Postscript to John Cage and Counterpoint

Sunday 1 November 2015

I’ve made a small but vital amendment to yesterday’s post. I should have said “John Cage sucked at counterpoint,” not that he “sucks at counterpoint”. It may have been one of his personal weaknesses, but it did not carry over into his music. Thanks to Philip Thomas for pointing out this error, by tweeting to me that “I think almost all the music since 1951 is great counterpoint. Stuff on top of other stuff.”

I pretty much agree, and this actually gets to the point of what I was trying to say. Just going back to the Morton Feldman interview I quoted. Feldman also recites the “no feeling for harmony anecdote” and adds, “but like anybody else who had no interest in harmony, he found that which freed music from harmony. He found his Zen for polyphony” (my emphasis). Peter Gena replies, “The rhythmic structure aspect which allows sounds and silences” (ditto). Soon after, their exchange continues:

GENA: So if Duchamp really did free the mind from the eye, to that extent he moved away from craft and picked on ready-mades.

FELDMAN: Especially if you had two left hands, like Duchamp. I mean he was better with a ruler. Once he took up a ruler, he was fine.

GENA: Yes, he was interested in mechanical drawing. Accordingly, Cage talked about his terrible ear for harmony, and once he took up the ruler, as it were, which was time grids and rhythmic structures, it was wonderful. So Cage freed the sounds because he wanted to put them outside of the harmonic context.

FELDMAN: I didn’t bring up Schoenberg’s remark about John’s lack of interest in harmony to imply what you’re trying to say. I said that Duchamp picked up the ruler, not Cage.

GENA: What did Cage pick up?

FELDMAN: He picked up the eraser! He’s bluffing. He’s a Duchamp in Cagean ears. He’s bluffing. He has impeccable ears.

They continue talking about traditional harmony, but something doesn’t add up. Philip Thomas’ observation is that Cage’s counterpoint improves around the time he allowed fewer of his personal choices to determine the finer details of his music, through impersonal means and then through chance. As Cage commented in one of his lectures, “giving up counterpoint, one gets superimposition and, of course, a little counterpoint comes in of its own accord.”

This is also the time when Cage talked frequently about letting sounds be themselves, i.e. putting sounds “outside of the harmonic context”. By then he had been using his above-mentioned time grids and rhythmic structures for nearly 15 years. His mature works begin in the 1930s with his radical use of rhythm as a structural principle, instead of harmony. By the 1940s he had become known as “the percussion composer” (as he himself reminded us in his anecdotes). It would be a neat deflection, to focus people’s attention on harmony, or rather the lack of it, if you didn’t feel too secure in your ability to organise your sounds and silences in your stated rhythmic structure.

The ruler that Cage picked up, like Duchamp’s, was “giving up” and accepting that the less say they had in the detail of their work, the better it was. The best type of aesthetic decisions are not aesthetic decisions at all.