CAGE, FREED
Visionary composer deeply impacted pop, rock
2012 is the centenary for two seminal figures in American music: folksinger Woody Guthrie and composer John Cage, both born in 1912.
They probably never met, but Guthrie is on record as being deeply affected by some of Cage’s groundbreaking, boundary-busting classical music. On July 10, 1947 — the day his wife, Marjorie, gave birth to his son Arlo — Guthrie wrote a fan letter to the Disc Co. of America. He’d been listening to Maro Ajemian’s recording of the “prepared piano” solos (in which piano strings are augmented with screws, cards and more) from Cage’s “Amores,” and Guthrie declared that “this sort of piano music was really a keen fresh breeze … a welcome thing in the way of a healthy change from the old ways.”
Guthrie and Cage strived (and sometimes starved) in the service of that goal — to freshen the stale ways of each particular niche in which they found themselves.
As a result, the other and primary commonality between Guthrie and Cage is their different but deep, deep influences on modern pop and rock music. Guthrie’s influence is better cataloged but Cage’s imprint is, well, cagier.
Like Guthrie, Cage’s legacy is often appreciated more for his ideals than his actual compositions.
“His theory, which was the strongest, utilitarian, American theory of music, was addressing the purity and the [at the time] European expectation of purity in music. He said there is none,” John Cale says.
Before joining deeply influential rock band the Velvet Underground in the late ’60s, Cale was a classically trained viola player who conducted the debut of Cage’s “Concert for Piano and Orchestra.”
“He said if you go to a concert intending to concentrate cleanly on what you hear, you can focus all you want but you’re going to hear traffic, people coughing, rustling. So forget about purity,” Cale tells the Sun-Times. “What he was really talking about is sound design, such as in theater or filmmaking. You can’t ever hear the music just purely; you’re going to hear it in context. That’s where he brought the concert hall out into the street.”
That basic idea found its ultimate expression in Cage’s “4’33”.” Titled for its duration, the 1952 piece calls for any kind and any number of musicians to sit quietly, not playing anything, for precisely four minutes and 33 seconds.
The idea is that the inevitable sounds of the performance space — a humming air system, a footfall, a sneeze or two, the general cacophony of an allegedly silent room — create the “music.” As Cage described the piece’s controversial 1952 premiere, “You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.”
Cage was quite serious about that piece — as well as his “prepared piano” compositions, his looped experiments with audio equipment, even when he’d drink a carton of milk on stage with a microphone at his throat. But his daring and his derring-do often came with a wink.
“John was a really mischievous guy. I liked his sense of humor,” Cale says. “It was such a relief for me. I was clinging to the Dadaists and Fluxus, and they were fun, but then the [German composer Karl] Stockhausen school was so intense and serious. … I read John’s Zen koans and his work with silence, and it was a relief. I liked the playful nature of his ideas. I mean, ‘4’33”’ — you know, they broadcast it on BBC [in 2004].” He chuckles. “One of the guys told me, ‘At the Beeb, they don’t allow silence on the broadcast waves. They have a system