I keep telling everyone that John Cage is the composer with the most pervasive influence on my work, and it is part of this influence which involves the necessity of ignoring or contradicting his ideas as well as accepting them. As far as I’m concerned, Cage is the orthodoxy.
I look at ways my working methods diverge from those of Cage. (This preoccupation with the past is itself an attempt at a Cagean strategy, that of transcending one’s situation through accepting it – the situation here being the apparent cultural impasse in a period of decadence that has followed postmodernism.) I also look at ways I can consciously diverge from Cage in a productive way.
That whole thing about music as process, keeping it “live”, avoiding fixed relationships – when I was a kid I remember reading Brian Eno talking about the same stuff. It always bugged me; it felt dogmatic. Why should music as an open-ended process be considered intrinsically preferable? It seemed like a good reason to make music which is conceived and received as an object. This is of course the natural state of recorded music, and it’s a state I want to fully exploit as both a form and a medium.
144 Pieces For Organ is thoroughly Cagean in its method: chance-determined materials and structure within an arbitrary form. The form, however, was conceived as a series of unique objects, like sculptures or drawings: a complex of fixed relationships. As with static visual art, any open-ended process is left to the audience. It seems as though how they sound depends a lot upon the level of attention given. Eight seconds of silence is given at the end of each piece to enforce its self-contained identity, and to break any sense of an ongoing continuity (i.e. perceptual process) that a sequence of pieces may give.
The generative nature of the pieces is starting to remind me of Allan McCollum’s Shapes Project. Although they are not permutational works, and are computer-generated, my 144 Pieces share some similar attributes. Most clearly, there is the creation of great, diverse abundance from a single determining process. There is also the possibility (explicit in McCollum’s work, implicit in mine) that more works in the same series could be created by other people, given access to the process.
There’s that word ‘process’ again. I want to keep stripping away any romantic connotations that might enhance a work of art, to see what remains; this applies equally to history, artistic biography and mythology as it does to Cage’s ideas about Zen. It takes no time to make these organ pieces: I could churn out millions of them, use each one once then delete it, outsource them, make them open-source, sell or give unique pieces to anyone who asks. This would all fit very well with the new surfeit/abundance (delete as appropriate) of information in which we now live. The problem, however, would then be that I had moved the work from an object to a process, a concept.
Then I start thinking about Morton Feldman’s music. Not just that he was influenced by Cage in the way most people are – find a few key ideas to embrace and reject everything else – but that he wrote music by setting up a hedge of contradictory imperatives and then negotiating a precarious path of compromises through them. (“It’s a sign of maturity.”) If I’m to treat my music as art – music is an art form, right? – then perhaps these organ pieces are not so much drawings as an edition of prints. More pieces could be made, but only as “duplicates” of the original work.
Contrary to some errors made in certain press articles, the Shapes are not “generated” in a computer with an invented or scripted “program.” Every shape is laboriously created by the artist using Adobe Illustrator — a common, everyday graphics program — by drawing little parts, cutting and pasting the parts into bigger parts, then cutting and pasting those parts into even bigger parts, and so on, and keeping track according to a written protocol, to insure against repetitions. The first exhibition of the project, in 2006, took around two years to complete.