John Milton Cage. A look at the most famous composer of the American avant-garde of the twentieth century.

Lipov Anatolii Nikolaevich PhD in Philosophy research assistant at Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences 119 330, Russia, g. Moscow, ul. Mosfil'movskaya, 41, of. 54 antolip@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

      Just a few decades ago, it was very risky to give a general assessment of the composer's work in the United States or to predict how it will develop in the future. The reason was not only ideological grounds. The picture of trends in American music was quite motley and insufficiently defined. The American composer and theorist John Milton Cage, whose avant-garde work caused a lot of controversy and even categorical rejection, significantly influenced not only modern piano music, but also the whole direction in the art of the mid-twentieth century, associated with the use of "random" elements (aleatorics) and "raw" life fragments, stood at the extreme the left flank of American avant - gardism of the early twentieth century .  

      A pioneer in the field of aleatorics, electronic music and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde, among which critics called him one of the most influential American composers of the twentieth century. At the same time, his avant-garde writings and views seemed to many to be quackery and they preferred to see only shocking or aesthetic challenge in them.

     But today, almost two decades after his death, hardly anyone will question the originality of both his radical instrumental innovations and his equally "radical" musical philosophy. At the same time, J. Cage was and probably continues to be the most odious composer in the history of modern music, who argued that the foundations of new music are not so much new technique and technology, but new thinking and artistic consciousness. After Cage's death in 1992, composers in the United States experimented with his more than 250 compositions, musical recordings and household items in order to create, thus, a new hybrid and new music based on the new technological capabilities already achieved.

     In the most generalized view, the avant-garde is something that is ahead of its time. John Cage, according to many, was the defining voice of avant-garde music of the twentieth century. And if the meaning of the artistic avant-garde aspirations of a group or a particular person in art is the active invention and application of new methods, then who else could fit this definition better than John Cage himself?  A man who was ready to cross new boundaries and try many, many new things in art, but at the same time believed that he was the one who wanted to invent new music, to a certain extent evaluating himself as not so much as an artist and composer, but rather as an inventor in the art of music.

     To understand the music of John Cage, you need to have an idea not only about the "mechanics" of his work, you should also have an idea of Cage as a composer, his sensitivity and musical style. As it happens with any composer, this style has changed over the years. But unchanged over time, from the composer's earliest works to his last compositions, was the composer's joy in realizing his musical fantasy.

     Whether it is through such works, considered expressive and improvisational, as his sonatas and interludes, or by developing a "controlled" "system of accidents" invented by him, as in "Music of Changes", or through simpler ways of "making" his latest works, compositions calculated by "the number of pieces"listening to which, we involuntarily witness the composer's work with music that is unique and beautiful in the sense of musical style. At the same time, the field of Cage's music is always an experiment.

    Art has always been a very definite cultural phenomenon until it became a means of self-expression of a social function, where the artist began to be used as a kind of shaman of society, which allowed him to remove sublimated social tension and direct it by referring to works of art. Cage may have been a kind of shaman in modern society, but with the exception that he became rather an anti-shaman because of his, to a certain extent, anarchic understanding of the essence of music. Already from a young age, along with Eastern philosophical trends, Cage will get acquainted with the thinking of such anarchist thinkers as Thoreau (1817-1862). And anarchism, perhaps, will be another reason why Cage was not interested only in transmitting a musical event to the viewer in order to include his work in a large mirror in which everyone listening can observe and see different things.

     The composer claimed that the whole tradition of Western music proceeded from the assumption that melody and harmony are the main elements of music. We, the composer wrote, just have to understand that almost all musicians, starting with Beethoven, were much more concerned with the musical field than with everything else. For if we believe that the pitch–ratio in a composition is fundamental, then some instruments and many types of sound will be relegated to an "average" place and percussion instruments, for example, can never be as important as, say, a cello.

      Instead of classical ideas about melody and harmony, Cage argues that the fundamental thing for a composition is not a step, but duration: rhythm and time. "... if you think that sound is characterized by a field, its volume, timbre, its duration and this silence and, therefore, it is necessary to characterize sound only by duration, you will come to the conclusion that of the four characteristics of the material of music, duration, which is the time of length, is the most fundamental. Silence cannot be listened to in the conditions of the field or harmony, it can be heard only in terms of time duration" ^{[9, p. 81-82]}. And it is silence, in the view of the komopzitor, that is the main element of music.

     "One thing that almost all musicians learn to understand is that fragments of a performance where the performer doesn't play anything can be as important and emotional as the sound itself. But fragments of silence can exist only as a duration, which is a fundamental property of music, because as long as we have such a time duration, we can put anything into it – ordinary musical sounds, noise or silence, which are all equal, because this is also a kind of music. No sound exists outside the silence that extinguishes it" ^{[9, p. 52]}.

      And no silence exists unless she is pregnant with sound. Silence does not come out of nothing; and it is no longer the absence of sound. It consists of all the surrounding sounds that make up the musical space, the space of which the boundaries cannot always be clearly defined. "Silence is the space in which sound occurs" ^{[9, p. 135]}. That is why – "We must listen to silence with the same attention with which we make sounds" ^{[9, p. 74]}.

      In this regard, it is necessary to get acquainted in more detail with the way Cage defined the connections between music and silence. His starting point is a simple but very important observation that the materials of music consist of sounds and silence; to compose, it is enough to formulate these two parameters. The only sound parameter that separates silence and sound is duration. Therefore, silence, as already mentioned, according to Cage, cannot be heard in terms of field or harmony.

      At the same time, Cage's influence on his surroundings and inspiration for masters of various artistic specialties in the American avant-garde of the early twentieth century were also diverse, and his work is characterized by a constant interaction between the perception and production of new influences and ideas. The group of people who can be most easily identified with the articulation of sound as an experimental ideal included: John Cage, David Tudor, Christian Wolf, Morton Feldman, Earl Brown, La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros and Cornelius Cardew, who worked together in the postwar years.

     The question of to what extent the composer's revolutionary ideas had their origins in the special and sometimes outlandish cultural stew of the 20-30s of the liberating, reverently open and not only American society, where high-brow expatriate artists mixed with mystics and movie stars, and artistic and sexual experiments did not necessarily represent separate activities comes out for redoing our analysis in the article.

     But it is also obvious that this was a time when the visible rise of popular American culture and the widespread use of psychedelics to a certain extent created fertile ground in American culture for an intoxicating cocktail of various kinds of artistic and non-artistic experiments. After the revolution in art that took place after the Second World War, the dawn of so-called modernism followed, as a result of which, the second generation, who began an active creative life in the 60s, filter these new ideas related to sound in their artistic practice, covering both the field of experiment itself and a wide range of points of view.   

     But it was Cage who discovered at this time that randomness in music exists as an important element of the ruling force of musical composition, which allowed it to play a central role in all his works. And although each part of it consists of a basic structure, the overall effect of the perception of a musical work, according to the composer, changes with each new performance in various variables, such as, for example, the location of the audience, directly affecting the sounds that were produced.

     By destroying the thesis of a historically defined bias that music was made by musicians using traditional instruments to perform structured and pre-prepared compositions, Cage opened up a new wealth of possibilities within the framework of contemporary art.  The consequence of the realization of this installation were his revolutionary performances, which opened the era of experiments in all media and shifted the focus from the inner psyche of the artist to the artist working in a modern artistic environment.  

     The composer focused his compositional career on the inclusion in the musical fabric of such unconventional elements as kitchen gadgets, metal sheets, various utilitarian objects and even silence in order to change the way music is perceived by modern listeners. Largely thanks to Cage, the operational musical principle has become – everything that makes sound belongs to the art of sound.