Stop Making Sense

Some lecturers just don't make sense. Often there are times when it seems that a professor tries to convey a message, but his words don't mean a thing.

John Cage, Harvard's Norton Lecturer this year, however, makes it a point to say nothing in his lectures. Relying on chance combinations determined by the I Ching principle, Cage arranges words and letters in a random fashion to create a speech that indicates, as he says, his "nonintention."

Better known, perhaps, for the non-intention in his music than for the randomness of his "poetic" speeches, Cage, 76, has worked for more than half a century to develop a method of music that frees him from the bonds of likes and dislikes, allowing him to seek the "purity of sound and thought."

The composer of such works as "4:33," in which no sound is heard except the environment where the piece is "played," and others works of "chance," in which he tosses coins to determine how the melody will progress, the native Californian has been seen as an innovator in today's occasionally stagnant art world, and one critic has labeled him the "apostle of indeterminacy in music."

Musical History

Cage has developed his theories of chance and randomness over a long spate of work with music. After leaving Pomona College as a sophomore, Cage went to Europe intending to become a writer. Instead, he studied modern music and art and returned to the United States in the mid-1930s to pursue two years of study with composer Arnold Shoenberg. It was after this stint in New York and with a new conviction that he had no ear for harmony that Cage began to usher in a new era of music.

"I left [Shoenberg] because it became clear that I had no ability with harmony," the composer says. "I could not hear harmony like other composers. And so we had come up against a wall--we could not progress any further. But I said I would butt my head against the wall."

Cage proceeded to butt his ideas against those of the traditional musical composers of the time.

"What was characteristic of modern music in the 1940s was that everyone was going in his own direction," says Cage. "There was a big split between the following of Shoenberg and that of Stravinsky. But the problem was that no one understood what anyone else was saying. It was understood that everyone would say something, but no one understood what that was. So I decided to give that up."

Cage says his first departure from traditional music was his focus on percussion instruments exclusively.

"I tried to work with the teponaxtli, an old South American--I forget if it is Mayan or Aztec--log with an 'H' cut out of it with two tongues in the middle," he says. "I trained groups of people to play those, and we had performances at the Museum of Modern Art--I think that with my work the repertoire of percussion instruments jumped from about three or four to about 100."

Cage says that in New York he met Dai Setz Suzuki, a teacher of Zen Buddhism and Oriental philosophy, who instructed him in the art of randomness.

"The purpose of music is to quiet and pacify the mind, to make it susceptible to divine influences," Cage says. "The Orient and the concept of chance gives us a mind free of likes and dislikes."

Cage says he then began to consult I Ching, a book of ancient Chinese wisdom, to come up with ideas for his music and lectures.

According to Cage, the I Ching book is the oldest of its kind on earth. He says the ancient sages used to toss sticks in 64 different ways to learn how to find answers to specific questions about life in the I Ching book.

"The answers differ from one reading to another," Cage says. "Instead of making decisions, I ask questions and get answers, which frees my mind from likes and dislikes."

Cage says that this freedom enables him to approach a more pure form of music.

The Sound of Silence

One of Cage's most famous compositions uses the principle of chance to explore durations of time and movements. When he composed "4:33" in 1951, Cage used the I Ching stick method to determine how long each of the piece's silence movements would be.

"The work is a piece in three movements," he says. "I was using the chance operations and dealing with durations. There are no sounds except those of the audience and the environment."

The composer says that the first presentation of the work met with a combination of surprise and unrest from the piece's audience in Woodstock, NY.

"It was first played at Woodstock--in three movements, and each was completed in four minutes," Cage says. "The performer closed the piano at the beginning of each movement and after the proper amount of time had gone by, opened it to signal the end of the part."

Cage says that because of the "silence," the "music" changes each time.

"The performance was outside, so at the beginning we heard the breeze, then we heard raindrops in the second movement and by the third movement the audience had figured out what was going on and had begun talking," Cage says.

Cage has worked on other compositions in which randomness guides the musical program. In his most recent operas, "Europeras 1 and 2," he says, "the story exists only in the program. It is a collage of all operas, which makes it funny. It covers many different areas, like a circus-opera, a Hellzapoppin."

"My music is not really saying anything," Cage says. "It's more of an activity of sounds. It could either be seen as an activity of melody or as sound for pure sound."

Norton Lectures

But most recently Cage has been composing his Norton lectures. He says that he has incorporated the principles of I Ching into a computer program that simulates the "binary probability function" produced by tossing the sticks. Computers can perform the random operations and interpret the results much faster than humans, Cage says. "It is the most ancient and very modern mechanism and is in relation to all numbers," he says.

When composing the lectures, six of which are delivered by a scholar in either the arts, literature or music each year, Cage enters passages from famous literary works into a computer. The machine then outputs randomly juggled words and phrases which Cage melds into a speech.

"I come up with a large body of material with the computer that results in a non-syntactical group of words," he says. "Then I go through and hunt for the words I want to use together. But the hunting is actually for ideas. The words come from ideas, and they also produce ideas."

Because his lectures are presented as they are written, with the composer reciting the words which the computer produces in a completely random order, Cage is offering seminars at Harvard this year to explain what his style and compositions mean.

"The lectures in their poetic form don't make normal sense, so I feel obliged to give a normal rendition every once a week so people can ask questions," he says.

Cage has also been working on "random" lectures on the subjects of anarchy and modern artist Jasper Johns. He plans to deliver the speeches to audiences at the Richmond Museum and the Philadelphia Art Museum respectively and has also been composing a "chance" symphony for the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

"The piece for the orchestra is for April, and it's called `101,'" he says. "It's going to use 101 players--strings, brass, woodwind, harp, piano and percussion."

"I have no lack of requests for music," Cage says. "I have to learn to say no."

Cage was invited to be the Charles Eliot Norton Lecturer this year by members of Harvard's music department and a Norton Lectures committee composed of faculty members. Past Norton lecturers have included Igor Stravinsky, Harold Blum, Frank Stella and Robert Frost.