not

z Kostelanetz, Richard – Conversing With Cage, 2nd ed (2003)

cage, 83
I’m on the side of keeping things mysterious, and I have never enjoyed
understanding things. If I understand something, I have no further use for it. So I try to make a
music which I don’t understand and which will be difficult for other people to understand, too.

cage, 85
I like art to remain mysterious. I find that as long as a book or a painting or a piece of music is
not understood by me that I can use it. I mean use it in order to employ my faculties. If I
understand something I can put it on a shelf and leave it there. In the past I thought it had to do
with the feeling in Europe of a tradition or the history, whereas we here in America have very
little sense of history.

!!! cage, 72
I have from time to time, either for myself or for others, made statements that are like manifestos.
You know this is popular in the field of the arts—to say in a manifesto-style statement what
distinguishes the contemporary or modern thing from what isn’t. The first time I was asked to do
it, I did it with regard to painting.
I said that a painting was modern if it was not interrupted by
the effect of its environment—so that if shadows or spots or so forth fell on a painting and spoilt
it, then it was not a modern painting, but if they fell on it and, so to speak, were fluent with it,
then it was a modern painting.
Then, of course, I have said the same thing about music. If the music can accept ambient sounds
and not be interrupted thereby, it’s a modern piece of music. If, as with a composition of
Beethoven, a baby crying, or someone in the audience coughing, interrupts the music, then we
know that it isn’t modern. I think that the present way of deciding whether something is useful as
art is to ask whether it is interrupted by the actions of others, or whether it is fluent with the
actions of others.
What I have been saying is an extension of these notions out of the field of the
material of the arts into what you might call the material of society. If, for instance, you made a
structure of society that would be interrupted by the actions of people who were not in it, then it
would not be the proper structure.
^ aliens, my art, open work, participative, ….theory building

cage, 77
I think the history of art is simply a history of getting rid of the ugly by entering into it, and using
it. After all, the notion of something outside of us being ugly is not outside of us but inside of us.
And that’s why I keep reiterating that we’re working with our minds. What we’re trying to do is
to get them open so that we don’t see things as being ugly, or beautiful, but we see them just as
they are.

cage, 66
Formerly, one was accustomed to thinking of art as something better organized than life that
could be used as an escape from life. The changes that have taken place in this century, however,
are such that art is not an escape from life, but rather an introduction to it.

cage, 1978 – on improvised jazz
Aside from the question of rhythmic regularity, one of the reasons for my reticence regarding
jazz has to do with its conception and use of improvisation. This matter of improvisation has
always greatly concerned me. What I have never appreciated in improvisation is the return to
memory or to taste: the return of things that have been learned or to which one has become
accustomed—sometimes consciously, deliberately, sometimes insidiously. Phrases thought to be
original are only articulations heard a long time ago. In improvisation, when you think you are
following your own direction, most of the time you are following someone else’s line. At the
most, that is not what bothers me so much as the desire for uniqueness that appears in the act of
improvising. Once you realize the number of obstacles and of more or less deliberate references
that the improviser is struggling with, you can only smile at the claim to originality. The desire
for originality seems to be one of the great myths of jazz (and of a good part of contemporary
music in the classic tradition as well, for that matter). And it seems that not even “free jazz”
escapes this. I am bothered by these disproportionate assertions of the ego when I hear them. For
my own part, I do not look for originality. Whether or not my music is original does not concern
me. I would prefer to find a music separate from my memory and my tastes, which would in
some way be a discovery for me, and that has nothing to do with originality, because intention is
not involved. (Originality is always an effort, a state of tension. ) With an open-mindedness
toward the unintentional sound, I want not to control sound events but simply at most to write
instructions. That is why I’m against improvisation as it is usually understood (even if I
sometimes use it, because nothing should be prohibited!). [..]
The problem that jazz raises for me, at the level of rhythm, I repeat, is that I am bothered by its
regularity. I prefer the rhythm of what I call silence where sound can be born at any time.

cage, 1979 – silence & there’s always sound
I made a decision in the early fifties to accept the sounds that are in the world. Before that I had
actually been naive enough to think there was such a thing as silence. But I went into an
anechoic chamber in Cambridge, at Harvard University, and in this room I heard two sounds. I
thought there was something wrong with the room, and I told the engineer that there were two
sounds. He said describe them, and I did. “Well, ” he said, “the high one was your nervous
system in operation and the low one was your blood circulating. ” So that means that there is
music, or there is sound, whether I intend it or not.

cage, 1979 – silence & composing
What silence is is the change of my mind. It’s an acceptance of the sounds that exist rather than a
desire to choose and impose one’s own music. That has been at the center of my work ever since
then. I try when I make a new piece of music to make it in such a way that it doesn’t essentially
disturb the silence which already exists.

Father told me that if someone says “can’t” that shows you what to do.
Mother: “..you know perfectly well I’ve never enjoyed having a good time.”

I was shocked at college to see one hundred of my classmates in the library all reading copies of the same book.

Fischinger: “Everything in the world has its own spirit which can be released by setting it into vibration.”

I was given a job at the Cornish School in Seattle. It was there that I discovered what I called micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structure. The large parts of a composition had the same proportion as the phrases of a single unit.

I could not accept the academic idea that the purpose of music was communication, because I noticed that when I conscientiously wrote something sad, people and critics were often apt to laugh.

I found this answer from Gira Sarabhai, an Indian singer and tabla player: The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences. I also found in the writings of Ananda K. Coomaraswammy that the responsibility of the artist is to imitate nature in her manner of operation.

I have never practiced sitting cross-legged nor do I meditate. My work is what I do and always involves writing materials, chairs, and tables. Before I get to it, I do some exercises for my back and I water the plants, of which I have around two hundred.

In the late forties I found out by experiment (I went into the anechoic chamber at Harvard University) that silence is not acoustic. It is a change of mind, a turning around. I devoted my music to it. My work became an exploration of non-intention. To carry it out faithfully I have developed a complicated composing means using I Ching chance operations, making my responsibility that of asking questions instead of making choices.

The Buddhist texts to which I often return are the Huang-Po Doctrine of Universal Mind (in Chu Ch’an’s first translation, published by the London Buddhist Society in 1947), Neti Neti by L. C. Beckett of which (as I say in the introduction to my Norton Lectures at Harvard) my life could be described as an illustration, and the Ten Oxherding Pictures (in the version that ends with the return to the village bearing gifts of a smiling and somewhat heavy monk, one who had experienced Nothingness). Apart from Buddhism and earlier I had read the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. Ramakrishna it was who said all religions are the same, like a lake to which people who are thirsty come from different directions, calling its water by different names. Furthermore this water has many different tastes. The taste of Zen for me comes from the admixture of humor, intransigence, and detachment. It makes me think of Marcel Duchamp, though for him we would have to add the erotic.

That summer Fuller put up his first dome, which immediately collapsed. He was delighted. “I only learn what to do when I have failures.”

It was at Black Mountain College that I made what is sometimes said to be the first happening. The audience was seated in four isometric triangular sections, the apexes of which touched a small square performance area that they faced and that led through the aisles between them to the large performance area that surrounded them. Disparate activities, dancing by Merce Cunningham, the exhibition of paintings and the playing of a Victrola by Robert Rauschenberg, the reading of his poetry by Charles Olsen or hers by M. C. Richards from the top of a ladder outside the audience, the piano playing of David Tudor, my own reading of a lecture that included silences from the top of another ladder outside the audience, all took place within chance-determined periods of time within the over-all time of my lecture.

I was to move from structure to process, from music as an object having parts, to music without beginning, middle, or end, music as weather. In our collaborations Merce Cunningham’s choreographies are not supported by my musical accompaniments. Music and dance are independent but coexistant.

My favorite music is the music I haven’t yet heard. I don’t hear the music I write. I write in order to hear the music I haven’t yet heard.

(1989)