritual in primitive cultures as the paradigm for a formalist and ethical expression of humanity. In cinema, Deren sought to achieve a similar effect through the structured use of photorealism and manipulation of this reality through space and time. Deren was 65 Renata Jackson, “The Modernist Poetics of Maya Deren,” in Maya Deren and the American Avant- Garde, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2001), 60. 136 explicit in her formulation of Gestalt theories of psychology in relation to her work, where part-whole relationships between the individual and group in social ritual can also be found in Deren’s individual “quests” for selfhood within the structure of the filmic medium in these earlier works. Deren’s struggle with theorists and filmmakers culminated at a panel discussion of the 1953 Cinema 16 Symposium on poetry and film. At the conference Deren presented a theory on the film image, where she outlined her dialectic axes theory of the horizontal and vertical. As she explained during the conference: …the poetic construct arises from the fact, if you will, that it is a “vertical” investigation of a situation…so that you have poetry concerned, in a sense, not with what is occurring but what is feels like or means…the metaphysical content of the moment. … This may be a little bit clearer if you will contrast it to what I would call the “horizontal” attack, which is concerned with the development, let’s say, within a very small situation from feeling to feeling. 66 As Annette Michelson observes, this structuralist reading closely allies with the writings of linguist Roman Jakobson. 67 In his 1956 essay studying aphasia, Jakobson found a similarity between the dichotomy of metaphor and metonymy and the linguistic division of syntagmatic and paradigmatic, or simultaneity versus succession. 68 Surprisingly, this method of structuralist analysis was already emerging in Deren’s early studies of the temporal aspects of filmic construction. While the hegemony of industrial narrative film 66 Maya Deren, “Poetry and the Film: A Symposium with Maya Deren, Arthur Miller, Dylan Thomas, Parker Tyler; Chairman, Willard Maas, Organized by Amos Vogel,” [1953] repr. in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Praeger, 1970), 173-74. 67 Annette Michelson, “Poetics and Savage Thought: About Anagram,” in Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2001), 24. 68 Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbance,” in Language in Literature (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1987), 98-113. 137 pressed contemporary film theory toward a syntagmatic structural chain as the principal axis, Deren’s theory, as Michelson contends, was committed to the substitutive metaphor as the essential constructive element. 69 The poetic construct —Deren’s “significant form”—focuses on the structural tension between temporality and poesis, the poetic “grace” of the syntagmatic. Temporality was the defining feature of filmic poetics according to Deren, which she outlined in Anagram during her observations of Marcel Duchamp’s 1926 film Anemic Cinema. The short “abstract” film consisted of a series of shots of a rotating “Rotorelief” (to be discussed further below) combined with a series of optical puns rotating around the optical illusion created by the movement of the spiral over time. In contrast to the temporal abstraction highlighted in the one-to-one ratios of audiovisual synthesis in Oskar Fischinger, Duchamp’s play on temporality, according to Deren, foregrounds time: Although it uses geometric forms, it is not an abstract film, but perhaps the only “optical pun” in existence. The time which he causes one of his spirals to revolve on the screen effects an optical metamorphosis: the cone first appears concave, then convex, and, in the more complicated spirals, both concave and convex and then inversed. It is Time, therefore, which creates these optical puns which are the visual equivalents, in Anemic Cinema, for instance, of the inserted phrases which also revolve and, in doing so, disclose the verbal pun. 70 Others, such as Moira Sullivan, situate Deren’s theory along the lines of French philosopher Henri Bergson’s notion of élan vital. 71 However it seems clear that Deren, 69 Annette Michelson, “Poetics and Savage Thought, ” 26. 70 Maya Deren, An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film [1946], repr. in Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film by Maya Deren, ed. Bruce R. McPherson (Kingston, NY: Documentext, 2005), 98-9 71 Sullivan, like Jackson, primarily trace Deren’s theories according to her educational background, and the connection to Bergson is clearly stated as “indirect.” Moira Sullivan, An Anagram of The Ideas of 138 like Cage, was primarily interested in constructive techniques directly applicable to the creation of a new method of filmmaking. Within this paradigm, duration and structure determine, rather than follow, content. Much like Cage’s comments on “Grace and Clarity,” the overarching determinate element was temporal structure. It was this aspect of filmic form that became the central focus to Deren’s second major film study, At Land (1944), which featured cameo roles by both John and Xenia Cage. As several scholars have observed, At Land was in many ways a continuation of the ideas outlined in Meshes of the Afternoon. 72 However, while At Land continues the “trance” genre through the investigation of the individual psyche, the overarching structure of the work begins to take a larger symbolic form, especially in relation to vertical and horizontal divides within a temporal structure. This is clearly evidenced in the role of chess throughout the film. On the structural level, the temporal aspects of a chess game are reflective of Deren’s linguistic duality of vertical and horizontal axes, where the individual moves within the game constitute a limited form of forward movement, and the contemplative pauses between moves, with no specific temporal duration, are reflective of the vertical axis. Here one is free to contemplate both past and future in a state of analytic and emotional stasis, where the forward motion of the game is entirely contingent upon the instigation of a further move within the game. On the ritual level, it is the very social structure of chess that Deren considers paradigmatic for the thought processes of modern society, and it is these “rules of the game” that are Filmmaker Maya Deren: Creative Work in Motion Pictures (Karlstad, Sweden: University of Karlstad Press, 1997), 125-32. 72 VéVé A. Clark, Millicent Hodson, and Catrina Neiman, The Legend of Maya Deren, 121. 139 comparable to any primitive rituals found in her voyages to Haiti or beyond. In fact, one could posit that Deren’s incorporation of chess as a new paradigm for social ritual was a result of her previous work with Marcel Duchamp on Witches Cradle (1943). Cage also maintained a close relationship to Duchamp via chess, such as his painting Chess Pieces (also from 1944), done for a show of work’s related to Marcel Duchamp’s interest in chess, at the Julien Levy Gallery, New York. In the 1960s, his primary connection to Duchamp was through a series of performance pieces focusing on their regular evening games at the end of Duchamp’s life. 73 Chess was a central part of Duchamp’s life after he famously “retired” from painting in 1923 to pursue a career as a professional chess player, and the connections between the game and his career have been examined in detail. 74 Thus both the structural and ritualistic portions of the chess game serve as an enframing element to Deren’s personal (and hence social) quest within the film. It is precisely at the nodal junctures within the film where these social and structural rules are upset that form the forward motion of the narrative. It is clear from her filming notes for At Land that Deren was particularly concerned with the actual moves shown in the film, since she carefully notated, in shorthand, all of the moves that were to be played within the movie. 75 73 Later in his career Cage would revisit Duchamp and his chess game for Reunion (1968), where a specially prepared chessboard triggered passages of music by Cage and others selected by chance according to the moves made by either Duchamp or Cage during the game. See: Lowell Cross, “’Reunion’: John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Electronic Music and Chess,” Leonardo Music Journal 9, Power and Responsibility: Politics, Identity and Technology in Music, (1999): 35-42. 74 See, for example, Francis M. Naumann and Bradley Bailey, Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess (New York: Readymade Press, 2009). 75 Deren notated these moves in descriptive shorthand, a now defunct and somewhat confusing form of notation, where individual moves are described according to the original placement of chess pieces: Thus 140 The first encounter with the chess game follows the extended opening scene on a beach where Deren is thrust forward from the primitive oceanic and naturalistic world into a bourgeoisie dining hall, where a number of ritual conversations and card games ignore her primeval crawl to the end of the table. Upon reaching the end (passing by, among others, Xenia Cage), Deren encounters a man playing chess against himself. After an extended moment of vertical stasis of contemplation, the man’s final move is to place the black queen in the center of the board, leaving the white king in check. The horizontal motion of the film having then been frozen, the man and the party members abruptly leave the great table, after which Deren watches with amazement as the animated pieces continue on their game without a human controlling element. At the end of the scene, the black queen takes a white pawn, knocking it off the table, upon which the scene suddenly returns to the ocean. Here the pawn transforms into the queen as Deren follows its moves along a series of scenes, each one searching for the missing piece of the game in an effort to reunite the structural elements of the chess ritual. In the following scenes, Deren confronts a number of male encounters, each of them hostile and confusing. While walking down a country road the men speak at her while she stares in confusion (one of them being John Cage), all the while quickening the pace and interchanging between different characters until Deren loses track, only to encounter another man hiding beneath a sheet in a room filled with sheet-covered furniture. Deren becomes frustrated with her attempt to reconstruct the chess piece, and W Kt – Q5, the first move seen in the woman’s game, would read: “White Knight moves to position in Queen’s column, Row 5” ; “Script notes for At Land,” VéVé A. Clark, Millicent Hodson, and Catrina Neiman, The Legend of Maya Deren, 183. 141 hence the ritual, by searching for similar looking rocks on the beach, and it is not until she encounters the women on the beach that the ritual again resumes. The woman’s chess game provides a clear opposition to the opening masculine game, and here the individual moves are highlighted both in the shots and in Deren’s filming notes. While the women converse lightly, the game quickens in pace as the black queen aggressively moves to check the white king in only three moves. 76 As the camera follows Deren’s dazed expression, several moves occur beyond the view followed by a long pan of the women in conversation. As the shot progresses across the screen, the blond-haired actress is transplanted to the same side of the board as the dark-haired woman, while Deren gently caresses their hair; meanwhile the chess game is suddenly in the favor of white. 77 At this point, the women make their moves without any apparent consideration for the outcome, yet the black is desperately defending the king as white eventually moves into check once again. 78 Deren, witnessing the possible outcome of the game, thwarts the rules by stealing the queen chess piece and running away from the table. Interestingly, Deren the filmmaker wrote in her notes that the final move thwarted 76 The moves according to Maya’s shorthand notes (description in parenthesis): 17 W Kt –Q5 (White Knight moves to Queen’s column, row 5); 17 B QxP (Black Queen takes Pawn); 18 W B-Q6 (White Bishop to Queen row 6); 18 B QxRch (Black Queen takes rook, check), “Script notes for At Land,” VéVé A. Clark, Millicent Hodson, and Catrina Neiman, The Legend of Maya Deren, 183. 77 The Moves continue: 19 W K-K2 (White King to King 2); 19 B BxR (Black Bishop takes rook); 20 W P- K5 (White Pawn to King 5); 20 B Kt-QR3(Black Knight to Queen’s Rook 3); 21 W KtxPch (White Knight takes pawn, check), “Script notes for At Land,” VéVé A. Clark, Millicent Hodson, and Catrina Neiman, The Legend of Maya Deren, 183. 78 21 B K-Q (Black King to Queen 1); 22 W Q-B6ch (White Queen to Bishop 6); 22 B KtxQ (Black King takes Queen - Thwarted by Maya), “Script notes for At Land,” VéVé A. Clark, Millicent Hodson, and Catrina Neiman, The Legend of Maya Deren, 183. 142 by the character Deren was to have the king take the queen, even though a number of other options could have followed. 79 It is here that the structure of the film essentially folds within, the rules of the game thwarted by Deren, and the temporal unfolding in any linear sense is mirrored as Deren runs through all previous scenes, the alternate Deren’s glancing off-screen at the sudden demise of the quest, where Deren’s divine intervention saves the queen, and the reflexive unfolding of structure ends with a return to the ocean. Thus the chess model creates a paradigmatic model of the metastructure of Deren’s time-space photorealistic form in film, where the paradigmatic and syntagmatic structures become the central issue for the filmmaker’s trance induced quest, and her ritual participation and subsequent rejection form a reflexive narrative on the moralistic issues of cinematic form that Deren herself was addressing at the time. After At Land, Deren applied several of her cinematographic innovations in a short study, A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945, hereafter Study). She originally intended to commission Cage for a score of prepared piano music in the style similar to his numerous dance commissions during the time, but the collaboration failed to materialize. 80 With Study, Deren found a format to further explore aspects of temporal organization and the articulation of space, an issue at the forefront of her theoretical 79 VéVé A. Clark, Millicent Hodson, and Catrina Neiman, The Legend of Maya Deren, 185. 80 VéVé A. Clark, Millicent Hodson, and Catrina Neiman, The Legend of Maya Deren, 263. 143 essays during the time. 81 As a hybrid between dance and cinema, Deren approached the project from the standpoint of a study by exploring the relationships between bodily articulation of space and temporality that a motion picture camera engendered. Just over three minutes in length, Study followed the movements of dancer Tally Beatty through a series of landscape backdrops in the Palisades, Deren’s Morton Street loft, and the Egyptian Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The entire film encompasses a continuous false tracking shot that positions Beatty at various portions within the frame. Edits connect Beatty’s precise movements between different interior and exterior shots in an attempt to remove the sense of suture, or enframing element of the directionality of the camera, and the entire work has a constant temporal flow that a traditional tracking shot would bring about. Deren’s use of a cinematic “trick” to create a fluid cinematic space foregrounded the relationship between a dancer and camera, where the sense of choreography is thus mirrored in the directionality of the camera itself. Significantly, Study was Deren’s first work that focused entirely on another person. As Mark Franko argues, Deren’s study of Beatty, an African-American, not only supplanted Deren’s normative cinematic trope of a psychological quest onto another person, it foregrounded difficult issues with modernist rhetoric in contemporary dance aesthetics regarding the “universal” expression of bodily gesture. 82 Arguments regarding 81 See for example, her essay from 1946, “Creating Movies With A New Dimension: Time,” Popular Photography (December, 1946), repr. in Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film, ed. Bruce R. McPherson (Kingston, NY: Documentext, 2005), 131-9. 82 Mark Franko, “Aesthetic Agencies in Flux: Talley Beatty, Maya Deren, and the Modern Dance Tradition in Study in Choreography for Camera,” in Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: UC Press, 2001), 134-135. 144 Deren’s sexuality in scenes such as the climax of At Land further augment the tensions within modernist aesthetic agendas among general discourse of the New York avant- garde. 83 In the following work, Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), gendered social rituals such as the spinning wheel are foregrounded as a paradigm of the form of the filmic structure itself. In both works, ritual in many ways functions as allegory for ethnographic accounts of aesthetic elements on the fringes of modernism’s sharp critiques, allowing for a coded frame of reference to address a number of questions regarding gender, identity and race. In 1946 Deren programmed Meshes, Study, and At Land in a landmark screening series at the Provincetown Playhouse in New York. The astounding success of these initial screenings prompted the establishment of a regular series by Austrian immigrant Amos Vogel that would eventually become the most successful independent cinema venue in New York, Cinema 16. Early reviews of Deren’s films were mixed, with one review by Manny Farber of The New Republic leading nearly to a libel suit by Deren for his comments on the “lesbianish” aspects of her work. 84 One review, by Richard Lippold in the Dance Observer, was among of the first critiques to situate Deren’s work within the intellectual circle of contemporary dance aesthetics, and in turn, the debate on “significant form” and the modernist readings of dance as universal expression. Lippold enthusiastically embraced the connections to dance aesthetics that Deren foregrounded, particularly in Study. Here he notes: 83 See for example, Maria Pramaggiore, “Seeing Double(s), Reading Maya Deren Bisexually,” in Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: UC Press, 2001), 237-260. 84 VéVé A. Clark, Millicent Hodson, and Catrina Neiman, The Legend of Maya Deren, 378. 145 The collaboration of the dancing figure with the dancing camera…finally achieves the liberation of the dance form from its struggle in a fourth-dimensional world against a two-dimensional Renaissance stage, the liberation of dance from a transitory stage…and the liberation of cinema, through the dancer, from its confines in documenting merely the real or artificial image. 85 After the success of the Provincetown screenings, Deren focused her efforts on a long-term ethnographic study of voodoo zombie rituals in Haiti, a project which eventually earned her a Guggenheim fellowship in 1947. Under the editorial guidance of Joseph Campbell, Deren completed an ethnographic study, Divine Horseman: The Living Gods of Haiti in 1953. The footage from her visit, however, was never fully edited under her supervision into a complete and coherent film. In one of her early fellowship applications she listed a possible commission to include Meshes in a film by Dada artist and German expatriate Hans Richter for the film Dreams that Money Can Buy. 86 A Profitable Avant-Garde? Hans Richter and Dreams That Money Can Buy Richter was quickly establishing himself in the New York film community as a successful producer and distributor. His production company, Art of This Century Films, funded by Peggy Guggenheim, endeavored to establish the first independent avant-garde film industry in America, and Richter emphatically championed the economic viability of the venture. Dreams That Money Can Buy (hereafter Dreams), was Richter’s first major project under Art of This Century. Richter authorized a stock issuance to fund the project, 85 Richard Lippold, “Dance and Film: A Review in the Form of a Reflection,” DO 13/5 (May 1946): 59-60. 86 VéVé A. Clark, Millicent Hodson, and Catrina Neiman, The Legend of Maya Deren, 141. 146 but the majority of the funding came from a $15,000 grant from Guggenheim. 87 The film, alternatively titled Movies Take A Holiday, was the American first feature-length film to feature avant-garde filmmakers. While the film went through many different treatments, Richter eventually settled on the format of a series of surrealistic dream vignettes from notable avant-garde filmmakers. Significantly, Richter’s final selection of artists were almost exclusively European, with the sole exception of Alexander Calder, himself a close ally of the European historical avant-garde. Despite correspondence between Deren and Richter regarding a costly enlargement of Meshes to 35mm, the film was not included in the final release. 88 Notwithstanding these cultural and economic slights to American filmmakers, Richter worked closely with American composers for the soundtrack to the film, including John Cage. Richter’s selection of a sequence of films on individual artists in a feature-length film reflected the programming patterns of film societies like Cinema 16 in New York. In fact, one could point to the earlier efforts of The Museum of Modern Art Film Library series as one of the many precursors to Richter’s idea for a montage of surrealist film segments. In a 1945 abstract film program, the initial sequence of films consisted of a similar ordering of films seen in Richter’s earlier treatments. This sequence, following chronologically with Richter’s Rhythmus 21 (1921-2), Ballet Mecanique (1924), Anemic Cinema (1927), and Emak Bakia (1927) by Man Ray, follows the film sequence and ideas in the final version of Dreams more or less chronologically, with the addition of the 87 “Six Ultramodern Artists Supply Dreams for New Film,” Life Magazine, 2 December, 1946, 85. 88 VéVé A. Clark, Millicent Hodson, and Catrina Neiman, The Legend of Maya Deren, 141. 147 single American artist, Alexander Calder. Richter even noted the timing of these films in his copy of the program, and the connection between a profitable screening event of these films under a narrative arc seems to have been a main concern with the project. 89 Before Richter settled on the format for the commercial release, he completed several treatments of the script with a notable creativity in their scope. Reflective of the surrealist practice of creating and publishing impossibly difficult film treatments, these documents in themselves portray a community of European exiles in a revealing and personal manner. In the earliest treatment, Richter focused on a dramatic setting that would include the artists themselves in acting roles. 90 This treatment is centered around a loosely-constructed plot in which a professor has devised a way to distill the essence of art in laboratory retorts. Abstract films by the artists are intercut with each action, the first is Viking Eggeling’s Diagonal Symphony No.1(1924), followed by Richter’s Rhythmus 21(1921), and Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema (1926). Suddenly, two agents appear out of one of the jars, Mac and Jack, who work for the television company. They intend to steal the essences for the boss, and a scuffle ensues, intercut with several more films and ending with Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñel’s infamous Un Chien Andalou (1926). An explosion blasts through the laboratory, and the final scene cuts back to the apartment as fireman break down the door. The clock strikes twelve, and all the artists turn to 89 “Museum of Modern Art Program, 1945” Hans Richter papers, E.XIX.3, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 90 Hans Richter, “Dreams that Money Can Buy, Treatment I,” Hans Richter Archive, C.IX.33, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 148 pumpkins. Meanwhile, during the confusion, Mack and Jack come back in to steal the “stuff that dreams are made of,” and sneak away down the fire escape. In the second treatment, the artist’s studio is abandoned in favor of the laboratory scene. 91 The professor has made a terrific invention. He is able to produce infinite motion pictures chemically without the aid of an actual production crew of cameras, actors and so on, and he intends to sell it for ten cents a bottle. However, the television companies want the formula in order to make it the biggest industry in the world. Their plan is to seduce the professor with a young girl, Nancy. The ascetic professor is entirely devoted to his work with the emotions, and any change in the dynamics of the laboratory would offset the volatile retorts. The essences must be surrounded by modern art, and thus the laboratory itself is decorated with a labyrinth of prints and film projections. After six months trying to seduce the professor’s secrets, Mr. Jordan, the boss, sends Mac and Joe to check up on Nancy. Nancy shows them all of the great wonders of the essences, revealing each through a film segment of the same films from the previous treatment. A similar climax occurs after Un Chien Andalou, and the professor enters at just the right moment to reveal himself as a handsome young man. The final snide comment ends as thus: …and they lived happily thereafter in the first monopolized television experimental laboratory for dream and visions, - collecting ideas of all the artists of the world and trying the never tried before. 92 91 Hans Richter, “Dreams that Money Can Buy, Treatment II,” Hans Richter Archive C.IX.33, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 92 Hans Richter, “Dreams that Money Can Buy, Treatment II,” Hans Richter Archive C.IX.33, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 149 Richter’s early treatments were likely prohibitively expensive for such a small venture as Art of This Century Films, and the final version he settled on shifts to the popular contemporary genre of noir. Like The City Wears a Slouch Hat, the film version of Dreams is centered on the drifter, a poet named Joe, who, with an uncanny sense of the psyche, decides to open a business to interpret people’s dreams. Each customer forms the impetus for the artist segues, connecting psychological issues with artistic expression. The final artists who participated in the project included those from the apartment treatment: Max Ernst, Ferdinand Leger, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, and Richter. Instead of screening previously made films in the interludes, however, Richter commissioned each artist to create his own dream sequence based roughly on past works of arts or their style in general. Original music was commissioned to accompany each film by, respectively, Paul Bowles (Ernst), John Latouche and Libby Holman (Leger), Darius Milhaud (Ray), John Cage (Duchamp), Paul Bowles and David Diamond (Calder), and Louis Appelbaum (Richter). Appelbaum served as music director for the project, and it was likely through him that Cage received the music commission on the project. Most of the other musical commissions for the project seem to have come out of Richter’s own personal contacts, including the score from Milhaud. Richter had originally intended to use Varèse for the Calder sequence, and had contacted Arnold Schoenberg with hopes for a commission. 93 93 Darius Milhaud to Hans Richter, 2 June, 1947, Hans Richter Papers, B.VII.19; Arnold Schoenberg to Hans Richter, 23 April, 1947, Hans Richter Papers, B.VII.10, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 150 Throughout the reality segments of the film, Joe’s every action is narrated by an omniscient character, his conscience, that guides the action along. There is no spoken dialogue, only the narrator, who drifts between Joe’s conscience and that of the patients seamlessly, much in the way Joe peers into the characters. In the opening scene, the destitute Joe discovers his skill, the ability to look into the minds of others, and the narrator reminds him: You’re no longer a bum, you’re an artist! Remember a poem you once read. ‘The eye is a camera,’ it said. Suppose like a film it could retain the images that glide so secretly through your brain. Have you ever tried to see the shadow world inside photographed by the retina, and held suspended in its memory? This is one of the more unusual talents, and it’s yours Joe. Maybe this will revive your bank balance. 94 After refurnishing his apartment, complete with artworks by Leger and Richter adorning the walls, the first customer arrives. Case #1 is a methodical and dull bank clerk, played by the art dealer Julien Levy (who also hosted Cage’s artwork, Chess Pieces in 1944 at the Julien Levy Gallery). The clerk peers over a series of collages from the surrealist book by Max Ernst, Une semaine de bonté (1934), upon which Joe prods into his love of art and his psychosexual desire. The semi-erotic Victorian images of girls in bed provokes the dream sequence, “Desire,” which, as the program describes, is a “romantic study of sex in 1850.” 95 The stream of consciousness monologue follows the horrific psychosexual yearnings of a man that dwells on the bed scene. A beautiful woman lies provocatively in the bed while her lover wanders through the scene. The 94 Dreams That Money Can Buy, 35mm, 99min, Art of This Century Films, 1947. 95 “Program for Dreams That Money Can Buy,” Arnold Eagle Papers, Box 1, Folder 13, Getty Research Institute Special Collections, Los Angeles, California. 151 sequence becomes a psychoanalysis within a psychoanalysis, as the woman narrates her dream to the man, while the man peers through the window on the scene. Ernst himself follows the scene as a sort of superego, while the bed becomes the scene of a number of violent surreal acts. A storm erupts underneath, and Ernst drags the man’s body out followed by a mannequin, while a Greek chorus chants in the background, admonishing the couple’s romantic soirée. The man drags his bride to an underground passageway, her body limp, while Ernst follows. Destitute in his own self wallowing, the man lies on the ground, throwing dice away, while the woman delivers a final soliloquy. The oddly moralistic undertones of the couple’s sexual abandon is echoed in the program for the film. The girls’ “vagabond unconscious materializes in an enraptured soliloquy through images in which fragments of conventional reality help build up a more real dream world.” While Ernst, on the other hand, as the artist-cum-moralist, “follows the lovers as a sort of superego, silently witnessing, and thus counterbalancing, their revel in emotional irresponsibility.” 96 The bank clerk shyly coughs up $50.00 for his personal peep show, while peering perversely at the next customer, a young woman who has entered the office with an entirely different agenda. With hair tightly pulled back and glasses squarely set, the girl has, as the program explains, an “organization mania,” she feels compelled to collect signatures for anything. Joe reluctantly signs something, as Joe strips her glasses away and peers into her eyes. The dream sequence reflects her materialism through kitsch: the Kurt Weill-esque tune, “The Girl With a Prefabricated Heart,” lyrics by John Latouche 96 “Program for Dreams That Money Can Buy,” Arnold Eagle Papers, Getty Research Institute. 152 and song by Libby Holman and Josh Watts, accompanies a montage of dancing mannequins arranged by Ferdinand Leger. The lyrics sing the praises of her perfection of beauty and the prospect of a perfect husband. And just in time, as a “mail order male was sent by the gods directly from Yale.” The male mannequin, with “biceps of stainless steel,” asks her hand in marriage, and the dress is laid over the Mannequin. Her bridal grown, “a synthetic weave of coal tar, milk, and wood, spun under atomic pressure in a four-billion dollar machine,” is clad for the bridal nuptials. The man offers her sterilized flowers and pedigree birds to fly through the sterilized air conditioned air. Offering her jewels and a painting by Leger, he promises her psychological well-being. He offers to interpret her fanciful dreams, to bring into view her hidden desires, and to “polish all the wheels in her brain.” They consecrate the courting with a “glorious Technicolor kiss,” after which the man continues to push for more. The woman pleads for him to stop, and brings in her “Amazon sisters,” who fight away the sexual pressures of the man. The chaste bride then rides off on a bicycle, “her loneliness she must insist on, an Isolde without a Tristan,” while the man falls lifeless, for “there is never a man who could ever survive a girl with a prefabricated heart.” The third sequence begins with an elderly spinster, a sort of offshoot of the young girl. The woman reflects on her own youth with a bitter self reflection, to illustrate the vanity of self-image. Man Ray begins perhaps the most conceptual segment of the film, the dream sequence, “Ruth, Roses and Revolvers.” The dream begins with a young couple that enter into a home screening. Playing on the projection of the archetype actor 153 and empathy of identification, the hostess announces to the theater audience that the film is participatory in nature: For the real success of this presentation, I earnestly implore you to collaborate even more interactively. You all know the principle character in this film; you have every confidence him and the economy of his gestures. To give these gestures their full meaning, I earnestly implore you to follow and to repeat these gestures as they occur. 97 In the beginning, the young couple is reluctant to follow the silly charades, which consist of following Man Ray, projected on the film screen, in his various poses and sitting positions. The film eventually dissolves into the surroundings, as Man Ray leaves through the door of the cinematic screen, and the audience follows his gesture out into the daylight. Interestingly, this play on the interpretive methods of diegetic space is happy to present a mocking of cinematic boundaries, but the real filmic space, that of the film of the film, is in every way conventional through the musical accompaniment by Darius Milhaud. Milhaud’s jocular gestures begin with the most familiar musical imitation devise, a canon in three voices, each voice in its own key. Ending the phrase with an extended trill, a lighthearted march follows the action of the characters both in the film, and in the film within the film. Walking in lock step, the music carries them out into the sunlight, making the entire enterprise as lighthearted as any conventional cinematic joke of “Mickey Mousing” along with the narrative action. Everyone ends with a lighthearted laugh of the afternoon reverie. And yet the closing section reveals the final mischief of Man Ray. The simple scene on camera in which Man Ray goes through his silly gestures consists of a chair, a 97 Dreams That Money Can Buy, 35mm, 99min, Art of This Century Films, 1947. 154 door, and, on the wall behind him, a large photograph of Hans Richter’s eyes, peering into the scene. Richter, as the directorial authority of the cinematic space, is the omnipresence of the author, the driving force behind a surface abstraction and juxtaposition of events. Ray is explicit in mocking this authority, as the laughing audience members come across a book outside with the title of the dream sequence. The woman observes, “all we need now is a revolver,” the act that will complete their game sequence, fulfilling the expectations of the cinematic and narrative premise. You see, it’s like this book. People look at one side, less for details, but a more prosaic title. Subject matter, country of origin, language. But look at the other side, and you will see the real significance, including the exact date of the writer. 98 This narration follows a picture of Man Ray, which erupts in flames, superimposed with images of a group of refugees marching along in horror. Clearly, the double image here of cultural capital versus the atrocities of time and place of narrative authority, namely the horrors of world war versus the lighthearted appropriation of cultural taste, are foregrounded in the final moments. The woman is disgusted with her dream, and bursts out into the foyer, where a scene has erupted. Customers are in a brawl, while a policeman calmly directs traffic, oblivious to the chaos around him. In comes a gangster, played by John Latouche, who demands from Joe a prediction of the next Derby winner. “Here’s the problem Joe,” tells the narrator, “he has no conscience. He has no subconscious…that’s why he wants to have a dream.” The gangster is knocked over his 98 Dreams That Money Can Buy, 35mm, 99min, Art of This Century Films, 1947. 155 head by an intruder, and his semi-conscious state instigates the next dream sequence, “Discs, and Nudes Descending a Staircase,” by Marcel Duchamp, with a score by Cage. Music for Marcel Duchamp A play on two of Duchamp’s artworks, the montage of spinning wheels are juxtaposed against images of a woman alternately clothed and nude while distorted through a prism lens. Here Duchamp reenacts the actual act of his 1912 painting, Nude Descending a Staircase discussed in Chapter 1. 99 A double exposure of the lens layers the images of the woman with what appears to be lumps of anthracite coal falling down the screen (the footage was taken from a common household coal bin). The female image appears several times, and after the criminal awakes he notices a shadow figure in the windowsill that resembles the image of the female prism. Between these images are the discs, or Rotoreliefs as Duchamp famously coined them in the 1920s. After Duchamp’s “retirement” from professional art, he famously began touting himself as a “precision oculist” and rented a booth at the Inventors’ Fair at the Porte de Versailles, where he offered cardboard reproductions of the discs in packages of six. The discs were to be mounted on phonograph records, where the rotation of the player would produce optical illusions. Some of the Rotoreliefs produced playful illusions, such as “Goldfish,” which swirled the reproduction within the confines of the space, while others, such as “Chinese Lantern,” and “Corolles,” evoked sexual double entendres. 99 This connection is made quite explicit in the program notes for the film, which include a reproduction of the original painting: “Program for Dreams That Money Can Buy,” Arnold Eagle Papers, Getty Research Institute. 156 “Discs, and Nudes Descending a Staircase” is in many ways a continuation of Duchamp’s first experiment in film, Anemic Cinema (1926), which juxtaposes the spinning wheel image with a circular presentation of puns. As P. Adams Sitney comments, Duchamp’s delicate play between illusions of depth and the flatness of the written images are a comment on the conflicting elements of perceptual depth within the cinematic space, a development of the cubist multi-perspective viewing of the artistic object. 100 Rosalind Krauss notes the division between Duchamp’s sexually explicit bodily references and a conceptual fascination with what he often referred to as the “Grey Matter.” Duchamp’s constant vacillation between the mental and the carnal imbued perspective vision with the mechanisms of desire. The “legitimate construction” of Renaissance perspective is thus critiqued much in the way “significant form” was debated. As Krauss explains: Duchamp’s repeated references to gray matter have therefore ballasted a tradition of interpretation in which visuality on Duchamp’s terms is understood as a condition of intellect, of the diagrammatic mastery of a reality disincarnated into what has been called the “purely ideal” status of the perspective image. 101 Along with a number of alchemical and technological readings of Anemic Cinema, scholars have observed the tension with gender performatives within the overall mind and body tension in Duchamp’s oeuvre. 102 Duchamp’s casual vacillation between male and female, bluntly displayed in his cross-dressing caricature Rrose Sélavy, (itself a 100 P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000, 3 rd Ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), 270-71. 101 Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 111. 102 For an alchemical reading, see John F. Moffitt, Alchemist of the Avant-Garde: The Case of Marcel Duchamp (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003), 143-44. 157 phonetic pun on "Eros, c'est la vie") perpetually distanced sexuality within a mental discourse. The suspension of climax became a central theme in the erotic underpinnings of Duchamp’s work, an aspect that clearly had an effect on Cage. 103 As early as 1942, Cage had been intimately involved with Duchamp, including one heated affair during his brief stay with Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim. 104 Marjorie Perloff has noted that it was precisely the suspension of pleasure that attracted Cage to Duchamp’s aesthetic. Such a perceptual distancing from the overt connotations of personal pleasure and desire were to become a central facet of the Neo-Avant-Garde, particularly the Cage/Cunningham aesthetic of choreomusical interpenetration. 105 Duchamp’s work not only dislocated the sense of cinematic depth through a perceptual tension between the erotic and the mental, it provided one of the few truly impervious commentaries on the commercialism of the American consumer economy. As Hal Foster comments, Duchamp’s projection of a disjunctive, fractured subject into a sort of “split personality” (such as his transsexual alter ego “Rose Sélavy”) was the first step in the removal of the indexicality of the photographic image. Parallel to this usurping of the meaning of the image was Duchamp’s constant play on the mediating element between everyday objects and artistic works. Through readymades and the later Boîte-en- 103 For a deeper reading of Anemic Cinema according to the concept of “exceedingly slow” resolve, see Patrick De Haas, “Erotic Optics, Anemic Mechanicals,” in Marcel Duchamp and Eroticism, ed. Marc Décimo (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 43-55. 104 Kenneth Silverman, Begin Again, 53. 105 Marjorie Perloff, “’A Duchamp unto my self’: ‘Writing through’ Marcel,” in John Cage: Composed in America, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 100- 24. 158 valise series (some of which Xenia Cage assisted on), Duchamp provided a complex, circular commentary on the Benjamin questioning of the work of art. 106 A parallel argument was made in Duchamp’s little-known music compositions, where the question of reproduction and indexicality were transferred to sounds. In Hidden Noise (1916) Duchamp presents the instructions to create a readymade of an unrecognizable object sealed in a box, producing a noisemaker that could not be seen. Craig Adcock has explained Duchamp’s musical readymades as instances of “virtual sound” reproductions of natural phenomena that focuses on the perceptual gap—the later “in-betweeness” or inter-media penetration of Fluxus—within the acoustic realm. 107 Cage’s accompanying score to the film provided a musical parallel to the play on dimensionality in visual space through the articulation of extended silent phrases. As James Pritchett observes, Music for Marcel Duchamp represents the summit of Cage’s prepared piano compositional style, with the prominent use of silent gaps to punctuate the melodic phrases. The flatness of the imagery is paralleled by the flatness of Cage’s materials, creating a taut, static acoustic space for the sounds to inhabit. 108 As Cage explained: The rhythmic structure for the music which accompanies the Duchamp sequence is, as is true of all my compositions since 1938, prismatic in character: in this case, each 11 measures of 5/4 (and the whole which is 11 x 11 measures) is phrased (and the whole divided into parts) according to the following 106 Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 154-9; 274-5. 107 Craig E. Adcock, “Marcel Duchamp’s Gap Music,” in Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde,” ed. Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 119-24. 108 James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 26-7. 159 relationships: 3,1,3,1,2,1. These numbers were derived from the time lengths given by the film itself as related to a pulse of 120 to the minute. By “derived,” I mean: arrived at from a desire to be with the film phrases at certain points and against or in “contrapuntal” relationship with it at other points.* The materials used to mute the strings of an ordinary grand piano, thus transforming its sound, are, in this case, fibrous weather-stripping, rubber and a single bolt. *”Counterpoints” not intended by me took place in the subsequent actual joining of film and sound track. 109 Cage’s concern for unintended “counterpoints” is notable, reflecting the growing concern between Cage and Cunningham for the choreomusical relationships in their dance collaborations. The use of a pre-programmed temporal space in which sonic and bodily events are coordinated would be the central tenant of the Cage/Cunningham aesthetic. Cage’s desire to distance the contrapuntal relationship between his own sonic articulations and the sexually distanced cinematic puns in Duchamp’s work reflect a similar coded reference to the fundamental dichotomy underpinning this group of artists. After the Duchamp segment Richter finishes with two final scenes, one by the American expatriate Alexander Calder, and culminating with his own segment to conclude the film. Following the dream sequence, the gangster awakes in a fury. A police officer enters and sides with the gangster, since he is able to provide identification specifying his profession, despite its illegal nature. The gangster steals Joe’s earnings, knocks him out and puts him in the closet. Meanwhile, a young girl and her blind grandfather enter into the waiting room. The girl begins bouncing a ball around the room, and as it reaches higher into the sky, the ball becomes fixed in the air with a number of 109 John Cage to Hans Richter, n.d., Hans Richter Papers, B.VII.3, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York, Reprinted in: “Program for Dreams That Money Can Buy,” Arnold Eagle Papers, Getty Research Institute. 160 other balls. The balls turn into a Calder mobile, and the next two scenes follow the kinetic rhythm of the sculptures. According to the script notes, it was Richter’s intention to have music for the segments by Edgard Varèse. 110 For the first dream, “Ballet,” Paul Bowles provided additional accompaniment, while David Diamond provided music to accompany the “Circus” dream. Despite the interesting camera work of cinematographers Arnold Eagle and Peter Gluckanok, the two Calder sections of the film are a far more simplistic than the dazzling work of Herbert Matter in the 1950 Museum of Modern Art Film on Calder, with an intricate prepared piano score by Cage, to be discussed in the following Chapter. Bowles and Diamond provide a simplistic score of playful accompaniment, light and breezy melodies that conservatively dance in a programmatic fashion to the mobiles. After the ballet, Joe awakes to speak with the blind man. The man propositions Joe with his own dreams, a myriad of Calder’s circus figurines, and the following segment is a montage of individual circus elements dancing across the screen, each manipulated by Calder’s hand. All of his most famous characters go through their motions: the sword swallower, the trapeze artist, and so on, while Diamond provides a circus-like accompaniment to their movements. After seeing the show, Joe agrees to the deal, and walks the man out of the room. The final scene, “Narcissus,” is directed by Richter himself, accompanied by music from Louis Appelbaum. Here, the film itself receives a final narrative, psychological, and musical summation of the events. In essence, the final “hero journey” 110 Hans Richter, “Dreams that Money Can Buy, Treatment I,” Hans Richter Archive C.IX.33, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 161 of Joe represents a full circle of psychological self-examination, both from the artistic and cinematic perspective. Joe’s horror dream begins with a series of shots of poker chips, while Joe narrates his own personal history, his place of origin and his self identity. The summation of this personal exposé ends with what the narrator describes as the “great disaster,” an explosion, that we must all one day face. A mix of atomic fears and psychological self-doubt, Joe’s introspection leads down a dark path of self mutilation. Sitting at a poker table, the objects around him begin to disintegrate, and Joe himself quite literally turns blue, to the admonition of his poker partners. “One day, in May, it suddenly happened. I met myself. I was not prepared for it when the unspeakable came true.” Joe’s existential self-awareness leads to a claustrophobic climax, as the objects of the room crowd around him. He narrowly escapes this schizophrenic space into the street. Following a cord reminiscent of Duchamp’s “16 Miles of String,” Joe climbs a ladder that leads into the sky, each rung disappearing under his feet as he ascends. The ascent into Babel is accompanied by a barrage of commentary that attacks Joe’s every thought. The ladder leads to an apartment with a sleeping woman, while colored brake drums hanging from strings clatter around him. Much like the ending of Meshes, Joe smiles into the eyes of a lover while holding a knife in his hand. They embrace, and as he brings the knife to her neck, an onslaught of noise from a passing train tracks us to an image of blood on the ground. In another room, Joe sees the statue of Narcissus from his office. Like Meshes and At Land, Joe realizes a way out: the events of the dream are shown in reverse. Joe’s final climactic soliloquy provides a clear parallel to the final moments of The Voice in The City Wears a Slouch Hat, as he descends into the ocean. 162 All kinds of events passed through my mind, some of them happened long ago. I remembered them without any apparent order or significance…but the further I came, the more all events lost their isolated meaning, everything seemed to happen all at once, and in the same space – it was quite a new experience. Then I decided to tear up my one-way ticket, and to stay where I was. I had not come so far only to jump at the wrong moment. I was out for the great embarrassment and I liked it. I would have gone on anyway, no matter what happened. There is so much ahead of me – so much that I have to find out. 111 This deeply prophetic and psychological ending of the film is in surprising contrast to the original theme of the early treatments, even when compared to the final draft version. In this draft, which follows the early scenes with Joe more or less in sync, the final “Narcissus” scene has quite a different ending, one that echoes the corporate interest of the earlier treatments. In this setting, Joe is confronted with the landlord, who barges in after the Calder sequence, demanding the rent. Since Joe had lost his earnings to the gangster, he is unable to pay, and as soon as the landlord realizes the situation, he decides to instigate a hostile takeover of the enterprise. Three businessmen with suits come in, echoing the opening contract scene, and draft articles of incorporation of “Dreams that Money Can Buy,” to which Joe submissively approves. A new character, the girl of Joe’s dreams, dressed in a bridal gown, enters the room and nods approvingly. She helps the dazed Joe up from the ground, and the group beams with satisfaction. 112 As the notes and treatments indicate, Richter was determined from the outset that his film be a profitable venture that could reflect the commercial viability of an independent avant-garde cinema. Not surprisingly then, virtually all of the stark 111 Dreams That Money Can Buy, 35mm, 99min, Art of This Century Films, 1947. 112 Hans Richter, “Outline of the Framestory of “Dreams that Money Can Buy,” Hans Richter Papers, C. IX. 16, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 163 commentaries on commercialism are abandoned in favor of a loosely-critical noir plot. The publicity campaign for the film was explicit in outlining the potential profitability for an experimental feature-length film. Life magazine called it “a remarkable venture in movie making,” due to the fact that it was a “surrealist movie whose producers expect to make money out of it.” 113 Amos Vogel inaugurated his new Cinema 16 screening series at the end of 1947, and in 1948 he screened both Richter and Deren’s films to a rapidly growing audience. In 1949, after coming into contact with San Francisco filmmaker Sidney Peterson, Vogel programmed one of Peterson’s earliest films, Horror Dream, a dance film choreographed by Marian van Tuyl, set to Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939). 114 Horror Dream The Cinema 16 program for Horror Dream described it simply as “the visualization of the anxiety dreams of a dancer.” 115 In line with the trance film lineage, Peterson’s work functions as a halfway point between dance documentary and a purely filmic expression of what would come to be defined as the dance film. As numerous authors from Dance Observer were beginning to realize, the camera itself became an integral part of the new artwork, and the musical element of the film was thus susceptible 113 “Six Ultramodern Artists Supply Dreams for New Film,” Life Magazine, 2 December, 1946, 85. 114 Scott Macdonald, Ed., Cinema 16: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 2002), program for May 18 th , 1949, 114. 115 Scott Macdonald, Ed., Cinema 16: Documents toward a History of the Film Society, program for May 18 th , 1949, 114. 164 to a new layering of information that interplays with editing and camera work as well as the actual physical choreography of the dancer. Peterson opens the film with a silent tracking shot of the primary dancer, performed by van Tuyl. The first thirty seconds focus exclusively on her leg movements, and the coloring of her leggings, a dark reddish purple hue, become a direct cue to the opening title insert. Horror Dream takes on a violent aspect of psychological invasion of the human body, and opens up another primary characteristic of the dance film: the provocative gaze of the female body, delicately gesturing for the camera. After the title sequence, the silent tracking shot continues up van Tuyl’s body as she lays prostrate on the ground, her eyes closed in a coffin-like pose. The ensemble of dancers lift her body and carry it away from the bed, placing it on the ground, and as they retreat the opening sliding tones of Cage’s variable frequency records cue a shot of their feet. The circular movement of the dancers’ feet becomes the primary ensemble gesture. Throughout the film, the ensemble dancers are veiled behind their Chinese hats, and many of these gestures reflect an orientalism reminiscent of the sliding tone characteristics of Cage’s score. 116 Here we are given perhaps the most direct correlation between the probing aspects of the sliding tones and cinematic probing. As mentioned in Chapter 1, Gundlach’s psychological experiments drove his test patients to the brink of hysteria, and as Cage pushes the clutch on the turntable, the anxiety of Van Tuyl is enacted in the erratic 116 For more on the use of sliding tones by Henry Cowell and John Cage, see: Nancy Yunwa Rao, “Cowell’s Sliding Tone and the American Ultramodernist Tradition,” American Music 23/3 (Autumn 2005): 281-323. 165 movements of the dancers. They walk aimlessly in and out of a corridor, and their primary dance step is a crouched leg kick. Their heads pointed toward the ground, the chorus extends the circular foot movement to a rotational gesture between a set of chairs. A sort of “musical chairs,” this repetitive motion continues during the first variable frequency section of the piece. As the muted piano enters, the ensemble lifts Van Tuyl from the ground (to the accompaniment of the first large cymbal roll), and we see her face in a direct shot as she begins a short solo dance. Peterson tracks her movements with an aerial shot in half time, and shots alternate between the feet of the ensemble dancers and van Tuyl as she gestures toward them. During the second piano interlude, a slow motion shot of van Tuyl’s feet, now barefoot, leads to her first real interaction with the ensemble. With each broad gesture, she seems to be cueing the ensemble dancers around her, fighting against and with them at various intervals. By this point, the opposition between the muted piano (van Tuyl) and the hysterical clutch probes (the ensemble) becomes clear. She pauses in the corner during the record segment, and during the third piano interlude, two ensemble dancers unfold a long shawl on the ground, alternately flapping at each end to create a ripple wave across the fabric. Van Tuyl tracks these movements from the side and the ensemble pair fold up the shawl and retreat with her behind a façade. During the fourth piano interlude, van Tuyl folds up the shawl, then wraps it around herself. Her dance becomes a “hysterical” movement, and while the ensemble sits still she unfolds the shawl once more, pulling it at one end against the dancers. The rope game retreats again, and during the final interlude the dancers surround van Tuyl on chairs, where they perform a series of leg gestures and hand clapping 166 movements in a final climax. The dancers begin to push van Tuyl back and forth in a final movement that slows to the final diminuendo of the piece. As was mentioned in Chapter 1, the overall sectional structure of Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 1 had numerous parallels to Deren’s circular structure of Meshes, and with Peterson’s dance film one can see many of the choreographic similarities between the mediums. The psychodrama of the protagonist, played out through the gestures of the ensemble dancers, functions in the same method as the symbolism of objects in Deren’s film. As a poetic movement, the dancers gestures exude a sense of meaning to the piece, yet evade any direct interpretation. What remains is the overall partitioning structure of events unfolded over time, yet enigmatic within any given movement; a micro-macrocosmic form of meaning that continued to adhere to Cage’s concept of “Grace” and “Clarity.” 1947 marked a pivotal year in Cage’s career and in New York in general. The longstanding bastion of American music, the journal Modern Music, closed its doors. Meanwhile, Cage collaborated with a new group of artists for the publication of the journal Possibilities, where Harold Rosenberg famously introduced Jackson Pollock’s work in “action painting,” and Cage interviewed Edgard Varèse, their relationship having been solidified after the longstanding feud regarding the use of the term “Organized Sound.” In 1948 Cage completed a large-scale orchestral ballet work, The Seasons, as well as the series of prepared piano works, the Sonatas and Interludes, several of which were dedicated to his new friend Richard Lippold. By 1949, Cage, like Deren, had received his first Guggenheim grant, which he used to travel to Europe with 167 Cunningham, who dutifully reported back to the journal Dance Observer with “Postcards from Europe.” By the early 1950s, filmmakers were beginning to take hold of the trance genre of filmmaking with such fecundity that supporters such as Joseph Campbell begin to lament that the genre had already run its course. 117 In the meantime, artists like Cage and Lippold were beginning to forge a new aesthetic discourse in opposition to the escalating popularity of abstract expressionism. Questions of figure-ground relationships brought about a new exploration of temporality and space that would form the crux of Cage’s infamous aesthetic of silence in 1952, a topic to which the following Chapter addresses. 117 As Campbell remarked, after having served as a judge for many years for the foundation, “God, they were boring though. There were two kinds of film: one was the lonesome young man or young girl wandering the streets of an unfriendly city. And then there was some kind of little thing done with drawings—the animated cartoon thing.” Stephen and Robin Larsen, A Fire In The Mind: The Life of Joseph Campbell, 355. 168 CHAPTER 3 Losing the Ground: Chance, Transparency and Cinematic Space, 1948-1958 Introduction: Defining the Indefinable Cage’s works from the 1950s are the most discussed and theorized of his career. Thus, an investigation of this period necessitates an examination of the ideological goals not only of Cage’s program, but also of the network of criticism and scholarship now generally defined as “Cage Studies.” 1 Contemporary scholarship addressing chance and the legacy of Cage’s aesthetic of silence during the 1950s falls into two categories. Theoretical-musical discussions focus on the transformation of spatiotemporal organization within Cage’s rhythmic structures. The increased use of silence within certain moments of works such as Four Walls (1944) and Music for Marcel Duchamp (1946), coupled with the disillusion of harmonic grammar in transitional works such as String Quartet in Four Parts (1950) and a fascination with the works of Erik Satie (1866- 1925) arguably led to Cage’s adoption of complex precompositional organization of musical materials that were then grafted onto a temporal structure using various methods of randomization. Silence thus evolved according to this analysis out of the temporal mapping of musical actions in a specific time-structure. 2 Chance, and the rhetoric 1 While often discussed informally, the term “Cage Studies” was inaugurated in the popular press by composer John Adams. John Adams, “The Zen of Silence,” New York Times, 19 Nov., 2010. 2 As many scholars have noted, Cage’s most famous proclamation 4’33” (1952) indeed contains a strict rhythmic structure of temporal duration, and the published version of the score is written with a strict proportional notation indicating the larger chance-determined rhythmic structure of the piece as a whole. Among the core musicological discussions exploring these implications are: James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993); Kyle Gann, No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 169 surrounding the use of the Chinese oracular method of the I-Ching is read an outgrowth of Cage’s compositional dilemmas. Cage’s appropriation of a potpourri of Buddhist, South Asian, and Christian mystic philosophical and spiritual quotations functioned as a coordinated set of heuristics that supported an aesthetic that was, according to this model, primarily driven by musical concerns. 3 Additional readings of Cage’s use of chance and silence point to the performative aspects these works, citing them as precursors to performance and conceptual art. Cage’s effort to map out a definitive history and technical explanation of American experimental music led to a series of theoretical writings on the nature of indeterminate actions and techniques. Implicit in these writings is a justification of the cultural significance of artists surrounding Cage such as Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns identified as the “Neo-Avant-Garde.” 4 Cage’s aesthetic of silence was buttressed against the theories and techniques of Abstract Expressionism, particularly the popular attention garnered by Jackson Pollock’s drip (or pour) technique. In addition, increasing divisions between the compositional methods of strict or “total” serialism versus 4’33” (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2010); David W. Bernstein, “Cage and High Modernism,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, ed. David Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), 186- 213; Paul van Emmerik, “An Imaginary Grid: Rhythmic Structure in Cage’s work up to circa 1950,” in John Cage: Music, Philosophy, and Intention 1933-1950, ed. David Patterson (NY: Routledge, 2002), 217- 238; and Deborah Campana, “As Time Passes,” in Writings Through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art, Ed. David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001), 120-136. 3 This conclusion is largely the result of David W. Patterson’s often-cited study, Appraising the Catchwords, c1942-1959: John Cage’s Asian-Derived Rhetoric and the Historical Reference of Black Mountain College (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1996). 4 The term “Neo-Avant-Garde” is largely the result of the work of Branden W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003). See also: Julia Robinson, “John Cage and Investiture: Unmanning the System,” in The Anarchy of Silence: John Cage and Experimental Art (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2009), 54-111, and Branden W. Joseph, “Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity,” in The Anarchy of Silence, 210-238. 170 indeterminacy within the Darmstadt School in Europe point to larger international tensions surrounding 1950s Cold War politics. 5 This Chapter examines three films involving Cage in the context of this historical and theoretical debate, a debate that looms over the question of Cage’s legacy as a composer and as a harbinger of conceptual and performance art in the 1960s. The first two films, Works of Calder (1950) and Jackson Pollock 1951, engage in the cultural and compositional issues outlined above. Cinema and the cinematic space functioned as one of the many grounds for theoretical contention during a period that sought to clearly define American art and defend its cultural significance. Rapid technological advances in all aspects of American industrialism and domesticity paralleled this “rush to the patent office” mentality among artists, and Cage eagerly incorporated these new technological spaces into his aesthetic. Magnetic tape quickly usurped film phonography as the preferred medium for sound reproduction and manipulation. The shift from a visual and tactile manipulation of sound on the optical track to a virtual space of the analog coding of sound led to a new theoretical discussion surrounding perception and cognition. Prompted by the pressures of Cold War politics, the “aesthetic” of silence shifted toward an ethical argument stressing the necessity of invention and experimentation. Cage’s use 5 Much of this discussion stems from the publication of the Boulez-Cage correspondence and commentary by Jean-Jacques Nattiez: The Boulez-Cage Correspondence, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993); For studies on the cultural politics of indeterminacy and the relationship between the United States and Germany in the Cold War, see: Amy C. Beal, New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany From the Zero Hour to Reunification (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2006), Rebecca Y. Kim, In No Uncertain Terms: The Cultural Politics of John Cage’s Indeterminacy (PhD Dissertation, Columbia University, 2008), and Philip Max Gentry, The Age of Anxiety: Music, Politics, and McCarthyism, 1948-1954 (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2008). 171 of abstract notational methods reflected his interest in the virtual space of sound reproduction and manipulation, echoed in the summary statements from his “Landscape” series during the same period. Finally, this Chapter explores recently recovered archival documentation on the relationship between Cage and the artist Richard Lippold, including a film conceived by Cage and Lippold utilizing chance procedures in the editing process. Their mutual concern for geometric abstraction, elaborate mathematical structures, and an open-ended spiritual discourse on the nature of the work of art sparked an important dialogue leading to the period of Cage’s most dramatic artistic gestures in the early 1950s. Cage repeatedly referred to the effect of “seeing through” the visual space of Lippold’s works, much to the same effect as Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-1923). Through graphic notation, transparencies, and chance procedures, Cage’s sonic efforts at “hearing through” the phenomenal present were founded on similar constructivist principles espoused by this largely forgotten American sculptor. Performative Space/Virtual Space: “Forerunners of Modern Music” (1949) and “Lecture on Nothing” (1950) Among Cage’s many writings surrounding his move toward chance in the 1950s, two stand out in the context of cinematic space and temporal-musical structure. The first essay, “Forerunners of Modern Music,” continued many of the themes begun in “The Future of Music: Credo,” with a new emphasis on magnetic tape. Cage maintained an empirical division of sound into scientific attributes, including the four characteristics of 172 pitch, timbre, loudness, and duration, along with its opposite, silence. Duration is privileged in this hierarchy in that it includes both sound and silence, and a structure based on duration is thus Cage’s foundational claim. In the section of the essay titled “claim,” Cage frames his summation with the legalese of a patent specification by stating, “Any sounds of any qualities and pitches (known or unknown, definite or indefinite), and contexts of these, simple or multiple, are natural and conceivable within a rhythmic structure which equally embraces silence.” 6 After explicitly noting this connection to patent specifications in the essay, Cage goes on to provide an example: Just as art as sand painting (art for the now-moment rather than for posterity’s museum civilization) becomes a held point of view, adventurous workers in the field of synthetic music (e.g. Norman McLaren) find that for practical and economic reasons work with magnetic wires (any music so made can quickly and easily be erased, rubbed off) is preferable to that with film. 7 Cage’s reference to sand painting was an explicit polemic against the drip or pour technique of Jackson Pollock. Cage delivered a lecture on the topic in 1949 to the 8 th Street Artists’ Club, the hub of intellectual discussion surrounding Abstract Expressionism, and would likely have been read as a direct provocation against Pollock’s technique. 8 Never mentioning him by name, the ensuing discussion attempts to transport 6 John Cage, “Forerunners of Modern Music,” [1948] in Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1961), 65. 7 John Cage, “Forerunners of Modern Music,” 65. 8 Cage delivered the lecture on January 29, 1949, but the original materials for the lecture have been lost. As he noted in an interview with Irving Sandler, “I was promoting the notion of impermanent art, and I was extending it certainly away from Indian sand painting to our own work as we were now making it…I was not thinking of gestures,” and when asked about the connection to Pollock, Cage elided by saying “I can see how it could have been, but his work had a permanence…I was fighting at that point the notions of art itself as something which we preserve,” Irving Sandler Interview with John Cage, Irving Sandler Papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA, Box 4, Folder 12. 173 this artistic space of the generally-defined “canvas” into a virtual realm of technological mediums of magnetic tape and wire. Indeed, the parallel between any sort of recording device, in which the duration is predetermined by the amount of recording material available, seems closely akin to Cage’s temporal-musical grid structure in early chance compositions. 9 Such an observation once again points to the tactile model of “visual music” filmmakers such as Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren. McLaren worked with similar methods of direct manipulation of the optical soundtrack and hand-painted film as Oskar Fischinger. Cage had sought out McLaren on a number of occasions, and continued a brief dialogue with the filmmaker in the 1950s. 10 In his carefully placed footnotes for the section, Cage again vacillates between descriptions of a temporal “sound-canvas” and the relationship between painterly space and virtual space. Following the statement on sand painting, Cage’s footnotes bespeak of the connection discussed in Chapter 2 regarding “significant form” and the poetic, ethical theories of cinematic space espoused by Maya Deren: This is the very nature of the dance, of the performance of music, or any other art requiring performance (for this reason, the term “sand painting” is used: there is a tendency in painting (permanent pigments), as in poetry (printing, binding), to be 9 Liz Kotz has noted this connection in the context of a general “time canvas” structuring or ordering during the period: Liz Kotz, “Cagean Structures,” in The Anarchy of Silence: John Cage and Experimental Art (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani, 2009), 126-127. 10 Cage likely was introduced to McLaren’s work through Peter Yates, who also provided him contacts with the Whitney brothers in Los Angeles, who were conducting similar sound-on-film works, but Cage did not seem to follow-through with these connections during his visits to Los Angeles in the 1940s. Cage sought out McLaren through Boulez, as he outlined in several letters, Pierre Boulez to John Cage, October 1952, Pierre Boulez to John Cage, 2 November 1952, repr. in The Boulez-Cage Correspondence, 136-140. 174 secure in the thingness of a work, and thus to overlook, and place insurmountable obstacles in the path of, instantaneous ecstasy). 11 In the following note, Cage explains his break from the temporal structure of sound-on- film techniques and the abstract space of magnetic tape: Twenty-four or n frames per second is the “canvas” upon which this music is written; thus, in a very obvious way, the material itself demonstrates the necessity for time (rhythmic) structure. With magnetic means, freedom from the frame of film means exists, but the principle of rhythmic structure should hold over as, in geometry, a more elementary theorem remains as a premise to make possible the obtaining of those more advanced. 12 As Julia Robinson argues, Cage’s used of veiled polemic within a generalized discourse on the virtual space of technology is part of a larger campaign she describes as “symbolic investiture.” Taking from the psychoanalytic case of Daniel Paul Schreber, where the symbolic power relationships within society are marked by founding moments of impasse and conflict that alter the structure of social and institutional authority, Robinson inserts Cage’s program into a paradigm of social discourse surrounding postwar American art. Cage’s understanding of the juncture in art criticism surrounding Pollock and the Artists’ Club prompted his critical negotiation of this power structure. As Robinson explains: In Cage’s midst, Pollock introduced the “accidental,” the dimension of chance, and the sense of something improvised, in lieu of an appreciable technique. There was also, of course, the grand Pollockian paradox: radical “deskilling” (from painting to dripping), and, at one and the same time, an incontrovertibly original painterly product. As the flood of vacillating pronouncements by contemporary critics made clear, Pollock had somehow exposed the false ground of criticism – 11 John Cage, “Forerunners of Modern Music,” [1948], 65. 12 John Cage, “Forerunners of Modern Music,” 65. 175 its rhetorical, performative projection of the symbolic as a feature of reality – opening a space for invention, which Cage systematically filled. 13 Robinson points to the dichotomy between “Forerunners” and Cage’s monumental attack on the Abstract Expressionist model in 1950, “Lecture on Nothing,” as the moment of impasse between two models of discourse edged against one another in the New York community of artists and intellectuals. Delivered to the Artists’ Club, Cage’s polemic introduced chance as an alternative operational method under the veil of a larger expanse of East Asian, Taoist, Buddhist, and Zen dictums in a new model of resistance. As a “composed talk,” “Lecture on Nothing” inaugurated the Cage event-speech, a performative act marked by Cage’s deadpan delivery style of calculated seriousness and dry wit emblematized by the now infamous opening statement of: “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it.” 14 Cage organized the lecture according to a strict temporal rhythmic structure, dividing individual lines into units with the same micro-macrocosmic organization as his musical compositions. In creating such a work, Cage effectively transplanted the musical event into a poetic, and in turn visual, event. As P. Adams Sitney has argued, Cage’s poetic structure is in many ways a perpetuation of the homiletic tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 15 Much like the diffusion of modern Gnostic principles of the “new Left” of American intellectualism in the postwar era discussed in Chapter Two, Cage’s use of the pulpit to proclaim a moment of 13 Julia Robinson, “John Cage and Investiture: Unmanning the System,” in The Anarchy of Silence, 58. 14 John Cage, “Lecture on Nothing,” [1950], in Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1961), 109. 15 P. Adams Sitney, Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008), 7-8. 176 transcendental cultural impasse reflected a growing trend among artists, and especially filmmakers, of rising to the podium with a sense of religious necessity to describe their art. Emerson’s “Transparent Eye,” a term elucidated by scholar Charles Olson (and friend of Cage’s at Black Mountain College in the late 1940s), functioned as a metaphor for the primacy of visual in the experiential action of American poetic oratory. As Sitney argues, the quickening of visual experience, brought on by the acceleration of transportation and communications technology, resulted in a visual poetic metaphor of rapid change over the vastness of landscape. Walt Whitman’s orphic poetry personified this action of successive and rapid observation, not as a projection of the self, but as a witness to the nature of his surroundings. The invention of cinema and the concurrent transmutation of a virtual space in magnetic tape enabled these cues to be translated into a poetic vision of time and space. 16 Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing” (1950) utilized this orphic model of successive visual imagery in passages such as the following, (reproduced with an approximation of the original visual layout): Re- gard it as something seen momentarily , as though from a window while traveling . If across Kansas , then, of course, Kansas . Arizona is more interesting, almost too interesting , especially for a New-Yorker who is being interested in spite of himself in everything. Now he knows he 16 The alchemical reference here is apt. As some scholars have noticed, a distinct parallel between theosophical ideas and alchemy emerged with the group surrounding Cage, especially David Tudor. See for example: Eric Smigel, Alchemy of the Avant-Garde: David Tudor and the New Music of the 1950s (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Southern California, 2003). 177 needs the Kansas in him . Kansas is like nothing on earth , and for a New Yorker very refreshing. 17 In addition, Cage foregrounds the rhythmic structure in sections such as the following: At this par-ticular moment, we are passing through the fourth part of a unit which is the second unit in the second large part of this talk . It is a little bit like passing through Kansas . This, now, is the end of that second unit . 18 This last section shows a clear affinity with structural film, examined further in the following Chapter. Sitney positions Cage’s lecture within the discourse of 1950s filmmakers, solidified by the many speeches and lectures given by Maya Deren on the poetics of film in New York at the same time. Cage’s discourse formed another dichotomy similar to that found with Jackson Pollock in the work of Stan Brakhage. Brakhage’s devotion to mythopoetic cinematography made both he and Cage “coequal heirs of the Beautiful Necessity,” according to Sitney, although they admittedly “invoke it to opposite ends.” 19 Cage’s brief involvement with film during this period provides a fitting example of the conflicts and issues outlined above. In the first film, Works of Calder by Swiss filmmaker Herbert Matter, Cage provided a score of prepared piano and magnetic tape music to a documentary that explored the kinetic sculpture of Calder’s mobiles. In this 17 John Cage, “Lecture on Nothing,” [1950] in Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1961), 110. 18 John Cage, “Lecture on Nothing,” 111. 19 P. Adams Sitney, Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson, 6. 178 film both motion and space are juxtaposed against the backdrop of Cage’s own acoustic articulation of time-space organization, evoking imagery of the technological sublime and the interpenetration of nature and sculpture with the naturalistic landscape of rural America. In the second film, a documentary on Jackson Pollock by Hans Namuth, Cage’s colleague Morton Feldman provided musical accompaniment to the frenetic energy of action painting captured in motion photography. Observing the temporal portraiture of Pollock in Namuth’s documentary, the essence of action painting is revealed as a comparable filmic act of motion in time. Comparing the parallel ideas of gesture in music and in painting, the film itself functions as one of the clearest examples of the essence of a Pollock painting as a living, ephemeral event. In addition, the film formed a documentary function by establishing a particular rugged Americanism in the Pollock aesthetic, an image perpetuated as his career began to flourish in the national spotlight, thus setting the ground for a performative conflict between the ideology of Abstract Expressionism and Cage’s oppositional rhetoric. Capturing Kinetic Sculpture: Works of Calder (1950) Alexander Calder began his career has an engineer, a spot welder in a Studebaker factory in Indiana. In 1925 he molded his first sculpture: a “rooster sundial” made of scrap wire and other waste materials found in the industrial tract of the Midwestern rustbelt. As Francisco Calvo Serraller has noted, scrap iron provided a powerful and subversive aesthetic connotation for the historical avant-garde. To capture and take hold of this waste was simultaneously an expression of Futurist liberation and Dadaist nihilism, 179 synthetically reconstructing a new art form that redefined the base materials for a work of art. 20 For both Cage and Calder, rhythm remained the unifying element in acoustic and visual space. As discussed in Chapter 1, Cage’s “micro-macrocosmic” durational organization in early percussion and electroacoustic works implied a haptic, kinesthetic relationship to bodily awareness. Choreutics and the ethical treatment of cinematic space and dance form discussed in Chapter 2 furthered these claims. A parallel can be found in virtually any one of Calder’s wire mobiles, where the proportions between different lines of attachment are essential for maintaining the balance between successive sections of the sculpture. Each series of attachments blossoms from the prior in an organic growth of asymmetrical proportions. In Calder’s mobiles the dynamic between geometric proportions and organic abstraction forms the nucleus idea of kinetic sculpture. The weightlessness and freedom of movement are contained within a specific articulation of three dimensional space. Air currents allow for the proportioned movement within a predetermined structure, a movement that is in interplay both with the unpredictable fluctuations of the environment and the changing perspective of the viewer. The periodic viewing of successive perspectives becomes a poetic act of self realization connecting environment and structure with human gesture. Within this dynamic, the optical and the auditory have the same ground. Acoustic waveforms and auditory realization are equally constrained by laws of physics, yet contain a limited amount of freedom in movement within a specific space. In Cage’s music, the same idea is articulated in the compositional 20 Francisco Calvo Serraller, “Calder: Gravity and Grace,” in Calder: Gravity and Grace, ed. Carmen Giménez and Alexander S. C. Rower (New York: Phaidon, 2004), 9. 180 method of proportional duration. In essence, this is the definition of rhythm. In the relative space of time, rhythm is only defined by ratio proportions, a self-referential perspective perceived by the listener. This ratio must be felt within the body, evoking a connection between the ratio of bodily movement and existence. Capturing this essence became one of the principal obsessions of Herbert Matter. A student of Ferdinand Léger in Paris during the twenties, the Swiss-born Matter immigrated to the United States in 1939, giving up painting for photography and graphic design. He quickly found success in the studio of Condé Nast, photographing for Vogue, Harpar’s Bazaar, and Fortune. Like Moholy-Nagy, Matter realized the expressive potential of photography, particularly in the observation of motion. In 1939 he developed a photographic method of stroboscopic light and extended exposure that highlighted motion in a single frame similar to Marey’s “chronophotographie géometrique” discussed in Chapter 1. In a series of photographs of his wife Mercedes, Matter captured her executing moves from the dance method of Mary Wigman (protégé of Cage collaborator Hanya Holm in Seattle). Matter used the same technique to illustrate the motion of Calder mobiles in space for an article by critic James Johnson Sweeney in 1939. 21 In a single frame, the photograph was able to represent the extent of material space that the mobile could occupy while in motion. The dizzying spirals that encapsulate the frame give a breadth to the mobiles unavailable at any given moment, yet experienced over time. The strict timing of the stroboscopic light projected movement into the single frame, and 21 For more on Matter’s stroboscope experiments, see: Ellen G. Landau, “Action/Re-Action: The Artistic Friendship of Herbert Matter and Jackson Pollock,” in Pollock Matters, ed. Ellen G. Landau (Boston: Charles S. and Isabella V. McMullen Museum of Art, 2007), 15-17. 181 summarized the proportional relationships between the trajectory of the individual nodes of the sculpture. Like Moholy-Nagy, Matter was interested in the relationship between these actions and other phenomena observed in nature. Matter’s transition to film functioned as an inevitable outgrowth of his interest in time-lapse photography. In 1948 he began plans for a documentary short on Calder’s sculptures funded by actor Burgess Meredith’s New World Films Inc., and later purchased by the Museum of Modern Art for exclusive non-commercial distribution. 22 Burgess Meredith (best known for his work in the early Twilight Zone episodes and as the villainous Penguin in the Batman television series, as well as Mickey Goldmill in the Rocky series) narrated the film. Works of Calder summarizes many of the topics outlined above in a brief series of episodic juxtapositions of narrative and superimposed rhythmic comparisons between kinetic sculpture and nature. Starring his six-year-old son Alex (named after his godfather, Alexander Calder), Matter sought to unify the rhythmic elements of Calder mobiles with superimpositions of images of nature. He described the final product as, “a poetic, almost abstract interpretation of an artist’s work rather than a simple document,” creating some tension between the artist, producer and director. 23 22 “Contract agreement, Burgess Meredith, Alexander Calder, and Herbert Matter,” 30 June 1948, Herbert Matter Papers, Series 1, Box 254, F. 1, Stanford University Special Collections Library, Stanford, CA. During the filming of Works of Calder, Meredith was busy taking over directorial duties for the classic French mystery noir The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949) after leading actor Charles Laughton threatened to leave the project after disagreements with director Irving Allen. Allen later bought all rights to the film from RKO and removed it from circulation. 23 Matter described the initial structure to both Meredith and Calder, and Meredith’s response was less than enthusiastic, noting “This is a picture about Sandy and not an interpretation of him. Furthermore, the nature thing has been done so many times before.” Burgess Meredith to Herbert Matter 18 October 1948, Herbert Matter Papers, Series 1, Box 257, F.2, Stanford University Special Collections Library. 182 Matter shot the first portion of the film in the East Hamptons and Montauk in the summer of 1949. He explained the general concept for this section in his notes: …an abstract presentation of movements in nature through a child’s perception (emphasis on things closely seen). It would start with Pundy [Alex] playing on the beach…there would follow a section, integrated rhythmically with music, of the elements around him…this part will reveal the parallel of such movements in nature to part three. 24 Superimposing a Calder mobile with the rolling motion of waves, the opening scene moves between several different assemblages of texture, beginning with the ocean waves, and followed by blurred images of light reflecting off the mobiles. The editing of these scenes maintains a clear visual rhythm of juxtapositions, cadencing with each transition of texture and light. A striking lens flare floods the screen as the sun penetrates a shot of trees slowly moving with the rush of wind. The lens flare suddenly molds into a shot of Alex, sitting in the sand on the beach, reflecting a shaving mirror toward the camera. The flares obscure his face, and his mild expression of curiosity continues in an erratic rhythm of reflected light. Matter’s deliberate evocation of the rhythms of nature and the rhythm in Calder’s sculpture is self evident in the section. However, perhaps without realizing it, Matter’s use of a dreamlike fantasy series of ocean shots in the sequence closely mirrors the trance genre. In Works of Calder, Matter’s use of trance is transported into the innocence of a child’s observations of the world. The difficulty in distinguishing between dreams and reality becomes the narrative trope of Calder’s mobiles, where the dream state of the child is used to demonstrate the plasticity between environment and the mobiles. The 24 Herbert Matter to Burgess Meredith, 1949, Herbert Matter Papers, Series 1, Box 257, F.2, Stanford University Special Collections Library. 183 transformation in the film thus moves from an opening segment of the child transfixed with objects in nature to an encounter with Calder shot in his converted farmhouse studio in Roxbury, Connecticut. This is followed by a dream state that leads to the abstract portion of the mobiles in space at the end of the film. …an abstract presentation of Sandy’s world – a parallel in movement and rhythm to part One. All of the all the shots of his objects whatever their environment – whether sky, space, or sea – [are to be] related visually as part of a rhythmic integration of movement, form, color, and music working up to the wonderful part of the whole bunch of them moving together in dark space. 25 The Natural Acoustic: Cage’s Prepared Piano The primary dynamic in the film became the evocation of a childlike dream fantasy set against the rhythmic integration of nature and art in the filming of the mobiles. Set in motion, the filmic aspect of the mobiles demonstrates the rhythmic ratios of the mobiles and their reflection in organic forms in nature. However, the juncture between the two remained with Cage’s score. As was the case in Dreams That Money Can Buy, Matter and Meredith originally planned to commission a score from Edgard Varèse, but the project eventually came to Cage, who at the time was still in Europe on a Guggenheim fellowship. As Matter’s notes indicate, he was deeply concerned with the rhythmic integration of sound and image, and Cage’s work clearly followed Matter’s vision. 26 25 Herbert Matter to Burgess Meredith, 1949, Herbert Matter Papers, Stanford University Special Collections Library. 26 The original proposals between Matter and Meredith mention Varèse, and it is unclear why he passed up to commission. Cage’s letters from abroad to Matter repeatedly asked for an upfront commission fee of $300.00 as well airfare back to the United States, but it is unclear whether he received any such payment for the work. John Cage letters to Herbert Matter, 1949, Herbert Matter Papers, Series 1, Box 255, f. 3, Stanford University Special Collections Library. 184 Cage’s score consisted of an equally strict integration of rhythmic structure in two sections for prepared piano which surround a central movement of recorded noises in Calder’s studio. The instrumentation thus reflects the same dynamic as the filmic aspects of Matter’s score. First, the prepared piano functions much like the dissolving grammar of Matter’s photomontage of nature and mobile. Developed over the course of a decade, the prepared piano deliberately subverts the traditional mechanical function of the piano by inserting items between the strings to create novel sounds from the altered vibrations. 27 Works of Calder ended up being one of Cage’s most elaborate preparations, with 54 different items used for 36 strings. While the definition of “natural” music remains a problematic term in the context of Cage’s later use of the term “nature,” if one can take “natural” as meaning simply the physical laws of the overtone series, the term remains apt. The mechanical sounds of screws, weather stripping and bamboo create a new palette of mechanized sound that still subvert the overtones of a piano tuned with equal temperament, an effect quite similar to the floating metal objects of the industrialized world set against the backdrop of nature. An examination of just the opening series of shots organized by Cage illustrates the parallel between acoustic and visual metaphors in the piece, and their unifying element of rhythm. (See Example 3.1) Beginning with the first e 1 , (prepared with a strip of rubber on all three strings and two screws each on strings 1 and 2), the overtones of the e 1 create a characteristic prepared piano sforzando sound through the dampening effect of the rubber 27 The history of Cage’s prepared piano was first outlined in “How The Piano Came to be Prepared,” in Richard Bunger, The Well-Prepared Piano (San Pedro: Litoral Arts Press, 1981). 185 and the metallic screws. The overtones are created by the placement of the screw on a particular node of the piano string 1 13/16 inches from the piano damper. 28 The resulting aural effect of this detailed preparation is both familiar and new. Example 3.1: Works of Calder (1950), systems 1-4, Written vs. Sounding 28 This transcription analysis is based on the 2002 recording by Margaret Leng Tan, Mode 106 “The Works for Piano Vol. 4,” Mode Records. Cage’s original recording contains similar overtone structures, but each preparation of the piano creates slightly different aural structures based on personal taste and the exact length of the piano used. Cage certainly was aware of this discrepancy, and at one point he specified the model of piano to be used in each performance. Later he became more comfortable with the variations in preparations. See: John Cage, “How the Piano Came to be prepared,” [1972] repr. in Empty Words (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1979), 8. As one of Cage’s last students, Leng Tan worked closely with Cage for her piano preparations, especially for Works of Calder, which included a detailed archival analysis of the original score. Margaret Leng Tan, email correspondence, May 2009. 186 The tuning of the string reverberates as a familiar structure of sound that would emanate from the piano, yet the metallic shimmer of the nodal intervention disrupts this structure in a conflict of acoustics. 29 After three measures, the following b 1 creates an equally confusing sense of acoustic structure and mechanical intervention. A fifth above the first note e 1 , this note was already heard in the overtone structure of the e 1 , and due to the particular nodal placement of the preparation, (a bolt and a piece of bamboo 3/8 inch from the damper), a c 3 is heard simultaneously with the clunking sound of the bamboo. The next note resolves the c 3 to d 3 , followed by another octave projection of the b 1 to b 2 . The preparation on this note creates an overtone note g 1 , which then becomes the nodal harmonic for the next g 1 , along with a sympathetic vibration of eb 1 below. Thus, with both the notated score and the sounding harmonics, two levels of projection occur aurally over time. The phrases interpenetrate one another, giving an aural analog to the superimposition of images used by Matter. Cage intended to take this one step further in the film by superimposing recorded performances of a prepared piano line with altered preparation lengths along the harmonic nodes in order to create microtonal sound palettes and timbres, but the technology was not available in post-production. 30 Thus there are two levels of synchronicity between the visual and aural: first, the acoustic vibrations and 29 This analytical approach was only briefly mentioned in Richard Bunger’s study: The Well-Prepared Piano (San Pedro: Litoral Arts Press, 1981), and further developed in the recent work of Jeffrey Perry; Jeffry Perry, “Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano: Performance, Hearing and Analysis,” Music Theory Spectrum 27/1 (Spring 2005): 35-66. This approach closely aligns with Jonathan Bernard’s approach to pitch in the music of Edgard Varèse; see Jonathan W. Bernard, The Music of Edgard Varèse (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1987), 217-256. 30 John Cage, “A Few Ideas About Music and Films,” [1951] repr. in John Cage: Writer, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight, 1993), 65. 187 the transition between images undergoes a parallel transition and projection over time, and second, the corresponding rhythms of movement correlate to the motivic organization of the work. Within the same phrase, the rhythmic characteristics are maintained at the phrase length, with a subtle transmutation that evokes the free moving characteristics of the mobiles seen over time. Sketches and notes for the score indicate Cage’s strong desire to connect the acoustic sounds emanating from the prepared strings to the movement and rhythm of the mobiles. Cage took exact measurements of the film length in seconds, and drafted the original score in proportional notation. His method of organizing the film would have a direct influence on his layout of a later film experiment with Richard Lippold outlined below. Cage divided the film into 143 different shots, and included measurements of the exact timing (down to the fraction of a second), which then correlated to measures in the score. One measure was equal to one eighth note in the score, and each system contains nine measures. (See Example 3.2) However, analysis of the final shot sequence and the score reveals a considerable amount of flexibility in this structure, as it was likely performed live against the score in the studio. The ratio between film timing and the measured music is approximate; the average ratio of the first ten shots was approximately .75 seconds per measure, and Cage’s performance tempos vary during the actual film. Cage indicated cues in the score, and marked each edit numerically in red ink. 188 Example 3.2: Works of Calder shot list and score, John Cage Music Manuscript Collection, JPB-95-3, Folder 175, New York Public Library, Music Division Special Collections, New York, NY, Courtesy The John Cage Trust. 189 A shot-by-shot analysis of the first ten edits reveals several motivic ideas that dominate the overall texture and provide explicit musical depictions of the kinetic movement of the sculptures. (See Example 3.3) The opening credits are the longest single scene in the score, marked as 45 5/12 seconds, or 1090 frames, which would yield approximately 34 measures of music. The opening phrases outline many of the main motivic ideas in the ensuing shots. Three types of figures are used in the opening section: A long sustained figure of one or two notes, each with precise articulation marks to indicate the amount of sustain. These figures are generally put in pairs, one with a nodal intervention giving a sustained harmonic projection, the other with a dampening or shimmering effect from the preparation, as outlined above. The second figure consists of a quick arpeggiation of sixteenth or thirty-second notes, and the rotation of these figures generally alternates between sustained and dampened preparations, creating a cycle of sounds that closely align with the rotation of the sculptures. The third figure is a similar motion, but more rhythmically precise and generally slower, reflecting clear rocking motions of slow moving sculptures. With these three categories of figures, Cage was able to closely align cues: the sustained tones could be performed with some degree of flexibility despite their detailed rhythmic notation, the rhythmic figures provided many transitional cues, and the short busts are used in the opening shots to clearly mark the transitional lens flares between cuts. The first shot of the film [titled “Double Exposure waves and mobile” in Cage’s score] consists primarily of sustained figures alternating between loud and soft dynamics. The second shot, a slow focus on a brook [“reflection of Brook from unsharp to sharp”] 190 begins with the rotation figure and leads to a metered pattern in the second phrase, marked by “brook coming” in the score. Shots three and four of trees slowly moving in the wind (a common trope of later experimental filmmakers representing the phenomenal present), continues the same metered pattern once more, followed by a sustained tone. Shot five, a series of lens flares caused by the sun penetrating through a tree, focuses on long sustained tones. Matter’s transition to Alex [“Pundy”] reflecting light off of a shaving mirror is directly cued by an arpeggiation burst, answered by two rhythmic downbeats. This same figure is repeated in the shot seven [“Slow Little Waves”] with more short bursts in shot eight [“Seaweed”] and shot nine [“Pundy in Grass”] diminishing into one single figure for shot ten [“Lonely Grass”]. Cage goes so far as to provide a small section of “Mickey Mousing” by following Alex’s footsteps in shot eleven, marked clearly in the score [“synchronize with Pundy’s 1 st , and 3 rd steps] and shot twelve consists of a series of rhythmic phrases that crescendo to mimic the Doppler effect of an actual wave sound. 191 Example 3.3: Shot Analysis of opening scene of Works of Calder John Cage Music Manuscript Collection, JPB-95-3, Folder 175, New York Public Library, Music Division Special Collections, New York, NY, Courtesy the John Cage Trust. Works of Calder (1950), Herbert Matter and Burgess Meredith, Music by John Cage. Film stills courtesy the Museum of Modern Art Film Study Center. Titles: 45 5/12 seconds 192 Part I: “Nature” Shot 1: “Double Exposure Waves and Mobile” — 16 seconds, 23 ½ measures. Shot 2: “Reflection of Brook from Unsharp to Sharp” —13 ¼ seconds, 18 ½ measures. 193 Shots 3 and 4 : “Green Leaves,” “Yellow Leaves” — 7 ½ seconds, 8 ½ measures. Shot 5: “Sun Through Tree” — 4 seconds, 5 ¼ measures. 194 Shot 6: “Pundy and Mirror” — 4 ½ seconds, 5 ¼ measures. Shot 7: “Slow Little Waves” — 5 ½ seconds, 8 ¼ measures. 195 Shot 8: “Seaweed” — 4 ¾ seconds, 6 measures. Shot 9: “Pundy in Grass” — 6 ¼ seconds, 6 ¼ measures. 196 Shot 10: “Lonely Leaves” — 4 seconds, 4 ½ measures. Shot 11: “Pundy’s Footsteps” — 3 2/3 seconds, 2 ¾ measures. 197 Shot 12: “Waves” — 17 seconds, 21 ¼ measures. Breaking the Sound Barrier As this analysis reveals, Cage’s approach to scoring the film was surprisingly conventional. Throughout the following sections, Cage continues with similar short motivic ideas in sync with the visual motion on screen. Cage acknowledged this explicitly in his notes on the film, especially regarding the central section of the film set in Calder’s studio: …if there is a story or pictures, the sounds should be the noises and sounds characteristic of or relevant to what one is following or seeing. This is what I was thinking of in the Calder film…not as sound effects but as organized sound (to quote Edgard Varèse). So that in the workshop part of the Calder film, what we hear are noises of mobiles and noises of the making of mobiles. 31 31 John Cage, “A Few Ideas About Music and Films,” repr. in John Cage: Writer, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (NY: Limelight, 1993), 64. 198 Little survives from Cage’s notes for this section except for a single sheet of editing notes covered with pieces of Mylar splicing tape. 32 (See Example 3.5) It is also unclear whether Cage actually made a “field recording” during the original shoot, since he was not commissioned to score the film until after the final editing. Cage divided the magnetic tape portion into seven subsections, each with a general indication of the tone. Each section sounds like an improvised use of a series of metal objects, and there are no discernible edits between sections. In the first section, a percussive strike of the hammer on a piece of sheet metal soon evolves into a clearly definable rhythm that increases in intensity for the first thirty seconds. This rhythm continues over the final narration until it is juxtaposed with an extended series of reverberations obtained through the close recording of large metal objects. The soundwaves that emanate from this section pulsate in an irregular rhythmic vibration of wave oscillations, until the final third moves toward smaller, quieter items. Throughout the scene Calder is seen pounding away at various items in his studio, and the rhythms are noticeably distinct from the motion of Calder’s hammering. Cage explicitly sought to tear away the rhythms within this section from the diegetic action on screen, creating an aural effect of the dream state that reflected the confusion of the child character. As he explained: …in the workshop part of the Calder film, what we hear are noises of mobiles and noises of the making of mobiles and the loudest noise comes when it is least needed, when the little boy smiles (a case of no-accompaniment) and no 32 John Cage, Manuscript Score for Works of Calder, John Cage Music Manuscript Collection, New York Public Library Music Division Special Collections, JPB 95-3, Folders 175-177. 199 hammering when Calder is seen hammering, etc. (Opposed to the redundant – otherwise nonpartisan.) 33 Example 3.4: Works of Calder, Magnetic Tape Score, John Cage Music Manuscript Collection, JPB-95-3, Folder 175, New York Public Library, Music Division Special Collections, New York, NY, Courtesy The John Cage Trust. 33 John Cage, “A Few Ideas About Music and Films,” repr. in John Cage: Writer, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (NY: Limelight, 1993), 64. 200 Alex is no longer able to distinguish between the world around him and the abstract space of the mobiles. In addition, the sounds are now dislocated from the narrative space of the film, transported instead to an asynchronous realm of flux. It is this aural transition that cues the final section of the film, where Calder’s mobiles are shown in an abstract environment. Matter described this section as an “abstract presentation of Sandy’s world – a parallel in movement and rhythm to part One,” in which the previous landscape shots “would be related visually as part of a rhythmic integration of movement, form, color, and music.” 34 Set to a black background, the mobiles are now isolated in a space with no ground. The motion and rhythm have now entered into a dream state, and the prepared piano accompaniment likewise enters into an elaborate final movement with complex juxtapositions of action and motivic structure. This final transition demonstrates an important connection between the filmic space and the diegetic acoustic space of sound in cinema. Both auditory and optical provide varying degrees of rhythmic continuity within the overarching cinematic space, and a key dynamic tension in sound film lies within these competing poles of temporalization. Both poles are able to maintain a sense of rhythm, whether through the repetition of images of movement, or through the division of sound into self-referential ratios over time. However, in contrast to the purely filmic action of the screen, the auditory portion of sound film perpetually threatens the authority of the cinematic apparatus. From the monophonic projection of low fidelity sound of a 16mm camera to 34 Herbert Matter to Burgess Meredith, 1949, Herbert Matter Papers, Series 1, Box 257, f. 2, Stanford University Special Collections Library. 201 the advanced surround sound technologies of the present day, sound creeps beyond the screen and into the environment. The 360-degree resonance of acoustic vibrations engenders a sense of personal connectedness to the virtual space of the film. This bridge between the narrative space within the film and the reality surrounding the experience of sound in film is uniquely positioned in the filmic documentary of visual art. Calder’s mobiles are captured in motion, but the perspective of frame continues to inhibit the embodiment of the experience of reality. As Cage later observed, it was this limitation of the “purely visual” aspect of film as a medium that inhibited its ability to push beyond the confines of an artificial construct of reality. A Forensic Reevaluation With a small budget for the outdoor scenes in the East Hamptons, Herbert Matter relied on friends to crew the shoot. Among those friends was Jackson Pollock. The two had first met in the early 1940s through their wives, Mercedes Matter and Lee Krasner, both of which were students of Hans Hoffman. Built on a foundation of mutual respect for their artistry, the dialogue between these two couples was central to the ascendency of Pollock’s career in the forties. Despite this connection, scholars have generally tended to describe Pollock’s move toward poured painting according to the parameters set out by critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. However, in 2002 the 63-year-old Alex Matter was sorting through one of his father’s storage sheds on Long Island, where he came upon a startling find. Wrapped in crumbling Kraft brown paper were 32 paintings marked “Jackson experimental works.” The discovery prompted a series of 202 forensic investigations to establish their authenticity. 35 Fingerprint and chemical analysis was accompanied by a detailed archival investigation by art historian Ellen Landau. In 2007 the project was unveiled at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College, but not without controversy. Researchers at Harvard University contested that certain pigments found in three of the paintings were not available until 1971. 36 “Pollock Matters,” as the exhibition was coined, sought to make the connection between Pollock’s approach to poured painting and Matter’s investigations in kinetic photography. The close proximity in dates between many of the alleged Pollock canvases and Matter’s series of “action photography” experiments and exhibits made the parallel all the more apt. 37 Despite the attribution questions involved with the discovered paintings, Landau’s archival research on the relationship between the two artists presents a provocative parallel to the filmic techniques seen in the documentary of Calder. Leading up to Landau’s work, art historians had felt confident in many of their conclusions surrounding the emergence of Pollock’s drip technique, perhaps most clearly epitomized by the 2009 publication of Irving Sandler’s summary statement: Abstract Expressionism and the American Experience: A Critical Reevaluation. 38 Michael Leja 35 For details on this debate, see the Introduction to Pollock Matters, by Claude Cernuschi and Ellen G. Landau (Boston: Charles S. and Isabella V. McMullen Museum of Art), 3-8. 36 Geoff Edgers, “Harvard study casts more doubt on disputed Pollock paintings,” The Boston Globe, 30 Jan., 2007. 37 These exhibits included the 1943 Museum of Modern Art Exhibit “Action Photography,” and the 1948 exhibit “In and Out of Focus: A Survey of Today’s Photography,” also at MOMA. Due to wartime shortages, no exhibition catalog survives. See: Ellen Landau, “Action/Re-Action,” 24-25. 38 Irving Sandler, Abstract Expressionism and the American Experience: A Reevaluation (NY: Hudson Hills Press, 2009). 203 has argued that the majority of these perspectives were shaped by Clement Greenberg’s formalist critique, and his opinions have continued to hold sway as a dominant argument for Pollock’s approach to the medium-specific questions of canvas painting. 39 Greenberg historicized Pollock’s “all-over” approach to canvas treatment as a logical outgrowth from Analytic Cubism that “created an oscillation between an emphatic surface…and an illusion of indeterminate but somehow shallow depth.” 40 In opposition, Harold Rosenberg’s romanticized perspective of “Action Painting” focused on the physicality of Pollock’s work, where the canvas functioned as a stage in which he would perform the mythic automatist dance of pouring. However, “Pollock Matters’ provides a perspective that incorporates issues from both critiques. The still photographs of energy encapsulated movement and rhythm within a single two-dimensional frame. Like Pollock’s poured paintings, these works were able to encapsulate not only rhythm and gesture, but more importantly, time. The logical next step in this process was to bring into life the representation of movement, this time to the industrial click of 24 frames per second. The Fate of a Gesture Of the thousands of photographs Matter took over the years, only a handful show Pollock. Perhaps out of a personal respect for his introversion, Matter chose not to invade the studio space of his colleague. The first person to do so was Hans Namuth. A German 39 Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1993), 33-36. 40 Clement Greenberg, “American-Type Painting,” [1955], repr. Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 218-9. 204 expatriate, Namuth had first made a career in photojournalism, creating pictorial narratives of Republican dissidents in revolutionary Spain. Fleeing his home country at the age of 25, Namuth enlisted in the US intelligence services, and finished his term by rounding up Germans for the war-crime division. Returning to the US as a naturalized citizen, Namuth concluded photography to be nothing more than a hobby. After a few years at a desk job in Manhattan, Namuth enrolled in night school sessions at the New School with the Russian photographer Alexey Brodovitch, and soon found a lucrative career in fashion photography. Working for Harper’s Bazaar, Namuth made the rounds of the New York art scene with the telling lens of a photojournalist. 41 An inveterate gallery visitor, Namuth was familiar with Pollock’s poured works, but found them disorderly and violent. It was only after his mentor Brodovich chided his night class for a “lack of awareness,” admonishing their lack of taste by asserting “Pollock is one of the most important artists around today,” that Namuth returned to the works. Brodovich echoed a sentiment that was flooding the New York Art community, and Pollock’s appearance in Life magazine rhetorically asked this very question. Pollock stood in the corner of the frame with a cigarette lazily dangling from his mouth. His vast canvas murals surrounded him, while the caption asked “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” 42 41 For the sole biographical study of Namuth’s career, see Carolyn Kinder Karr, “Photographing the Arts in America: The Portraits of Hans Namuth, 1950-1990,” in Hans Namuth: Portraits, ed. Carolyn Kinder Carr (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 1-82. 42 “Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?,” Life Magazine, 8 August, 1949. 205 Namuth’s first series of images were used for the article, “Pollock paints a picture,” as part of a series for ARTnews that showed artists in their studios at work. In these images, the spectator could now witness the emotional intensity that flooded Pollock’s workspace. As many scholars argue, these series of photos solidified the Pollock image in the public eye, meanwhile opening up a host of interpretations on the nature of his painting style and its implications for the future of the medium. 43 By revealing the method behind their creation, these artworks could no longer be understood from their autonomous setting in an art gallery. Harold Rosenberg’s definition of “Action Painting” saw Pollock’s theatrics as literally destroying the canvas surface by moving beyond the frame and into the environment around him. 44 Here, the actual ephemeral act of painting was given primacy, making painting more like theater, or music. Pollock painting was revealed as process, the final result of which summarized an act. Greenberg attempted to reconcile this difference by describing the canvas as an illusionistic field that implied the act in a purely visual sense, much like kinetic photography implied movement. But this still seemed incomplete. Suddenly, art critics were forced to ask the same ontological question troubling Cage: Where is a Pollock painting? Is it the final framed canvas, picked up off the floor and taken from the barn 43 See, for example: Barbara Rose, Pollock Painting (New York: Agrinde, 1980); Francis V. O’Connor, “Hans Namuth’s Photographs of Jackson Pollock as Art Historical Documentation,” Art Journal 39/1 (Fall, 1979): 48-9; Barbara Rose, “Hans Namuth’s photographs and the Jackson Pollock Myth: Part One: Media Impact and the Failure of Criticism, and: Part Two: Number 29, 1950,” Arts Magazine 53/7 (March 1979): 112-116; 117-119; Bernard Harper Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), 164-7. 44 Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” in The Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon Press, 1959), 23-9. 206 and placed on a wall to be viewed on a horizontal plane? Or was the canvas merely an index much like the mechanical recording of sound: an imprint of a fleeting event that occurred in a particular moment in time, yet forever reproducible? Could Pollock painting be reproduced through a detailed understanding of cubist space in a Pollock painting, then experienced through an optical engagement of movement and dimension within the conscious eyes of the engaged viewer? Surely Greenberg’s conception failed when faced with the indisputable index of the photograph. Yet even from this angle, Namuth’s preoccupation with Pollock (he often said he was just as concerned with his face as with the paintings), distorts the pure opticality that viewing the painting index does. Namuth’s desire to peer into Pollock inevitably led to a study with film. Ironically, this fetishization resulted in a unique glimpse into the space of a Pollock painting through his search for transparency. At the same time, Cage was just beginning his ontological crisis that resulted in the initial statements on the aesthetic of silence. Projections: stitching the audible canvas In the autumn of 1950, Cage was busy at work with his young colleague Morton Feldman. Their walks and discussions occurred nearly every day, and Feldman likely witnessed Cage’s work on the studio recording for Works of Calder. For the past five years, Cage had undergone a period of intense introspection on the nature of artistic expression, yet he continued to write music for the decidedly expressive prepared piano. Despite his intense reading of Antonin Artaud and repeated proclamations deriding the difficult paradigm of expression in music, Cage continued work on a concerto for 207 prepared piano, a form in Western art music generally considered, alongside the sonata, as the pinnacle of individual expression. For Feldman, his studies with Varèse stressed the engagement of sonic texture in the organization of sound, but he still held to Varèse’s primacy of the notated score in structuring the sound of Western acoustic instruments. Of the two, Feldman was the most engaged with Abstract Expressionist artists and their work, and thus it came as no surprise when he provided one of the first musical notation solutions that borrowed directly from the visual techniques he observed. Feldman adopted a statistical method that utilized a graphic notation to depict broad compositional gestures over time. In Projection I for solo cello (1950), sonic structure is given an overall arc and motion, but the precise aural results are left to the act of performance. Register is indicated through the horizontal placement of specific blocks, while duration of specific sonic events is indicated through the length of blocks along the horizontal axis. Density of gesture is observed through the accumulation of events along the vertical axis as specific moments in time. Time itself is the only remaining absolute in the final score. Feldman provided varying degrees of instruction for specific musical techniques through the projection series. 45 As a notational technique, graphic organization of sound structure in a two dimensional field provided one of the clearest analogs between visual and acoustic. While Feldman’s score indicates gesture over time, Pollock’s canvas summarizes gesture over time in a single frame. Both mediums address the same ontological quandary: Feldman’s score is indeterminate of specific action, yet 45 Few studies of Feldman’s music exist. Among the most incisive: John Welsh, “Projection I,” in The Music of Morton Feldman, ed. Thomas DeLio (Westort, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 21-39, and Amy C. Beal, “’Time Canvasses’: Morton Feldman and the Painters of the New York School,” in Music and Modern Art, ed. James Leggio (New York: Routledge, 2002), 227-246. 208 determinate in gesture, and Pollock’s painting depicts a determinate action that did occur, but is indeterminate in gesture. In performance, both artists are in the realm of complete determinacy through process. Yet beneath the surface, so to speak, of both artists are a number of historical precedents similar to those outlined here in Chapter 1, and closely related to the “Industrial Sublime” theory outlined below. For Pollock, scholars have repeatedly turned to his mentor Thomas Hart Benton’s influence on the cubist schematics of Pollock’s poured paintings. 46 Benton’s technical methods for constructing large-scale realist murals were based on a pragmatic synthesis of essential structures of human form and shape. Assigning vectors for specific movement and shape, Benton’s diagrams provide a framework for maintaining a sense of proportion and scale in realist painting. Compared to Pollock’s abstractions, they provide a template for the gestural abstraction that Pollock layered in his large scale all-over canvas works. As Barbara Jaffee argues, Benton’s diagrams of human movement and structure were a direct result of the systematic training of industrial art in American vocational schools. The approach to human form and structure was based on the pseudoscientific rationalization of efficient industrial manufacturing. Scientific management, the grandfather of modern-day management consulting, was based on the logic of time structuring of human movement. 47 Taylorism, centered on the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor, exerted unrelenting demands on factory worker’s based on efficiency observations measured in time. Efficiency was 46 See for example: Stephen Polcari, “Jackson Pollock and Thomas Hart Benton,” Arts Magazine 53/7 (March 1979): 20-24. 47 Barbara Jaffee, “Jackson Pollock’s Industrial Expressionism,” Artjournal 63/4 (Winter 2004): 68-79. 209 calculated for humans in the same way as machines were tooled and organized to maximize output. Determining the exact motion that would use the least amount of energy was calculated by Taylor’s colleague Frank B. Gilbreth, and his wife Lillian M. Gilbreth (later famous for the 1950s movie farce of their excessively efficient family household, Cheaper by the Dozen). The Gilbreth’s utilized film documentary of worker motion, along with a new technology, the chronocyclograph, to track hand movements in three dimensional space, and thus calculate efficient movement and gesture. 48 Like Matter’s action photography, the Gilbreth’s captured kineticism, this time in the service of mechanization, and locked in step to the standardization of the clock. Jaffee argues that Pollock’s abstractions, and the cultural construction of Pollock as the American outlaw and hero, are linked to his retooling of mechanization as an artistic expression. 49 A similar element can be found in Feldman’s Projections. For the majority of his compositional career, Feldman spent his days working in the family business, a garment manufacturing firm that specialized in children’s winter- wear. Traveling between his discussions with Cage on notational techniques and his day job in manufacturing, Feldman’s idea for Projection bears an interesting parallel to the sewing patterns used for clothing manufacturers. Indeed, at one point Cage went so far as to compare his detailed score for Williams Mix, his monumental work for magnetic tape 48 Frank B. and Lillian M. Gilbreth, Applied Motion Study: A Collection of Papers on the Efficient Method to Industrial Preparedness (New York: Sturgis and Walton, 1917). 49 Barbara Jaffee, “Jackson Pollock’s Industrial Expressionism,” 72. Taylorism immediately suffered innumerable criticisms from factory workers for its cruelty. Ignoring the needs of individual workers, man became a mechanized and hollow machine. Critics began to realize that Taylor’s methods were often concocted on false evidence, or fabricated on loose assumptions in order to push the scientific model as an efficient, and efficiently billable, method for organizing labor 210 that would take much of the next year to compose, as “like a dressmaker’s pattern – it literally tells where the tape shall be cut, and you lay the tape on the score itself.” 50 Mass marketing of standardized clothing formed an integral part in the codification of efficient assembly methods and was the driving force of industrial development. The mechanical function of a sewing template, like a blueprint or any other form of industrial drafting, provides a detailed description of a reproducible process for manufacture. In Cage’s studio, where Feldman developed the graphic score method, the process was explored in the same systematic fashion as an architect or clothing designer. Cage worked at a large table, constructing meticulous scores with the skills of a draftsman. Feldman and Cage used the same commercial transparent paper for drafting copies of scores, as he outlined in a letter to pianist David Tudor (the letter was written on a large sheet of the same paper, with remnants of a score beneath the writing): Morty just left and you can see from this paper something of what we were doing this evening. It was a question of finding a way of writing the graph music on transparent paper so that it can be reproduced cheaply, and what you see here was a transitional stage, the final outcome is stunning and perfectly clear but only the utterly essential lines remain. Vertical lines (indicating the measures) are dotted (which makes the solid thick lines of the sounds clear). The horizontal lines are thin but only present when needed. The result is a space design very beautiful and easy to read. 51 50 John Cage, Interview with Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner,” [1965] in Conversing With Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, 2 nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2003) 163; This connection is also noted by Liz Kotz, “Cagean Structures,” in The Anarchy of Silence: John Cage and Experimental Art (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona), 132. 51 John Cage to David Tudor, Jan. 1951, The David Tudor Papers, Series IV, Correspondence, Box 52, Folder 3, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA. 211 In the same letter, Cage mentions his work on the Concerto for Prepared Piano. Until this point, the compositional format for a concerto highlighted the traditional juxtaposition between soloist and orchestra as a dynamic between opposing social forces and the expression of individual identity. However, Cage was disillusioned with this compositional template that weighed so heavily on the individual, and he would soon find a new technique to dissolve the grammar of hierarchical structure. Chance procedures, primarily through the use of the I-Ching, became the preferred method for Cage’s compositional approach, and he first utilized this method in the second movement of the Concerto. During the same winter, Pollock’s poured technique underwent a similar transition. The Transparent Eye “It began as a dream,” Namuth recalled, “I realized that I wanted to show the artist at work with his face in full view, becoming part of the canvas, inside the canvas, so to speak – coming at the viewer – through the painting itself. How could this be done?” 52 As a logical extension of Namuth’s photography of Pollock in action, he began shooting a film of the artist at work, first as a black and white Super-8 documentary, and later that fall as a twenty minute documentary in 16mm color, edited by Namuth’s friend, filmmaker Paul Falkenberg. Up until this point, Namuth’s film captured much of the same essence as the photographs. Namuth caught Pollock in the act of painting, shots of his studio barn and scenery, and a number of narrative suggestions from Falkenberg: 52 Hans Namuth, “Photographing Pollock,” in Pollock Painting, ed. Barbara Rose (New York: Agrinde, 1980), 3. 212 shots Pollock’s feet, stirring paint, and wandering between the countryside settings, and finally, lifting the painting up off the ground and displaying it in a gallery. Namuth’s fetishization of Pollock’s action space led him to probe deeper into the painting space, through a camera approach that would literally be “in” the painting. He asked Pollock, an expert carpenter, to construct an apparatus that would allow him to film underneath Pollock. In order to capture the canvas space through the photographic lens, Namuth created a canvas on a lens by having Pollock paint on a sheet of glass directly above him. Aside from giving someone an actual point of view shot directly from the eyes of Pollock, it was the closest Namuth could come to actually being not just inside a Pollock painting, but to voyeuristically be inside Pollock himself, to embody the action of creation through the peering lens. As Barbara Rose argues, the painting that Pollock constructed, No. 29, 1950, crossed the last boundary available to the drip technique. The transparent glass support eliminated the figure-ground relationship of painting surface much in the same way that Marcel Duchamp achieved in Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare of Her Bachelors, Even, 1915-1923). 53 To even display such a work against the wall of a studio would betray the transparency of its ground. Littering the surface with beach pebbles, wire mesh and other studio materials, Pollock attempted to equate the glass painting with the literal world around him. Afterwards, he left the painting outdoors for much of the winter, 53 Barbara Rose, “Namuth’s Photographs and the Pollock Myth,” in Pollock Painting, ed. Barbara Rose (New York: Agrinde, 1980), 75. 213 where he admired its transparency when placed against the backdrop of the dramatic ocean views outside his barn studio. 54 Like Duchamp’s Large Glass, there were many precedents for this technique, as Rosalind Krauss has noted. Most importantly for Pollock was the 1950 documentary on Picasso, which attempted to capture much the same effect as Namuth’s transparent camera. Visite á Picasso featured Picasso whimsically painting on a large French window inside his farmhouse at Vallauris, and Pollock would have been familiar with the 1950 Museum of Modern Art exhibition of Picasso’s Space Drawings, which utilized a technique similar to the Gilbreth’s chronocyclograph to capture Picasso painting in thin air. 55 After filming this final portion of the film, Pollock and Namuth went in to the house, bitter with cold, and bitter with the deeply disturbing filming that had just occurred. Suddenly Pollock realized that the intricacies of his painting technique has been literally exposed, challenging the alleged inauthenticity of his artistic program that haunted him to his last days. In the infamous next encounter, retold over and over in Pollock lore, Jackson resumed his voracious drinking habit, prodding Namuth and creating a riotous scene at a dinner party organized by Krasner. 56 54 Bernard Harper Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), 163- 164. 55 Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 301-302. For further examination on the question of suture and the direction of the frame, see Carolyn Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996), 72-80. 56 Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible, 164. 214 The Fate of a (Non) Gesture Cage rarely spoke directly of Pollock, although he seemed to have understood the implications of poured painting, especially the glass work. “I more tried to avoid him,” Cage recalled, “because he was generally so drunk, and he was actually an unpleasant encounter…Now and then I would be unable to avoid the encounter; we would meet, and he always complained that I didn’t like his work enough. And I didn’t” 57 On Pollock and Duchamp, Cage was more explicit in his criticism. A Duchamp [sic]. Seems Pollock tried to do it – paint on glass. It was in a movie. There was an admission of failure. That wasn’t the way to proceed. It’s not a question of doing again what Duchamp already did. We must nowadays nevertheless at least be able to look through to what’s beyond – as though we were in looking out. 58 Falkenberg had ironically first suggested Indonesian gamelan music to accompany Pollock’s film. As he recalled, “the seemingly-amorphous elements swirling in Pollock’s canvases suggested to me the loose-structured sound sequences of a gamelan orchestra,” an idea that Jackson rejected, citing its lack of “Americanness.” 59 Lee Krasner confronted Cage with the project, to which he was not particularly interested, and Cage passed it on to his 25-year-old colleague Morton Feldman. 60 As his first serious commission (to which 57 John Cage interview with Irving Sandler, before 1967, Irving Sandler Papers (Getty Research Institute), 2000.M.43, Box 4, f. 12, p. 1. 58 John Cage, “26 Statements Re Duchamp,” [1963] in A Year From Monday: New Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1967), 70-71. 59 Paul Falkenberg, “Notes on the Genesis of an Art Film,” in Pollock Painting, ed. Barbara Rose (New York: Agrinde), 90. 60 Cage and Feldman offered differing accounts on the origins of the commission. Cage biographer David Revill recalls the Krasner connection, David Revill, The Roaring Silence. John Cage: A Life (New York: Arcade, 1992), 141, while Feldman recalls receiving the commission directly from Pollock: Morton 215 he was paid with a Pollock spatter ink drawing), Feldman used traditional notation, and worked with a shot list and metronome much like Cage did for the Calder film. However, Feldman had no concern for articulating any precise correlations between the gestures on screen and the sound. Scored for two cellos, both played by Daniel Stern, the thin, evocative texture of the score mimics the shape of Pollock gestures on a basic level. The cello’s large expressive range is fully exploited in the first phrase, where a drone pedal M7 D-C# plays against a shrill high register ostinato G#-C#. This pitch set functions as the primary axis of control for the following gestures, much in the way that the deeper structure of Pollock’s gestures were based on particular shape vectors. The alternation between moments of sustained drones and the violent juxtapositions of extended technique sections of pizzicato give the score a level of surface mimesis, but overall the dark evocation of the score is more reminiscent of a horror film. Indeed, once the final section arrives, where Pollock sternly looks down on the camera, thrashing away with paint, the frantic action of the soundtrack only intensifies the stereotype echoed in the 1956 Time magazine article that dubbed Pollock “Jack the Dripper.” 61 In the following autumn of 1951, both Works of Calder and Jackson Pollock were submitted to the First Art Film Festival In America in Woodstock, New York. Matter’s film was met with critical praise, and Cage won the award for best film score. 62 Both Feldman, "Crippled Symmetry," Morton Feldman Essays, ed. Walter Zimmermann (Kerpen: Beginner Press, 1985), 136. 61 “Art: The Wild Ones,” Time Magazine 20 Feb., 1956. 62 Program for The First Art Film Festival In America, Woodstock Artists Association, the American Federation of Arts, and the Film Advisor Center, 1-3 September, 1951, Anthology Film Archives, New 216 Norman McLaren and Pierre Boulez praised the film and its score, noting the connections between Calder’s mobiles and the prepared piano. 63 Pollock’s film did not receive the same enthusiasm. “It was all but laughed off the screen,” recalled Falkenberg. 64 After the bitter experience the previous November, Pollock never fully recovered from his alcoholism. His final series of black and white paintings were written on one continuous scroll and then cut up at points for the exhibition, as sort of a final summation of the effect that moving images had on his painting method. Namuth however had found his niche, and embarked on a lifelong career of photographing artists in their studio. His 1964 documentary on de Kooning featured music by Feldman, and Pollock got his wish for a true “American” music in the 1987 Kim Evans documentary, with a score by Aaron Copland. 65 Chance and Cultural Politics: Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951) While Cage’s indirect involvement with Jackson Pollock 1951 hinted at the tension involved with competing views on transparency and cinematic space, the clearest provocation was his next statement in the “Landscape” series, Imaginary Landscape No. York. Reviews: Emily Genauer, “Woodstock Conference on Art Films – Some Questions it Failed to Answer,” New York Herald Tribune, 8 Sept. 1951. 63 Norman McLaren to John Cage, ca. 1952, John Cage Collection, Northwestern University, Series I: Correspondence, Box 2, F. 7.1; Cage and Boulez discussed the Calder film on several occasions, especially regarding its Parisian premiere: The Boulez-Cage Correspondence (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press), 37, 45, 52, and 86; In addition Boulez sought out Norman McClaren per Cage’s advice, but found his films to be “of disarming naivety and lack of taste,” Pierre Boulez to John Cage, Nov. 1952, repr. in The Boulez- Cage Correspondence, 139-140. 64 Paul Falkenberg, “Notes on the Genesis of an Art Film,” in Pollock Painting, 90. 65 Jackson Pollock: Portrait of an Artist, produced and directed by Kim Evans (London, 1987). 217 4 (1951). Its premiere in particular echoed the themes of technological sublimity and temporal order. The piece began shortly after midnight on April 10, 1951 at the McMillan Theater of Columbia University, when twenty-four performers rose to the stage, paired among twelve RCA Victor radios. The cumbersome radios were an imposing sight, with the anthropomorphic design of a “golden throat acoustical system” evoking an air of somnambulist mystery. Because of the late hour, the majority of the work consisted of murmurs from distant stations among the incessant static hiss. The poet Harold Norse recalled: “The effect was similar to an automobile ride at night on an American highway in which neon signs and patches of noise from radios and automobiles flash into the distance.” The word “Korea” recurred: In Korea….And on the central front, the enemy Fielder’s choice…Tommy Spillane is moving off base…Now ladies, remember when washday comes…But mother, I can’t tell. As Norse continued, “Picking up snatches of music – a Mozart violin concerto fragment – with lengthily silences in between, it had a disturbing effect.” 66 After the concert, the sculptor Richard Lippold drove up in his 1941 hearse, loaded the radios in the coffin space, and drove away into the night. Much less publicized than the premier of 4’33” at Woodstock a year later, this ominous event was in many ways the summit statement of Cage’s “Landscape” compositions. As a whole, Cage’s series represent a transformation in his creative interaction with technology. As discussed above, Cage’s early works in the series probed 66 Harold Norse, quoted in David Revill, The Roaring Silence: John Cage, A Life (London: Bloomsbury, 1992), 137. 218 the possibilities of the new mediums of radio and amplification with a scientific and inventive mindset, foregrounding the signature sounds of the new mediums within complex micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structures. At the same time, these compositions functioned as a conceptual tool for Cage’s expansion of musical resources to include environmental sounds. Moving from the basic technological act of percussive release of sounds to the use of amplification technology, Cage’s interaction with the apparatus of creating his music was as critical as the actual resulting aural phenomena. The exploration of technological space in electric and radiophonic mediums provided a new compositional canvas, a space in which the traditional rhetoric of nonrepresentational or abstract nature of music was transformed into the realm of the technological sublime. Through Cage’s unique blend of distancing rhetoric and ambiguity, a seamless transition from the classical ideals of aesthetic withdrawal to a new mode of sonic musicality or panaurality became the model for his new musical sensibility. On a cultural level, the oppositional tendencies and withdrawal rhetoric of Cagean aesthetics were in many ways a reaction to the emerging commodification of sound and imagery in the modern postindustrial culture, where indeterminate procedures functioned as a reactive barrier to the consumerist imperative. At the same time, chance procedures reduced the materiality of the work of art to its most basic elements, and the resultant “death of the object” in works such as Imaginary Landscape No. 4 created a phantasmagoric perception of the radiophonic and technological apparatus in its relationship to the image of the body, human utterance, and cultural fetishism in a work of art. The resultant product of such a conflation of discourse was a new form of the historical concept of 219 Marxist “Phantasmagoria.” As Marx describes the term, “the commodity-form, and the value relation of the products of labor with which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity - it is a phantasmagoric relation between things.” 67 Phantasmagoria was originally used in relationship to the optical illusions of nineteenth-century horror shows, where the ghastly reflection of a human was projected onto a screen. Used in this context, the term conflates the illusionistic and dehumanized relationship between commodity fetishism and the dislocation of the object from its natural or purely objective state. Describing Cage’s “Landscapes” along these lines, Alan Weiss likens the transcendent sphere of the works as “forerunners of virtual reality…representing a world of quotidian sounds into their technical and musical counterparts,” adding later that “ironically, the ego returns through the institution of this style as a coherent deformation of the musical field.” 68 Cage was explicit in his concern with the illusionist connection between the consumer imperative and musical sounds when he first presented his idea for Imaginary Landscape No. 4 in his infamous lecture at Vassar College in 1948. In the same presentation Cage added the idea for a work of “canned music, a piece of uninterrupted silence to sell to the Muzak Co.” 69 The oppositional politics of Cage’s rhetoric make 67 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, Tr. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books), 165. This definition is taken directly from Theodor Adorno’s characterization of Phantasmagoria in the context of Wagnerian aesthetics: Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner (New York: Verso, 1981), 74, f.1. For more on Adorno’s use of the term, see: Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (Macmillan, 1978), 30-1, 40-2, 47. 68 Allen S. Weiss, Phantasmic Radio (Durham: Durham Univ. Press, 1995), 50-2. 69 John Cage, “A Composer’s Confessions,” repr. John Cage: Writer, 43. 220 explicit the direct confrontation of the consumer imperative and the ethical ideology of silence and indeterminacy. A reduction of the object to its basic elemental workings was very much a result of the indeterminate procedures, the ultimate reduction resulting in a soundscape of complete silence. However, the reciprocity of such an ideal in ways implies as much intention as the most determinate forms of abstract expressionism, leading to the conflict outlined above with Jackson Pollock. As Katherine Hayles points out, randomness itself implies a noncompressibility, a plenitude of information that defies simplification. The result is that the information is a technically defined quantity having nothing do with meaning – the generation of maximum uninterpretable information. 70 Marjorie Perloff observes that, once the outer limit, so to speak, of indeterminacy is reached, there is a return to the more “basic” elements of hypnotic sound patterning and conceptual schemes, “sounds, denuded of meaning in their ghastly scheme that formulate a fascinating experiment in poeisis.” 71 When Cage brought forth his “golden throats” to an audience deeply enmeshed in the brewing ideals of abstract expressionism, he confronted his peers with a disturbing act of reflexive poetics, evoking the phantasmagoric shadows of the commercial radio and newscasts in a dehumanized “concert” presentation. Cage’s act paralleled in many ways the disturbing radio broadcast just a few years earlier of Antonin Artaud’s To Have Done With The Judgment of God (1947), which, because of the censors in France, never 70 N. Katherine Hayles, ”Chance Operations: Cagean Paradox and Contemporary Science,” in John Cage: Composed in America, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 236-8. 71 Marjorie Perloff , The Poetics of Indeterminacy: From Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 338. 221 actually made it on to the air. As Allen Weiss notes, Artaud’s work functioned as an “electric shock therapy,” with glossolalic utterances and incoherent babble reducing the manifestation of language at the level of its pure materiality—the realm of pure sound. Here the visceral imagination of Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty” projected an incoherent and disincarnate voice, the radiophonic apparatus emitting an omniscient phantasm in a disenfranchising and disturbing work of art. 72 Reading Imaginary Landscape No. 4 according to the postmodern categories of pastiche and schizophrenia presents a number of problems, as Julia Robinson argues. Frederic Jameson’s definition of irony and parody does not fit well with the underlying polemic of Cage’s statement. However, insofar as Cage’s work seems to provide a representation of current experience through the utilization of live broadcast, Robinson points again to the investiture model, here set in a field of the contemporary imaginary, whereby the technological apparatus defines and transmits current experience. 73 The temporal imagery emanating from Cage’s “Golden Throats” could alternately be cast under the banner of the “American Technological Sublime.” As cultural historian Leo Marx observes, in the classical canon of American literature, themes of withdrawal from society into an idealized landscape abound from Emerson to 72 Allen Weiss, “Radio, Death, and the Devil: Artaud’s Pour en Finir Avec Le Jugement De Dieu,” in Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde, ed. Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 271-2, 281, 285, 301. 73 As Robinson notes, Jameson’s key example of pastiche was Nam June Paik’s TV Garden (1971) an installation piece consisting of televisions scattered amidst foliage. What neither connected however, was that the material on Paik’s television was a remixed version of Paik’s A Tribute to John Cage (1972), which included, among other snippets, a performance of Cage’s 4’33” in Harvard Square in 1970. This dialogue between Paik, video art, and the generational conflict within the neo-avant-garde and 1960s conceptual art will be addressed in the following chapter. Julia Robinson, “John Cage and Investiture: Unmanning the System,” 88. 222 Melville. This bucolic sense of pastoral complacency is habitually upset by the sudden onslaught of images of modernity, with the industrial burst of the locomotive providing the most common rhetorical trope. This arresting, evocative image brought forth a conflict that redefined the symbolic value of the natural landscape, creating a “cardinal metaphor of contradiction, exfoliating, through associated images and ideas, into a design governing the meaning of entire works.” 74 The adoption of this rhetoric in the twentieth century resulted in an extension of the metaphor of fate, where the mythology of death transforms the landscape into a “garden of ashes,” with images of mankind in the grips of uncontrollable forces. What is unique about this metaphor, however, is the sudden pastoralization of the industrial landscape into an anomalous blend of illusion and reality in the American consciousness. 75 As David Nye argues, the evocation of the sublime in American rhetoric has its roots in this complex interaction between technology and grandeur as a reinvigoration of the desacralized modern landscape with transcendent significance. 76 Thus the pinnacle of Cage’s “Landscape” series of compositions simultaneously represented the coalescence of Cage’s poethical idealism with his conflicting anarchistic views of individualism and the consumerist imperative—a conflict that epitomizes Leo Marx’s “cardinal metaphor of contradiction” of the American technological sublime. Beginning with a scientific idealism, Cage explored the technological apparatus and its 74 Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), 10-11, 228-9. 75 Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden, 356. 76 David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), xiii. 223 perceptual implications, constructing a rhetoric based on the transcendent space of the new technologies of broadcast and amplification. The tension within an unfolding dynamic of veiling and unveiling presented a host of theoretical problems for Cage. As he continued to explore various procedures for constructing the core repertory of chance compositions, tension arose between historical models of subversion found in Cage’s direct predecessor, Marcel Duchamp, and the ethical imperative of chance found in the early statements from the Neo-Avant-Garde. Defining Cage’s aesthetic of silence in the context of chance is perhaps one of the most contentious grounds in Cage scholarship, as the opening of this chapter noted. “Work-world” models that contextualize artistic actions and statements within a particular “artworld” have provided a framework for discussing the meaning and relevance of Cage’s statements within a historical context, such as that proposed by philosopher Noël Carroll. Carroll reasons that Cage’s silence is a purposeful and intentional act within a historical structure, but he nevertheless identifies that purposefulness as a “contextually poignant gesture of repudiation.” 77 This historical viewpoint of Cage’s silence as an act of subversiveness or repudiation continues to dominate art-historical discussion of the artistic period of the nineteen fifties. Moira Roth’s theory of the “Aesthetic of Indifference” situates Cage and his circle, including Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, and Jasper Johns, within a distinctive subgroup of artists in opposition to the masculine hegemony of the Abstract 77 Noël Carroll, “Cage and Philosophy,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52/1, The Philosophy of Music (Winter, 1994): 93-98. 224 Expressionists, where silence is seen both as an expression of differences in sexual mores and as a strategy for passive subversion against oppressive American Cold War politics in the McCarthy-era. Roth’s identification of Cage’s strategies as an outgrowth of a historical avant-garde practice, particularly the actions of Marcel Duchamp, has been seen as the lynchpin for situating the Neo-Avant-Garde in relationship to a modernist historical lineage. 78 In addition, Caroline A. Jones argues that Cage’s positioning sought an important opposition to the culturally constructed ideal of the subjective masculine individualism of the Abstract Expressionist movement, an opposition embodied through a technologically mediated selflessness. The tension between progress and transcendentalism was foregrounded through Cage’s manipulation of the mechanisms of the piano, a technological intrusion into the “naturally” organic. 79 These criticisms are deeply indebted to cultural historian Peter Bürger, who reads the activities of postwar artists like Cage, in particular the Dada elements of experimental music, from a materialist and social criticism that views their recapitulation of the prewar, or “historical” avant-garde strategies as an institutionalization of the societal critique that the original works were meant to attack, arguing that, “in a changed context, the 78 Moira Roth, “The Aesthetic of Indifference,” in Difference/Indifference Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp, and John Cage, ed. Jonathan D. Katz (Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 1998), 38. 79 Caroline A. Jones, ”Finishing School: John Cage and the Abstract Expressionist Ego,” Critical Inquiry 19/4 (Summer 1993): 631-2, 637-9. 225 resumption of avant-gardist intentions with the means of avant-gardism can no longer even have the limited effectiveness the historical avant-gardes achieved.” 80 Chance and the perceptual field Arguments pertaining to literary, cultural, and socioeconomic issues loom large over Cage’s work. Perceptual or cognitive questions however are perhaps the most difficult to articulate, yet the most revealing. Throughout the 1950s, Cage continued to refine his aesthetic position as a means to justify chance and indeterminacy, resulting in a series of astute observations on the implications of indeterminacy in the context of immediate perceptual experience, a concept examined further in the following Chapter. The issue of “noncompressibility” serves as both a start and end point. As discussed in the opening of this Chapter, Cage’s approach to the temporal sound field of perception, both as a notational challenge and as an object of tactile inquiry through various levels of technological mediation, emerged out of a strict application of temporal order through rhythmic structure. These temporal sound fields continued to function as the basic soundscape, or perceptual canvas, onto which a chance-determined work was realized. However, the selection of materials continued to fall short of a noncompressible continuation of all possibilities within any given durational structure, hence Cage’s increasing concern with the concept of “realization,” or the particular action or sound 80 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 58. This claim is the starting point of Branden Joseph’s critique of the “neo-dada” definition of postwar American art and the neo-avant-garde, to be discussed in the following chapter. Branden W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 12. 226 event occurring in any instance of the performance of a piece. Cage sought methods to maintain the largest canvas of possible realizations within any given composition in order to push further and further toward a complete perceptual field. In essence, this compositional goal was nothing more than an effort to create a moment of experience that has been aestheticized, or better yet, an ethical action that fulfills the performative expectations of any public interaction surrounding a work of art. Branden Joseph has noted the affinity between Cage’s ideas and French philosopher Henri Bergson’s critique of disorder in Creative Evolution (1911). 81 Cage cited Bergson on a number of occasions, and Joseph’s argument is compelling in that it applies the Bergsonian concepts of virtualities, possibilities, realization, and actualization. Due to translation issues, Joseph shifts these categories somewhat to fit Cage’s usage of similar terms. The elucidation of these implications of chance and indeterminacy are beyond the scope of this study, however it does point to the increasing concern within Cage’s artistic program for a complete incorporation of perceptual experience. The Cagean artwork relied on collaboration with other artists, and the multisensory implications of the Cunningham dance included film and visual scenery in the overall experience. These relationships, as well as that of indeterminacy and perception, are the subject of the following Chapter. In the meantime, one final connection with cinema, Cage’s collaboration with the sculptor Richard Lippold, 81 Branden W. Joseph, “Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity,” in The Anarchy of Silence: John Cage and Experimental Art (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2009), 210-238. 227 provides another example of the complex relationship between chance, perceptual experience, and issues of transparency. Richard Lippold and the Ethics of “Open Sculpture” Richard Lippold in many ways paralleled his American counterpart, Alexander Calder. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Lippold studied industrial design at the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating in 1937, the same year as Moholy-Nagy first failed effort to establish a “New Bauhaus” discussed in Chapter 2. After a brief career in manufacturing design, Lippold and his wife Louis, an aspiring dancer, moved to New York. Louis began working with Martha Graham, while Lippold devoted much of 1944 contemplating a career as an artist. 82 His publications in Dance Observer, discussed in Chapter 2, clearly demonstrate his newfound interest in the public debate between medium-specific artistic expression and the future of the New York art world. Much like Joseph Campbell, Lippold’s career during his time in New York was split between championing the dance ambitions of his wife, theoretical writings on sculpture and design, and a series of teaching appointments in the New York area. It is likely that he first met Cage in 1944 or 1945 through Louis. Cage offered his services as both a pianist and composer to the intimate group of modern dancers centered in the Lower East Side of New York, even offering at one point to compose music at the rate of five dollars per 82 Details on Lippold’s biography can be found in the brief chronology in Curtis L. Carter, ed. Richard Lippold Sculpture (Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, 1990), as well as Lippold’s unpublished memoirs, held by the Richard Lippold Foundation. 228 minute. 83 Sometime after 1945, Lippold moved into the infamous “Bozza Mansion” on Monroe Street. Named after its charismatic Italian landlord, “Bozza Mansion” was the centerpiece of the New York School surrounding Cage until its demolition in 1952. Home to Cage, Feldman, and many other artists, the three-story walkup offered spectacular views of the East River, prompting a profile of Cage’s minimalist-décor apartment (adorned with several Lippold Sculptures) by Junior Harper’s Bazaar in 1946, which noted, “he [Cage] has launched a trend in living: Artists, musicians, and writers are beginning to invade slum and industrial districts bordering on the lower East River.” 84 By the late 1940s, Cage and Lippold were clearly on close personal terms, both through his wife’s dance career and through their mutual artistic concerns. Lippold received his first one-man show at the Willard Gallery in New York in 1947, which would continue to represent him for the rest of his career. Included in the exhibition were the first five of a series of “Variations Within a Sphere,” the fifth of which was dedicated and later given to Cage to adorn his apartment. 85 (See Figures 3.1 and 3.2) In response, Cage dedicated Sonatas XIV and XV from his monumental Sonatas and Interludes (1948) to Lippold. A talented organist, Lippold considered pursing a performance career 83 David Revill, The Roaring Silence, John Cage: A Life, 81. 84 “Cage’s Studio Home,” Harpers Bazaar (June, 1946), repr. in John Cage, John Cage: An Anthology, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Da Capo, 1970), 84-85. 85 Cage later sold the sculpture to the Museum of Modern Art after falling on hard financial times in 1956, where it remains today. 229 at several junctures, and the architectonic nature of his sculptures was deeply influenced by his study and fascination with the music of Bach. Figure 3.1: Richard Lippold, Variation Within A Sphere No. 6, 1948, Stainless steel, brass and enamel wire 8 x 8 inches. Collection of Anni Albers, Connecticut. Photo: Sasha Hammid. Courtesy The Richard Lippold Foundation. 230 Figure 3.2: Richard Lippold, Full Moon, Variation Within a Sphere No. 7, 1949-1950. Brass Rods and Nichrome Wires. 120 x 36 x 36 inches. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: John D. Schiff. Courtesy the Richard Lippold Foundation. Much like Cage’s later relationship with pianist David Tudor, it seems that Cage and Lippold held a mutual yet platonic intimacy in personal and artistic matters. As Lippold recalled, “I’ve always been very interested in music, and that was one relationship I had 231 with John. We had evenings together at his place or my place, playing the piano or doing whatever we could musically.” 86 In 1948 Cage invited Lippold and Louis to join him for the summer session at Black Mountain College. The session proved to be one of the most influential moments in Cage’s career, shared among such colleagues as Buckminster Fuller and Elaine and Willem de Kooning. Cage also composed In a Landscape, for harp or piano, dedicated to Louis. Cage and Lippold worked on plans for an opera, which likely was based on the Perseus and Andromeda material from Joseph Campbell’s libretto discussed in Chapter 2. 87 Cage and Lippold’s intimate dialogue was deeply enmeshed with parallel spiritual and artistic investigations that both artists underwent during the late 1940s. Cage’s dedication of Sonatas XIV and XV was subtitled “Gemini,” in reference to Lippold’s 1947 sculpture of the same name. Cage’s overall ordering of the collection according to the “rasas,’ or “permanent emotions” culled from his readings of art historian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and his relationship with his pupil Gita Sarabhi has been discussed in depth, particularly by David Patterson and James Pritchett. 88 Pritchett notes in particular the relationship between Cage’s dynamic tension of temporal rhythmic structure and surface elaboration as a continuation of the theories expressed in “Grace and Clarity,” 86 Richard Lippold, interview with Vincent Katz, 2 October, 2001, repr. in Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art, ed. Vincent Katz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 91. 87 Richard Lippold, letter to Joseph Albers, 24 May, 2002, North Carolina Museum of Art, Black Mountain College Research Project, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, repr. in Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art, 91. 88 David W. Patterson, Appraising the Catchwords, 58-124. James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage, 33- 38. 232 and continuing with his polemic address at Black Mountain College in 1948, “Defense of Satie.” As Pritchett notes: In “Defense of Satie,” however, Cage does not merely assert the advantageousness of musical structure based in time, but attempts to prove its absolute necessity. He points out that duration is the only aspect of sound that is common to both sound and silence. 89 As the discussion of “Grace and Clarity” in relationship to the dialogue in Dance Observer in Chapter 2 deduced, Maya Deren’s efforts in constructing a similar ethics of cinematic form through ritual and spatial transformation highlighted the effect of suture and transparency that was central to the dialogue between graphic notation, cinematic space, and the perceptual “ground” in both Works of Calder and Pollock 1951. A similar thread of questioning emerged at the same time in Lippold’s early freestanding sculptures. While teaching at Goddard College in 1944, Lippold recalled an experience walking in the moonlight that prompted his investigation of spherical forms in what would eventually be the variations series leading to “The Sun” and the film project with Cage. As he later recalled, “I was struck by the almost breathable light given to the air by a radiant, partial moon; even the mountains seemed to float in it. I remember thinking how impossible it would be to express this tranquil, luminous loneliness in such finite materials as my materials.” 90 The progenitor of the series, a small study New Moonlight 89 James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage, 39. 90 Richard Lippold, “Lippold’s Lippold,” Unpublished manuscript, excerpt repr. in Richard Lippold: Sculpture, 10; Lippold also recalled this experience in a 1972 interview with Joan Seeman: Joan Seeman Interview with Richard Lippold, Joan Seeman Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington, DC. 233 followed by New Moonlight No. 2 (1948) represent the central visual concern of Lippold’s freestanding works. (Figure 3.3) Figure 3.3: Richard Lippold, New Moonlight, 1948. Nickel-silver and stainless steel, wires, beads. Collection of Louis Lippold. Photo: Sasha Hammid. Courtesy The Richard Lippold Foundation. 234 As Lippold’s “Significant Form,” this particular geometric abstraction has many affinities with the Hegelian notion of “spirit” imbued in Oskar Fischinger’s statements discussed in Chapter 1. As Curtis L. Carter has argued, Lippold’s use of space as a metaphor for the spiritual is brought about by the abandonment of mass in favor of transparent space. This rejection of the classical model of figurative embodiment of specific geometric form engenders a transcendent articulation of specific, individual acts of experience. As Carter notes: It would appear that both Hegel and Lippold have in mind a similar notion in their respective concepts of abstract spatiality and abstract spatial construction. Hegel thus concludes that the spiritual or “inner life” of mankind is concentrated and given corporal shape in the sensuous forms of sculpture, thus transforming their mechanical and material means. 91 Lippold echoed many of these sentiments in his unpublished writings during the same period. In “New Space Forms,” written in 1949, Lippold connected philosophical and technical developments, noting, much as Moholy-Nagy did in The New Vision, the parallels between structural-architectural forms such as suspension bridges, radio and television antennae, derricks, elevated highways, and high tensions lines. As he noted: These are objects which seem to symbolize most clearly the basis of our present philosophy: a detachment from earthly forces of gravity, or a single, specific location. Instead, we are actually a world of displaced person, conquerors of space and time, able to penetrate – even physically - into all regions simultaneously…thus we look beneath the surface of things – and people – for an understanding of what goes on inside. 92 91 Curtis L. Carter, “Richard Lippold: Space As a Metaphor For the Spiritual in Art,” in Richard Lippold: Sculpture, 15. 92 Richard Lippold, “New Space Forms,’ [1949], Richard Lippold Papers, Reel D342, Archives of American Art, Washington, DC. 235 Lippold’s discussion of detachment and gravity forces has an affinity with the theories John Cage Sr., who was beginning to articulate around the same time his ideas regarding the electron cloud theory and his engineering applications for space travel. This likely had a clear bearing on his governmental research projects for the Bureau of Ships during and after the war, where he once again hired his son Cage Jr. as a research assistant. The only surviving document outlining Cage Jr.’s “Secret Navy Research” lists his Monroe Street address, and it is likely that both father and son openly discussed similar theories relating to sonar and sonobouy technology during the same time. 93 Politics in the New York School: The Origins of The Sun The division between the circle of artists surrounding John Cage generally defined as the “Neo-Avant-Garde” and the mainstream of the New York Abstract Expressionist School remains central to the critical discourse surrounding the New York art world of the1950s, and the artistic and conceptual concerns outlined above clearly mark the division between “painterly” ideas on medium-specificity and the emergence of conceptually-defined art. The relationship between space, environment, inner and outer modes of expression, and transparency both in auditory and visual are markers of a significant part of this divide. On a political and social level, this division was clearly defined by 1952. Both Cage and Lippold maintained a tenuous relationship with many of the central figures, such as the opinions Cage expressed regarding Pollock outlined above. While Cage continued to associate himself with such institutions such as the 93 John Cage, “Secret Navy Research,” John Cage Collection, Series I: Correspondence, Box 4, Folder 7.17, Northwestern University Music Library, Evanston, Ill. Much of this document is redacted. 236 Cedar Bar Tavern and the 8 th Street Artist’s Club, Lippold’s relationship with this group was largely through Cage. In 1952 Lippold moved to Long Island, and the following year Cage moved to the Stony Point Artist’s commune in New York State, and for the remainder of the 1950s both artists gradually moved away from the core group of painters both personally and artistically. 94 However, while most critics and historians have examined the conflicting ideological grounds of this divide, the economic structure of the New York art world largely dictated many of these conflicts, in particular the curatorial philosophies of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, and, to a lesser extent, the directives of Peggy Guggenheim. One particular incident involving Lippold demarcates the boundaries of this divide, both artistically and politically. After World War II, a complex series of agreements were made between the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Metropolitan on the acquisition of American Art. Initial agreements intended to delineate certain periods to each museum, but quickly dissolved by 1948. In 1949, the Metropolitan Museum established a Department of American Art under the direction of Robert Beverly Hale with the generous purse of the George A. Hearn and Alfred A. Hoppock Hearn memorial fund, along with a host of other endowed funds directed for such acquisitions. 95 Put in direct competition with popular curators such as Alfred Barr and Dorothy Canning Miller at the Museum of Modern Art, as well as the pervasive influence of socialite Peggy 94 Joan Seeman Interview with Richard Lippold, 1972, Joan Seeman Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington, DC. 95 For details on this complex set of agreements, see: Robert Beverly Hale, “The American Moderns,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 16/1, “New Series” (Summer, 1957): 18-28. 237 Guggenheim, the new department sparked protest among artists. The first exhibition of 52 American painters under the age of thirty-six in March of 1950 ignited the first campaign. Under the direction of Robert Motherwell, a group of artists that became known as the “Irascible 18” assembled a letter of protest to the Museum, and Richard Lippold was asked to sign the letter. To their surprise Lippold declined, as he explained in a later interview: And he [Motherwell] called me and asked, ‘would you like to sign this letter too? And I said, well I agree with what you have to say, but I don’t like to make joint efforts. I think if I got an attitude I would like it to be known and I think it has more strength if, you know, it’s done individually. If everyone wrote a letter instead of everybody signing a petition or something; I’ve never thought that in any area of my life. 96 Lippold decided to write a letter of his own rather than join the group petition, an action that would have permanent repercussions for his career and his relationship to the Abstract Expressionist School. The highly publicized letter of protest, covered extensively by every major news outlet in New York, and solidified by the obligatory Life magazine profile featuring the now infamous photograph of the collective, marked the establishment of the Abstract Expressionist School as a dominant force in American and international art. The independent “9 th Street Show” that followed the publicity in 1951, underwritten by Leo Castelli and the financial core of New York art dealers, laid the foundation for the economic structure of the American modern art world. 97 This event 96 Joan Seeman Interview with Richard Lippold, Joan Seeman Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington, DC. 97 Among the many summaries of this event, see Irving Sandler, Abstract Expressionism and the American Experience: A Reevaluation (Lenox, MA: Hard Press Editions, 2009), 233-4. 238 has been the springboard for numerous political and economic discussion of Cold-War politics and the cultural economy of art in the last thirty years. Art historians such as Serge Guilbaut (How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art), Michael Leja (Reframing Abstract Expressionism), and others have centered their arguments on this critical juncture between art and commodity culture in response to the material interpretations of prior scholars. 98 Moreover, the coalescence of an aesthetic of individual withdrawal from political and economic issues emerging from the New York art community surrounding Cage and artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, and Jasper Johns would further delineate the dichotomy between political and material means of artistic value, use, and societal obligations. The desire among artists such as Lippold to establish a clear ethics behind this attitude was in many ways predicated on their basic approach toward the use and means of artistic expression and its relationship to space, environment, and concept. Lippold’s surprising turn following the statement by the “Irascible 18,” would result in the largest commission by a living American artist from the Metropolitan Museum for his sculpture “The Sun” in 1953. After deciding to write a separate letter, Lippold visited the museum to see the exhibition and came across the Persian carpet room. Noticing the unique illumination provided by a sunlight in the space, Lippold conceived of a sculpture that would 98 Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1993), Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole The Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). This dialogue is perhaps most clearly conveyed in the final chapters of Irving Sandler’ 2009 publication, Abstract Expressionism and the American Experience, a volume written largely in response to the outpouring of criticism of his influential yet decidedly sympathetic publication in 1970, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (New York: Harper and Row, 1970). 239 complement the space: a reflective figure of sunlight that would further illuminate the room. He then wrote to the director of the Metropolitan Museum, Henry Francis Taylor, offering such a commission. While perhaps unintended, the implicit dialogue within the letter between “East and West” positions the project at the center of Cold War politics. In the letter Lippold argues: The present intersection of east and west which marks the exact instant of all our lives does not leave me unmoved in relation to my work which obviously contains many references of craftsmanship, symmetry and spirit to the Orient…to prepare a sculptural statement adequate to describe our occidental debt to the orient and its debt to us has always been a concern of mine. The international events of the present urge on me this awareness even more; all other national concerns seem quite petty. 99 The letter was met with interest, but the proposal was initially rejected in 1951. 100 However, in 1953 the Board of Directors reconsidered the offer, and a contract was drafted in June of the same year. 101 The sudden change of heart was a quick maneuver in the wake of bad publicity over the “Irascible 18” incident, and was possibly in response to another highly politicized event: The Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner competition held in 1952, for which Lippold was a finalist. Launched in 1952 by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (ICA), the competition was highly suspect from the outset as thinly-veiled Cold War propaganda. Largely funded by government 99 Richard Lippold to Francis Henry Taylor, 28 Dec., 1950, Richard Lippold Papers, Reel D-342, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. 100 Robert Beverly Hale to Richard Lippold, 6 March, 1951, Richard Lippold Papers, Reel D-342, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. 101 Richard Lippold, Contract for “The Sun,” [1953] Richard Lippold Papers, Reel D-342, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. 240 grants, scholars have pointed to this and other international art competitions as a backdrop for a number of espionage programs aimed at promoting abstract art as a model of democratic ideals of individuality and freedom. 102 Lippold’s submission summarized a number of artistic tropes regarding transparency and space. As he explained in notes for the contest: Actual political imprisonment is an experience restricted to a comparative minority of the world’s population…if such a monument is to have universal and timeless meaning, it must depict this theme in terms which are common to the many kinds of imprisonment which confront all men daily. 103 Constructed as two interpenetrating conic shapes of thin wires, the structure was meant to be literally transparent, enabling the visitor to walk through and around the base and then look up at the central conic elaboration spreading out into two dove-like wings. (See Figure 3.4) These themes continued in many of Lippold’s later works, and the context of political imprisonment provided an apt metaphor for the neo-avant-garde movement surrounding Cage. Looking very much like a cage, Lippold’s proposal had a number of implications for Cold War politics of identity and withdrawal. As Lippold later noted: I have hoped, also, that a final reaction might be felt in this space…this is the reaction which feels not submission or resistance, or vacillation between the two, but which feels that by understanding the sources of their imprisonment, and by accepting the reality of their existence, one is able to acquire or preserve a sense of “self,” of human dignity. 104 102 See for example: Joan Marter, “The Ascendancy of Abstraction for Public Art: The Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner Competition,” Art Journal 53/4, Sculpture in Postwar Europe and America, 1945-59 (Winter 1994): 28-36. 103 Richard Lippold, “The Meaning of My ‘Unknown Political Prisoner’ Maquette.” [1952] Richard Lippold Papers, Reel D-342, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. 104 Richard Lippold, “The Meaning of My ‘Unknown Political Prisoner.’” 241 Figure 3.4: Richard Lippold, Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner (1953). Gold-plated brass rods and stainless steel wires 38 x 12 inches (base included) Image courtesy The Richard Lippold Foundation. Lippold’s maquette prompts a number of questions regarding identity and cultural politics beyond the scope of this study, but it provides a fitting metaphor for the implications of spatial articulation, and has a direct bearing on the collaborative project to document the making of The Sun. 242 Documenting The Sun: John Cage and Richard Lippold’s Film experiment Lippold devoted three years to constructing The Sun. With over two miles of 24 karat gold wire and tubing, the construction of the sculpture itself was as monumental as the final product. (Figure 3.5) Photographer John Schiff, a friend and associate of Lippold, visited his studio during the construction, and like Hans Namuth, decided to film the artist at work. The resulting footage—over five thousand feet of film—documented every stage of the construction of the sculpture. Lippold originally intended to have Schiff film the final installation, but due to an eye accident he was unable to complete the project, leaving Lippold with the unedited footage. 105 Cage had originally intended to write a score for the film, but Lippold instead proposed that he edit the film itself. They convened at Lippold’s summer home in Danville, Vermont in the summer of 1956 to begin the project. 105 All information on the collaboration is taken from: Richard Lippold Interview with Joan Seeman, 1972, Joan Seeman Papers, Archives of American Art. 243 Figure 3.5: Richard Lippold, The Sun, Variation Within a Sphere No. 10. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image courtesy The Richard Lippold Foundation. Lippold had already divided the footage according to sections of certain processes involved in constructing the sculpture such as cutting wire, stretching, or welding, and the debate on how to organize the shots naturally turned toward chance procedures. As Lippold explained: 244 I said it ought to be – I hadn’t thought about it a lot – I said that’s why you’re here, to help me out, but I thought it ought to have some of the, perhaps some of the rhythmic qualities of the processes. Some are slow, some are fast, some are jerky, some are smooth, and if we could somehow in the flow of the film, not necessarily in direct relationship to these movements, but related in some way, the rhythm of the film to the varying rhythms of the work. Some of the moments are dangerous, are precarious or fragile, others are sturdy and – you know – some are troublesome, some are smooth, I said maybe the film can show some of this. He said “well that’s all interesting” [laughter] “but we really ought to do it by chance.” [laughter] 106 Lippold’s concern for a rhythmic editing structure has clear parallels to the organization of Works of Calder, and Cage’s response—to “do it by chance”—marks a difficult juncture in the “chance aesthetic.” What exactly constituted “chance procedures” throughout the 1950s was a rather open interpretation of the varying levels of decision- making involved in the overall organization of a work. Cage’s use of chance procedures during the early 1950s generally involved the successive organization of predetermined modules, whether they were short groupings of figures in works such as Music of Changes (1951), or sound modules on magnetic tape in Williams Mix (1952). Works belonging to the “Ten Thousand Things” series experimented with applying chance to increasingly complex parameters of compositional structure, but throughout the period chance was exercised with varying degrees, and The Sun was no different. This conflict within the chance aesthetic and its relationship to total indeterminacy was clearly evident in the dialogue that ensued between Cage and Lippold in the editing of the film. 106 Richard Lippold, Interview with Joan Seeman,1972. 245 As Lippold recalled, and as the surviving manuscript and film reveal, chance was often a messy business. The project was divided into three parts, the first two for the making of the sculpture, and the final third showing the finished work, which due to John Schiff’s injury was never completed. The film was to last around twenty minutes, and the surviving edited reels total around 14 minutes. In keeping with the graphic notational procedures outlined above, Cage notated the precise editing procedure in a single bound notebook of graph paper. (Example 3.5) Example 3.5: John Cage, The Sun, Manuscript Realization, 1 v. (22 p.) + paper bag. The Getty Research Institute Special Collections, 2005.M.4. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA. Courtesy The John Cage Trust. Parts I and II of the film were organized according to twenty-four categories of shots, the 24 th being blankness. The parameters for organizing these lengths was likely limited to the actual total length of individual categories, but no range is indicated for the sectioning 246 in the surviving score. For Part I, the graph paper was scaled so that each square equaled 36 frames, or 1.5 seconds, and each page contained 30 squares progressing horizontally, while the vertical axis was divided into 24 sections for the individual categories of shots. The preface indicates that numbers placed next to the dot correspond to the 24 categories, while a second number in parenthesis indicates the number of frames, and that the camera speed be the standard for American film at 24 frames per second. The placement of the dots within this grid space are scattered, especially within each square. As Nancy Perloff argues, this likely indicates that Cage’s chance procedure for the organization of edits was the same used in scores such as Music for Carillon (1952-1954) and Music for Piano (1952-1956). 107 In contrast to the time-consuming process of calculating I-Ching correlations to every individual duration or edit in works such as Williams Mix or Imaginary Landscape No. 5, Cage experimented with various means of assembling a random array of points within the graphic space for the majority of his chance compositions. This included correlating imperfections in the paper on which the piece was written to specific actions or notes (Music for Piano I, 1952), the use of template stencils of arbitrarily folded pieces of paper to triangulate points within a predetermined rhythmic structure (Music for Carillon No. 1, 1952), and various other methods defined in Cage’s notes as simply “chance procedures.” 108 As James Pritchett has noted, these simplified means for creating a random array of contact points on a graphic score were a quick and efficient way to avoid the tedious 107 Nancy Perloff, Research file for “The Sun,” [2004] Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA. 108 See for example, John Cage, “Notes on Compositions II,” in John Cage: Writer, Previously Uncollected pieces, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight, 1993), 51-56. 247 labor involved in the chart system used in other large-scale works such as Williams Mix. 109 It is clear that one of these methods was employed in The Sun, since a crossed-out page in the score contains nothing more than a series of points on the page with no corresponding notation of shot categories or frames. (Example 3.6) Example 3.6 John Cage, The Sun, Manuscript Realization, 1 v. (22 p.) + paper bag. The Getty Research Institute Special Collections, 2005.M.4. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA. Courtesy The John Cage Trust. Whatever the method for creating the imperfections may have been, Cage from the outset cornered himself with a number of practical challenges that inevitably made these types of complex collaborations exceedingly difficult to execute, and were the cause of a number of difficulties between Cage and Lippold during the two-week editing process. 109 James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage, 93. 248 For example, the choice of how many points to indicate within any individual page affected the overall editing process, particularly on pages with a number of shots. The most complex page, with 24 different edits prescribed to a space of just 45 seconds, proved to be difficult if not impossible to cleanly execute on the crude editing board Lippold had acquired for the project. The final product contains a number of extremely short shots, some as small as a few frames, and the process for applying editing tape was crudely done in a number of portions. Layers of tape, and in a few instances, the use of magnetic audio splicing tape (which was already pigmented and would have obscured the original image) created an at times distorted frame. Coarse cuts between frames only added to the sense of surface disorder. Calculating the actual lengths of individual shots according to this method would have been especially tedious, as numerous calculations between pages indicate. Each page was tallied to insure it added up to 1080 frames (30 square x 36 frames per square). However, it is unclear just how Cage approximated the exact number of frames for each shot, since the points were at various locations within each 36 frame square. It seems that Cage worked through deduction, first correlating the total number of frames within larger sections, and then approximating the exact frame length according to the location of the point along the horizontal axis and within the individual 36 frame square. An example of this complex calculation and editing structure can be seen with the first two pages of the score. (See Example 3.7) A surviving work-list of corresponding shots was left with the manuscript, written on two sides of a paper bag. The list of twenty-four shots also contain their specific durations both in frames and approximate 249 seconds. The first shot labeled “wood” was identified as category 23 in the score, which means that Cage and Lippold either had a category of shots that were all wood, or of a similar action, or a specific “bin” of shots closely related to this activity. The frame length is 36, or 1½ seconds, followed by the next edit labeled “scissors” at 110 frames, about 4½ seconds, and so on. The shortest two edits written on the bag are just 8 frames long, or 1/3 of a second. Example 3.7: John Cage, The Sun, Manuscript Realization, 1 v. (22 p.) + paper bag. The Getty Research Institute Special Collections, 2005.M.4. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA. Courtesy The John Cage Trust. 250 The detailed template provided a clear method for organizing lengths of shots and categories, but Cage and Lippold soon clashed on one aspect not under control of chance procedures: which strips of film to choose from the 24 different bins of shots. During the initial discussion of categories, Cage proposed arranging the direction and orientation of each edit: forward, right side up, backward, right side up, forward, upside down and backward upside down. Lippold balked at this option, arguing “I said we are not just making a movie, we’re presumably making a study of my making a sculpture, and I’d really rather reserve the right not to use some of the shots backward, upside down, and that’s when he first said ‘Oh Richard, you have a beautiful mind, it’s time you got rid of it!’” 110 In addition, the choice of individual shots according to their quality caused more disagreement, as Lippold had selected and labeled the best shots technically, since many shots were over or under exposed or washed out. Cage immediately disagreed, stating “There’s no such thing as better or worse, They’re all beautiful!” As Lippold recalled, however, the tediousness of the process soon caused a reversal of opinion for both Cage and Lippold. For the first week, Lippold insisted on using the best material for each edit, but the laboriousness of the editing process soon led to a change of heart by the second week: So I said all right, I reached in grabbed—he said “oh, but there was a better one than that!” [laughter] I said well John it really doesn’t matter because we’ve taken the best ones now and whatever else comes on we’ll just be interesting splicing, you know, with because they’re either overexposed or underexposed, have different texture. I said I just wanted to be sure that we got all the good shots for the sake of the clarity of an explanation of what the whole film is about. He said 110 Richard Lippold interview with Joan Seeman, Joan Seeman Papers. 251 “Oh, no there was ah—we should take the best ones!” He was now convinced, he was in my original position and I was in his original position. He started to get headaches because I didn’t care whether we got—I didn’t feel like rummaging through to find the very best shots each time. It was a very interesting experience, because we started at opposite ends and crossed over and ended up in the other position. 111 Lippold’s recollections point to the greatest difficulty facing Cage during the time: the ability to withstand the tediousness of his compositional methods in their execution. Procedure, structure, and order were essential to any project Cage undertook, and his ability to effectively manage a work rather than execute became his greatest challenge. The final result of Cage and Lippold’s collaboration, however, pointed to a new approach to the material use of film. The exploration of multiple perspectives, and in this case multiple perspectives of a work meant to be transparent and site-specific, pointed to the concern for a new approach to the virtual space of an artistic object. Collaborations such as this pointed to many conceptual and practical challenges for the chance aesthetic, issues Cage began to address in the latter half of the 1950s. Conclusion: Medium Specificity and Film: “A Few Ideas About Music and Film” (1951) and “On Film” (1956) Perhaps the best example of this change in Cage’s approach both to method and medium-specificity is a comparison of two writings about film, both at opposite ends of the 1950s. In the first, “A Few Ideas About Music and Film,” published in the small trade 111 Richard Lippold interview with Joan Seeman, Joan Seeman Papers. 252 journal Film Music Notes in 1951, Cage outlined practical, technical issues associated with film music composition, characteristically peppering his text with the usual heuristic aphorisms found in other essays such as “Forerunners” discussed above. He outlined many of the similarities between structuring a dance commission and a film score, including the relationship between rhythmic structures. Within this form, Cage is explicit in eliminating any sense of “accompaniment” noting, “given this structure, both film and music may proceed free of one another and everything works out beautifully,” and in a nudge to the standard method of industrial film music composition, notes, “it is even possible to have several composers working independently of one another on the same music.” 112 However, as the analysis of Works of Calder revealed, Cage’s approach to a standard film commission was quite conventional: it was only in the portion for magnetic tape that any sense of independence between sound and image occurs, and it was used in a very explicit narrative evocation of the dream state, which at the time was a standard trance strategy that pushed the boundaries of traditional cinematic form and its ability to manipulate time and space. What was necessary for film as vehicle for experimentation to have any relevancy to the indeterminacy aesthetic was the elimination of this very boundary of frame, directionality and suture, and to focus not on narrative forms of symbolic divergence from the industrial norm, but to use the material and apparatus of film to examine the very context and boundaries of art world definitions outlined above. This became the 112 John Cage, “A Few Ideas About Music and Film,” repr. in John Cage: Writer, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight, 1993), 63. 253 focus of Cage’s second essay, “On Film,” written for an address to the Creative Film Foundation in 1956. Notably, this was the same foundation that Deren first introduced her ideas on the paradigmatic and syntagmatic structure of cinema discussed in Chapter 2, which was met with both consternation and confusion. It is likely that Cage’s address was met in much the same way. In the opening passage, he gets right to the point: I am not interested in any art not as a closed-in thing by itself but as a going-out one to interpenetrate with all other things…and so I do not agree that “film is a visual form.” Ordinary film music is ignored by the average person because he assumes that it is (film is) a visual form. He is therefore not entirely alive under film bombardment, but if the building he is in begins to burn down, he will wake up and use his liveliness to save himself. In other words, I am not interested in an emotional response, but rather in bringing about a situation which life on the part of everyone concerned is an obvious necessity. 113 Cage phrases his ethical imperative as an “obvious necessity” in the context of his familiar set of heuristics: Artaud, Zen Buddhism, and the virtual space of magnetic tape. As outlined above, however, Cage’s primary motivation toward a cerebral approach to art and form was driven by familiar debates on medium-specificity, transparency and the grounding of art in readily identifiable methods and structures. Cage then gives two examples of how film might eliminate its dependence on medium-specificity. The first example came from an experience in 1930 where he went to view a silent film in Seville and was surprised to find it projected on a screen that could be viewed in front or behind depending on one’s orientation in the café. In the second example, Cage compares a situation in which he was at a glass-walled dining room that overlooked a swimming pool. Transparency was thus equated not only with an aesthetic experience, but with an 113 John Cage, “On Film,” [1956] repr. in John Cage: Writer, 116. 254 ontological experience cued by the phenomenal awareness of the present. He concludes by stating, “Therefore, the most important thing to do in film now is to find a way for it to include invisibility, just as music already enjoys inaudibility (silence).” 114 It is this type of statement that would characterize the next phase of Cage’s career, when his program expanded outward in the 1960s to encompass an ontology of all arts, leading simultaneously to an expansion of interdisciplinary rhetoric and strategies for the performative artwork, coupled with a contraction of a specific ideological tenant of Cagean indeterminacy in opposition to the expanded network of “Post-Cagean” aesthetic strategies in the 1960s. Unraveling this thick network of discourse is the most contentious ground of “Cage Studies” mentioned at the opening of this Chapter. Musicological discourse surrounding medium-specific means of musical composition and technique provide specific empirical foundations for the justification of Cage’s artistic program in the most conventional of means, as portions of this chapter have elucidated. However, moving beyond medium-specificity toward a generalized discourse on the concept of an artwork itself presents new challenges to scholars generally versed in textual-based criticism of a musical score and its concomitant relationship to aural results, societal relationships, and interpretation. It is to these methodological and historical questions that we now turn, with an examination of film in perhaps Cage’s most influential period: the 1960s. 114 John Cage, “On Film,” [1956] repr. in John Cage: Writer, 116. 255 CHAPTER 4 Post-Cagean Aesthetics, Experimentalism, and Intermedia In April of 1967 John Cage participated in a symposium on “The State of the Cinema” at the University of Cincinnati, as part of the University Spring Arts Festival. At the time, Cage was a composer in residence at the College Conservatory of Music. The talk, chaired by film scholar Jim McGinnis, included Cage, Jonas Mekas, and Stan VanDerBeek. A transcript was later published as Cinema Now by Michael Porte, chairman of the University Film Committee, with an additional statement by Stan Brakhage, who did not attend the original symposium. As Porte explained, the purpose of the publication was “to make available to film-makers, societies, distributors, exhibitors, and students a statement of intent by the makers of new cinema,” and “to provide for the future a documented understanding of developments in the art form that vitally communicates what is happening now—Cinema Now.” 1 The panel discussion highlights several issues addressed in this Chapter. The speakers examined the relationship between Cagean aesthetics and multimedia or expanded cinema along with the state of Underground Cinema and institutional support of independent film. 2 The opening speaker, Stan VanDerBeek, was a close associate of 1 Michael Porte, introduction to Cinema Now, ed. Hector Currie and Michael Porte (Cincinnati, OH: University of Cincinnati University Press, 1968), 3. 2 For the purposes of this study I designate “Underground” as the network of filmmakers centered in New York in the early 1960s adopting an alternative rhetoric for a “New American Cinema” in contrast to independent and industrial narrative cinema. For deeper examinations of these genre boundaries, see: Parker Tyler, Underground Film: A Critical History (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995); David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 85-165; 256 Cage who moved to the Stony Point Artists Commune in 1964, and was previously a student at Black Mountain College during the infamous 1952 summer session, which featured Cage’s first happening. VanDerBeek opened with characteristic enthusiasm: America is becoming conscious of movies as more than Hollywood folk art…the personal film is now becoming part of the dialogue…I feel that we are on the edge of a cultural revolution. I see this in the people who are in and out of school who want to engage in this art, in cinema, who plunge in in their own manner— get hold of an eight mm. camera….It’s as common as clothing. 3 Due to relatively inexpensive equipment and development costs, in the 1960s filmmaking became a performative act, an ongoing dialogue with the cinematic apparatus and its relationship to individuals and environment, echoing Cage’s spatial politics of interpenetration among artistic mediums. VanDerBeek’s utopian vision of participatory cinema was in contrast to the mainstay of cinematic practice emanating from a well- established Hollywood tradition of narrative form, coupled with the homogenization of narrative filmic poetics in the European Art Film movement in the postwar period. The growing legitimization of independent film in Europe and America, championed by institutionalized cultural venues such as Lincoln Center, international festivals such as Cannes and Venice, and the New York Film Festival, beginning in 1963, further Paul Arthur, A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film Since 1965 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 1-24; and, finally, artists statements on The New American Cinema reprinted in Film Culture Reader, ed. by P. Adams Sitney (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), 71-118. By “Expanded” cinema I take the term originating with Stan VanDerBeek discussed below in consideration of the formalization of the practice by Gene Youngblood in 1970. This is in contrast with the concept of “Expanded” cinema emerging at the same time in the United Kingdom, which presupposes audience interactivity as a necessary condition for the genre designation. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1970); A.L. Rees, Duncan White, Steven Ball and David Curtis, Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film (Millbank, London: Tate Publishing, 2011). 3 Stan VanDerBeek, Cinema Now, 6. 257 relegated the dimensions of cinematic space available for the creative artist to the pictorial and the narrative in lieu of the abstract and the discursive. Cage’s opening remarks were more concerned with exploring what the nature of film may be, and he presented three examples: his own silent piece, 4’33”(1952), Robert Rauschenberg’s “White Paintings” (1951-2), and Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film (1964), which consisted of an hour of blank film leader projected on a screen. Cage characterized the differences between the three works according to environmental relationships: Rauschenberg’s paintings were “airports for particles of dust and shadows that are in the environment,” 4 while 4’33” became, in performance, the sounds of the environment. In the case of Paik’s use of film, Cage noted that in projection the room is darkened and what is seen are the dust particles that collected on the film, but rather than equate this with the airport metaphor of Rauschenberg’s canvas plane, he noted that the “focus is more intense,” and that “the nature of the environment is more on the film, different from the dust and shadows that are the environment falling on the painting, and thus less free.” 5 Paik’s distillation of the cinematic apparatus into the simple interaction of light in space represented one pole of cinema theory and practice in the 1960s, and Cage equated 4 One of Cage's favorite metaphors for Rauschenberg and Duchamp was the “airports for particles of dust,” which Branden Joseph argues is taken from a caption written by Man Ray in the magazine Littérature of his photograph Élevage de Poussière [Dust Breeding] (1920), a close-up photograph of Duchamp’s famous Large Glass (1915-1923) after it had been covered with dust, thus resembling a topographical landscape. The caption read “view taken from an airplane by Man Ray,” reflecting on the relationship between landscape on the large and small scale. Branden W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 36. 5 John Cage, Panel Discussion, repr. in Cinema Now, 9. 258 such dematerialization acts with the general concept of “renunciation of intention,” but he was also, problematically, willing to accept the opposite, the complete saturation of activity, which was characterized best by VanDerBeek’s immersive multimedia and multiprojector light shows. As Cage noted in the Cinema Now discussion, “in this multiplicity, intention becomes lost and becomes silent, as it were, in the eyes of the observer. Since he could not be looking at all five or six images at once but only at one particular one, the observer would have a certain freedom.” 6 This implied dichotomy between total expansion and total reduction would characterize many of the interpretations of Cagean aesthetics in the 1960s. In film, this was explicit in two competing, yet concurrent, practices. On the one hand, artists and theorists such as Gene Youngblood described expanded cinema as an outgrowth of consciousness in the interpenetrating networks of communications technologies, thus lumping film, television in an all-encompassing artwork genre. 7 As a natural reaction, cinema was alternately differentiated by its very medium-specificity in structural film. Here, like in early minimalism, film was atomized to its base characteristics, echoing the ontological categorization cinema as idea or concept, relying only on the basic procedure of light 6 John Cage, Panel Discussion, repr. in Cinema Now, 9. 7 Following a lengthily and discursive introduction by Buckminster Fuller, Youngblood echoes the prevalent sentiments of media theorist Marshall McLuhan discussed below by explaining, “when we say expanded cinema we actually mean expanded consciousness….this is especially true in the case of the Intermedia network of cinema and television, which now functions as nothing less than the nervous system of mankind.” Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 41. 259 interaction in space. 8 As filmmaker Hollis Frampton remarked, “film is anything that may be put into a projector that will modulate the emerging beam of light.” 9 These twin poles of expansion and contraction, of intrinsic and extrinsic properties, best characterize the competing poles of Cagean indeterminacy and the aesthetic surround his artistic program in the 1960s. For example, one can point to Cage’s summit composition reflecting the aesthetic tenants of multimedia expansionism in the 1960s, HPSCHD (1967-9). The product of a two-year collaboration with composer and computer engineer Lejaren Hiller, HPSCHD (the computer abbreviation code for “harpsichord”) utilized state-of-the-art computer facilities at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign to assemble a multimedia spectacle integrating chance-determined sound system configurations for seven harpsichordists, fifty-one tape players cueing 208 computer-randomized tapes, eight film projectors playing an assemblage of 40 films, and sixty-four slide projectors projecting 6,400 slides. In contrast, Cage’s 0’00” (4’33” No. 2) (1962) provides a purely intrinsic consideration of the acoustic parameters of listening and sound system amplification, where the score for the work consists of a single 8 While relevant to the larger question of Cagean influence in the 1960s, for the purposes of this study, structural film, which proliferated in the latter half of the 1960s after Cage’s period of expanded multimedia collaborations, will not be considered. For more on Cage’s relationship with early minimalism and the structural films of Tony Conrad, see: Brandon W. Joseph, Beyond The Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts After Cage (New York, Zone Books, 2008), 74-85. Equally, the “idea of cinema” as a general ontological inquiry emerged concurrent with Cagean discourse, but the parameters for discussing “post-medium” considerations of the general ontology of the artwork are beyond the scope of this study. For more on this subject, see the following recent articles by Jonathan Walley: “Identity Crisis: Experimental Film and Artistic Expansion,” October 137 (Summer 2011): 23-50, and “The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema: Contrasting Practices in Sixties and Seventies Avant-Garde Film.” October 103 (Winter, 2003): 15-30. 9 Hollis Frampton, “A Lecture,” in On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, ed. Bruce Jenkins (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 127. 260 sentence: “In a situation with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action.” Cage’s participation on the panel was easily justified by the organizers, partially out of convenience, but just as likely for the cultural cachet that Cage’s name brought to any institutional discussion of contemporary media aesthetics. By 1967, Cage had achieved “guru” status, as Nam June Paik would later note. His career followed a rapid trajectory in the 1960s beginning with his famous sojourn to The International Summer Course at Darmstadt in 1958, followed by a year-long tour of Europe and multiple residencies at the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University, The University of Cincinnati, The University of Illinois, and the University of California, Davis, to name just a few. He embarked on several world tours with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, whose repertoire expanded to include collaborations with a potpourri of notable composers and visual artists from the 1960s. His 1961 publication, Silence coupled with a contract with Henmar Press and C.F. Peters to publish his entire catalog, the record release of his 1957 25-Year Retrospective concert, and the David Tudor album collaboration, Indeterminacy, in 1958, which consisted of Cage reading many of his famous anecdotes, created a cultural image of Cage and the New York School that was quickly absorbed by the 1960s generation. Cage for the first time became “Cage,” emblematic of a new cultural spirit that swept up the spirit of experimentation, while simultaneously sweeping under the table many of the inconsistencies within his artistic program. 261 As James Pritchett notes, from 1952 to 1959, Cage composed about 40 compositions, many of them involving substantial precompositional limiting procedures such as chance, chart or grid layouts similar to the scores discussed in Chapter 3. From 1962-1969, on the other hand, Cage completed only 15 pieces, many of them—in particular the “Variations” series discussed below—consisted only of transparency sheets or textual commentary outlining the original performance. 10 Cage’s “music” consisted of theatrical multimedia events, incorporating live electronics and sound system configurations alongside dance, theatrical action, and of particular interest to this study, multimedia projections within the performance space. Cage’s role in the composition of these works shifted from the traditional separation of composer/performer to that of active participant and director of a multimedia event. The parallel concepts of “multimedia” and “intermedia” were interspersed with rhetoric surrounding composition, theater, and performance art that encompassed a widening social interaction at the site of aesthetic experience. 11 As a result, questions of medium-specificity and authorship were blurred in Cage’s multimedia works. Cage became in a sense a “multiplatform” artist, engaging with engineers, performers, set designers, computer scientists, and art gallery curators. This new authorial responsibility inevitably caused internal tensions among the network 10 James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage, 143 11 William Fetterman loosely grouped a number of these works as “theater,” where Cage actively moved and performed within a performance space, John Cage’s Theatre Pieces, Notations and Performances (Melbourne, Australia: Harwood, 1996); for more on Cage’s collaborations, see: Leta E. Miller, “Cage’s Collaborations,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, ed. David Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 151-168. 262 of performers and theorists who remained close to Cage and artists reading into Cage’s notion of experimentalism, particularly among free-jazz improvisatory artists and early minimalist composer/performers. Cage’s notoriety and popularity garnered a wealth of institutional support, including universities, which in the 1960s looked to artists as employers in burgeoning arts departments. Bell Labs, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, WGHB-Boston, and others all provided grant money and support for larger installation works from artists like Cage. As the Cinema Now panel emphasized, a similar trend was occurring within independent and experimental cinema. The third speaker on the panel, Jonas Mekas, was the self-appointed spokesperson for this new generation of filmmakers. Along with theorists such as P. Adam Sitney, Mekas established such cultural institutions as the Film-makers’ Cooperative, the journal Film Culture, and in 1970, Anthology Film Archives. These institutions established a historical narrative highlighting the fundamental aesthetic tenants and threads of independent, experimental, and avant-garde film in America. This narrative, largely adhered to in this study, begins with the poetic cinema of trance emerging from Maya Deren, Sidney Peterson and others in the 1940s, followed by the formulation of film societies in New York in the 1950s, and ending with the emergence of Underground film in the 1960s. Central to this narrative was the element of self-expression, as Mekas noted in the talk. The cinematic apparatus and projection of the film was equated with psychological expansion, and it was this element of cinematic communication that collided with Cagean notions of communications theory later in the decade. In the 263 Cinema Now discussion, Mekas notes the importance of cinematic reality, a notion that Cage was interested in, but concerned with its specificity. As Mekas explains “all camera reality is reality as it is…all is real; all is true. But not everything is a truth.” Representational photography was eschewed in favor of nonrepresentative light and color, “setting our cameras in constant motion and pointing our cameras and strobes at light itself.” 12 Cage responded: Yet a person can’t look in all directions at once; one’s observation is no longer focused; rather, it’s given some freedom. As I understand it, that brings about for the observer something of that personalism that Jonas Mekas was speaking about with regard to the film-maker. And it’s this personalism that interests me in art, this element of individuality that can enter into the state of observing in contrast to the observer being given what someone else has already pre-digested. 13 In many ways, this dichotomy between personalism and indeterminacy echoes the same conceptual divide between Cage and Jackson Pollock outlined in the previous chapter. The transformation of the Cagean aesthetic of indeterminacy is difficult yet enlightening to parse. Within the parameters of what could be described as a network or utility theory, Cage’s ideas on plurality focused on the networks and systems of information dissemination, moving from the inexactitude of pluralistic situations in which “anything” can occur toward directed moments of experience and phenomenological awareness. As Cinema Now demonstrates, the effect of Cage’s aesthetic loomed large in the 1960s. One clear example in cinema was George Maciunas’ often-reprinted diagram from the 1966 special edition of Film Culture on Expanded Arts, which presented (in 12 Jonas Mekas, Panel Discussion, repr. in Cinema Now, 9. 13 John Cage, Panel Discussion, repr. in Cinema Now, 9. 264 mockingly large broadsheet print) a planimetric map outlining the diverse network of individual artists working in film, theatre, music, and dance, situating Cage in the center. 14 However it would be incorrect to relegate the Cage effect as “influence” in the traditional sense, for Cage’s discursive aesthetic was both marvelously acute and frustratingly obtuse. Kyle Gann notes that, in the aftermath of the Cage generation, no specific “school” emerged in the traditional sense; not a single artist, including those within the “inner circle” of Cage’s coterie, adopted chance procedures, graphic or transparent notation, star charts, or Cagean theatrical performativity in any strict sense. 15 Artists consistently utilized elements from Cage’s handbag of compositional and rhetorical/philosophical ideas, but each immediately sought out a sense of “beyond” or “post” in an effort to delineate boundaries between the tenants set forth by Cage and their individual artistic platforms. 16 Not surprisingly, despite the vast amount of literature surrounding Cage influence and aesthetics in the 1960s, few have managed to clearly articulate a specific set of principles that emerged from indeterminism and experimentalism, and the following section will review these tenants in relationship to the definition of expanded cinema echoed in manifestos from the period. 14 George Maciunas, “Expanded Arts Diagram,” Film Culture 43, Expanded Arts Special Issue, (Winter 1966): 7. Noticeably, the recent publication by Tate Modern on expanded cinema history includes a similar diagram, with Cage given just a small corner network among the diverse artists. Expanded Cinema: Art Performance, Film (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 2-9. 15 Kyle Gann, “No Escape From Heaven: John Cage As Father Figure,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, ed. David Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 242-260. 16 The need to designate a “post” generation is evident in contemporary scholarship surrounding Cage’s influence. See for example: Branden W. Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate, Tony Conrad and the Arts After Cage (New York: Zone Books, 2008), and Liz Kotz, “Post-Cagean Aesthetics and the ‘Event’ Score,” October 95 (Winter 2001): 54-89. 265 This Chapter focuses on the speakers for Cinema Now, first by examining the dialogue between Cage and the “two Stans,” Brakhage and VanDerBeek, using Cage’s indeterminate “Variations” series (1958-1967) to map the collaborative interaction between Cage and VanDerBeek, while consistently returning to the opposing pole of Brakhage aesthetics and underground Cinema. Cage’s collaborative multimedia work, Variations V (1965), enveloped a wide variety of performative, theatrical, and sound- system strategies into the Cagean artwork, and VanDerBeek’s film projections played an integral role, opening up questions of authorship, media boundaries, and performativity. Unlike the small group of artists in the 1950s working closely around Cage, each eschewing a relatively firm opposing aesthetic position within the Greenwich Village enclave, artistic activity flourished in the 1960s, emanating from artistic communities such as the Stony Point Artists Commune, venues such as The Kitchen, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the expansive network of performance venues in Downtown New York. 17 The diversity of trends and the emergence of post-medium theatrical art scattered artistic practice, and in turn, relied on increasingly difficult theoretical and aesthetic discussions of particular artworks, genres, and the ever-looming question of “influence.” …………………………..…………………….. 17 For instance, the oral histories compiled by composer John Gruen on 1950s and 1960s New York artist communities highlight the drastic expansion of downtown performance and theater venues that engendered the stratification of artistic practice over the ensuing decades. John Gruen, The Party’s Over Now, Reminiscences of the Fifties (New York: Viking Press, 1972), and The New Bohemia: The Combine Generation (New York: Shorecrest, 1966). 266 The previous chapter of this study ended with Cage’s 1956 essay, “On Film,” where Cage challenged the traditional ontology of film, particularly its medium-specificity. These sentiments were not lost in his Cinema Now comments on the nature of film, nor would they ever fully exit his characterization of the filmic apparatus and the cinematic experience. In the years leading up to the publication of Silence, Cage gradually solidified a vision of indeterminacy and experimental music. The opening fifty pages of Silence were a direct manifesto of these various ideas, arranged to articulate a historical progression, beginning with the misdated “The Future of Music: Credo” (1940) discussed in Chapter 1, followed by the pair of essays on experimental music, “Experimental Music: Doctrine” (1955), and “Experimental Music” (1957). 18 Noticeably, Cage chose to present these three essays in succession, thus alluding to connections between disparate moments in his career. However, the examination of source materials for Cage’s 1940 credo in Chapter 1 points to the possibility that the text was vastly reworked for publication in Silence, possibly to align the ideas with later notions of experimental music. In addition, the third essay on experimental music from the later 1950s, “History of Experimental Music in the United States” (1959), was placed later in Silence next to “Forerunners of Modern Music” (1949), thus creating a distorted chronology for readers that emphasized a steady progression of ideas rather than the discontinuous development of differing ideological goals mentioned in the previous Chapters. In these three essays (excluding “The Future of Music: Credo”), Cage formally outlines the tenants behind 18 Phillip Gentry has noted this connection based on his recent investigation of the publication of Silence and Cage’s dialogue with editors at Wesleyan University Press. Phillip Gentry, “Writing Silence,” Paper presented to the National Meeting of the American Musicological Society, San Francisco, CA, November 2011. 267 both the negative aesthetic of silence and the necessary conditions for experimental music. A brief examination of these three essays will serve to delineate the parameters of experimentalism formerly espoused by Cage in contrast to post-Cage interpretations. Chapter 3 discussed Cage’s transition in the mid 1950s from chance-determined compositional techniques and various randomization arrays utilizing grids, star charts and, later, transparencies. Concurrently, Cage began to fully develop the negative aesthetics of silence in this series of articles. Magnetic tape functioned as a metaphor for a larger “field situation” of a total sound space in these essays, while the East and South Asian heuristics perpetuated a Cage’s loosely-defined yet enigmatic formula: “The purpose of art is to imitate nature in her manner of operation.” 19 Finally Cage formally introduced the notion of process, a term that was immediately taken on by those following in his footsteps. The title of Silence presupposed a negative aesthetic; even the cover and layout of the text implied a subversiveness and reflexivity that readers absorbed while perusing its intellectual boundaries. Cage’s earlier thesis of “sound-as-sounds,” which categorized the empirical characteristics of sounds and their morphology in structural-temporal arrangement, was predicated on the binary opposition of sound and silence, or absence of sound. However, as his famous experience in an anechoic chamber in 1951 revealed, silence in the empirical sense was an impossibility for the listening subject; one’s own 19 This summary and the ensuing discussion benefited greatly from the insightful thoughts of You Nakai. You Nakai, “Imitating Nature in Her Manner of Operation: Cage’s Use of Technological Media as Metaphorical Models in the 1950s and ‘60s,” Conference paper delivered to the National Meeting of the American Musicological Society, San Francisco, CA, 2011. For more on Cage and Coomaraswamy, see: Edward James Crooks, John Cage’s Entanglement with the Ideas of Coomaraswamy (PhD Dissertation, University of York, 2011). 268 body continued to reverberate within the resonant shell of a sentient being. Thus the “no such thing as silence” thesis, which continues to fascinate and perplex scholars and artists to this day. Cage realized that he could still maintain his logic by merely defining silence according to its opposite. It was not that silence did not exist, for within the anechoic chamber there empirically was a near-complete absence of sounds, and within a vacuum there are simply no atoms in which soundwaves can vibrate and perpetuate; rather Cage’s thesis should really have read: “there is no such thing as a situation in which a sentient being can perceive the complete absence of audible sound.” No-sound was an idea or concept, defined only through a negation. By using negation as an operative word, Cage was able to provide an infinite amount of possible situations defined not by their existence, but by the absence of knowing their existence (often using his favorite pseudo- word “no-thing” rather than “nothing”); a simplistic logic formula that could be applied in a variety of different situations and contexts. Despite the fact that the anechoic chamber revelation pointed directly to subjectivity, Cage found that the loss of his empirical dichotomy eliminated the last remaining structural element in his compositions: duration. In its place, he sought out parameters for a “no matter what” situation in which all subjectivity is removed from the relationship between subject and object. This “pure” situation occurred in the process of recording, as Cage initially proposed, where the act of transduction inscribed the sonic parameters in and of themselves directly onto the recording apparatus. What Cage ultimately sought out, then, was a similar situation for the relationship between listener and object, where sounds are inscribed directly in the ear of the listener. This was in a 269 sense, “beyond ears,” which he considered inferior to the mechanical recording apparatus because of their very subjectivity. In his earliest essay in the series, “Experimental Music: Doctrine” (1955), Cage argued: Beyond them (ears) is the power of discrimination which, among other confused actions, weakly pulls apart (abstraction), ineffectually establishes as not to suffer alteration (the “work”), and unskillfully protects from interruption (museum, concert hall) what springs, elastic, spontaneous, back together again with a beyond that power which is fluent (it moves in and out), pregnant (it can appear when- where- as what-ever), related (it is you yourself in the form you have that instant taken), obscure (you will never be able to give a satisfactory report even to yourself of just what happened). 20 Pure objectivity in the sense of a direct association between the sound object and the perceiver suffered from the same logical problem as pure silence: it simply does not exist. Cage’s solution was to apply the same negative logic to the act of perception. No-thing is transferred to “no-thinking” in a situation that defines the purely objective through its negative: unknowing. He then comes to a conclusion similar to the Bergsonian notion of potentialities discussed in Chapter 3: “In view, then, of a totality of possibilities, no knowing action is commensurate, since the character of the knowledge acted upon prohibits all but some eventualities.” 21 Here he reaches an early approximation of experimentalism: An experimental action, generated by a mind as empty as it was before it became one, thus in accord with the possibility of no matter what, is, on the other hand, practical. It does not move in terms of approximations and errors, as “informed” action by its nature must, for no mental images of what would happen were set up 20 John Cage, “Experimental Music: Doctrine,” [1955] in Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 14-15. 21 John Cage, “Experimental Music: Doctrine,” 15. 270 beforehand; it sees things directly as they are: impermanently involved in an infinite play of interpenetrations. 22 This characterization is in contrast to the familiar formulation at the beginning of the essay, that an experimental work is simply “an act the outcome of which is unknown.” 23 This statement, along with the environmental awareness logic behind 4’33”, was the basis of Michael Nyman’s thesis in his influential 1974 publication, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. Nyman’s formulation included additional keywords such as process, situation, and field, which were at odds with Cage’s original formulation: Experimental composers are by and large not concerned with prescribing a defined time-object whose materials, structuring and relationships are calculated and arranged in advance, but are more excited by the prospect of outlining a situation in which sounds may occur, a process of generating action (sounding or otherwise), a field delineated by certain compositional “rules.” 24 It is precisely at this divide, between the “pure” notion of experimentalism espoused by Cage, and the expanding strategies adopted by composers, that the notion of “post-Cage” emerged. Cage’s strictest formulation implied an impossible situation of pure unmediated perception, and he spent the majority of the 1960s adopting a variety of notational and performative practices that could come close to this ideal. In essence, all actions or strategies employed by post-Cagean artists worked outward from this singularity in a plurality of theatrical multimedia works. It was only when this expansion reached a point of saturation that Cage was willing to equate a work with his unmediated perception 22 John Cage, “Experimental Music: Doctrine,” 15. 23 John Cage, “Experimental Music: Doctrine,” 13. 24 Michael Nyman, Experimental Music, Cage and Beyond, 2 nd ed.(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 4. 271 ideal; any point in between inevitably evoked contradictions of subjectivity anathema to Cage’s ideological discourse. Cage opened his second essay on experimental music with this very point, turning again to the aspect of an unmediated listening subject as the personal litmus test. Cage no longer objected to the word “experimental,” and noted, “I use it in fact to describe all the music that especially interests me and to which I am devoted, whether someone else wrote it or I myself did. What has happened is that I have become a listener and the music has become something to hear.” 25 He again criticizes the subjective ear, because “the measuring mind can never finally measure nature,” and the fallacy of logic, where “hearing sounds which are just sounds immediately sets the theorizing mind to theorizing, and the emotions of human beings are continually aroused by encounters with nature.” 26 As You Nakai argues, what was really at stake in Cage’s discourse on the sound field was the relationship between listening, which is both indeterminate and inevitable, and what is written and what is performed in the act of musical production. 27 Magnetic tape provided a metaphor and concrete evidence of the temporal structure of sound in the same way that sound phonography provided a visual tactile means of understanding the empirical structure of sounds. However, magnetic tape did not provide a visual cue, since the tape recording mechanism translated sound into an electromagnetic 25 John Cage, “Experimental Music” [1957], in Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 7. 26 John Cage, “Experimental Music” [1957], 10. 27 You Nakai, “Imitating Nature in Her Manner of Operation: Cage’s Use of Technological Media as Metaphorical Models in the 1950s and ‘60s.” 272 medium undecipherable to the naked eye. Visually, tape represented the void of total sound space in which, as Cage described, “the total field of possibilities may be roughly divided and the actual sounds within these divisions may be indicated as to number but left to the splicer to choose.” Graphic notation, as discussed in Chapter 3, provided a means for greater indeterminacy than the chart technique, and Cage attempted to equate the transcription, or transduction, that occurs during recording, with the evolving means of instructional scores, where points within a grid provide specific correlates to whatever compositional choices one must make given the materials surrounding a specific piece. The composer, in this case, as Cage remarked, “resembles the maker of a camera who allows someone else to take the picture.” 28 Cage compared this relationship to the static and the variable again to the act of listening: For this music is not concerned with harmoniousness as generally understood, where the quality of harmony results from a blending of several elements. Here we are concerned with the coexistence of dissimilar, and the central points where fusion occurs are many: the ears of the listeners wherever they are. This disharmony, to paraphrase Bergson’s statement about disorder, is simply a harmony to which many are unaccustomed. 29 This comparison between the ocular and auditory is again predicated on the ability to interpret what sound actually is, which can be approximated in a visual or graphic depiction of soundwave structures, but it ignores the fundamental difference between listening and seeing, namely the inevitability of listening versus the directionality of seeing. Focus is primarily a visual term: we focus our attention in accordance with the 28 John Cage, “Experimental Music” [1957], 11. 29 John Cage, “Experimental Music” [1957], 12. 273 correction of our retina to specific objects within a visual field in order to interpret their meaning or significance. However, focusing our hearing—listening in the sense of a visual metaphor—is a different experience. 30 This boundary between perceptual means and cross-sensory metaphors was the basis of early intermedia discussions. At the same time, all sensory perceptions were equated with “media” in general, removed from any medium-specificity and outlined in broader terms. In an unpublished essay on magnetic tape from 1955, Cage articulated this cross-sensory metaphor, while still giving “music,” in terms of audition, primacy: Curious, that I should have to point out that musical art has no boundaries…I accept only the boundary of being able to hear….and I’m not sure that I even accept that boundary, for…super- and sub-sonic sound have been “felt.” Furthermore, on several occasions when I was being subjected to musical performances…I have noticed my attention moving to what I was on each occasion seeing, seeing moving. I perceived that music has no boundaries at all to do with the ears but moves beyond these to include the eyes and all the other senses. That is, we are alive, and what we are living, if one must speak of art, is not music, but theater. 31 This conflation of multisensory awareness and intense personalism marks the intrinsic pole of Cage’s something-nothing dichotomy of negative aesthetics. In the Cinema Now discussion, Cage noted that it is “personalism that interests me in art, this element of individuality that can enter into the state of observing in contrast to the observer being given what someone else has already pre-digested.” The fourth speaker included in the Cinema Now publication, Stan Brakhage, was noticeably absent from the panel 30 This point is central to contemporary discourse surrounding sound art aesthetics. See, for example, Seth Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art (New York: Continuum, 2009). 31 John Cage, “Tape Music,” [1955] The John Cage Papers, 1937-1992, Series 1: Manuscripts, Box 2, Folder 9, Wesleyan University Special Collections, Middletown, CT. 274 discussion; the editors instead chose to include an interview transcription from his cabin enclave in the mountains above Boulder, Colorado. 32 In the interview, Brakhage primarily discusses the future of filmmaking and access to film materials, but it is tempting to speculate what conversation would have ensued following Cage’s remarks in the panel discussion. Most commentary on the relationship between Cage and Brakhage’s aesthetics have focused on the surface element of chance in composition or filmic assemblage, the most famous moment being Brakhage’s use of chance for the superimposition of multiple rolls of footage in his magnum opus, Dog Star Man (1961- 64). 33 In this case and in many others, composers and artists were consistently preoccupied with the implications of “chance procedures” and chance in general in the realm of artistic creativity, and less aware of the implications of chance that Cage was beginning to explore. Unmediated perception was equated with a pure sensory panaurality that quickly expanded to include all audiovisual experience, thus leading to a similar dichotomy between Brakhage’s work when compared to Cage as in the Cage/Pollock divide discussed in Chapter 3. Cage’s examination of the implications for magnetic tape sound recording and reproduction in music closely resembled Brakhage’s investigation of the materiality of 32 Stan Brakhage, Interview with Michael Porte, repr. in Cinema Now, ed. Hector Currie and Michael Porte (Cincinnati, OH: University of Cincinnati University Press, 1968), 22-28. 33 See for example, P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000, 3 rd Ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 203-4. There is little documentation indicating that Brakhage and Cage interacted personally, although a few remnants of correspondence survive between the two, including a note by Brakhage on the editing process of Dog Star Man, Stan Brakhage to John Cage, 6 June 1960, The John Cage Collection, Series I: Correspondence, Box 3, Folder 8, Item 15, Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill. Cage and Brakhage met in Colorado in 1963, as Brakhage later recalled, Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (N.Y.: Praeger, 1970), 242. 275 film as it relates to visual experience. Both artists sought out a moment of clarity, of unmediated perception, within the artistic experience, yet both artists were working with recording tools that essentially mediate experience. For Cage this marked a moment of impasse, leading toward a pursuit of extrinsic properties of experience, yet the foundational ideal of his negative aesthetic remained. For Brakhage, the moment of unmediated perception was precisely a moment of mediation within the camera. Much in the same way that Pollock wished to be literally in the painting, Brakhage sought out the moment of mediation as the site of aesthetic experience; his body became, as he described, “an instrument for the passage of internal vision, through all my sensibilities, into its external form.” 34 Just as Cage sought a moment of perception “beyond ears,” Brakhage imagined “an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception.” 35 Brakhage additionally sought out a model of vision that eliminated the boundary of directionality in favor of a sense of inevitability that auditory experience engenders. Brakhage’s interest in “hypangogia,” the threshold moment of consciousness between wakefulness and sleep, combined with “closed-eye-vision,” whereupon one views the images and patterns formed while closing the eyelids, allowed for a conception of the filmic eye that presented a totality of perception akin to the phenomenal experience of existence. As David James argues, Brakhage utilized the body as an epistemological 34 Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision (New York: Film Culture, 1965), 77. 35 Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision, 23. 276 instrument that circumvents the cultural coding of received visual language and, as a result, “his total involvement in the shooting process that posits the camera as both an extension of the eye and a material-specific medium for the collection of light all manifest the insistence on the film’s self-generation out of the immediate present of perception.” 36 Cage’s moment of epistemological clarity in the anechoic chamber ignited the negative aesthetics, and his desire for a similar cochlear experience is clearest in works that utilize contact microphones, particularly his follow-up statement on acoustic awareness, 0’00” (4’33” No. 2) (1962). The score for the work consists of s single sentence: “In a situation with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action.” The first performance consisted of Cage writing out this instructional sentence, and in subsequent incarnations, such as a 1965 performance at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Cage attached contact microphones to his body and the materials surrounding him and wired them into the sound system. In the 1965 performance, audience members heard the squeaking of Cage’s chair, the clatter of his typewriter (writing out the instructional score), and the gurgling noise of a contact microphone attached to his throat when he periodically drank from a glass of water. James Pritchett argues that this work represents a line of stylistic demarcation between temporally structured works, such as the hermeticism of 4’33”, toward process, in which 36 David James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 43. 277 a performer acts in a deliberate and personal fashion. 37 While Cage’s theatrics certainly reflected the growing improvisatory nature of Fluxus happenings, the site of action was predicated not on the subjectivity of the individual, but rather the unmediated amplification of those activities into the environment, creating a model of epistemological clarity. In this sense, the sound system and amplification became an extension of the body, transplanting the cochlear experience into the electronic circuitry rather than through the mediation of a recording apparatus. Brakhage’s isolation in the Midwest afforded him the luxury of maintaining a hermetic artistic program; Cage’s popularity and notoriety, however, brought every element of the aesthetic of silence, chance, and indeterminacy under scrutiny from performers, critics, and the extensive range of “post-Cage” artists looking to catapult independent careers on the heels of the “anything goes” dictum eschewed from surface readings of Silence. While the intrinsic aspects of Cage’s personalism seemed to afford negative aesthetics a sound platform for inquiry, the extrinsic properties of indeterminacy—the method of execution—proved difficult to maintain without compromising the purity of unmediated perception. This compromise resulted in a hegemonic discourse that gradually resulted in a specific ideological stance of “sympathetic” performance practice within Cagean performance circles in the 1960s. Immediately following the essays concerning experimentalism in Silence are the famous trio of essays, “Composition as Process,” first delivered to the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik at Darmstadt in 1958. Whereas the essays examining 37 James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage, 139-40. 278 experimentalism outlined the theoretical principles of Cagean indeterminacy, the “Composition as Process” lectures laid out a political stance of ethical necessity. Cage’s bombastic confrontation with the European avant-garde in 1958 has been repeatedly cited as one of the most significant historical moments in his career, and he was not invited again to Darmstadt for over 30 years, in 1990, when he was 78. 38 Moreover, the audience for these lectures included notable figures such as Nam June Paik, Cornelius Cardew, Daniel Charles, Mauricio Kagel, Helmut Lachenmann, György Ligeti, Krzysztof Penderecki and Iannis Xenakis. Rebecca Kim and Amy Beal have both noted that these lectures were directly related to Cage’s series of courses on experimental music at the New School for Social Research. Several passages from the notebooks of New School student and future Fluxus leader George Brecht contain verbatim passages found in the lectures, and thus the final printed documents themselves should be viewed as another contested ground of Cagean notions of indeterminacy. 39 The real figure central to American-European dialogue during the postwar period was undoubtedly David Tudor, who, despite the controversy surrounding the 1958 lectures, continued with a regular series of engagements at Darmstadt and other venues well into the 1960s. The “Composition as Process” lectures epitomize the ethical orphic necessity of Cage’s artistic program, and the printed 38 For more on Cage’s visits to Darmstadt, see: Christopher Shultis, “Cage and Europe,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, ed. David Nicholls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 31-40. 39 Amy C. Beal, New Music, New Allies, 95-97; Rebecca Y. Kim, “The Formalization of Indeterminacy in 1958: John Cage and Experimental Composition at the New School,” in John Cage, ed. Julia Robinson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 141-170. George Brecht’s early notebooks have been published and edited by Dieter Daniels, George Brecht, Notebooks I-III (June 1958-August 1959) (Cologne: Walther König, 1991). 279 documents belie the performative experience of the Cage/Tudor lecture-recital experience. Often accompanied by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the lecture recital format of Cage/Tudor collaborative talks was an all-encompassing package (and was later sold explicitly as a package, with different rates depending on the number of talks), consisting of lectures, lessons, and performances. The highlight was the evening lecture recital, where Cage performed a variety of theatrical acts alongside Tudor, either at the piano or on a stage with various sound producing objects. It was this collaborative- theatrical environment that characterized the general evening entertainment of Cage’s tours in the late 1950s and 60s. The earlier performative lectures, “Lecture on Nothing,” (ca. 1949-50) and “Lecture on Something,” (ca. 1950) set the template for these performance events, where performers coordinated actions through temporal notation. This was the same format for all Cunningham collaborations, where, rather than choreograph events in the traditional sense, actions were structured according to temporal synchronization; performers were given space to complete acts, either improvised or from a gamut of possibilities, and the accompanying audio/visual simultaneities were strictly coincidental, hence “by chance.” Finally, the “Composition as Process” lectures represent a culmination of Cage’s rhetoric surrounding the general concept of indeterminacy, shifting from the selective application of various randomization procedures on a particular gamut of precompositional choices, and toward a structural template that more represented a “field situation” as Cage explained, where all categories of actions and events were open to realization in the broadest sense. In addition, despite all the claims for a moment of 280 “total” indeterminacy in Cage’s work, a specific school of performance practice emerged from David Tudor’s realizations of Cage’s graphic scores, whereby select individuals committed to the application of Cage’s specific ideological goals were granted authority in recreating the specific Cagean “sound” of indeterminacy, which, in the end, maintained a limited—yet unique—characteristic tone in execution. This last point remains a contentious yet important arena within contemporary “Cage Studies” regarding the legacy of Cage’s advanced indeterminate works, and for the purposes of this study, the boundaries and parameters of influence that can be directly attributed to Cage versus an interpretation of post-Cagean ideals. The history of American experimental music has largely been dictated by traditional musicological methodology: contextualization of oral histories authenticated through the indexing of archival documentation and justified through musical analysis. Benjamin Piekut argues that Cagean indeterminacy represents just one strain of a diverse network of performative genres within the United States in the 1960s. The generally accepted discourse surrounding the history of experimentalism has relied heavily on Cage’s own historicism. Cage’s proclivity, as Piekut notes, for equating experimentalism with high-art obfuscates many of the concurrent practices and discourse surrounding the “core” group of Cage’s generation, and Piekut’s study focuses in particular on the practice of improvisation, which is wholly ignored within Cagean discourse (although, as he reveals, it was often incorporated in Cage’s “band” of artists and musicians for practical reasons). Piekut examines experimentalism as a network proliferated through discourse that has largely been dominated by conventional studies of canonic definition and style history. Cage’s 281 “scores” for his more indeterminate works such as the transparencies used in the “Variations” series have been analyzed, documented, and performed with the purity of any traditional score in Western Art Music, despite the implied liberation that they purportedly claimed. Piekut reads Cage’s artistic program less as liberatory politics under the general veil of anarchism and more as conventional postwar American liberalism, noting one concerning element inherent in the larger discourse surrounding American liberalism: The “freedom of choice” ideology of liberalism in fact masks a meta-operation of power that defines the terms through which those choices can be made…from this perspective, Cage’s work evidences a peculiar status as both a model and a mirror—a mock-up of utopian anarchism and register of hegemonic liberalism. 40 Piekut’s study examines the controversial performance of Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis (1961-2) by the New York Philharmonic in 1964. The performance, which was hailed by critics as a disaster, became a springboard for political discussions within new music circles, largely due to Cage’s repeated retelling of his conflict with the performers. However, as Piekut argues, the ideological conflict closely resembled an instantiation of hegemonic liberalism pitting the classical idealism of orchestral performance practice against the veiled improvisatory practice of 1960s experimentalism. 41 The same can be said of Cage’s largest series of compositions in the 1960s, Variations I-VII. Cage’s “Variations” series spanned nearly a decade, and represent many of the problematic interpretive and performative aspects of Cage’s notions of indeterminacy. 40 Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 25. 41 Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise, 64. 282 The scores for these works were an outgrowth of the star or constellation technique used in such scores as the film on Lippold discussed in Chapter 3, with the literal use of transparency in the layout. In early works, sheets of transparent Mylar, each containing configurations of lines, dots, and circles, were overlaid by the performer in a random fashion. The points of contact between different lines and objects within the score gave “point-to-line” measurements for a range of sound arrangements in performance. 42 These scores represent the essence of Cage’s total soundscape goals, providing an unlimited array of configurations, each unique to one performance. However, the execution of these scores was largely done through the meticulous work of David Tudor, and his specific realizations became the standard interpretation for later performances, creating a new performance practice within Cagean indeterminacy circles that continues today. 43 42 In Variations I (1958), Cage specifies that the points represent single or multiple sounds, while the five lines represent “lowest frequency, simple overtone structure, greatest amplitude, least duration, and earliest occurrence within a decided upon time,” John Cage, Variations I, (New York: Henmar Press, 1960). Variations II specifies that the performer measure perpendiculars between overlaying lines “by means of any rule” to determine frequency, amplitude, timbre, duration, point of occurrence in an established period of time, and structure of event, John Cage, Variations II, (New York: Henmar Press, 1960). Variations III specifies that the performer cut individual circles and lay them on a sheet of paper, and to “make an action or actions having the corresponding number of interpenetrating variables,” John Cage, Variations III, (New York: Henmar Press, 1961). Variations IV (1963) specifies the same point-to-line measurement with respect to materials used in performance and with the performance space itself, John Cage, Variations IV, (New York: Henmar Press, 1963). Variations V consists solely of “Thirty-seven remarks re an audio-visual performance,” with the idea that subsequent performances may emulate or reinterpret the original performance. John Cage, Variations V, (New York: Henmar Press, 1965). Variations VI (1966) consists of two hundred and twenty-one individual shapes and lines, asking the performer to use individual shapes in accordance with the amount of live electronic equipment available, John Cage Variations VI, (New York: Henmar Press, 1966). Variations VII (1967) consists solely of “7 statements re a Performance Six Years Before,” John Cage, Variations VII, (New York: Henmar Press, 1972). Variations VIII (1967) likewise consists of the simple statement in published form: “6 Statements re a performance 1967 at Skowhegan, Maine,” John Cage, Variations VIII, (New York: Henmar Press, 1978). 43 For example, in his detailed study of indeterminacy performance practice in Cage’s “Variations” series, David P. Miller adheres to many established research methods for developing an “appropriate methodological practice”” realization of the point-to-line scores and the written language describing the original performances. Miller cites “oral tradition” and “documentation of Cage’s actual practice,” concluding with a traditional view of score interpretation, noting that “the body of practice that we require 283 The Variations series represent the pinnacle of Cagean performativity and its registered hegemony within the American avant-garde. The scores themselves retain the last surviving remnant of Western Art Music tradition, in that they require a performer to interpret and execute a visual coding of sounds or actions. They are published scores available for purchase and performance. Five of the eight compositions in the series utilized transparent sheets, while Variations V, VII and VIII merely consisted of a summary explanation of the original context in which the piece was performed, with the instruction that future performances may mimic or reinterpret the original settings (these textual scores are also still available for purchase). Cage’s description of the parameters for interpretation of point-to-line measurements is equally elusive. He repeatedly gives the caveat that “any number of performers or any kind and number of instruments” may be used, or that “some or all of one’s obligation may be performed through ambient circumstances (environmental changes) by simply noticing or responding to them,” (Variations III), or that “a performer need not confine himself to a performance of this piece,” and that “at any time he may do something else” while “others, performing something else at the same time and place may, when free to do so, enter into the performance of this.” (Variations IV). 44 The elusive rhetoric and meticulous detail inherent in these scores have led scholars to view the series as a thorough examination of the plurality of structures available within any given set of parameters, and alternately, as to determine the limits of “appropriateness” will only be created through repeated engagements with the scores.” David P. Miller, “Indeterminacy and Performance Practice in Cage’s Variations,” American Music 27/1 (Spring 2009): 64-5. See also: David P. Miller, “The Shapes of Indeterminacy: John Cage’s Variations I and Variations II,” Frankfurter Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 6 (2003): 18-45. 44 John Cage, Variations III, 1; Variations IV, 2. 284 a pseudo-improvisatory practice veiled under the authoritative cloak of the notated score and the concomitant profundity that classical performance practice engenders. 45 The series also highlight Cage’s involvement with live electronics and multimedia installation works, raising questions of authorship and the general ontology of the musical artwork versus the interactive experiences themselves. In contrast to earlier works with magnetic tape and electronics, which maintained a relationship between written score and specific performance elements, the “Variations” series focused on systems or networks of interconnected circuitry assembled in each individual venue as a new composition. Cage’s interest in live electronics began in the late 1950s, when Cage and Tudor began collecting electronic gadgets from junks shops on Canal Street in New York. Tudor actively pursued new technologies, eventually learning to wire and construct devices on his own. Cage, meanwhile, functioned largely as a director rather than performer, delegating the wiring and assembly of individual components to Tudor and other assistants, such as Gordon Mumma. 46 In the first three works in the series, Tudor experimented with various amplification and sound-modifying equipment to alter sounds emanating from the piano, thus extending the basic defamiliarization techniques of Cage’s earlier prepared piano works through amplification and modification. As James 45 See, for example, Tom De Lio’s detailed analysis of Variations II, where he notes that “the subject of Cage’s Variations II is…the recognition of that infinite multiplicity of structures which any collection of materials might engender,” making the piece “one large comprehensive system which itself represents the total accumulation of its many constituent realizations.” Thomas DeLio, “John Cage’s Variations II: The Morphology of a Global Structure,” Perspectives of New Music 19/1-2 (Autumn 1980—Summer 1981): 369. 46 Gordon Mumma, email correspondence, 18 January, 2011. See also, Gordon Mumma, “Electronic Music for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company,” Choreography and Dance 4/3 (1997): 51-8. 285 Pritchett observes, despite the veil of indeterminacy that the abstract point-to-line notation seemed to promise, Tudor constructed elaborate yet precise scores for each work, thus making each performance nearly the same. 47 Variations IV represents the first transition away from manipulation of acoustically generated sounds to an integrated circuitry of electronics and tape recorders. However, Tudor applied the same methodology to the sound system installations by constructing elaborate flow-charts and layout diagrams for each performance. 48 While alterable to a certain extent for each given venue, the overall configuration of tape recorders, wiring, and execution remained consistent. 49 In addition, as Benjamin Piekut and others argue, it is unclear to which extent, if any, Cage indeterminately manipulated the individual electronics or sound mixing equipment in performance. While the point-to-line technique alluded to a temporal structuring of events that a performer could arrange, it is clear that in actual performance many of the individual manipulations—dial turnings, input-output switching, and tape recording cues—were improvised. 50 Cage and Tudor maintained that any last minute or performative decisions were executed according to a realization of 47 James Pritchett, “David Tudor as Composer/Performer in Cage’s ‘Variations II,’” Leonardo Music Journal 14, Composers inside Electronics: Music after David Tudor (2004): 11-16. 48 Tudor’s extensive archive holdings include over 10 linear feet of flow charts and diagrams, largely uncataloged. See, The David Tudor Papers, Series III: Electronics, 1950s-1990s, Boxes 36-50, The Getty Research Institute Special Collections, Los Angeles, CA. 49 Gordon Mumma, Interview with the Author, 2 July, 2010, Orinda, CA. 50 Gordon Mumma, Interview with the Author, 2 July, 2010, Orinda, CA. See also, Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise, 47, and Leta E. Miller, “Cage, Cunningham, and Collaborators: The Odyssey of Variations V,” The Musical Quarterly 85/3 (Fall 2001): 552-3. 286 another transparency piece from the period, Cartridge Music (1958), as a sort of on-the- spot method for indeterminate decision making. Variations V was funded by the New York Philharmonic for the French-American Festival in the summer of 1965, in the wake of Cage’s controversial performance at Avery Fischer Hall of Atlas Eclipticalis in 1964. 51 While Atlas Eclipticalis represents a summit statement on indeterminacy regarding the hierarchical social structure of symphony orchestras and the canonical performative tradition of Western art music, Variations V moves in an altogether different direction, applying indeterminacy to the sound system arrangement in conjunction with film, video, dance, and theater. Instead of offsetting the performative actions of instrumentalists through randomization methods in notation and playback, the actions of the players themselves direct the indeterminate action through their movement within the performance space. Variations V was one of the first interactive multimedia electronic works to emerge from the New York avant- garde. The work was centered on twelve capacitance antennas constructed by Robert Moog wired to a fifty-channel mixer built by engineer Max Matthews at Bell Laboratories (which was also used in the 1964 performance of Atlas Eclipticalis). Prerecorded sounds were looped on a series of tape recorders, combined with frequency oscillators and other simple electronic sound-producing devices. Members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company entered into the space, and their position between the capacitance antennas triggered the circuitry in the mixer, thus allowing for an 51 For thorough summary of the premiere of Variations V, see: Leta E. Miller, “Cage, Cunningham, and Collaborators: The Odyssey of Variations V,” 552-7. 287 indeterminate randomization of individual sounds in any given performance. Films by Stan VanDerBeek, slide projections, and video manipulations by Nam June Paik were cast onto the screens, many of them out of focus and offset, blurring alternately onto the dancers and the stage backdrop. While in theory Cage’s multimedia collaboration promised a new level of interactivity and indeterminacy, in practice it was rife with technical difficulties. From the outset, Moog’s capacitance antennas were prone to short circuiting, requiring last- minute adjustments for the premiere and constant maintenance for later tours. 52 Even though the work appeared to fall within the parameters of Cagean indeterminacy, the actual layout and progression of the dancer’s actions within the stage arena was set after the first performance; thus the sound system manipulations remained fairly consistent in subsequent performances. The primary site of interactivity was the dancer’s movement within the space, and there was no effort to coordinate the visual projections into the mixing apparatus, thus the sequence of slides and films also remained consistent in each performance. Finally, as assistants James Tenney and Gordon Mumma recalled, there was little if any effort on the part of the technicians, including Cage and Tudor, to use 52 Cage’s correspondence with Moog during the period highlights the tension involved with the costly creation and maintenance of the antennas. See: John Cage letters to Robert Moog, 28 May-18 October, 1965, John Cage Collection, Series I, 5.4.25; 5.5.11; 5.5.19; 5.6.2; 5.7.8; 5.7.9; 5.8.15; the arguments primarily concerned the equipment costs and delivery schedule, culminating in a note from Cage on 6 August, 1965, where he quipped, “I find it very difficult to understand how you have managed this far. I myself have never failed to do as well as I can whatever I promised and I have always meet the deadlines given me….I do think that a better rule than the Golden One is this: do what you said you would.” John Cage, Letter to Robert Moog, 6 August, 1965. John Cage Collection, Northwestern University Special Collections Library, Evanston, IL, Series I: Correspondence, 5.7.8. For more on the technical difficulties at the premiere, see: Leta E. Miller, “Cage, Cunningham, and Collaborators,” 554-6. Ironically, the technical difficulties and required maintenance for touring led Cage and Merce Cunningham to solicit the assistance of Gordon Mumma in 1965, who would go on to collaborate with both artists for the next ten years. Gordon Mumma, Interview with the author, 15 April, 2010, Orinda, CA. 288 transparencies to govern their activities. As Tenney recalled, “By the time of Variations V Cage had come to terms with free improvisation (though he didn’t like that word) as long as it was done by people sympathetic to his aesthetic aims.” 53 The collaborative environment evidenced by these comments reflects the hegemonic effect of Cage’s veiled liberalism, and highlights the divide between collaborators and organizers in Cage’s multimedia works. Many scholars have asserted that Variations V constitutes a multiauthor work, with each respective participant engaging equally in the final conglomeration of action, sound and image. 54 However, in reality the collaborative environment was clearly divided into a hierarchical network of participants centered on the interaction between Cage’s sound system mixing apparatus and the choreography of Merce Cunningham. While no footage survives from the original performance, a studio production of Variations V by Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR TV) at Studio Hamburg in 1966 serves as the primary visual documentation of the original choreography. 55 The production was pared down from the original twelve capacitance antennas to just six for ease of travel, along with a smaller mixing console and tape deck apparatus, but the choreography, films, slides, and gamut of electronic 53 Leta E. Miller, “Cage, Cunningham, and Collaborators, The Odyssey of Cage’s Variations V,” 553. 54 See the comments below by Mark Bartlett, along with Leta E. Miller, “Cage’s Collaborations,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, and Leta E. Miller, “Cage, Cunningham, and Collaborators, The Odyssey of Cage’s Variations V.” 55 Arne Arnbom, Variations V (1966), 16mm film/videotape, black and white, 48 min. Merce Cunningham Dance Company: Merce Cunningham, Barbara Lloyd, Sandra Neels, Albert Reid, Peter Saul, Gus Solomons Jr., and Carolyn Brown, sound by John Cage, David Tudor and Gordon Mumma, Lighting: Beverly Emmons, Television Staff: Sound: Peter Sonntag, Lights: Yngve Mansvik, Camera: Frank A. Banuscher. A special thanks to David Vaughan and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company Archives for providing a reference copy of this film. 289 sounds remained the same. In the pared-down performance, the electronic sounds are fairly simple, alternating between two frequency oscillators and a small selection of prerecorded sounds. The recordings consist of a short excerpt of a solo drum improvisation that is repeated throughout, sheep sounds (in conjunction with several slides of sheep in the background), and a few excerpts of classical piano music. The soundscape could be generally described as ambient; the sound texture is homogenous throughout, alternating between the principal recording of drum sounds and the electronic oscillations. The dancers interact both with the space and with several props wired into the sound system, including a towel with a contact microphone tied to dancer Sandra Neel’s head, a fake plant wired with contact microphones that dancer Carolyn Brown and Merce Cunningham disassemble and reassemble (Brown later breaks the pot and repots the plant with newspaper for soil), and a bicycle that Cunningham rides around the stage in the finale. At one point the ensemble unwinds a string, triggering the entire circuitry of the photoelectric cells and capacitance antennas, although this does not cue a larger texture of sound. The images projected on the screen consisted of excerpts from VanDerBeek’s Poemfields, a series of stop-animation shorts and digital animation films produced from 1965-1969, recorded footage of the dancers performing excerpts from Variations V, along with a collage of found footage, including the 1950 film Born Yesterday. 56 Nam June Paik’s early video manipulation experiments, which altered the cathode ray tube scanning mechanism by placing magnets on the sides of a television, are 56 For more on VanDerBeek’s Poemfields series, see: Zabet Patterson, “POEMFIELDs and the Materiality of the Computational Screen,” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Arts Journal 5 (2010): 243-262. 290 overlaid in the film version, and the slide projections consisted of a variety of images, including cityscape panoramas, rural landscape images, several images of Pan America airplanes in flight, Navajo carpets, cartoon stills, and a recurring image of a grid. In the overall accumulation of activity, the video and slide projections in the Norddeutscher Rundfunk version of Variations V is generally relegated to the background, even in sections of superimposition on video. The real focus of the film seems to be the interaction between Cage, the electronic circuitry, and individual dance movements. However, reviews of the original premiere and subsequent live performances focused almost entirely on the overwhelming effect of the film projections. 57 Despite the complex electronic array of activity, most reviews noted the new approach to “set design,” which until this point had consisted of collaborations with painters and sculptors such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. VanDerBeek’s collaboration marks the first attempt to spatialize cinema in performance through spillage and overlap between physical screens, and through the projection of prerecorded footage of the dancers aimed on the bodies of the dancers in live performance. However, VanDerBeek’s film collage, which he titled Movie-Mural, was not wired to the sound system apparatus, and the projectionists did not correlate their activities with the “sympathetic” aims of Cage’s technical assistants. Movie-Mural’s relative autonomy within the sound system aesthetic of interpenetration elevates his animations, as Andrew Uroskie argues, to the level of performers, actors involved in the 57 A. Hughes, “Leaps and Cadenzas,” New York Times 1 August, 1965; W. Terry, “Parting Shot Applause,” New York Herald Tribune, 24 July, 1965. Dancer Carolyn Brown recalled that the visual components “stole the show,” Carolyn Brown, Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years With Cage and Cunningham (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 459. 291 articulation of spatial relationships within the performance venue. This marks a transition in VanDerBeek’s interest in the site of animation on the screen toward an interdisciplinary rhetoric of assemblage, where, as Uroskie notes, “[Movie-Mural] can be understood as part of a more broad-based interest in mobilizing the site of the moving image away from the static fixity of the theatrical paradigm.” 58 Variations V marks one summit in the Cage/Cunningham theatrical paradigm, where the resulting project maintains a heterogeneous assemblage of interpenetrating images and sounds. In contrast to a Wagnerian ideal of Gesamtkunstwerk, whereby the individual components serve to unify a singular vision of an all-encompassing artwork, the Cage/Cunningham assemblage celebrates heterogeneity and simultaneity that is all- encompassing, but pluralistic. 59 However, Cage’s libratory politics was constrained by his own liberalism: the final product of Variations V considered in its totality was, while revolutionary for its time, constrained by the specific ideology of “sympathetic” performers and collaborators willing to adopt Cage’s strategies for indeterminacy. Many of the same tensions existed within the Cunningham Dance Company, as evidenced by Carolyn Brown’s memoir publication in 2007, which highlighted the divide between choreographer and performers. 60 This moment of impasse between creators and 58 Andrew V. Uroskie, “From Pictorial Collage to Intermedia Assemblage: Variations V (1965) and the Cagean Origins of VanDerBeek’s Expanded Cinema,” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Arts Journal 5 (2010): 237. 59 For more on the contrast between Cunningham collage and Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, see Roger Copeland, “Merce Cunningham and the Aesthetic of Collage,” The Drama Review 46/1 T173 (Spring 2002): 11-28. 60 Carolyn Brown, Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years With Cage and Cunningham. 292 collaborators within the Cage/Cunningham circle marks the divide between Cagean performance practice and “post-Cagean” aesthetics. Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Mural in this sense represents a similar impasse between expanded cinema and Cagean discourse. VanDerBeek’s slides and film projections threatened to slip not only off the projection screen, they gradually slipped beyond the Cagean parameters of pure indeterminacy by invoking political discourse beyond Cage’s utilitarian ideals, while simultaneously asserting the cinematic apparatus as an equal method of discourse as music, which held primacy within Cage’s listening model of negative aesthetics. In a sense Cage’s artistic program was threatened by the very circularity of “neo” idealism that it attempted to subvert. Peter Bürger’s criticism discussed in Chapter 3 noted the limitations of a negative aesthetic, in that any void of “anything whatsoever” will inevitably be filled with an alternate idealism; in this case the void was filled with Cage’s own form of liberalism, which maintained the veil of individual autonomy within a social order that implicitly invoked its own hegemony for the sake of stability within its own discourse. Negative aesthetics, again invoking Benjamin Piekut’s formulation, became less of a model, or, perhaps better, a window—the idealism invoked in Cage’s early notions of transparency and the sonic field—and more a mirror, reflecting a specific thread of discourse adopted by practitioners sympathetic to Cagean discourse in the ensuing years. The adoption of Cagean discourse within many cultural institutions beginning in the late 1960s reflected a growing assimilation of a specific ideological discourse that maintained the familiar social boundaries of liberalism, while asserting Cage’s social hierarchy for “interpenetration.” 293 Nowhere was this boundary more prevalent than in the discourse surrounding new media technology and the industrial supporters that fed artistic innovation in the 1960s. Robert Moog’s capacitance antennas were but one step removed from the commercial sensation of his portable electronic synthesizers that would dominate the commercial music market in the 1970s, and Bell Labs generously contributed parts and labor with the goal of developing creative avenues among its technicians and engineers for commercially viable products. Cage’s subsequent sound system collaborations, such as the 1966 realization of Variations VII at the 69 th Regiment Armory in New York as part of the “Experiments in Art and Technology” series, furthered his network integration theory by incorporating telephone hookups from various locations around Manhattan to cue the circuitry in performance. 61 Cage’s liberatory politics continued to penetrate into the realm of new technologies, evidenced in his two subsequent publications following Silence, A Year From Monday (1967), and M (1973). Here Cage adopted the rhetoric of media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s technological determinism, coupled with communications savant Buckminster Fuller. These two figures, whose influence crept into popular discourse on media politics, provided a new set of heuristics in Cage’s writing, replacing many of the Zen aphorisms that previously peppered his discourse. Catch phrases and headline topics from both theorists supplemented Cage’s ideological anarchism. Cage presented again a model of utopian society, largely predicated on Fuller’s circuitous and incomprehensible 61 For more on the monumental E.A.T. series, see: Catherine Morris, 9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theatre, and Engineering, 1966 (Cambridge: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2006). 294 speeches and writings, that relied on social integration of utilities, providing the means and resources for humankind automatically without interfering in the business of individuals. Despite the variety and depth of McLuhan’s discourse, Cage highlighted the popular singular message emanating from his various writings, echoed repeatedly in established discourse surrounding expanded cinema, that electronics represented an “extension of the nervous system,” and that it eventually will function along the lines of utilities for the service of an independent and autonomous individual of the future. Historians have tended to relegate VanDerBeek’s discourse to just such a model of 1960s liberatory politics, placing him within the group of expanded cinema artists characterized by Gene Youngblood’s formal outline of electronic expansion into the realm of social interaction and autonomous utopia. Mark Bartlett argues that this narrative fails to give VanDerBeek due credit for proposing a greater political strategy for social revolution, instead grouping him within the media essentialism prevalent among most discourse in the late 1960s. The ultimate extension of this model was the “Portapak Revolution” beginning in 1965, when Sony released its first portable video recorder, inaugurating video art and, eventually, digital media arts practice. 62 This originary point is a contentious ground not just for formalist critiques and historical narratives, but also for the political and social forces involved in the establishment of a solidified media 62 Recent criticism has challenged the “Portapak Narrative” largely adhered to by video art historians. See, for, example: Jon Burris, “Did the Portapak Cause Video Art? Notes on the Formation of a New Medium,” Millennium Film Journal 29 (Fall, 1966); Federico Windhausen, “Assimilating Video,” October 137, (Summer 2011): 69-83; Christine Mehring, “Television Art’s Abstract Starts: Europe circa 1944-1969,” October 125 (Summer 2008): 29-64, and David Joselit, “No Exit: Video and the Readymade,” October 119 (Winter 2007): 37-45. 295 culture. Portapak history, as Bartlett argues, represented a left-leaning reactionary liberalism, a consumerist model for participation reinforcing the illusions of capitalism. VanDerBeek, on the other hand, aimed to change social consciousness through a radical conception of information and communication technologies that, according to Bartlett: …aimed to compel through a specifically ‘socialist, performative’ imaginary, a recognition that the technocultural forces of the period constituted not only a socio-political crisis of global proportions, but an imminence for social change that was exceedingly fragile, and the outcome of which would be decided very rapidly, with little chance of recuperation should a positive outcome fail. 63 Mark Bartlett argues that VanDerBeek’s politics were intertwined with contemporary discourse arguing alternately for cinema as a medium or a concept. VanDerBeek’s two major publications in the 1960s represent this divide. The first, “The Cinema Delimina: Films from the Underground,” published in the respectable academic journal, Film Quarterly, summarized through a series of quotations from artists, the current state of underground film. VanDerBeek’s interspersed commentary eschew a liberatory politics similar to Cagean anarchism, but with a socio-political drive advocating for absolute integration of cinema and culture. VanDerBeek’s “dilemina,” is “the making of private art that can be made public, rather than the public art we know, which cannot be made private.” 64 In contrast to the populist determinism of McLuhan, VanDerBeek foresaw the implications of integrated circuitry and cybernetics for public and private discourse, and his model of cinematic expansion encompassed a technocratic vision similar to Cage’s 63 Mark Bartlett, “The Politics of Media in Stan VanDerBeek’s Poemfields,” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Arts Journal V. 3 (2008): 268. 64 Stan VanDerBeek, “The Cinema Delimina: Films from the Underground,” Film Quarterly 14/4 (Summer 1961): 6. 296 utility theory, but with a pluralism engendered by machinery automatism. In his 1966 essay, “ ‘Culture: Intercom’ and Expanded Cinema: A Proposal and Manifesto,” VanDerBeek proposed the construction of audio-visual “experience machines,” similar to his experiments with “Movie-Dromes” at the Stony Point Commune in 1965 65 that saturated the audience with “image libraries” transmitted by satellite from a worldwide library source, allowing for a “maximum use of the information devices that we now have at our disposal.” 66 Bartlett notes that VanDerBeek’s collaborative anti-essentialist intermedia works, in contrast to the purely phenomenological idealism of Cagean poetics, “emphasize the relations between the human body and technologies, as well as between the technologies themselves, as opposed to the unified or merely co-presented senses of ‘mixed-media’ or ‘multimedia.’” 67 In the later 1960s, the same political divide occurred in Cage’s notions of anarchy and utopianism, exemplified by the work that most characterizes his political drive for multiplicity mentioned at the opening of this Chapter, HPSCHD (1967-9). Cage’s massive assemblage of computer-randomized tape recording cues and film and slide projection arrays was premiered to an audience of nearly 9,000 at the University of 65 In 1965 VanDerBeek constructed his first immersive cinema environment at the Stony Point Artists Commune out of a grain silo top raised on a fabricated platform. Multiple projectors within the space presented a cacophony of images on the dome, and spectators were free to wander within the space and lie down at various points to experience the images in any succession. The project was beset with technical difficulties and soon abandoned. For more information on the “Movie-Drome,” see: Gloria Sutton, “Stan VanDerBeek: Collage Experience,” in Stan VanDerBeek: The Culture Intercom (MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2011), 85-88. 66 Stan VanDerBeek, “’Culture: Intercom’ and Expanded Cinema: A Proposal and Manifesto,” The Tulane Drama Review 11/1 (Autumn 1966): 38-48. 67 Mark Bartlett, “The Culture: Intercom,” in Stan VanDerBeek: The Culture Intercom (MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2011), 74. 297 Illinois Assembly Hall in 1969. As Sara Heimbecker argues, Cage’s presentation of a pluralistic model of abundance and anarchic interpenetration in essence created a kind of “avant-garde Gesamtkunstwerk,” a “mock reality that modeled his dream of an anarchic society just as Wagner had created his own model of social unity.” 68 In contrast to Variations V, which presented a model of heterogeneous activity within a performance space, HPSCHD transported the Cagean model of indeterminacy into an immersive environment that reflected the singular vision of its creator, John Cage. Heimbecker notes that, just as Wagner’s ambiguous politics distorted his all-encompassing vision of a utopian artwork, so too did Cage’s aversion from discussions of racial and social inequality—which was evident in a series of race riots over minority student enrollment at the University of Illinois during the same period—shielded his utopianism from a truly pluralistic vision. Cage’s “Bayreuth,” as Heimbecker argues, was the university, which supported and safeguarded a particular form of liberal politics emanating from the growing enrollment of boomer-generation students in the 1960s. Just as Cage’s transparent point-to-line notations ultimately resulted in a specific form of sympathetic improvisatory performance practice, so too did his political leanings inevitably lead to a specific ideological discourse that forced exclusion. As Heimbecker notes: The utopian nature of HPSCHD actually constrained him. Cage was caught up in an ironic double-bind: in order to represent an anarchic narrative, an artwork must allow for diversity. Yet, the problem with utopian constructs is that in the end they often become totalitarian…Unity, order, and the necessity of consistent, 68 Sara Heimbecker, “HPSCHD, Gesamtkunstwerk, and Utopia,” American Music 26/4 (Winter 2008): 478 298 moral conduct inevitably restrict some expressions of individuality; there is a price to be paid for order and stability. 69 Cage seemed aware of this price, and the physical and mental toll of institutional extravaganzas like HPSCHD proved too exhausting to sustain. In the same year, Cage famously returned to composing for acoustic instruments, leaving his sound-system utopian phase in favor of an inward examination of transcendentalism, particularly the work of Henry David Thoreau. In 1969 Cage made a two-piano arrangement of the third movement of Erik Satie’s Socrate (1917) to accompany the Cunningham dance, Second Hand. However, because of copyright restrictions he was unable to publish the arrangement, and instead rearranged the melody line utilizing I-Ching operations, while retaining the original phrase structure. The final three-movement work is an intimate and somber reflection on the haunting, wandering melodic phrases of Satie. Moreover, as Daniel Callahan recently discovered, Cage and Cunningham explicitly choreographed the work as a personal artistic and intimate statement regarding their relationship, yet kept these programmatic elements from the public, which by then had embraced Cagean indeterminacy and Cunningham interpenetrating choreomusical relationships as the summit statement on 1960s liberal political and social pluralism, intermedia aesthetics, and medium-specificity. 70 69 Sara Heimbecker, “HPSCHD, Gesamtkunstwerk, and Utopia,” 491. 70 Daniel Callahan, “Choreomusical Relationships in Merce Cunningham’s Second Hand and the Aesthetic of Indifference,” Conference Paper Presented to the National Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Philadelphia, November 2009. 299 Following his “heroic” period, Cage’s collaborations were scaled back, and relied increasingly on a smaller group of artists familiar with the intricacies of his aesthetic program. Abandoning the point-to-line technique, Cage found that computer-generated I- Ching calculations provided the most reliable method for calculating various compositional decisions. By the end of his career, he relied exclusively on these charts for his works. Cage’s departure from the platform and into the drawing room reflects the indelible forces of his liberal politics of indeterminacy; the opposing poles of expansion and contraction would ultimately shape the remainder of his career. Several large-scale collaborations, such as Lecture on the Weather (1975), Roratorio (1979), and the series of Europeras (1987-1992) were in stark contrast to the intimate acoustic reflections emanating from the extensive “number pieces” composed at the end of his life, or the technical profundity of the Freeman Etudes (1977-90/1989-90), to name just a few examples. Despite this reactionary turn, Cage’s influence was only beginning to take shape as a specific thread of ideological discourse that looked toward the Cagean “window,” while ignoring the reflexivity of his “mirror.” This tension between post-Cage artists is best exemplified in the tumultuous professional relationship between Cage and the “father of video art,” Nam June Paik, to which we now turn. ………………………………………… About two-thirds into Nam June Paik’s documentary film, A Tribute to John Cage (1973), we are given a setup in which Paik stages Cage’s famous silent piece, 4’33” in several locations throughout Manhattan. The locations were determined by chance 300 procedures, and for the third movement Cage and Paik found themselves in Harlem on a busy street corner. With busses breezing by, horns honking, and passers-by glancing in curiosity, one would think the chance encounter to be the ideal setting of Cage’s most famous statement on environment, acoustics, and listening. However, shortly after the introduction of the movement Cage became noticeably flustered, clutching his stopwatch and glancing nervously at a crowd of African-American teenagers casually observing the video camera. Paik seized the moment, grabbing the microphone and asking the ringleader: PAIK: “Do you like this street sound? Do you love this street sound? What do you like, this music more or this street sound more?” PASSERBY: “The music you know, I dig the music more because, you understand, the music is what’s happening. And uh all this here, uh…, all this here,.. all the buses and airplanes and stuff, you know… and fire engines—they don’t have to make all that noise at night, you try to sleep—they don’t have to make all that noise….you know? Handing the microphone back, Cage grinned precipitously as the final seconds of the clocked ticked off, turning to the camera with an impending stare the moment the movement passed. The segment marks one of many uncomfortable encounters between Cage and Paik, and in many ways summarized the tenuous relationship between the two artists. A Tribute to John Cage was commissioned in 1971 by WGBH Channel 2 in Boston to commemorate Cage’s 60 th birthday. In Paik’s tribute, Cage is seen less as a commanding figure of the American neo-avant-garde than as the solitary sage witnessing the post-1968 transformation of his aesthetic in a new generation of artists and composers. Paik had 301 witnessed Cage’s rise from “gadfly to guru” in the New York Downtown music scene during the 1960s, and his documentary perspective personifies the confusion with Cage’s late-modernist utopian aesthetics. 71 A Tribute to John Cage combines spectacle, live performance, interview, and commercial breaks in a scattered amalgam of imagery and homage, at times celebrating but more often critiquing the various aspects of Cage’s career and influence. Interspersed between segments are brisk commercial breaks of spasmodic kitsch commercials from Japanese and Korean television for American products such as Coke and Pepsi. Two performances of Cage’s 4’33” are juxtaposed with Fluxus stagings, a performance of cellist and avant-garde impresario Charlotte Moorman’s “TV Bra,” video synthesized psychedelia, and multiscreen projections. A Tribute in many ways personifies the character of Paik and his complex relationship with Cage. Calculated wit and irony seem to float in a world of pastiche, defying the listener’s attempt to extrapolate any sense of an authorial critique. Paik’s choice of television as the central medium for his artistic gestures opened up a new space of sociological critique. At the cusp of what Raymond Williams describes as the periods of invention and convention, television in the 1960s had entered into a set of carefully calculated conventions that privatized the aesthetic experience within the 71 Paik first made this observation in the 1990: “The one good fortune in my life was that I got to know John Cage while he was considered more a gadfly than a guru and Joseph Beuys when he was still an eccentric hermit in Düsseldorf. Therefore it was possible for me to associate myself on equal footing with these two senior masters as colleagues even after their stardom.” Nam June Paik, Nam June Paik: Beuys Vox 1961-1986 (Won Gallery/Hyundai Gallery, Seoul, 1990), 7. 302 domestic setting. 72 Drama, sports, news, and variety shows fell into familiar programming patterns that structured a routine of daily existence centered on the illusion of community that television projected onto the individual psyche. Documentary television in particular developed during the period as the primary outlet for the collective construction of the past. With the recent explosion of “Docuwood” in America, this particular genre has, next to 24 hour news broadcast, had one of the most penetrating longitudinal social effects on the construction of individual and historical identity. 73 A Tribute to John Cage functions simultaneously as a documentary homage and as a statement on Paik’s conception of television as “flow.” Raymond Williams’ pioneering analysis of television programming in the 1970s first described the term as a shift from the concept of sequential organization in television programming to that of sequence as flow. While television programs still adhered to specifically-timed and programmed events, the experience of television in domestic settings adhered to a setting similar to radio, where an endless stream of programming supplies viewers with various forms of entertainment until the late hour. Fundamental to this shift, according to Williams, was the dissolution of the “interval,” the isolation of discreet events in succession. Commercial programming—and commercials in particular—necessitated a seamless transition between content and advertising. Commercial breaks, trailers for future programs, and overlap at time intervals between various forms of content (news, sports, 72 Williams’ categories, which form the core of contemporary television theory, are outlined in detail in his seminal text: Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Routledge, 1974), 38-76. 73 See for example, Steve F. Anderson, Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2011). 303 drama etc.) brought about a continuous series of stimuli with no discernible end until the late hour sendoff (oftentimes heralded in America with patriotic themes of military prowess such as the familiar “Blue Angels” closing montage cued to “America the Beautiful”). 74 As a general experience, “flow,” or “tuning in” became the cultural norm for television programming, a semi-aesthetic experience of passive participation. Consumers became accustomed to the inevitability of daily content delivery and the ease of mental engagement with the domesticated temporal sound-image experience. Paik’s work with television was in dialogue with the various social and cultural effects of television flow. Paik considered the televisual phenomenon a plastic medium available for manipulation, noting that, “the nature of environment is much more on TV than on film or painting. In fact, TV (its random movement of tiny electrons) is the environment of today.” 75 At the same time, he was clearly aware of the effect of flow and content interval in his single- channel video works such as A Tribute to John Cage. 76 Thus the genre of television documentary in Tribute is imbued with additional layers of critique of the interiority of aesthetic experience and the illusion of representations of reality that documentary footage espouses. This privatization of the individual aesthetic experience has been well- documented in the work of Jonathan Sterne, among others, and follows closely with the 74 Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, 86-91. 75 Nam June Paik, Electronic Art III: Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer with Charlotte Moorman, exh. brochure (New York:Galeria Bonino, 1971), 1. 76 Following the lead of video art scholars, I use here the term single channel to identify works of video art consisting of a single monitor image, as opposed to multichannel installations of a single or independent video feeds on individual monitors. 304 idea of the “technological sublime” discussed in Chapter 3. 77 Television, and the aura of documentary, was fueled by the liveness of the medium and its ability to provide a feeling of the “present tense” and the sense of immediacy of effect likened the medium to the general interpretation of “nature” in Cage’s writings. 78 Paik’s tribute continuously engages the dichotomy between realism and suture, rupturing the language of documentary and opening up realms of identity critique. 79 A Korean expatriate, a classically-trained composer, and a member of the “silent generation” (those born between the “greatest generation” of World War II veterans and the postwar “boomer” generation), Paik’s perspective was one of a perpetual outsider. Paik completed his undergraduate studies at Tokyo University with a thesis on Arnold Schoenberg, and then ventured into the Western buffer-zone of occupied Germany to join the politically-motivated Darmstadt summer courses. Witnessing Cage’s infamous 1958 polemic lectures, including “Composition as Process” and “Indeterminacy,” Paik began to catapult an ideological torpedo into the highly politicized debate between serialism and indeterminacy that emerged from the summer courses. In 1959 he performed Hommage a John Cage in Cologne, his first of many responses to Cage’s transcendental artistic program. Paik hurled eggs, rosaries and other objects at the audience, cueing tape recordings of spliced piano noises, screaming, classical music and sound effects. 77 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 78 See, for example Bruce Kurtz, “The Present Tense,” in Video Art: An Anthology, ed. Ira Schneider and Beryl Korot (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976), 234-5. 79 Frederick Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 31, 71, 162-5. 305 Pounding the final sounds out of a dilapidated piano and tossing it over, Paik then marched into the audience toward Cage with a pair of scissors and cut his tie in half. Cage’s response to the fist homage, a mixture of reserved humor and marked awkwardness, would characterize the dialogue between the two artists for the majority of their careers. 80 In a political environment dominated by western reconstruction efforts of soft economics and acculturation, Paik’s critique of Cage’s Zen philosophy was from the outset laden with its own sense of “cultural terrorism,” as Allan Kaprow famously put it, a nonviolent but dramatic and shocking series of gestures laden with a sense of irony, humor, and disturbing emotional depth. 81 After the performance, Paik honed his engineering skills at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk studios in Cologne, and through his connection to Fluxus founder George Maciunas, developed a series of notorious performance art concerts during the early sixties similar in dramatic effect to his initial homage. However, Paik’s collaborations with cellist Charlotte Moorman in the later 1960s marked the divide between Cage’s aesthetic and the activist body politics of 1960s conceptual art. Like Paik’s collaboration and interaction with Fluxus artists Yoko Ono and his later wife, Shigeko Kubota, female sexuality was foregrounded to a provocative 80 Few studies exist on the relationship between Cage and Paik. While mostly biographical, Íñigo Sarriugarte Gómez does outline some basic connections between the two artists and Zen philosophy, Íñigo Sarriugarte Gómez, “John Cage Y Su Influencia En La Obra Del Video Artista Nam June Paik,” Annuario Musical, N. 64 (enero-diciembre 2009): 237-58. See also, Dieter Daniels, “John Cage and Nam June Paik ‘Change Your Mind or Change Your Receiver (Your Receiver is Your Mind)’,” in Nam June Paik, ed. Sook-Kyung Lee and Susanne Rennert (Liverpool: Tate Liverpool, 2011), 107-26. 81 Allan Kaprow, “Nam June Paik,” in Nam June Paik: Video Time, Video Space, ed. Toni Stoos and Thomas Klein (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1993), 114. 306 and visceral extreme, a mandate dictated by Paik to “bring sex into music” in ways never before thought possible. 82 This was perhaps the most contentious ground between Paik and Cage. Cage’s “queer silence,” as Jonathan Katz described it, was a difficult aesthetic dividing line between the rigid modernism of the New York School and 1960s artists and intellectuals. 83 Paik repeatedly pushed this point in his interactions with Cage, such as the intrusion into his personal space at the 1961 Cologne performance of Étude for Pianoforte, where Paik jumped off the stage, again cut Cage’s tie with scissors, and dumped shaving cream on David Tudor’s head. Cage’s reactions were generally reserved, however his writings on Paik evoke a subtle degree of disdain for the sexual obtrusiveness in Paik’s performance art. Writing in 1982, Cage noted that “Paik’s involvement with sex, introducing it into music, does not conduce toward sounds being sounds. It only confuses matters.” 84 Critics alike attacked Moorman on various levels, particularly after the obscenity scandals surrounding the 1967 premiere of Paik’s Opera Sextronique. In the course of the 45-minute work, Moorman adorned her breasts with an “electric bikini” of light bulbs that flashed according to Paik’s off-stage control, and the third movement—which was interrupted by a police raid—had Moorman appearing topless wearing football pads and playing Bach. 82 For more on Paik’s collaborative projects with female artists, see: Joan Rothfuss, “The Ballad of Name June and Charlotte: A Revisionist History,” in Nam June Paik (Liverpool: Tate Gallery, 2010), 145-68. 83 Jonathan Katz, “John Cage’s Queer Silence; or, How to Avoid Making Matters Worse,” in Writing Through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art, ed. David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 41-61. 84 John Cage, “More on Paik,” [1982] repr. in John Cage: Writer, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight, 1993), 156. 307 Moorman’s subsequent trial and conviction skyrocketed Fluxus and performance art on the national scene. The opinion by New York Municipal Judge Benjamin Shalleck (who famously walked out of Cage’s controversial 1964 performance of Atlas Eclipticalis at Lincoln Center) in The People vs. Charlotte Moorman summed up public opinion on the newly-defined boundaries of Cagean aesthetics, and in many ways mirrored Cage’s rash grin on the streets of Harlem: That small group of rushing, impetuous persons (most of them youthful) wandering fretfully somewhere for some unknown goal of intangible value and for uncertain reason will look askance at these words. It will shout loudly that I am a ‘square’ and stagnant in my thinking…The noise emanates from a mighty vocal minority whose actual pipsqueak voice receives stentorian publicity because what is angrily said makes good copy…Can the “Happening” or “Event” be acceptable for its wholesome effect in enhancing the social relationship of people within a community, or must it be shocking and instructive upon that relationship in order to be of validity to the progenitors of it, whose desire it is to force it upon everyone? 85 Nowhere was the divide between Cage and Moorman clearer than in the ongoing controversy regarding her performances of 26' 1.1499" for a String Player ([1955] 1960). The work appears in several incarnations in Paik’s single-channel video works, including A Tribute to John Cage and Global Groove as a subtle but effective confrontation, and the history of Cage’s disdain for Moorman’s interpretation of the work exemplifies the divide foregrounded repeatedly in Paik’s documentary. Like many of Cage’s indeterminate works, 26' 1.1499" for a String Player was extremely difficult to execute, creating a visceral relationship between performer and piece. 26' 1.1499" for a String 85 Benjamin Shalleck, The People vs. Charlotte Moorman [1967], repr. in Nam June Paik: Video Time, Video Space (New York: Harry M. Abrams, 1993), 54. 308 Player would eventually become Moorman’s signature work in her repertory. However, her first public performance of the work in 1963 at the loft of Philip Corner was, by her own account, a disaster. With only two weeks to rehearse, Moorman only performed the first nine pages, ceding to the complexity of Cage’s “extramusical” instructions. Moorman’s “failure” to execute the battery of percussion and gymnastic effects with a professional exactitude dictated in Cage’s obtuse temporal notation ignited a lifelong engagement with the theatrical implications of the work. Despite repeated attempts to perform the piece according to Cage’s temporal model, Moorman, like many artists interpreting Cage’s work in the 1960s, was attracted to the possibilities implied in the score for “non-cello” sounds. Benjamin Piekut has outlined Moorman’s performances of the work in detail, noting that, as she developed her interpretation of the score, the boundary between Cagean “sounds as sounds” and the overtly political, social, and gender-based identity of culturally specific “sounds” was destroyed. As Piekut notes, Moorman incorporated broken glass, pie pans, sand, used tampons and snippets of political speech, foregrounding themes of consumer culture, morality, women’s health, and misogyny, to name just a few. 86 The generational divide was obvious to both Shalleck and Cage, however Cage’s Zen dictum predicated—at least to the post-Cage generation—an openness to theatrical exploration of environment. But for Cage the abstract “natural” of the landscape, or the sublime space of an aestheticized experience of duration, did not include the individual, especially when it concerned identity. As Piekut notes, Cage’s disdain was most startling 86 Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise, 153. 309 in personal correspondence, where Cage noted Moorman’s repeated “murdering” of the piece, and later citing his publishers comments that “the best thing that could happen [for the piece] would be that Charlotte Moorman would die.” 87 Cage’s longtime collaboration with David Tudor, who worked diligently and intimately with Cage to realize his indeterminate works, had set a standard of interpretation entirely within the societal norms of composer-performer relationships mentioned above, and the intrusion of artists such as Paik and Moorman in the realm of artistic interpretation is one of the most problematic issues of the post-Cage era. Paik’s video various homages and experiments in the late 1960s exemplified and problematized these tensions. His early work in video art was a part of the expanding “Guerilla Television” network of alternative new media spaces that emerged from the influx of public support for independent cable television programming in the early 1970s. Among the first to purchase the Sony portable ½ inch video recorder in 1965, Paik championed the alternative video movement, and through a series of grants from the Rockefeller foundation was able to secure institutional support within public television studios such as WGBH in Boston and WNET in New York. Political activism sparked a cottage industry of video news reporting collectives, fueled by the work of producers such as Michael Shamburg and the Raindance corporation. Shamburg’s highly-influential 1971 publication Guerilla Television led to the collective Top Value Television, or TVTV, along with the Woodstock-inspired collective Videofreex, who managed to 87 Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise, 150. 310 garner support from CBS to launch a pilot episode of counterculture reportage entitled “The Real World,” which met with disaster once reviewed by executives. 88 Paik developed close relationships with institutional foundations, mainly through the assistance of Howard Klein, who as director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s arts program, leant particular support for Paik’s installation-based art in lieu of the politically motivated video collectives, creating a divide not unlike Paik’s earlier break with Fluxus founder George Maciunas. 89 With support for his projects, Paik worked with several artists and technicians, most notably Shuya Abe, Jud Yalkut and Russell Conner at WGBH and David Loxton at WNET. Shuya Abe’s video synthesizer provided the means for intricate video editing and synthesis, and the first incarnation of Paik’s large-scale single-channel video art, Global Groove, in collaboration with Conner, instigated a series of works at the two studios. Global Groove contains many of the core single-channel video strategies Paik employed during the period. Over the course of thirty minutes, Paik hurries through approximately 22 sequences of dancing, interviews, and musical performances intercut with Japanese commercials. Video distortions occur in certain segments, combining electronic cross fading, solarization, blue-box overlapping (also known as Chromakey or blue-wall), negative picture effects, electronic feedback and 88 Michael Shamburg, Guerilla Television (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971). For a comprehensive history of the Guerilla Television movement, see Deirdre Boyle, Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997). 89 The relationship between Paik and Maciunas is outlined in detail in: Owen D. Smith, Fluxus: The History of an Attitude (San Diego, CA: San Diego State University Press, 1998), 43-4, 90-2. 311 picture distortions. 90 Paik clearly evoked the notion of televisual flow through the use of rapid pacing and sharp intercuts. Segments last no longer than 2-3 minutes, and alternate between live onscreen dance numbers and documentary footage of Japanese, Korean, and Native American folk music performances. In this sense, televisual flow represents not only Williams’ notion of a single network’s effort to capture a viewer through the seamless integration of content, it gives the effect of a more complex television experience of multichannel “surfing” through the variety of content available at any time on any given network. Paik is explicit with this point, and in the opening narration Russell Conner explains “This is a glimpse of a video landscape of tomorrow, when you will be able to switch to any TV station on earth and TV Guide will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book.” Images of TV Guide are overlaid one atop the other, cuing the endless stream of “content” for the thirty-minute segment. Rock ‘n’ roll music provides the overall tempo and pacing of the work, beginning with an extended segment of go-go dancers accompanied by Mitch Ryder and The Detroit Wheels. The dimensional space of the dancers is in constant variation as Paik explores different uses of color distortions and solarisation. This strategy continues in subsequent sections, where poet Allen Ginsberg meditates to a regular chiming of tablas for approximately one minute, only to be cut short by another dance segment. Two interview sections soften the pace, the first with Charlotte Moorman and the second with John Cage. Cage’s section, later reused in A 90 For a complete shot analysis of Global Groove, see Anja Osswald, “Global Groove Shot Analysis,” in Nam June Paik: Global Groove 2004 (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2004), 36-41. “Blue-Box” overlapping, later replaced by the more familiar “greenscreen” technique, enabled image layering by replacing, or “keying out” the preselected color with the secondary image. 312 Tribute to John Cage, consists of a single reading from “Indeterminacy” of the anechoic chamber anecdote. The pace continues with intercuts of a Japanese Pepsi-Cola commercial of children singing the advertising slogan at the beach, and later moments blur the sense of segmentation. In one sequence, a Navajo woman performs amidst one- second bursts of the earlier Mitch Ryder section, only to cut away to a nude vaudeville dancer accompanied by the Andrews Sisters. Traffic noises, country music, excerpts from Stockhausen’s Kontakte, Beethoven, and more rock ‘n’ roll bursts continue to the final section until the primary go-go dancer from the earlier sections falls to the floor in exhaustion, cueing the credit scene overlaid on footage of an African dance troupe. Many of these video segments were transplanted to Paik’s extensive and direct homage, A Tribute to John Cage, in 1972. A Tribute to John Cage begins with Paik’s’ robotic amalgam, K-456, clumsily moving down a side street in New York City. Narrator Russell Conner explains the relationship between Cage and Paik, noting that “a close, sometimes violent relationship developed,” whereupon they discovered a “deep mutual concern that modern society may turn mankind into a parade of mindless robots.” Paik’s robot, K-456, which originally played John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address on a monitor and could defecate beans on command, was emblematic of Paik’s technological experiments from the 1960s, and its wanderings evoke a parallel between Paik’s remote-controlled robot and the cultural image of Cage described by Carolyn Jones as a “Frankenstein of modernism,” both in his 313 outward appearance and in the oddity of his difficult aesthetic in the larger cultural eye. 91 Paik’s attempt to equate their communal sense of outsiderness is further punctuated by the accompanying music from Cage’s Aria with Fontana Mix (1958), sung by Cathy Berberian, which included a number of guttural cries and nonsyntactical turns of virtuoso signing. The atmosphere of confusion and disarray is then transferred to excerpts from a nearby video commune, where “two passers-by dropped in and did their thing.” Accompanied by two Beatles tunes, first the memorable cover of the Burt Bacharach song Baby It’s You, (1963) followed by I Call Your Name, (1963) this montage of playful experimentation with video distortions of the face functions as an introductory credit interlude. The Beatles reference unashamedly highlights the connection between both Cage and Paik with John Lennon, the second husband of Fluxus artist Yoko Ono, who during the same period lived adjacent to the Merce Cunningham Dance Studio near Abingdon Square in the West Village, as well as the series of video distortions done by Paik and Jud Yalkut at the Video Commune in 1967 entitled Beatles Electroniques, which distorted video from live performances, commenting on the purely mediated cultural space that popular music seemed to imbue. The next scene cuts to an interview by Conner with Brandies professor and composer Alvin Lucier, who functions throughout the documentary as both expert witness and cultural historian. Interjected within the interview are shots of Cage performing David Rosenboom’s 1971 experimental composition, Brainwave Feedback, 91 Caroline A. Jones, “Finishing School: John Cage and the Abstract Expressionist Ego,” Critical Inquiry 19/4 (Summer, 1993): 628-665. 314 in which low-frequency alpha brainwaves detected by EEG electrodes attached to Cage’s head are amplified through loudspeakers, thus effectively “tuning in” to the mind of the artist. Lucier vehemently defends the modernist genealogy of Cage’s aesthetic against contemporary social movements, using the case of Woodstock as evidence. Cage’s premiere of 4’33” at the Maverick Auditorium in Woodstock, NY in 1952 is contrasted with the 1969 festival in Bethel, NY, to which Lucier decries, “we really should regard the Maverick performance as the first authentic Woodstock, and that the Woodstock that just occurred, with the 500,000 human beings sitting in the mud under the hot sun really isn’t as important as that historical piano performance.” However, Paik’s choice of Lucier as the interview subject is imbued with an additional air of irony. Throughout his interview, Lucier’s stutter speech disorder, made famous by his composition I Am Sitting In A Room (1969), interferes with the most important signature phrases delineating the two events, such as the words “Maverick,” and Woodstock,” obscuring the geographic specificity of these two historical milestones and thus blurring Lucier’s proposed hierarchy. Immediately following Lucier’s interview is the first “commercial break,” the fast-paced montage advertisement for the 1970 Michael Wadleigh documentary of the Woodstock festival, thus juxtaposing the established institutional hegemony of Cage’s artistic platform with the cultural revolution inspired by 1960s identity politics. Meanwhile, Paik’s curious “looking in” perspective permeates the documentary sphere with an aura of humor and naiveté, offering soft criticisms of avant-garde academicism and of the commercial appropriation of 60s-era political revolution. 315 The next segment, a live performance of Cage’s silent piece in Harvard Square, Boston, shifts from interview-authority perspective to live spectacle. The narration takes the tone of a fast-paced sportscaster, as Conner rapidly chimes: Welcome to Harvard Square, where Mr. Cage will recreate his famous performance at Woodstock in 1952… The name of the game tonight is how to enjoy boredom, a privilege usual reserved only for aristocrats. Let’s chant Ohm together, or turn on a vacuum cleaner and enjoy the buzz. This is what the Chinese oracle I-Ching told us to do tonight. Here’s Johnny, and the hit parade of the year 2001! Here we are introduced to a distinct cultural image of Cage perpetuated until the end of his life. Abandoning his familiar coat and tie dandy wardrobe, Cage appears with a thick beard and long hair, wearing blue jeans: the solitary sage of American modernism. In contrast to the Frankenstein image of Cage in the 1950s, this casual and approachable Cage was the product of a cultural fascination with the poetics of indeterminacy, an image projected into the national consciousness through the widespread dissemination of his influential 1961 publication Silence. The scene on Harvard Square is both spectacle and homage; passersby pause with looks of confusion, while devotees encircle the piano in celebration. A series of intertitles form a second level of commentary. In the first slides, Paik inserts Fluxus event scores, short and humorous instructions for the performance of conceptual pieces, such as “Open the window and count the stars,” or “If rainy, count the raindrops on the puddle,” and the tone gradually shifts, with quotes from Henry David Thoreau and others, culminating in Paik’s characteristically understated gesture of wit: “This is. Zen for TV enjoy boredom,” followed by two of his more familiar aphoristic Fluxus instructions, “See your eyes with your eyes,” and “See your 316 left eye with your right eye.” By dislocating grammatical emphasis and instigating a humorous sense of conceptual play, Paik’s critical thesis summarizes the inherent reflexivity of the television apparatus and its relationship to cultural assimilation of avant-garde idealism. This point is foregrounded by a sudden commercial break following the performance, in which Paik inserts a Pepsi commercial from Japan featuring a musical montage celebrating the joys of American consumer culture. As one of several commercials recycled in his video works from the period, the sudden interjection points directly to the conflicting socioeconomic position of Asian culture faced with the soft economic influence of American culture. In the next series of scenes, Paik presents several performances of Cage and Cage-inspired works, each intercut with narration by Cage from his infamous series of lectures entitled “Indeterminacy.” First published as a collection of colorful vignettes interspersed within the individual essays in Silence, the series, which consisted of anecdotes written by Cage narrating his compositional and personal career, were performed and recorded by Cage, whereby each anecdote —regardless of the length— was to be read evenly over the course of one minute. In the documentary, Cage is shown reading the anecdotes from a paper prompt, and the framing of this space reflects Williams’ definition of the anonymous authoritative news anchorman, where the personable host diligently reads off the uncontested written script in a studied informality. 92 Cage’s anecdotes were fundamental to establishing a specific persona that was quickly absorbed into the social construction of postwar avant-garde art, and Paik 92 Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, 42. 317 utilizes this authoritative reporting style to frame the following scenes. Beginning with a performance by Maryanne Amacher of Cage’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1957- 8), a parade of artists join in at Harvard Square for a “Musicircus,” as Cage later would describe such performance, where any number of Cage works were performed simultaneously in the same space. Within the scene, Paik frames Cage against the 60s generation of artists and performers, including a carefully calculated fade between a passerby with Cage performing from the Song Books (1970). The scene is again interrupted with another fragment from Japanese television, this time of a young boy singing a modern Cambodian-pop inspired ode to his playtoy, another reference to Paik as an outside and innocent observer of cultural assimilation. Following the break is the longest continuous section of the work, a rehearsal performance by Charlotte Moorman of Paik’s Variations on a Theme by Saint-Saens (1973). For the piece, Moorman performs Paik’s arrangement of the piece while wearing a version of her “TV Bra,” a pair of chromium-plated discs taped to her breasts that project a mirror image of the camera, instilling a sexually imbued circularity to the mechanical probing of the cathode-ray tube. A female French voice interrupts the chaos to instruct us to “flip this TV set to a blank channel and count the dots,” followed by a quick cut to a 1971 performance of Violence Sonata by fellow film and video artist Stan VanDerBeek, in which he systematically destroys an upright piano with a pickaxe. Amidst the destruction is the playful off-screen chatter and laughing, and the scene suddenly cuts to an extended montage of synthesis effects from the Paik-Abe video synthesizer of the face of Jud Yalkut. Set to an electronic score of baroque music similar 318 to the popular recordings by transgender artist Wendy Carlos, the scene wanders until Yalkut finally declares, “I don’t know, I am getting awfully bored,” to which Paik responds, “Ah, thank god it’s the last run through.” Dissolving the last semblance of documentary realism, Yalkut asks Paik, “Well, what do we do now,” to which he responds, “well, let’s start it from the beginning.” With this final dissolving of suture, Paik begins a descending arc of scenes that recapitulate the opening half, first with another interview segment with Lucier, to which he openly addresses his stutter as a form of experimental poetry, intercut again with an extended dance interlude of Japanese women in a Broadway-style review, and several additional excerpts from “Indeterminacy,” followed by shots of Merce Cunningham performing from Variations V. Completing the palindromic arc of the work, Paik returns to the Cathy Berberian performance of Aria with Fontana Mix (1958), this time set to a four-screen rapid montage of short-spliced Fluxus performances, a reference to two important experimental film traditions, the extended multiscreen film works of Andy Warhol such as Chelsea Girls (1966), and the short-cut documentary camera technique of underground film impresario Jonas Mekas. Following a burst of applause, the final scene consists of the second performance by Cage of 4’33” discussed above. As he explains to the camera, the locations of the performance are determined through chance operations according to a grid of Manhattan, in which each street intersection is assigned a numeric value. Much like the first performance in the documentary, Paik presents a number of questions regarding reception and identity in Cage’s artistic dictum. Paik’s bodily intervention into the cultural politics of Cage’s artistic program perpetually confronts the 319 awkward by putting Cage in a series of compromising situations, and with each provocation comes a spirit of mischievous retreat into the realm of the outsider. In the end credits, Paik inserts a scene of a nostalgic 1930s burlesque dancer played upside down and in reverse, accompanied by the popular Yiddish song by Jacob Jacobs Bei Mir Bistu Shein (1932). Thus Paik concludes with a veiling rather than unveiling, of the inherent politics of culture, memory, and identity, firmly encapsulating the question of Cage with a circularity not unlike the feedback loops in his video installations. After A Tribute to John Cage, Paik shifted toward multimedia art installation projects, and the footage taken from this and other films became a part of an overall landscape of technological critique. In the 1974 installation TV Garden, scenes from the film are projected on televisions dispersed amid foliage in an art gallery, a literal recycling of cultural byproducts in a biomechanical universe. Ironically, by the 1980s many of Paik’s innovative ideas found a commercial outlet in the nascent music video industry, and as public support for independent film and video production faded, the meteoric rise of consumer electronics from Japan and Korea elevated Paik’s status as the new “guru” of electronic communications technology in the consumer art industry. The success of Guerilla video groups like TVTV gave rise to the new genre of cable documentary and news programming; Michael Shamburg eventually moved into Hollywood production with such works as A Fish Called Wanda (1988), and Pulp Fiction (1994), while Videofreex moved upstate and formulated an increasingly isolationist stance in the public dialogue over video art. 93 With the rise and subsequent decline of 93 Deirdre Boyle, Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited, 190-208. 320 video art in America, Paik’s initial critique of Cage functioned as a fitting metaphor for the cultural constraints of such a tradition. Bordering on the commercial and the performative, the stability of any such venture was predicated by institutional support, which, by its very nature, forced the marginalization of aesthetic concerns in the wake of spectacle, an element which Paik opportunistically celebrated as central to his own artistic program. 321 CONCLUSION “Through the Looking Glass”: Poetics and Chance in John Cage’s One 11 (1992) One 11 is a film without subject. There is light but no persons, no things, no ideas about repetition and variation. It is meaningless activity which is nonetheless communicative - like light itself. -John Cage, 12 June 1992 In the introduction to this dissertation I outlined a broad notion of audiovisuology and its implications for Cage’s artistic program. These interactions between sight and sound demonstrate the fluidity and subjectivity of any specific speculations on the nature of the relationship between listening and seeing, and as Chapter 4 notes, Cage’s indeterminate or experimental methods for approaching art were themselves caught up in the perennial question of subjectivity at the site of aesthetic experience. As Dieter Daniels and Sandra Nauman note in their introduction to Audiovisuology¸ audiovisual experience and theory is also a perennial topic of artistic investigation, where theory often outpaces technology, and artists often simultaneously formulate their own histories of cross- sensory metaphors in the process of investigating the possible parameters for which to delineate their own theories on the nature of audiovisual experience. 1 Cage had, by the end of his career, done just this. He coalesced the negative aesthetic of silence around 1 Dieter Daniels and Sandra Naumann, introduction to: Audiovisuology Compendium: An Interdisciplinary Survey of Audiovisual Culture, 13-14. 322 clear, definable parameters of chance-determined techniques for randomization in the late number pieces, and presented a clear and entertaining historicism of his own artistic program, retold in countless interviews now referred to commonly as “Cagean lore,” that began with the anecdote surrounding Oskar Fischinger and ended with the communications theories of Marshall McLuhan. Throughout, Cage maintained an ethical imperative regarding the future of music as an ontologically complete model and as a political discourse. It was only in the 1970s, when Cage encountered the works of Henry David Thoreau and retreated into a familiar discourse of American transcendentalism, that this trajectory came full circle by placing audiovisual inquiry back into the realm of metaphysics, separating thought from object, mind from body. This, combined with strong institutional support in America and abroad, sustained the Cage legacy well into the twenty-first century. As of writing this dissertation, the John Cage Centennial celebrations marking the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth are underway throughout the world, with festivals in Washington, D.C., Germany, and many other venues, alongside academic conferences and symposia, and numerous gallery exhibitions exploring the legacy and influence of Cage’s oeuvre in modern media arts history. Benjamin Piekut’s recent investigation of experimentalism in the United States points to a new trend of investigation into Cage’s influence that is essential for the next generation of Cage studies within the academy. Detailed archival investigation work and analysis of the actual methods of randomization that Cage applied to his compositions has revealed a number of deficiencies in the indeterminacy model, and in this dissertation I have both critiqued and praised some of the alternate directions that Cage pursued in his 323 lifetime. In terms of the audiovisual experience, I have argued for a number of theoretical approaches to consider when examining the multimedia artwork, namely the indexicality of soundwave structure in scientific application, theories of cine-dance and poetics of bodily articulation of three-dimensional space, and the acoustic articulation of space through mechanical means. Film has functioned more as a metaphor for this critique than as a sociological or aesthetic means to present the argument, and I have embraced the interdisciplinary nature of such a topic, arguing that Cage’s artistic program itself is inherently interdisciplinary, and that any investigation into his artistic career necessitates such a broad conceptualization. One final example will suffice to demonstrate the fluidity of Cage’s artistic program and the necessity of a multifaceted strategy for investigating and critiquing the Cagean artwork in the context of the audiovisual experience. Cage’s last major work, the feature-length film One 11 (1992), sought to capture a sense of unmediated perception in the naturalistic experience of art. His collaboration with director Henning Lohner and cinematographer Theodor Van Carlson applied chance procedures to camera shot, duration, and lighting, in “a film without subject.” The work consisted of a series of randomized lighting cues captured through randomized camera shot durations and angles for the entire ninety minute film. Cage accompanied his film with a musical score that followed similar techniques, creating an orchestral sound palette that mimics the experience of light in the film. Conceived both as a piece for “solo camera” and as an experience of the effect of light in space, the work mediated between the experiential 324 elements of interactive media and the subjective directionality of the cinematic presentation of film. Situating this work within the Cage aesthetic prompts a host of questions on the relationship between cinema and conceptual art. However, Cage’s answers to these problems are shrouded beneath the characteristic—one might say “Cagean”—aesthetics of ambiguity, where chance procedures and distancing rhetoric enabled Cage to create a work of art that dissolves the boundary between art and life, yet still manages to celebrate the idealized abstraction of aesthetic experience. This ambiguity is evident in the structure of the work laid out by Cage and Lohner. Cage approached the project in a manner similar to his other number pieces of the late eighties and early nineties by establishing a particular gamut of compositional possibilities and then subjecting them to chance procedures, using printouts of a computer based software that generated I Ching hexagram readings for any specific situation. Beginning with the empty space of a television studio, Lohner presented Cage with a variety of possible lighting intensities, directions, and angles, as well as a selection of possible camera lenses, angles and movements. After inputting this material into the computer model, Cage then presented Lohner with a final succession of lighting cues and camera shots to execute in the studio. The resulting film represents a central conflict found throughout Cage’s process-oriented works: the subjective, compositional (or directorial) decisions are found within the production stages of the work rather than in the final cinematic product, leaving open the question of authorship and intentionality in the experience of directly showing (or viewing) the film. 325 One 11 projects the tension between these two elements, as Cage simultaneously focused his attention on the effects of light and the directionality of the camera movement. Cage initially characterized the film as a study on “the effects of light on an empty room…where the effect of chance operations will be to make a kind of scenario of its own.” 2 Cage and Lohner’s collaboration was developed out of an extremely complicated set of lighting variables, where chance procedures were applied to the ADSR (attack-decay-sustain-release) curve and duration of the light events. As Lohner describes it, each ADSR movement of a light is like a musical note, with attack and delay phases by which the light wave reaches its peak, is held, and then decays, creating a “light-field” not unlike the “sound-field” of an orchestra. In the ninety minutes of film, approximately twenty-four thousand light changes occur, divided into seventeen scenes and twelve hundred cues, with an average of twenty light changes per cue. 3 The complicated choreography of these light events was programmed into the electronic lighting system of the FSM Television studio in Munich in a coordinated series of events that paralleled the camera movement. In contrast to the lighting elements, the camera angles and shots of the visual space formed the important opposing pole of the conceptual foundations of One 11 . In a 2006 interview, cinematographer Theodor Van Carlson was quick to note that he performed the piece through his act of executing the complex shot angles in a way not unlike a traditional musician would perform any other Cage work. Van Carlson 2 Henning Lohner, “The Making of Cage’s One 11 ,” in Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art, ed. David Bernstein and Christopher Hatch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 264. 3 Henning Lohner, “The Making of Cage’s One 11 ,” 277. 326 commented that the cinematography was fundamentally different than anything he had done before, with extremely complicated cross fades for up to 15-20 seconds—quadruple the length of anything being done in traditional filmmaking at the time. 4 Like the lighting cues, Cage’s score for One 11 contained thousands of individual shots, ranging from one second to over a minute, with each successive shot involving a complex change of camera lens, angle and positioning. Much like the application of transparency notation in Cage’s “Variations” series outlined in Chapter 4, Cage allowed for a certain amount of subjective intervention in the final choices of shots during his collaboration with Van Carlson. Since a number of the initial choices of camera shot and angle were difficult if not impossible, oftentimes not capturing lit sections of the surface, Cage allowed for changes. 5 Thus it seems that from the outset the question of a subjective viewpoint emerged as much as a technical difficulty involved in the medium itself as a compositional choice made by Cage, and its emergence during the process is illustrative of the overall subjective nature of the camera lens when placed in the hands of an individual. This is not much different in the case of the majority of Cage’s musical compositions, where the performer is left with a number of personal decisions that must be made in order to realize a performance. In a certain sense, this transference of the subjectivity to the 4 Following a general pattern noted by performers of Cage works, Carlson noted the tremendous challenge not to give into his own artistic instincts, particularly when he was inclined to follow the light more during certain shots. Theodor Van Carlson, DVD interview, One 11 and 103 for Orchestra (Mode Records, Mode 174, 2006). 5 As Lohner noted, some of these adjustments were determined using chance procedures, but many were made ad hoc according to the discretion of Van Carlson, allowing him certain freedoms to follow the light more closely. Henning Lohner, “The Making of Cage’s One 11 ,” 287. 327 performer is as important as the absolution of the subjective compositional process in Cage’s works. While there is certainly a subjective viewpoint through the camera lens, the critical act for Cage was that it was not his subjective viewpoint, but rather the performer of the work creating a new web of possibilities in his own interaction with the formal elements presented via the score. From the outset of the project, Cage was very much concerned with doing away with the editing process. As he put it, “the advantage of the use of chance operations in filmmaking is that you can use all the material which you make, rather than being confronted with the judgment of editing.” 6 The idea for this method came from an earlier project in which Cage collaborated with filmmaker Allen Miller, former director of Symphony Space, in which a collection of ten second strips of Cage playing a game of chess with Teeny Duchamp was arranged according to chance procedures. 7 Interestingly, the majority of filmmakers who interacted with Cage—Allen Miller, Theodor Van Carlson, and Henning Lohner—are all highly successful commercial artists in television and industrial filmmaking. As Van Carlson noted, however, he found it extremely difficult to translate any of the lessons learned into the American television world, noting that “European television is a lot more accepting of these types of ideas.” 8 Cage originally intended to accompany the film with a composition of recorded sounds made during the production of the film, but later changed his mind, crafting the 6 John Cage, Henning Lohner, “John Cage ‘22708 Types’” Interface 18 (1989), 243. 7 Ibid, 244. 8 Theodor Van Carlson, DVD interview, One 11 and 103 for Orchestra (Mode Records: Mode 174, 2006). 328 ambitious work for 103 orchestral musicians simply entitled 103 for Orchestra. This work, along with One 11 were a part of Cage’s “number” pieces, a series of works composed late in life whose titles are derived from the number of performers, with superscripts to designate additional works for a particular number. In a way, the number designations highlight the sense of abstractedness through the evocation of the European tradition of autonomous titles such as “Sonata 109” or “Symphony in Eb.” As James Pritchett explains, these pieces all have a common compositional technique: that of the time bracket, fixed or flexible, where the exact placement and duration of each note is free within a specific time span restriction. Cage’s number pieces parallel his visual art works through the fragmentation of sound floating within a total space of time—single sounds spontaneously emerging and receding in the texture. 9 103 was one of the most ambitious works, with a large orchestral texture alternating between different smaller ensembles. Cage explained the structure as divided into seventeen equal parts, where strings and percussion follow one pattern, and woodwinds and brass another. Chance operations determined the presentation, with a resulting textures varying between solo trombone, trumpet and horn duo, and numerous tutti sections in between. 10 It is the sense of human interaction beneath the interweaving textures of light and sound that delimits the interaction of visual and aural landscapes in One 11 . Thus it seems logical that Cage had little concern with the conceptual implications of the directionality 9 James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 201-202. 10 John Cage Henning Lohner, “The Making of Cage’s One 11 ,” 291. In this sense, the number pieces are quite reminiscent of contemporary composers Morton Feldman or Earle Brown, where the indeterminate sound fields are allowed an open texture that allows for a certain amount of humanistic musical control over the resultant sound textures emerging from the performance choices made. 329 of the camera or the limiting field of the projected space in the theater. When pressed on the issue, Cage quixotically added the stipulation that One 11 could be viewed for any duration, from a brief moment to an infinitely repeated loop, and that it could be shown anywhere, where the audience would be free to do whatever they like while viewing it. 11 As Lohner later commented, Cage was opposed to the forcefulness of the cinema, objecting to the unidirectional limitations and the sense of a captured audience space. However, it was not until the DVD release that the ideal setting of One 11 could take place—freeing the viewer from any type of formal restraints of the theater. 12 Again, it is the tension between these two formalistic elements—the directionality of the screening and the theatricality of the humanistic interaction with light and sound— that form the primary conceptual tension within the work as a whole. One 11 , through its intense structural organization and conceptual foundation, falls within the “structural film” genre coined by P. Adams Sitney, where the actual shaping of the film is foregrounded as the primary conceptual issue. 13 However, One 11 does not follow many of the primary characteristics of Sitney’s category such as fixed camera position or loop printing, and although it is in opposition to the intensely subjective experience of the lyrical film, as the previous discussion has revealed, the structuring of the film reveals a new sense of humanistic lyricism through the interaction between performance and product. While there are a certain affinities between Cage’s interest in light and the 11 Henning Lohner, “The Making of Cage’s One 11 ,” 294. 12 Henning Lohner, DVD interview, One 11 and 103 for Orchestra (Mode Records: Mode 174, 2006). 13 P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film, 348. 330 absence of light that parallel work such as Peter Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer (1960), or the exploration of a predetermined space such as that of Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967), the tension remains between the deterministic structures of these films and the indeterminate structures of Cage’s works. Cage’s quixotic handling of the conflict with the directionality of the cinematic gaze was ultimately thwarted by his complex situating of the final product in an open-ended environment that relied as much on the humanistic integration of the cinematographic perspective of visual space with the musical interpretation of sound fields. Thus the final result does not resolve the conceptual conflict, but instead foregrounds the humanistic interaction of the final peformative work—be it for a moment, or an extended loop for the rest of time. 331 REFERENCES Archival Materials Arnbom, Arne. Variations V (1966). 16mm film/videotape, black and white, 48 min. 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Cage Sr. Patent No. 1,367,797 (Long Beach, CA, Cage Engine Syndicate, Inc. of New York, NY, a corp. of Delaware): “Six Stroke Three Phase Engine” (renewed Mar. 20, 1919) 26 Oct. John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 1,281,132 (Long Beach, CA; Mesne Ass. to L.A. Submarine and Boat Company): “Steering and Propulsion for Submarines” 1916 15 Mar. John M. Cage Patent No. 1,301,036 (Detroit, Mich.): “Internal Combustion Engine and Method of Operating the Same” 1917 7 June John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 1,294,395; 1,386,393 (Detroit, Mich.: Cage Engine Syndicate, Inc.): “Internal Combustion Engine” 1918 3 Dec. John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 1,386,394 (Long Beach): “Internal Combustion Engine” 1920 23 July John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 1,619,460 (Ford City, Ontario) “Internal Combustion Engine and means for supplying charge thereto” 1921 25 Aug. John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 1,575,541; 1,600,795 (Santa Monica, CA, mesne to Halvor Andresen of Christiana, Norway and Oliver Otis Howard of Rockport, MA) “Internal-Combustion Engine” 25 Aug. John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 1,575,542 (Santa Monica, CA, mesne to Halvor Andresen of Christiana, Norway and Oliver Otis Howard of Rockport, MA) “Sleeve-Valve Engine” 26 Sept. John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 1,518,688 (Santa Monica, CA): “Condenser” 1926 27 Dec. John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 1,743,526 (Los Angeles, CA, ½ to Oliver O. Howard, Rockport, MA): “Lightning Protection” 1927 17 Sept. John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 1.754,009 (Los Angeles, mesne ass. to Dehydrators Inc.) “Dehydration of Oil and Water Emulsions” 361 1928 Spring “Other People Think” Los Angeles, CA 1930 11 Feb. John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 1,887,010 (Los Angeles, mesne Ass. to Electric Separation Co. LTD. NY, NY): “Insulator Bushing for Electrical Petroleum Dehydrators” 18 June John Cage attends Neue Musik Berlin festival, witnessing Paul Hindemith’s Trickaufnahmen and Ernst Toch’s Gesprochene Musik 1-5 Oct. Oskar Fischinger delivers address to the 2 nd annual Kongreß für Farbe- Ton-Forschung n.d. John Cage Sr. drafts “The Rape of Common Sense” winter Cage and Don Sample in Biskra, Algeria 1931 8 Sept. Cage composes “Untitled Composition” Mallorca, Spain 1932 8 July 1932 Fischinger publishes “Sounding Ornaments” in Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung Nov. Cage Premieres Greek Ode, First Chapter of the Ecclesiastes, and Three Songs for Voice and Piano for the Santa Monica Women’s Club with Harry Hay 1933 10 Mar. Cage begins his Santa Monica Lecture Series April California Composers Soiree, performed with Harry Hay May Three Easy Pieces 21 June John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 2,074,829 (Schenectady, NY, ass. to General Electric Co.): “Electron Beam Tube” 14 July Cage’s name and phone number are written in Cowell’s calendar 2-5 Sept. Sonata for Clarinet 26 Oct. Letter, Cage to Cowell: Cage requests career advice 3 Nov. Sonata for Two Voices (Santa Monica) 1934 15 Jan. Composition for 3 Voices (Ojai, CA, dedicated to Pauline Schindler) Feb. Cage publishes “Counterpoint” in Pauline Schindler’s publication, Dune Forum Mar. Letter, Cage to Weiss: request for composition lessons 5 April Solo with obbligato accompaniment of two voices in canon, Six short Inventions on the Subjects of the Solo (Carmel, CA) Fall Cage moves to New York to study with Cowell and Weiss, learns to “run the recorder” 11 Dec. Letter, Cage to Schindler, “I am terribly excited at the prospect of seeing you again…” 15 Dec. Cage returns to Los Angeles with Cowell 29 Dec. Letter, Cage to Schindler, “I’m in LA now living with my parents, I want to start a new music society” 30 Dec. Letter, Cowell to Olive Cowell: “I’m setting up a New Music Society in Los Angeles with Cage 362 1935 11 Jan. Letter, Cage to Schindler: concert reports, “I met Schoenberg, Wendell Hoss will teach me horn” 18 Jan. Letter, Cage to Schindler, love letter n.d. Letter, Schindler to Cage: “never let me lead you to intellectualization” n.d. Letter, Cage to Schindler, “you did not come,” mention of Danz and Ramiel, letter from Xenia 24 Jan. Letter, Cage to Schindler; Ticket receipts, Weiss has left 7 Feb. Letter, Galka Scheyer to Alexej von Jawlensky recounting her first meeting with Cage and the purchase of Meditation N. 160 (1934) 9 Feb. Letter, Cage to Pauline, “I’m composing on the sly and won’t show it to Weiss” Feb? Letter, Cage to Jawlensky, “You are my teacher.” 21 Feb. Letter, Cage to Schindler, love letter 22 Feb. Letter, Cage to Schindler, Stravinsky concert review 1 Mar. Letter, Cage to Pauline, “I have that job now today…” 2 Mar. Articles of Incorporation filed for Sturdy-Cage Projects, Inc. Corporation # 162010 2 Mar. Letter, Cage to Schindler, “Kings road must be the place, I would like it ready by May 15…Schoenberg would like to meet me next week” Mar. Letter, Cage to Henry Cowell, “I have a job in scientific research…it is very interesting” Mar. Three Pieces for Flute Duet (Santa Monica) 18 Mar. Cage joins Schoenberg’s UCLA extension course on counterpoint 19 Mar. Letter, Cage to Schindler, review of Schoenberg course Mar.? Letter, Cage to Pauline, “I am luminous…I shall be fired from my job.” 13 Apr. Cage arranges shakuhachi concert at the Schindler House in Los Angeles 15 Apr. Letter, Cage to Schindler, review of concert, dream with Rudolph 22 Apr. Letter, Cage to Schindler, Love letter, delicate subtones 28 Apr. Premiere of Quest and Royce Hall, UCLA n.d. Two Pieces for Piano Spring Announcement, Schoenberg to Scheyer on Summer Courses at USC summer? Cage begins Quartet for percussion, third movement titled “Axial Asymmetry” 11 May John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 2,089,174 (Schenectady, NY, ass. to General Electric Co.) “Starter for Pool-Type Tubes” 24 May Letter, Cage to Pauline, Schoenberg cpt. lessons, 3 June Letter, Cage to Pauline, Kings road? Xenia will be here Thurs. “emotional nows” 7 June Yuma, Arizona: Cage elopes with Xenia Kashevaroff, ends Schindler corr. 6 July Cage Sr. files US patent no. 2,395,099: “Invisible Ray Vision System” fall Screening of Fischinger films at Filmarte Theater in Los Angeles 6 Aug. John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 2,078,123 (Schenectady, NY, ass. to General Electric Co.): “Electric Discharge Device” 363 1936 26 Feb. Fischinger arrives in Hollywood under contract with Paramount Spring Galka Scheyer introduces Cage to Fischinger n.d. Cage composes Trio for percussion 18 June Letter, Cage to Cowell: distress over Cowell’s arrest winter First unofficial performance of Trio and Quartet in Santa Monica at Hazel Dreis’s apt. 10 Sept. Letter, Cowell to Scheyer, from San Quentin, wishing all well 1937 13 Mar. John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 2,160,583 (Schenectady, NY, ass. to General Electric Co.): “Pool-Type Discharge Device” 23 Mar. Letter, Cowell to Cage, advice on percussion music and the future of music Summer Cage apprentices for An Optical Poem Fall “Listening to Music” 1938 Spring Taught Extension course “Musical Accompaniment for Rhythmic Expression” with Aunt Pheobe, UCLA 1 Mar. John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 2,190,511 (Schenectady, NY ass. to General Electric Co.): “Ultra Short Wave System” 7 Apr. Mvmt. I of Metamorphosis 27 Jun.-30Jul. Gave percussion course at Virginia Hall Johnson School of Dance 2 July Premiere of Music for an Aquatic Ballet, National Aquatic Show, Olympic Swim Stadium, Los Angeles, CA July Five Songs for Contralto Fall Cage moves to Seattle 22-24 Oct. Music for Wind Instruments Fall Letter, Cage to Scheyer on Cornish, music for Wind Instruments Nov. Fischinger is hired by Walt Disney as a motion picture effects animator for the feature film Fantasia 9 Dec. Cage’s first percussion concert at the Cornish School 1939 Jan-Feb. Correspondence, Scheyer to Cage re Exhibition in Seattle before mar 13 Letter, Cage to Scheyer on IL#1 recording 13 Mar. Letter, Scheyer to Cage re IL#1, payments 24 Mar. Premiere of Ho to AA, Marriage at the Eiffel Tower, Imaginary Landscape, No.1, Cornish School, Seattle 22 Apr. John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 2,225,330 (Schenectady, NY ass. to General Electric Co.): “Electron Beam Tube” Summer Mills College Summer session, “Percussion for Accompanists” 11 July William R. Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard Inc. files US patent no. 2,268,872, “Variable Frequency Oscillation Generator,” the first 8 of which are purchased by Walt Disney 9 Dec. Premiere of First Construction in Metal 364 12 Dec. Article “Anvils, Gongs, to Eliven Musical Concert” Uses Cowell 37’ article, “I Believe..” 1940 13 Jan. Letter, Cage to Peter Yates, regarding proposed article 18 Feb. Cage delivers “The Future of Music” lecture at the Seattle Artists’ League 1 May Imaginary Landscape No. 2 (1rst Version), Seattle 2 July “List of Percussion Instruments” July Fads and Fancies in the Academy 8 Aug. Letter, Cage to Cowell, Center for exp. Music, Xenia is Translating Russolo 16 Aug. Letter, Cage to Cowell, “My father has invented a new instrument which may be capable of marvels…conversations with Varèse were very exciting” 12 Sep. Letter, Cage to Cowell, “I expect shortly to have a conversation with Disney.” Oct. Living Room Music Oct. Guggenheim Application: Galka Scheyer Oct. Guggenheim Application: Cage 28 Oct. Letter, Cage to Cowell, “ran records for Toch, heard ‘Geographical Fugue,’ 25 Nov. Letter, Cage to Cowell, frustrations with fundraising, running records for everyone 13 Dec. Varèse publishes “Organized Sound for the Sound Film” 16 Dec. Cage clips article, “Music in the films” by Bruno David Ussher, LA Daily News 24 Dec. Letter, Cage to Peter Yates re “Organized Sound” 1941 18 Jan. Letter, Cage to Yates, “emphasize organized sound…publish under your name” Mar. Yates publishes “Organized Sound: notes in the history of a new disagreement: between sound and tone,” in California Arts and Architecture. April Third Construction, Double Music, San Francisco May Letter, Cage to Peter Yates re Organized Sound Article “Thought it was fine” 21 Aug. Letter, Renata Garve to Cages, translation of second half of Russolo September Moves to Chicago School of Design 8 Sept. Letter, Cage to Doris Dennison, “Bauhaus work which is exciting… Sound-on-film work at Bell and Howard…” 26 Oct. Letter, Cage to Doris Dennison; Experimental work in Radio at Northwestern, Radio group, reading Patchen, started notes for 4 th construction 1 Nov. Letter, Xenia to Doris Dennison, re performances, rehearsals, etc. 15 Dec. Letter, Varèse to Scheyer regarding Cage’s used of the term “Organized Sound” 365 1942 7 Jan. Letter, Xenia to Cage, rehearsals, preparing for CBS workshop, meetings in NY 6 Feb. Letter, Xenia to Doris Dennison 1 Mar. Imaginary Landscape No. 3, Chicago April. Imaginary Landscape No.2, or March (Imaginary Landscape No. 2), Chicago 31 May The City Wears a Slouch Hat, WBBM Radio, Chicago 2-3 June Letters, Crete to Cage re Slouch, composing for film, Steinbeck, Dad’s research… June Moves to NY (???) July Credo in US 1 Aug. Letter, Cage to Denison, re which stations broadcast Slouch Hat 20 Oct. Forever and Sunsmell, Totem Anscestor Nov. And the Earth Shall Bear Again; The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, New York Dec. Primitive; In the Name of the Holocaust; Shimmera, NY 1943 7 Feb. MOMA art of this Century Concert, premiere of Amores 20 May Letter, Fischinger to Cage, requesting percussion music for a film 18 June Contract, Solomon R. Guggenheim and Oskar Fischinger for a “film with percussion music by John Cage” 30 Aug. John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 2,945,089 (Upper Montclair, N.J. ass. to Sturdy-Cage Projects Inc., Los Angeles, CA): Microwave Television System” 1944 11 Feb. John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 2,671,857 (Upper Montclair, N.J.): “Micro- microwave Generator” 8 Mar. participated in panel discussion “Composers and the Dance,” Y.M.H.A, NY Summer Cage appears as supporting actor in Maya Deren’s At Land, Port Jefferson, NY July A Valentine out of Season 22 Aug. Premiere of Four Walls at Perry-Mansfield Workshop, Steamboat Springs, CO, Aug. Filming of Integration of Dance and Drama, by Portia Mansfield 12 Dec. “The Imagery of Chess” exhibition at Julien Levy Gallery, NY, Chess Pieces 1945 n.d. Party Pieces, with Cowell, Harrison, and Thomson, like an “Exquisite Corpse” Summer Separates from Xenia 30 June John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 2,516,298 (Elm Grove, Wis., ass. to Allis- Chalmers Manufacturing Co., Milwaukee, Wisconsin): “Regulating System Utilizing Voltage Response Thyratrons” 366 30 Nov. John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 2,506,266 (Elm Grove, Wis., ass. to Allis- Chalmers Manufacturing Co., Milwaukee, Wisconsin): “Voltage Regulating System” Dec. Three Dances, Daughters of the Lonesome Isle 1946 19 Mar. Letter, Lucretia Cage re Cage Sr. and Television Summer Residency at Pittsburg Playhouse, readings of Huxley, Jung, etal 25 July John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 2,480,631 (Wellesley, MA, ass. to Raytheon Manuf. Co., Newton, MA): “Tire Vulcanizing” July-Aug. Two Pieces for Piano n.d. Music for Marcel Duchamp 31 Oct. John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 2,579,362 (Montclair, N.J.): “Inhaler” 1 Nov. John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 2,553,182 (Montclair, N.J. ass. to Cage Projects Inc., Union City, N.J.): “Color Television” 1947 Jan.-Apr. The Seasons Winter Letter, Cage to Hans Richter re Dreams, counterpoint problems March Premiere of Dreams that Money Can Buy 23 April Letter, Schoenberg to Richter re film commission (denial) 8 Apr. John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 2,610,288 (Wellesley, Mass., ass. to Raytheon Manuf. Co., Newton, Mass.): “Dielectric Heating Apparatus” 28 July John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 2,618,758 (Montclair, N.J.): “Television Camera Tube” 4 Oct. John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 2,568,484 (Montclair, N.J. ass. to Cage Projects Inc., Union City, N.J.): “Power Supply” 29 Nov. John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 2,568,485 (Montclair, N.J. ass. to Cage Projects Inc., Union City, N.J.): “Power Supply for Image Reproducing Tubes” Winter Co-publishes “Possibilities” 1948 27-29 Feb. “A Composers Confessions” Vassar College Feb.-Mar. Sonatas and Interludes Feb.-Mar. Letter, Cage to Peter Yates re Sonatas 21 Apr. John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 2,635,208 (Montclair, N.J.): “Television Circuit” 7-9 May New Arts Weekend, Stephens College, MO, Deren film screenings July-Aug. Black Mountain simmer courses Aug. In a Landscape, Suite for Toy Piano Black Mountain 28 Aug. John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 2,567,874 (Montclair, N.J. ass. to Cage Projects Inc., Union City, N.J.): “Cathode-Ray Tube” 9 Sept. Letter, Cage to Peter Yates re book review, particularly Satie 28 Sept. Letter, Cage to Peter Yates re Satie, Form and Structure 19 Nov. John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 2,569,654 (Montclair, N.J.): “Cathode-Ray Tube” 367 1 Dec. John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 2,553,182 (Montclair, N.J. ass. to Cage Projects Inc., Union City, N.J.): “Condenser” 1949 Mar.-Oct. Guggenheim funded travels in Europe 6 July John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 2,568,486 (Montclair, N.J. ass. to Cage Projects Inc., Union City, N.J.): “High Voltage Power Supply” Aug. Began String Quartet in four parts n.d. Began attending Artists Club, lecture on Indian Sand Painting, “Lecture on Nothing” (Could be in 1950 or 1951, after Suzuki) 16 Nov. Letter, Cage to Peter Yates, “I’m against the radio, against recordings, etc.” Dec. Works of Calder 1950 26 Jan. (Or after), “Lecture on Something” Jul-Aug Began Concerto for Prepared Piano; receives copy of Book fo Changes from Wolff 22 Dec. John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 2,630,543 (Montclair, N.J.): “Cathode-Ray Tube” 1951 1 Feb. Release of Works of Calder March First Suzuki Lectures at the New School 5-27 Apr. Imaginary Landscape No. 4, meets Earl and Carolyn Brown 10 May. Premiere of IL#4 Spring.-Dec. Began Music of Changes 1-3 Sept. First Art Film Festival in America, Woodstock NY, Works of Calder wins best score Dec. Letter, Norman McLaren to Cage, praise for Works of Calder 1952 12 Jan. Imaginary Landscape No. 5 Spring Water Music May Began Williams Mix 13 June John M. Cage Sr. Patent No. 2,698,388 (Upper Montclair, N.J.): “Television Channel Selector” August First “Happening” at Black Mountain, composed 4’33” 29 Aug. Premiere of 4’33” and Water Music, Woodstock, NY 1953 22 Jan. Letter, Max T. Krone (USC) to Cage re tape music with stylus, referred to Whitney Brothers 13 March Letter, Peter Yates to Cage re Whitney Brothers 4 Aug. Letter, Cage to Peter Yates, response to Partch, pitch vs. frequency, tape music 1954 March John Cage Sr. “Developments in Projection TV” Radio-Electronic Engineering 368 1957 4 Mar. John Cage Sr. and William R. Hewlett joint filing of US Patent no. 3,014,135, “Direct Current Amplifier and Modulator Therof” 1960 6 June Letter, Stan Brakhage to Cage re visiting Colorado, DogStarMan 1964 6 Jan. Letter, Cage to Herbert Sturdy re John Cage Sr.’s business affairs 29 Dec. Certificate of Election to Wind Up and Dissolve Sturdy-Cage Projects, Inc. #47612 1976 22 Nov. Letter, Xenia to John, “I think you have finally achieved what your dear father hoped..” 369 APPENDIX II “The Future of Music,” Sources and Bibliography II.1 – Source materials for the Essay II.1.1 “The Future of Music,” manuscript Version, (John Cage Papers, Northwestern University, Series V: Ephemera, folder “1940”) 1940 handwritten draft undated typescript draft I believe that the use of noise 1 to make music 2 will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments 3 which will make available to composers <for musical purposes> any and all sounds 4 that can be heard. Photo-electrical, film and mechanical mediums for the synthetic production of music 4 will be explored. Whereas, in the past, the point of disagreement has been between dissonance and consonance, it will (be) in the immediate future be between noise and so-called musical sound sounds. The present methods 5 of writing music, principally those which employ harmony 6 and its reference to a a particular particular steps in the field of sound, 7 will be inadequate for the composer <music makers> composer who will be faced by by with the entire field of sound. 5 New methods will be discovered, bearing a definite relation to Schoenberg’s 12 twelve tone system 6 and present methods of writing percussion music 7 and any other methods which are free from the concept of a fundamental tone. The principal of form 9 will be our only constant connection with the past. Although the great great forms 13 of the future will not be as it was in the past, at one time a fugue and at another the sonata, it it they will be related to these as they are to each other: 13 8 through the principle of organization or man’s common ability to think. // (The following paragraph is stricken from the typescript.)The advent of new materials, 14 mediums, 15 methods and forms acts and will continue to act as a purification enliven the art of music, makes it exciting. (Concern for notes on paper 16 will change to a concern for sounds and the ear. Self-expression 17 will give place to the organization of materials 18 (which express themselves).) Disproportionate interest in and appreciation 19 of past music will disappear in the making 20 and enjoying 21 of now-music. 22 ESTABLISH MUSIC-MUSEUMS 23 FOR THE INSTRUMENTS 24 AND MUSIC 25 OF THE PAST INSIST ON MUSIC-MUSEUMS MADE OUT OF 20 TH CENTURY MATERIALS. 26 *why analyze music? why not listen to it? (This paragraph is not included in the typescript or published versions.) Some composers today are writing music of a conventional nature, but with the purpose of helping to bring about a better state of society. When this better social order is achieved, their songs will have no more meaning than the ‘Star-spangled Banner’ has today. We will then realize our need for the new music which will have been written by composers who didn’t help fight, but who were aware in a general way of, and sensitive to, the continual series of world events. 370 II.1.2 - Footnoted Text, possibly redrafted for Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1961), p.3. ………….. Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments. Every film studio has a library of “sound effects” recorded on film. With a film phonograph it is now possible to control the amplitude and frequency of any one of these sounds and to give to it rhythms within or beyond the reach of our imagination. Given four film phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heartbeat, and landslide. …………. If this word “music” is sacred and reserved for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound. …………. Most inventors of electrical instruments have attempted to imitate eighteenth- and nineteenth –century instruments, just as early automobile designers copied the carriage. The Novachord and the Solovox are examples of this desire to imitate the past rather than construct the future. When Theremin provided an instrument with genuinely new possibilities, Thereministes did their utmost to make the instrument sound like some old instrument, giving it a sickeningly sweet vibrato, and performing upon it, with difficulty, masterpieces from the past. Although the instrument is capable of a wide variety of sound qualities, obtained by the turning of the dial, Thereministes act as censors, giving the public those sounds they think the public will like. We are shielded from new sound experiences. …………. The special function of electrical instruments will be to provide complete control of the overtone structure of tones (as opposed to noises) and to make these tones available in any frequency, amplitude, and duration. …………. It is now possible for composers to make music directly, without the assistance of intermediary performers. Any design repeated often enough on a sound track is audible. Two hundred and eighty circles per second on a sound track will produce one sound, whereas a portrait of Beethoven repeated fifty times per second on a sound track will have not only a different pitch but a different sound quality. 371 …………. The composer (organizer of sound) will be faced not only with the entire field of sound but also with the entire field of time. The “frame” or fraction of a second, following established film technique, will probably be the basic unit in the measurement of time. No rhythm will be beyond the composer’s reach. …………. Schoenberg’s method assigns to each material, in a group of equal materials, its function with respect to the group. (harmony assigned to each material, in a group of unequal materials, its function with respect to the fundamental or most important material in the group.) Schoenberg’s method is analogous to a society in which the emphasis is on the group and the integration of the individual in the group. …………. Percussion music is a contemporary transition from keyboard-influenced music to the all-sound music of the future. Any sound is acceptable to the composer of percussion music; he explores the academically forbidden “non-musical” field of sound insofar as is manually possible. …………. Methods of writing percussion music have as their goal the rhythmic structure of a composition. As soon as these methods are crystallized into one or several widely accepted methods, the means will exist for group improvisations of unwritten but culturally important music. This has already taken place in Oriental cultures and in hot jazz. …………. Before this happens, centers of experimental music must be established. In these centers, the new materials, oscillators, turntables, generators, means for amplifying small sounds, film phonographs, etc., available for use. Composers at work using twentieth-century means for making music. Performances of results. Organization of sound for extra-musical purposes (theater, dance, radio, film). II.1.3 - Essay Draft for Peter Yates (possible second half of “Credo”) 1940, (Peter Yates Papers, Mandeville Special Collections, University of California at San Diego, MSS 14, Box 3, Folder 2) Recent technological advances in the field of sound-engineering together with recent achievements in the field of experimental music make it possible to prophecy with certainty the development of a new musical culture. This new art-science, which will not depend upon the 372 instruments of the symphony or jazz orchestras for its performance, nor be limited to the use of so-called musical tones, will have for its materials the entire field of sound, made available through the use of vocal, manual, mechanical, electrical and film means. Counterpoint and harmony, which concern the methodical use of 18 th and 19 th century instruments will be inadequate as methods for the use of the unlimited new materials. No present musical laws will hold true for this future music, save the principle of organization. Since in every other respect the new will differ from the old, it will be desirable and tactful to give to this new all-sound-art a new name: Organized Sound. The most forbidden field of sound was, and is, that of noise. Therefore, with revolutionary spirit, Luigi Russolo, Italian futurist, published in 1913 his manifesto, ‘The Art of Noise.’ Three months later he demonstrated in Milan, before an audience of 2000, his first “noise- tuner,’ an instrument which produced the characteristic noise of an explosive motor and enabled one to vary the frequency of the sound within the limits of two octaves. This instrument was followed by the invention and construction of twenty-two other ‘Noise-tuners’ which rumbled, thundered, crashed, whistled, hissed, whispered, buzzed, rustled and together made possible the performance in Northern Italy, London and Paris of Russolo’s three compositions or “Spirals of Noise”; “The Awakening of Cities,’ ‘Dining on the Hotel Terrace,’ and ;The Assembly of Automobiles and Aeroplanes.’ Although critical estimates of Russolo’s work have with the passing of time tended to minimize the value of his contribution, there can never be little doubt that his work greatly influenced Igor Stravinsky and Edgar Varèse, both of whom were familiar with it, and both of whom subsequently made experiments related to it. Four-square, the classic symphony orchestra has its string, wood-wind, brass and percussion sections. To the percussion section were relegated whatever noises 19 th century composers saw fit to use, their purpose in such use being to produce special effects, punctuate the rhythm or heighten the climaxes. The gradual acceptance of dissonance was accompanied by the placing of greater emphasis on the percussion section of the orchestra. Not only were the number of instruments increased but they were given an integral rather than coloristic part in such compositions as Stravinsky’s ‘Les Noces” and Milhaud’s ‘Christophe Colomb.’ This tendency through dissonance towards the sound, noise, became increasingly pronounced in the work of Edgar Varese, until, in 1931, he completed his “Ionization,” scored for 13 players of percussion instruments alone. With this composition Varese effectively announced the new disagreement: between sound and so-called musical tone. Disagreement had previously been between consonance and dissonance. Before this time, and in, what would at first consideration seem, another direction, several composers, including Ernst Toch, George Antheil and Paul Hindemith, made experiments in music requiring for its performance the perforated rolls of the player piano or the revolving discs of the phonograph. These machines had been developed for the commercial purpose of reproducing the performance of artists. But composers were alive to the possibility of using them in a productive rather than reproductive way. Unencumbered by the physical limitations of an artist, the machine could reproduce, at the composer’s will, organic differences, tonal combinations and tempos previously unheard and unimagined. The possibility of controlling the speed of recording equipment gave Ernst Toch the idea for his “Gesprochene Musik,’ a composition which requires the rerecording of choric speech nine times as fast as originally spoken. With these two mechanical means, it seemed in 1926 that the most far-reaching imagination could not encompass the range of possibilities. 373 II.1.4 - Draft letter to Peter Yates for “Organized Sound” article, Dec. 24, 1940 (Peter Yates Papers, Mandeville Special Collections, University of California at San Diego, MSS 14, Box 3, Folder 1) Gradually more and more importance is given to the percussion section in so-called modern symphonic works, e.g., works by Stravinsky and others finally resulting in such works as Milhaud’s Orestiad with one entire section for choric speech and percussion and his opera, Christophe Colomb, which contains many sections for speech and percussion. Not until 1931 did the logical outcome of this activity take place: Varèse’s Ionization, for percussion alone, which differs in intent from Russolo’s work, being in no way an imitation of natural or city sounds, but being instead an expressive organization of sound as opposed to tone. With this work Varèse announced the new disagreement: between sound and tone. Musical disagreement had previously been between consonance and dissonance. …composers and critics soon saw that the new electrical instruments had one thing in common with the percussion and mechanical work and that was a common interest in exploring the field of sound and rhythm, bringing into availability new musical materials. …the goal began to be clear: an instrument which would make the entire field of sound available for musical purposes: any desirable frequency, amplitude, overtone structure and duration. It can be seen that radio and film work to produce sound effects is a commercial exploitation of the field that interested Russolo. Only difference is that radio and film companies use the materials representatively, and Russolo wanted to organize them for “futurist noise”. Mills in his book, A Fugue in Cycles and Bells, suggests that through the acquisition of a library of templates, i.e., film library, the most practical exploration of sound may be made. Douglas Schearer, MGM Sound Engineer, agrees. I believe that film will make noise available for musical purposes and that electrical means will make tones available for musical purposes. …I rationalized the whole thing with reference to the overtone series, that is, I said our ears are in one of the high octaves where we are able to hear sound <compose and hear music> without reference to a fundamental <tone underlying the entire composition>. …I defined music for myself as Organized Sound. and I still define it that way. …I had meanwhile become aware of the background of my work and had made two compositions using mechanical possibilities, and was interested to establish a center of experimental music which would continue the work done with percussion instruments and add the use of mechanical and electrical means for further exploration of the field of sound and rhythm. …In looking for support, I made many new contacts, learned a lot. For one thing became acquainted with new technological advances, including the possibilities of film. Began to think of synthetic music, that is music made through the use of film and film editing, enabling a composer to compose directly without the use of any musical instruments. This field is only one of the fields which interests me, and could be used in combination with other mechanical and electrical means. 374 II.1.5 - John Cage, Essay (excerpt), “For More New Sounds,” Modern Music (May-June) 1942 Many musicians, the writer included, have dreamed of compact technological boxes, inside which all audible sounds, including noise, would be ready to come forth at the command of the composer. Such boxes are still located somewhere in the future. At present the choice is either to wait and lament the fact that they aren’t available now for experimental and musical purposes, or to continue to work with what “axes and buckets” can be found or made. Recently the percussion group in Chicago had access to the sound effects collection of a Chicago radio station. An audio frequency oscillator was used in combination with electric buzzers, muted gongs, tin can xylophones, marimbula, a coil of wire, and recorded sounds …Organizations of sound effects, with their expressive rather than representational qualities in mind, can be made…parallel possibilities exist in connection with the use of sounds recorded on film, film phonographs, and organizations of such material for the moving picture. In writing for these sounds, as in writing for percussion instruments alone, the composer is dealing with material that does not fit into the orthodox scales and harmonies. It is therefore necessary to find some other organizing means than those in use for symphonic instruments. The sounds cannot be organized through reference to an underlying fundamental tone since such a tone does not exist. Each sound must be considered as essentially different from and independent of every other sound. A method analogous to the twelve-tone system may prove useful, but, in such a case, the “sound-row” would contain any number of elements. However, because of the nature of the materials involved, and because their duration characteristics can be easily controlled and related, it is more than likely that the unifying means will be rhythmic. II.2 – Items from the John Cage Correspondence Collection relating to “The Future of Music” II.2.1 – “Bibliography of Articles etc. on Percussion Music, Electrical Music, Synthetic Music, or Composers Thereof. Compiled by John Cage, before September 8, 1940 (John Cage Papers, Northwestern University Series V: Ephemera, folder: “Exptl Music and Percussion.”) Cage, John “Introduction to ‘Percussion Music and its Relation to the Modern Dance’” Dance Observer Oct. 1939 Russell, William “Hot Jazz and Percussion Music” Dance Observer Oct. 1939 Horet, Louis “Modern American Percussion Music” Dance Observer Aug-Dec. 1939 Frankenstein, Alfred “A Program of Percussion” San Francisco Chronicle July 38, 1939 Brown, Gilbert ”Not Flat-Wheel Tram, but Percussion Seattle Star Music” Dec. 11, 1939 Avahalomoff, Jack “Cage Percussion Players” Reed College Quest 375 Feb. 16, 1940 Cowell, Henry “East Indian Tala Music “ Dance Observer Dec. 1939 Cage, John “Goal: New Music, New Dance” Dance Observer December 1939 Ussher, Bruno David “Music in the Films” L.A. News [LA Daily News] Sept. 16, 1940 Fisher, Marjory M. “Scientist Reduces all Arts to Numerical S.F. News Equations” Sept. 7, 1940 ‘’ “Fingersnaps and Footstomps” Time July 29, 1940 Cage, John “Modern American Percussion Music” Seattle Post Intelligencer Jan. 7, 1940 Frankenstien, A. San Francisco Chronicle July 19, 1940 Jones, I.M. L.A. Times Aug. 4, 1940 Sept. 1, 1940 Sept. 8, 1940 Rosenblatt, E. Dance Observer Aug.-Sept. 1940 [Handwritten Citations] Erksine, John “Instruments of the Future,” in A Musical Companion, N.Y.: Alfred Knopf, 1950, p. 50. --, “Percussion Orchestration,” p. 126 Myers, Rollo H., Music in the Modern World, NY: Longmaus, Green, and Co., pg. 201-204. Toch, Ernest, “Toward New Sonorities,” in Music and Dance in California [ed. José Rodriguez, Compiled by William J. Perlman, Bureau of Musical Research, Hollywood, CA, 1940]. pg. 25 II.2.2 - Draft letter, n.d. (1941?), “Dear Sir:” (John Cage Papers, Northwestern University Series V: Ephemera, folder: “Exptl Music and Percussion.”) I believe that percussion music represents a transition from music which refers to a particular field of sound to that electronic music of the future which will refer to the entire field of sound. Not only new methods of sound production must be found, but new methods of writing must be used and carefully tested. This work, I hope, will be carried out through the 376 collaboration of composers and scientists in every institution in the country which is suitably equipped with laboratories and imagination (the desire to experiment). II.2.3 - Whitney Foundation Application (John Cage Papers, Northwestern University Series V: Ephemera, folder: “Exptl Music and Percussion.”) The project may be described as a center of experimental music to be established at the School of Design in Chicago. This center will continue the work with percussion instruments and proceed with the exploration of new musical materials now available through the use of mechanical, electrical and film means. Application of the results will be made not only to the field of music (composition for and performance by a group of players), but also to the field of dance, theater, and film. II.2.4 – Letter, John Cage to Bland L. Stradley John Cage Papers, Northwestern University Series V: Ephemera, folder: “Exptl Music and Percussion.”) Bland L. Stradley Dean, College of Arts and Sciences Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio I now propose to establish a center of experimental music, the purpose of which would be to continue the work with percussion instruments and to do further research, composition and performance in those fields of sound and rhythm, not yet explored. The ultimate goal of such a project would be the use of electrical, mechanical, film, and like means for the production of any desired frequency in any desired duration, amplitude and overtone structure. I would regularly advise composers throughout the country of the new materials available and invite them to contribute scores for performance. American Music will be enlivened and enriched by such exploration and use of new musical materials. These can best be brought about through the cooperation of scientists with a real appreciation of music, and composers with an understanding and appreciation of science. That is the combination I am endeavoring to bring about. II.4.5 - Henry Cowell, letter to Cage, 23 March, 1937 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 115) I honestly believe and formally predict that the immediate future of music lies in the bringing of percussion on one hand, and sliding tones on the other, to as great a state of perfection in construction of composition and flexibility of handling on instruments as older elements are now. 377 II.4.6 - Program Notes, Cornish School, Dec. 9, 1939, by W.C. Williams (John Cage Papers, Northwestern University Series IV: Scrapbooks) I felt that noise, the unrelated noise of life, such as this in the subway, had not been battened out as would have been in the case with Beethoven still warm in the mind, but it had actually been mastered, subjugated. The composer had taken this hated thing, life, and rigged himself into power over it by his music. The offense had not been held, cooled, varnished over, but annihilated, and life itself made thereby triumphant. This is an important difference. By hearing such music, seemingly so much noise, when I actually came upon noise in reality, I found that I had gone up over it. II.4.7 - Program notes, Reed College, 14 February, 1940 (John Cage Papers, Northwestern University Series IV: Scrapbooks) Many variations of sound quality, amplitude, pitch and duration are yet to be found and used. In the realm of pitch, for example, we have yet to explore the possibilities of sliding tones…Perhaps in the near future, we will have electrical instruments which, when dials are turned, buttons pushed, etc., will give us everything we want: free access to sound. Machines will be invented which will play rhythms which human beings could not. II.5 – Contemporary Published Sources II.5.1 Luigi Russolo, “The Art of Noises,” from Nicholas Slonimsky, Music since 1900, 1rst ed., 1938, trans. Stephan Somervell [Translation by Xenia Cage and Doris Dennison, handwritten and typescript draft: David Tudor Papers, Getty Research Institute, Series IV: “Articles and Reviews, Music Related 1941-1959,” Box 62, folder 1 (Accession X 980039-62).] The art of music at first sought and achieved purity and sweetness of sound; later, it blended diverse sounds, but always with intent to caress the ear with suave harmonies. Today, growing ever more complicated, it seeks those combinations of sounds that fall most dissonantly, strangely, and harshly upon the ear. We thus approach nearer and nearer to the music of noise. [The musical art sought and obtained first the purity and sweetness of the sound, then mixed the different sounds, preoccupying itself always to caress the ear with suave harmony. Today, musical art, becoming always more complicated, seeks the mixture of the most dissonant sounds, the most strange and odd to the ear. So we come always nearer to the sound-noise.] This musical evolution parallels the growing multiplicity of machines, which everywhere are assisting mankind. Not only amid the clamor of great cities but even in the countryside, which until yesterday was ordinarily quiet, the machine today has created so many varieties and combinations of noise that pure musical sound – with its poverty and its monotony – no longer awakens any emotion in the hearer. 378 [This evolution of music is parallel to the multiplication of machines which cooperate everywhere with mankind. Not only in the raked atmosphere of big cities, but also in the country which until yesterday was normally silent. The machine has created today many various and conflicting noises, so that pure sound in its monotony no more brings forth any emotion.] To excite and exalt our senses, music continued to develop toward the most complex polyphony and the greatest variety of orchestral timbres, or colors, devising the most complicated successions of dissonant chords and preparing in a general way for the creation of MUSICAL NOISE. [To excite and exalt our sensibilities, music strove toward the most complex polyphony and toward variety of instrumental quality and color, seeking the most complicated succession of dissonant chords and vaguely preparing the creation of MUSICAL NOISE.] …moreover, musical sound is too limited in qualitative variety of timbre…so that modern music, in its attempts to produce new kinds of timbre, struggles vainly. […on the other hand, the sound is too limited in the qualitative variety of timbre…so modern music struggles in this small circle, trying in vain to create new variety of timbre.] We must break out of this narrow circle of pure musical sounds, and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds. [It is necessary to break this restricted circle of pure sounds and to conquer the infinite variety of sound-noises.] …we must fix the pitch and regulate the harmonies and rhythms of these extraordinarily varied sounds. To fix the pitch of noises does not mean to take away from them all the irregularity of tempo and intensity that characterizes their vibrations, but rather to give definite gradation or pitch to the stronger and more predominant of these vibrations. Indeed, noise is differentiated from musical sound merely in that the vibrations that produce it are confused and irregular, both in tempo and in intensity. Every noise has a note – sometimes even a chord – that predominates in the ensemble of its irregular vibrations. [We want to tune and regulate harmonically and rhythmically these various noises. To tune noises does not mean to deprive them of all the irregular movements and vibrations of time and intensities. But on the contrary it means to give a grade or tone to the most outstanding and loudest of these vibrations; the noise in fact distinguishes itself from sound only in so far as the vibrations which produce it are irregular and confused in tempo as in intensity. EVERY NOISE HAS A TONE sometimes also a chord which predominates in the union of its irregular vibrations.] Every manifestation of life is accompanied by noise. Noise is therefore familiar to our ears and has the power to remind us immediately of life itself. …we are convinced, therefore, that by selecting, coordinating, and controlling noises we shall enrich mankind with a new and unsuspected source of pleasure. Despite the fact that it is characteristic of sound to remind us brutally of life, the Art of Noises must not limit itself to reproductive imitation. It will reach its greatest emotional power through the purely acoustic enjoyment which the inspiration of the artist will contrive to evoke from combinations of noises… [Every manifestation in our life is accompanied by noise so that noise is familiar to our ears and has the faculty to recall us immediately to life itself…we are sure that choosing, coordinating and dominating all the noises will enrich mankind by a new voluptuousness unsuspected. Although the characteristic of noise is to recall us brutally to life, the ART OF NOISE MUST NOT LIMIT ITSELF TO AN IMMEDIATE REPRODUCTION. It will attain its 379 major emotional faculties by the acoustic enjoyment in itself, which the inspiration of the artist will know how to obtain from the combination of noises…] …we note in present day composers of genius a tendency toward the most complex dissonances. Moving further and further away from pure musical sound, they have almost reached the Noise-sound. This need and this tendency can only be satisfied by the supplementary use of noise and its substitution for musical sounds. [….we can notice in the genius composers of today a tendency toward the most complicated dissonances. Always going farther away from pure sound, they almost reach sound- noise. This necessity and tendency won’t be satisfied until we have the conjunction and substitution of sound by noises.] …since every noise has in its irregular vibrations a general, predominating tone, it will be easy to obtain, in constructing the instruments which imitate it, a sufficiently wide variety of tones, semitones, and quarter-tones. This variety of tones will not deprive any single noise of its characteristic timbre but will merely increase its tessitura, or extensions. […as every noise with its irregular vibrations has one general predominant tone, it will be easy to obtain in the construction of instruments which imitate it, a sufficiently extended variety of tones, half-tones and quarter-tone. This variety of tones will not harm the characteristic timbre of every single noise, but will only amplify the texture and extension.] II.5.2 Edgard Varèse “Organized Sound for the Sound Film,” The Commonweal, Dec. 1940 As the term “music” seems gradually to have shrunk to mean much less than it should, I prefer to use the expression “organized sound,” and avoid the monotonous question: “But is it music?” “Organized sound” seems better to take in the dual aspect of music as an art-science, with all the recent laboratory discoveries which permit us to hope for the unconditional liberation of music, as well as covering, without dispute, my own music in progress and its requirements. I am sure that organized sound has an ever more important role to play as a dynamic- dramatic element in motion pictures. But we must unmuzzle music if we are to allow it to perform its function of arousing people and making them feel…organized sound may be called upon to intervene at the point where the spoken word has reached the limits of its efficacy, and where the precision of the image only tends to limit the flight of the imagination. The microphone is an incomparably keener detective than our modest eardrum, so why should we impose on it our anatomic limitations and, at the moment when the film has become as sensitive to sound-waves as to light-waves, why try to restrain the rôle of organized sound? …we are now in possession of scientific means not merely of realistic reproduction of sounds but of production of entirely new combinations of sound, with the possibility of creating new emotions, awakening dulled sensibilities. Any possible sound we can imagine can be produced with perfect control of its quality, intensity and pitch, opening up entirely new auditory perspectives. And these sounds must not be speculated upon as separate entities for sporadic, atmospheric effects but taken as thematic material and organized into a score standing on its own merit. …it seems to me that the motion picture industry might profit (even in the dollar sense in the end) in having a laboratory or a department for the study of the problem of a more complete and understanding use of the sound apparatus. There is scarcely more than a bowing 380 acquaintance between the music and the sound departments. What they need is to take off their coasts and sweat together. There should be a coordinating department where composer, or sound organizer, and electrical engineer work together. …As the architect basis his structures on a perfect knowledge of the materials he uses – their resistance, their reaction, their tensile strength – the composer today should, in building his sonorous constructions, have a thorough knowledge of the vibratory system in the atmospheric domain, and of the possibilities that science has already abundantly placed, and continues to place, at the service of his imagination. The last word is: Imagination. II.5.3 - László Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision: Fundamentals of Design, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture (NY: W.W. Norton, 1936), 19. In all fields of creation, workers are striving today to find purely functional solutions of a technical-biological kind: that is, to build up each piece of work solely from the elements which are required for its function. Of course “function” means here not a pure mechanical service. It includes also the psychological, social and economical components of a given time. It seems that it would be better to use the terms “organized functional” for design. Such a design must be serviceable even to function unforeseen while it is in use. II.5.4 - Oskar Fischinger “Sounding Ornaments” (1931) Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung 8 July (Tr. William Moritz) …if you look at a strip of film from my experiments with synthetic sound, you will see along one edge a thin stripe [sic] of jagged ornamental patterns. These ornaments are drawn music – they are sound: when run through a projector, these graphic sounds broadcast tones of a hitherto unheard of purity, and thus, quite obviously, fantastic possibilities open up for the composition of music in the future. …undoubtedly, the composer of tomorrow will no longer write mere notes, which the composer himself can never realize definitively…control of every fine gradation and nuance is granted to the music-painting artists, who bases everything exclusively on the primary fundamental of music, namely the wave-vibration or oscillation in and of itself. …it would be essential for a complex and distinct composition, with the abstract, diverse effect of an orchestra, to utilize several 3mm soundtracks running parallel to each other. Each track would produce a different, well-defined sound, and planning them together, the composer could design and organize overlapping and intersecting wave patterns, on the minutest level. II.5.5 - Kurt London, Film Music (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), 110-146. What will it be like, if at some future date human interpreters can be altogether dispensed with in the recording of photographed music? if the sounds of the music transmitted through the 381 loudspeaker gradually deviate more and more from the normal? And if the public accustomed itself to hear new sound-dimensions in the cinema, just as it has accustomed itself to take account of new picture dimensions? …the composer will present his artistic fancies in a form that will as little correspond to normal spatial dimensions as the film its visual aspect, whether it be on a plane or posses plastic properties. The sound-film of the future will be made much more in light of music than the spoken word. II.5.6 – George Antheil, “Music Tomorrow,” transition 10 (January 1928), 125. I believe that soon there will be electrical machines which can automatically reproduce every sound wave, and which will not only replace the old orchestra, but create every sound on the earth the ear is capable of hearing. II.5.7 - Ernst Toch, “Toward New Sonorities” in Music and Dance in California (Hollywood, CA: Bureau of Musical Research), 26. While I do not mean to say that the tone colors of our orchestra are exhausted or even exhaustible – their use being subject to the superior import of the composition itself, in fact being part and parcel of it – I always feel more and more inclined toward this other, irresistibly luring realm beyond the fixation of pitch. Merely as a composer, not by way of intellectual speculation, but attracted by my visions of the erratic sound, I wondered: Why not once reverse the proportion of clean-pitched and the cloudy sounds in our orchestra, yes, why not, certain definite compositional ideas excepted, give up for once the pitched ones entirely? And as to the instruments themselves, I have wondered for a long time: Why restrict ourselves (in keeping always with our hitherto notion of orchestra music) to the sounds of strings, wind instruments or membranes, while neglecting all the other sound-sources that nature, combined with technical achievements of our time, would offer? I remember how intensely in my earliest youth, it would strike me when I passed stone- breakers, busy with road building, to observe that not two of the hammer-blows sounded really alike, but according to different size, material, etc., produced a rich, though unpitched gamut of sounds; to observe that no two drops, falling intermittently from particularly turned off faucet into a calm water surface would sound alike, bur produce, apart from indistinct sounds, even cleaned-pitched scales; what a variety of sounds, from the loveliest purling and clucking to the most uncanny roaring of the rolling water would produce! Sounds that, once caught in essence by small instruments, could easily be augmented by our modern means of electric gadgets. …steam whistles never have been used for musical purposes…In the motion picture studios I have often observed what I would call waste products of sound, originated inadvertently by some slip or mistake either of the machine or the technician, and therefore only likely, by their appallingly unexpected character, to shock the listeners. (we know that also from the radio.) Yet, these miscarriages (which of course can also be produced at will), once caught and controlled, I am sure can be of great value in the category of vagrant sounds. 382 II.5.8 - John Erskine, “Instruments of the Future,” in A Musical Companion: A Guide to the Understanding and Enjoyment of Music (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936), 50-51. The secret of any attractiveness possessed by percussion instruments, particularly those of indefinite pitch, for the novelty of effects constitutes their only right of entry into the orchestra. Once they are heard, however arresting the sound, we are twice shy of any further effort they may attempt; we demand a change of colour, for familiarity with these instruments breeds a certain contempt. II.5.9 - John Mills 1935, “An Electrical Future for Music,” in A Fugue in Cycles and Bells (NY: D. Van Nostrand Co.), p. 254-255 The electrical devices which are today in prospect can produce complexes of musical tones far beyond the dreams of composers; they offer untold possibilities but require new skills for their use. …phonographic recording is not necessary; there is an alternative method which avoids any loss in either pick-up or recording…the method employs some of the principles involved in the variable-area film records. On such a record a pure tone appears as a space pattern; one side of the strip is black and the other transparent, with the boundary between the two parts a wavy line. This line is a plot of a sinusoid on a scale where distance along the film represents time. The distance between successive crests depends upon the frequency of the sinusoid and upon the speed at which the film travels. If the frequency is f there must be f crests in the length of film which will move past the photoelectric cell in one second; or, otherwise stated, the crests must be so spaced that each reaches the cell 1/f the of a second after the preceding. If two pure tones of different frequencies and intensities are simultaneously recorded the boundary, between black and clear on the film, is a complex curve which is the geographical addition of the curves corresponding to the separate sinusoids. In this way any number of sinusoids can be combined to obtain the space pattern of the corresponding complex sound. The wave form of any desired complex sound may be constructed by accurate mechanical drawing. All that is required is to lay out each sinusoid, making the height of its waves proportional to the amplitude desired for that component, and then to combine all these space patterns into a pattern for the synthetic sound. This graphically constructed wave may then be photographed on a strip of film to produce a variable-area sound track. From this the synthetic sound can be obtained in the usual manner for such records. …Templates of this type can be constructed to represent faithfully the complete overtone structure of any musical instrument, or for that matter any orchestral combination of instruments. …for producing the currents various methods are available of which those already described are sufficiently typical. The suggested use of individual oscillators for each component sinusoid in a complex sound would demand a very large number of oscillators. By the use, however, of templates cut to desired wave patterns the amount of apparatus is greatly reduced. 383 Some such general method, therefore, appears to offer the most economical procedure. Libraries of templates could be constructed covering all desired combinations of tones. Not only do the available techniques permit the combination of familiar tones but they offer to the creative musician possibilities of tones as yet unheard. Since the quality of a complex tone depends on the relative intensities of the various harmonics of its fundamental, new qualities may be obtained by enhancing some of the overtones beyond the intensities which they can attain in the course of the natural vibrations of their sources. It is possible to go much further and to create the most unheard-of combinations. What new sounds will prove pleasing or useful in musical compositions can be determined only by trial. II.5.10 - Leopold Stokowski, “New Horizons in Music,´ Journal of the Acoustic Society of America, 1932 …the tone film is bringing into consciousness the idea that much in sound has esthetical value that formerly we wouldn’t call music at all. It suggests ideas to us. It evokes emotions, and if it evokes emotion, it is esthetic, and if it is esthetic, we must bring it into the field of music and not bar it and say it is mere noise. …how are we to determine where is the borderline between noise and music? …It seems to me that we have to bring broader conceptions into our work to discover that borderline. The probability is that it will be solved by a combination of the work of physicists, musicians, and psychologists. …we were limited to the old empirical methods of tone production until recently, but new possibilities open out to us – new possibilities in frequency and timbre. For example, in the electrical instruments we now have we are able to intensify any harmonic we wish, to give any timbre. That was not possible in the old instruments. That is one possibility. But there is another. Instead of taking those concentric harmonics above the fundamental, we can take eccentric sounds above the fundamental and intensify those in various degrees so that we shall be able to create an entirely new timbre. …One can see coming ahead a time when a musician who is a creator can create directly into TONE, not on paper. That is quite within the realm of possibility. That will come. Any frequency, any duration, any intensity he wants, any combinations of counterpoint, of harmony, of rhythm, -anything can be done by that means, and will be done. …In the past we have had a relation between intensity and frequency that was governed by our empirical practice and our instruments. But now there comes a new question: Now that we have a great freedom and can produce almost anything we wish, what relations are desirable esthetically, musically, between the fundamental and its components? …Then, in duration, rhythmic combinations are going to be possible which on the old type of instruments were difficult and sometimes impossible. II.5.11 - Rollo H. Myers, “The Music of the Future?” in Music in the Modern World, (NY: Longman, Green, and Co., 1939), 193-204. 384 ..a day will come when people will only go to concerts to hear works which have not already been made available by various methods of recording…if they want to hear the established masterpieces of ancient and modern music they will go to special “listening-rooms’ in public music-museums, just as one goes today to the reading-room in a library. …the actual vocabulary of music is certain to be extended still further, and it is probable that new sonorities, that is to say, new kinds of sounds, new timbres, as well as new harmonies, will be sought…It may even be that the boundaries of music will be extended so as to include noise. 385 APPENDIX III Select Unpublished Correspondence III.1 – Cage-Schindler Correspondence III.1.1 John Cage to Pauline Schindler, 9 February, 1935 Dearest Pauline, Everything is in a rush. What with the hours and exercises and now I’m composing and there are new Kandinskys and I’m really composing – The same material as for the song I showed you but I’m composing on the sly and won’t show it to Weiss. But I’ll show it to you because I like it and I love you. I want very much to see you but I’m in a muddle of Saturday Sunday etc. I’m not going East; I don’t think Buhlig would want me to break up the house so soon. I have written to Xenia. She sent me an Eskimo drum and I have asked her to marry me again and she is going to write me soon. I know she is. I have a magnificent gift for her which I shall be paying for the rest of my life. Love, John P.S. would you use some of the enclosed to send me the library book? It is worrying me. J. III.1.2 John Cage to Pauline Schindler, n.d (possibly March or April, 1935) Pauline, dearest, I am luminous. There is a marvelous extension around me like the things continents have around them in atlas maps. I am on the topmost peaks of sensitivity. I am convex and then I’m concave. I include and exclude. I simmer. I purr. I shall be fired from my job. My father’s like a character out of Molière. Stubborn, one faced like imitation-college short story. He’s become an idea, a dissension, a unit molecule taking up position. But I am on top. Did you know that your note in the book depressed me..I wrote you a long letter which, (thanking God) – I didn’t send. But we shall not bother Mary McL. Place does not matter. We will live everywhere and always. I shall not ask you my usual question, but send you and Mark real love. And I am so reflective now of some mysterious sources of brilliance that I am sure you and Mark are radiant. John III.2 Letters regarding John Cage Sr. John Cage Papers, Northwestern University, Series I: Correspondence. III.2.1 Herbert Sturdy to Lieutenant General Elwood R. Quesada, Nov. 23, 1957, I.2.3.16 386 GIBSON, DUNN AND CRUTCHER Lawyers 634 South Spring Street Los Angeles 14, California File: 2157-10-1 November 23, 1957 Lieut. General Elwood R. Quesada, Special Assistant to the President, Aviation The White House Washington, D.C. Dear Pete, I have hesitated to write to you on the matter set forth below, and yet I would feel remiss in my duties as an American if I did not mention it to someone high in authority for such an action as he might deem it proper to take. In the field of navigation in outer space, I suppose that it is generally felt that everything which needs to be invented has been invented and that it is largely a matter of engineering into practice what we already understand theoretically. Nevertheless I am equally convinced that some new concepts will arise and that these will not always come from the man with the longest number of academic letters after his name. In my opinion someone well at the top in our basic research with respect to satellites and space travel generally should contact and make use of the abilities of John M. Cage (whose address is 71 Orange Road, Montclair, New Jersey, and his telephone Pilgrim 4-6406). John has basic concepts of electrical forces which have twice before produced very practical results and which undoubtedly have an important relationship to satellites and space travel. 1. In a competition with the engineers of the Southern California Edison Company and Cal- Tech, the Pan American Petroleum Company had John install his lightning protection system to the large Pan American oil tank farm here in southern California. John’s model was built quite contrary to the classic concept of electrical forces held by the engineers, and yet the model of his system was the only one they could not hit in the lightning-producing laboratories of Cal-Tech. In any event, it has been completely installed in the Pan American tank farm for a generation now and none of the tanks has ever been hit by lightning. 2. Based on his concept of electrical forces, John designed and supervised the building and installation of oil dehydrators for Richfield Oil Corporation. I understand these dehydrators are still in use and are considered among the most efficient in the industry. In the course of the development of these dehydrators John reports that he witnessed the rising of a globule take up an orbit in the air above the oil pool until its electrical charge was so changed by that of the air through which it was passing that it would finally increase the radius of its orbit and splash against the side of the tank. What I have been most impressed with in John’s case is that his theories have a habit of working out to a practical result. A few brief examples will illustrate what I mean. 387 (a) In the early days of radio, he and E.K. Jett had a small radio manufacturing business near Los Angeles. They got tired of service calls to replace batteries, so John designed and built the sets to plug into the 120 volt house current. This was years before patents were applied for by others in this field. John just did it to save night trips out to the customers. You will be interested to note that E.K. Jett later became the Chief Engineer of the Federal Communications Commission and is a strong believer in John Cage’s concepts with respect to the electrostatic field. Mr. Jett can be reached at 4546 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, Maryland, telephone Belmont 5-2127. (b) In World War I John Cage conceived and supervised the installation of the under- water microphone system which was used to spot German submarines in the English Channel. (c) During World War II he submitted to the Government a plan for the Sonobouy System. Although the Government contracted this to others, I am sure that it was John’s basic submission which stimulated the whole project. (d) In recent years he has developed the best inexpensive projection television that has yet been devised. I still think that the projected image is not bright enough to meet the public’s demands for the television in a lighted room, but there seems to be general agreement that he has gotten a brighter image than anyone else through the use of tubes which he has personally designed and had built. Over the years John’s friends have urged him not to talk about space platforms and space travel, although these are subjects close to his heart and directly involved in his concept of electrical forces. This admonition was because his friends felt that his talking about such unfamiliar subjects would detract from his effectiveness in convincing business men of the practicability of his other concepts. On January 15, 1952, he sent to the national Science Foundation a proposal to undertake a scientific investigation concerning behavior of electrically-charged bodies. This proposal was rejected because space platforms and the like were not considered as having very high priority at the time. Times have changed, as they have a habit of doing, and it certainly would be well to have someone near the top discuss this whole matter with John Cage as soon as possible, decide whether he should be given a research project or employed as a consultant, and thereby get for this country the benefit of his lifetime study and experiments. Obviously he is not a young man, and time will not wait on us. Mr. Cage has recently written to the National Science Foundation Director, requesting a reconsideration of his proposal. I enclose two copies of his letter dated November 9, 1957, although you may well conclude that this is not the most appropriate way to proceed. While I am a great believer in free enterprise, it seems to me that this type of research will only be undertaken with Government sponsorship. With very best personal regards - - Sincerely yours, 388 (Signed) Herbert Herbert F. Sturdy HFS/F III.2.2 John Cage to John P. Hagen, Feb. 10, 1958, John Cage Papers, Series I.2.3.17 Sturdy-Cage Projects, Inc. 71 Orange Road Montclair, New Jersey February 10, 1958 Dr. John P. Hagen Naval Research Laboratory Washington, D.C. Dear Dr. Hagen: Since my last letter to you dated October 6, 1958 in which I endeavored to create an interest in a fundamental study of the structure of outer space, much has happened. Sputnik I has come and gone. Sputnik II has made more than 1100 world trips and is doomed to disappear. These objects are not satellites in the true sense of the word. And now as our Explorer, Alpha 1958, zooms along in its orbit, rushing to the same fate, we talk of satellites. We talk of space platforms, while we watch and hope to see the fiery death of Sputnik II. Will the proposed space platforms suffer the same fate? We are told that “Sputnik I, the first man-made moon, plunged back into the dense atmosphere in flames between January 4 and 10. - - -the carrier rocket was similarly destroyed December 1--- .” But no observer has reported seeing the event. Do these objects remind one of our moon or the moons of Jupiter, or the rings of Saturn? The name satellite connotes more than “shooting rockets higher and higher each year” just to listen to their messages until their batteries die and then waiting and watching for their fiery deaths. Satellites will be placed in orbits around the earth when we know the structure of space. When we know the ultimate nature of gravity and have found anti-gravity, then space ships will take of gently, not because of rocket power and a delicate balance between centrifugal and centripetal forces, but because it will be as easy to fall away from the earth as it is believed easy for Sputnik to fall back to the earth --- somewhere. The moon does not fall back to earth so may I again say that these objects “fall back to earth because nothing has been done to make them act otherwise.” 389 If the study of the electrostatic field, per se, can bring back the ether, that is, prove that we do have an ether, and give rational explanations for all these discrepancies which caused Dr. Albert Einstein to say, “After such bad experiences, this is the moment to forget the ether completely and to try never to mention its name. We will say: our space has the physical property of transmitting waves, and so omit the use of a word we have decided to avoid.” We need an ether and there is an ether. The electrostatic field which is a basic part of each and every object in space merges into an infinite ether which controls space. Each individual object in space is the center of its own ether – its electrostatic field. Matter carries electricity. This bound electricity produces the field. This field, reacting against the density and distribution, inversely as the square of the distance from the given mass, determines the position of every object with respect to planet –planet with respect to sun—sun with respect to galaxy—galaxy with respect to infinite space. One of the concepts of the Electrostatic Field Theory is that each object in space assumes a place in space which is proportional to the charge carried by the object. The Sputniks and Alpha 1958 exhibit certain characteristics which cannot be accounted for by mechanical theory but are easily explained when viewed in the light of known facts concerning electrostatic fields in operation. For instance, Alpha 1958 having a fixed weight and moving at a uniform velocity is sustained in a non-uniform field. The gravitational field varies inversely as the square of the distance. Therefore the gravitational pull is approximately fifty times greater at perigee than it is at apogee. How can it possibly stay in its orbit? In an electrostatic field the real orbit is a zero plane therefore the object is repelled at perigee and attracted at apogee. Its charge will rotate it on its axis—tumbling. The reason for all this is explicit in the Electrostatic Field Theory. I know that the actions of the objects indicate they are now “charged objects” and I hope that a study can be initiated to account for the “charge.” This charge is one of the fundamental laws of space which all objects, even the smallest meteors obey. When we know the law and can control the amount of the charge then we can utilize the power inherent in the electrostatic field to move our satellites and space-platforms through space. This power is inexhaustible and eternal. A study based on the orbital characteristics of these objects might reveal the electrostatic nature of outer space and elucidate many of the questions which have become apparent since the carrier rocket of Sputnik I went tumbling through the sky to be lost in mystery. Did we lose it like we lost Hermes or did it vanish in a flame? Kind regards and best wishes or your success. Sincerely, John M. Cage JM 390 APPENDIX IV John Milton Cage Sr., Chronology of Filed Patents and Corporations (Chronology organized by patent submission date) UDate Patent # Description Location Company Assignment Date Patented U1906 21 Feb. 854,146 Submarine Boat……………………... Long Beach, CA mesne Ass. for L.A. Submarine and Boat Co. (1/2 to James C. Harvey of Denver, CO)…………………21 May, 1908 860,126 Submarine Boat……………………... Denver, CO (1/2 to James C. Harvey of Denver, CO)…………………16 Jul., 1907 896,361 Submarine Boat……………………... Denver, CO mesne Ass. for Submarine and Manufacturing Co., Denver……………………………………………….. 19 Aug., 1908 U1912 26 Dec. 1,126,616 Submarine…………………………… Long Beach, CA L.A. Submarine and Boat Co……………………………. 26 Jan., 1915 1914 16 June 1,367,797 Six Stroke Three Phase Engine…….. Long Beach, CA Cage Engine Syndicate, Inc. of New York, NY, a corp. of Delaware (renewed Mar. 20, 1919)…………..8 Feb., 1921 26 Oct. 1,281,132 Steering and Propulsion for Submarines…………………………... Long Beach, CA mesne Ass. to L.A. Submarine and Boat Company…... 8 Oct., 1918 1916 15 Mar. 1,301,036 Internal Combustion Engine and Method of Operating the Same……. Detroit, MI John M. Cage……………………………………………… 15 Apr., 1919 1917 7 June 1,294,395 Internal Combustion Engine………. Detroit, MI Cage Engine Syndicate, Inc., Delaware………………... 18 Feb., 1919 1,386,393 Internal Combustion Engine………. Detroit, MI Cage Engine Syndicate, Inc., Delaware (Renewed 26 May, 1921)………………………………… 2 Aug., 1921 391 Date Patent # Description Location Company Assignment Date Patented 1918 3 Dec. 1,386,394 Internal Combustion Engine………. Long Beach, CA Cage Engine Syndicate, Inc. NY, NY (Renewed 26 May, 1921)………………………………… 2 Aug., 1921 1920 23 July 1,619,460 Internal Combustion Engine and means for supplying charge thereto...Ford City, Ontario Cage Engine Syndicate, Inc. NY,NY…………………… 1 Mar, 1927 1921 25 Aug. 1,575,541 Internal-Combustion Engine………. Santa Monica, CA mesne to Halvor Andresen of Christiana, Norway and Oliver Otis Howard of Rockport, MA…………………. 2 Mar., 1926 1,575,542 Sleeve-Valve Engine………………... Santa Monica, CA mesne to Halvor Andresen of Christiana, Norway and Oliver Otis Howard of Rockport, MA…………………. 2 Mar., 1926 1,600,795 Internal-Combustion Engine………. Santa Monica, CA mesne to Halvor Andresen of Christiana, Norway and Oliver Otis Howard of Rockport, MA…………………. 21 Sept., 1926 26 Sept. 1,518,688 Condenser…………………………… Santa Monica, CA J.M. Cage………………………………………………….. 9 Dec., 1924 1926 27 Dec. 1,743,526 Lightning Protection………………...Los Angeles, CA ½ to Oliver O. Howard, Rockport, MA……………… 14 Jan., 1930 1927 17 Sept. 1,754,009 Dehydration of Oil and Water Emulsions……………………………..Los Angeles, CA mesne ass. to Dehydrators Inc………………………… 8 Apr., 1930 1930 11 Feb. 1,887,010 Insulator Bushing for Electrical Petroleum Dehydrators…………….. Los Angeles, CA mesne Ass. to Electric Separation Co. Ltd. NY, NY……8 Nov., 1932 392 Date Patent # Description Location Company Assignment Date Patented 1933 21 June 2,074,829 Electron Beam Tube………………… Schenectady, NY General Electric Co………………………………………. 23 Mar., 1937 1935 2 Mar……………………………………………………………………Los Angeles, CA Articles of Incorporation filed for Sturdy-Cage Projects, Inc. Corporation # 162010 11 May 2,089,174 Starter for Pool-Type Tubes…………Schenectady, NY General Electric Co………………………………………. 10 Aug., 1937 6 Jul. 2,395,099 Invisible Ray Vision System…………Los Angeles, CA Sturdy-Cage Projects, Inc………………………………... 19 Feb., 1946 6 Aug. 2,078,123 Electric Discharge Device……………Schenectady, NY General Electric Co………………………………………. 20 Apr., 1937 1937 13 Mar. 2,160,583 Pool-Type Discharge Device………. Schenectady, NY General Electric Co………………………………………. 30 May, 1939 1938 1 Mar. 2,190,511 Ultra Short Wave System…………... Schenectady, NY General Electric Co………………………………………. 13 Feb., 1940 1939 22 Apr. 2,225,330 Electron Beam Tube………………… Schenectady, NY General Electric Co………………………………………. 17 Dec., 1940 1943 30 Aug. 2,945,089 Microwave Television System…….. Upper Montclair, NJ. Sturdy-Cage Projects Inc., Los Angeles, CA…………... 12 Jul, 1960 1944 11 Feb. 2,671,857 Micro-microwave Generator………. Upper Montclair, NJ J.M. Cage………………………………………………….. 9 Mar., 1954 393 Date Patent # Description Location Company Assignment Date Patented 1945 30 Jun. 2,516,298 Regulating System Utilizing Voltage Response Thyratrons……... Elm Grove, WI Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Co., Milwaukee, WI…. 25 Jul, 1950 30 Nov. 2,506,266 Voltage Regulating System………… Elm Grove, WI Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Co., Milwaukee, WI…. 2 May, 1950 1946 25 July 2,480,631 Tire Vulcanizing…………………….. Wellesley, MA Raytheon Manuf. Co., Newton, MA…………………... 30 Aug, 1949 31 Oct. 2,579,362 Inhaler………………………………... Montclair, NJ J.M. Cage………………………………………………….. 18 Dec., 1951 1 Nov. 2,553,182 Color Television…………………….. Montclair, NJ Cage Projects Inc., Union City, N.J……………………... 15 May, 1951 1947 8 Apr. 2,610,288 Dielectric Heating Apparatus……... Wellesley, MA Raytheon Manufacturing Co., Newton, MA…………... 9 Sept., 1952 28 July 2,618,758 Television Camera Tube…………… Montclair, NJ J.M. Cage …………………………………………………. 18 Nov., 1952 4 Oct. 2,568,484 Power Supply……………………….. Montclair, NJ Cage Projects Inc., Union City, NJ……………………… 18 Sept., 1951 29 Nov. 2,568,485 Power Supply for Image Reproducing Tubes………………… Montclair, NJ Cage Projects Inc., Union City, NJ……………………… 18 Sept., 1951 1948 21 Apr. 2,635,208 Television Circuit…………………… Montclair, NJ J.M. Cage………………………………………………….. 14 Apr., 1953 28 Aug. 2,567,874 Cathode-Ray Tube………………….. Montclair, NJ Cage Projects Inc., Union City, NJ……………………… 11 Sept., 1951 394 Date Patent # Description Location Company Assignment Date Patented 1948 cont. 19 Nov. 2,569,654 Cathode-Ray Tube………………….. Montclair, NJ J.M. Cage………………………………………………….. 2 Oct., 1951 1 Dec. 2,569,655 Condenser…………………………… Montclair, NJ Cage Projects Inc., Union City, NJ……………………… 2 Oct., 1951 1949 6 July 2,568,486 High Voltage Power Supply………. Montclair, NJ Cage Projects Inc., Union City, NJ……………………… 18 Sept., 1951 1950 22 Dec. 2,630,543 Cathode-Ray Tube………………….. Montclair, NJ J.M. Cage………………………………………………….. 3 Mar., 1953 1952 13 June 2,698,388 Television Channel Selector……….. Upper Montclair, NJ J.M. Cage………………………………………………….. 28 Dec., 1954 1957 4 Mar. 3,014,135 Direct Current Amplifier and Modulator Therof…………………… Palo Alto, CA Hewlett-Packard Co……………………………………... 19 Dec., 1961 1964 29 Dec……………………………………………………………………Sacramento, CA Certificate of Election to Wind Up and Dissolve Sturdy-Cage Projects, Inc. #47612 395 Chronology by Patent # 854,146 “Submarine Boat” 860,126 “Submarine Boat” 896,361 “Submarine Boat” 1,126,616 “Submarine” 1,281,132 “Steering and Propulsion for Submarines” 1,294,395 “Internal Combustion Engine” 1,301,036 “Internal Combustion Engine and Method of Operating the Same” 1,367,797 “Six Stroke Three Phase Engine” (renewed Mar. 20, 1919) 1,386,393 “Internal Combustion Engine” 1,386,394 “Internal Combustion Engine” 1,518,688 “Condenser” 1,575,541 “Internal-Combustion Engine” 1,575,542 “Sleeve-Valve Engine” 1,600,795 “Internal-Combustion Engine” 1,619,460 “Internal Combustion Engine and means for supplying charge thereto” 1,743,526 “Lightning Protection” 1,754,009 “Dehydration of Oil and Water Emulsions” 1,887,010 “Insulator Bushing for Electrical Petroleum Dehydrators” 2,074,829 “Electron Beam Tube” 2,078,123 “Electric Discharge Device” 2,089,174 “Starter for Pool-Type Tubes” 2,160,583 “Pool-Type Discharge Device” 2,190,511 “Ultra Short Wave System” 2,225,330 “Electron Beam Tube” 2,395,099 “Invisible Ray Vision System” 2,480,631 “Tire Vulcanizing” 2,506,266 “Voltage Regulating System” 2,516,298 “Regulating System Utilizing Voltage Response Thyratrons” 2,553,182 “Color Television” 2,567,874 “Cathode-Ray Tube” 2,568,484 “Power Supply” 2,568,485 “Power Supply for Image Reproducing Tubes” 2,568,486 “High Voltage Power Supply” 2,569,654 “Cathode-Ray Tube” 2,569,655 “Condenser” 396 2,579,362 “Inhaler” 2,610,288 “Dielectric Heating Apparatus” 2,618,758 “Television Camera Tube” 2,630,543 “Cathode-Ray Tube” 2,635,208 “Television Circuit” 2,671,857 “Micro-microwave Generator” 2,698,388 “Television Channel Selector” 2,945,089 “Microwave Television System” 3,014,135 “Direct Current Amplifier and Modulator Therof
Abstract (if available)
Abstract
This dissertation examines John Cage’s interaction with experimental and avant-garde filmmakers, highlighting key points in Cage’s career where film either informed or transformed his philosophy on the nature of music and the ontology of the musical artwork. I approach the sound-image amalgam in film from the perspective of audiovisuology, exploring the implications of sound in film as well as sound on film. Chapters are divided according to case studies in which the audiovisual experience of film had theoretical implications for Cage’s aesthetic. The first, sound on film, examines Cage’s interaction with German abstract animator Oskar Fischinger in the 1930s in conjunction with Cage’s proclamations on the “Future of Music.” I present heretofore unacknowledged documentation on research Cage undertook for his father, John Cage Sr., an inventor and engineer. Chapter 2 examines Cage’s interaction with Maya Deren, Joseph Campbell, and Hans Richter in the 1940s, and reviews their theories of poetic and cine-dance aesthetics. Chapter 3 examines the idea of transparency in film and visual media and its relationship to acoustics. I review two films on Alexander Calder and Jackson Pollock that highlight the conceptual divide between indeterminacy and abstract expressionism, as well as the formulation of Neo-Avant-Garde aesthetics in the postwar period. The Chapter concludes with an examination of a newly-discovered film conceived by Cage documenting sculptor Richard Lippold’s construction of his monumental sculpture, The Sun, from 1952-1956. Chapter 4 reviews Cage’s stance on silence and indeterminacy in the context of theories of intermedia in the 1960s, particularly through the interpretive lenses of Stan Brakhage and Stan VanDerBeek, and concludes with a reading of Korean video artist Nam June Paik’s 1973 documentary A Tribute to John Cage in the context of television and documentary theory. In the conclusion I examine Cage’s final work One11 (1992), a feature-length film for “solo camera” that explores the phenomenal relationships between a television studio space and lighting effects.
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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
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