Construction on Paris’s Opera Bastille wasn’t entirely finished when John Cage was invited to perform the third and fourth entries in his five-part “Europeras” series. An attempt to attend a party immediately after the performance found him sharing a service elevator with fellow composers Stephen Montague and Yvar Mikhashof, dancer Merce Cunningham and Alexina Duchamp, the widow of Marcel and daughter-in-law of Henri Matisse.
After the elevator went pitch black between floors, panic quickly set in. "What are we going to do?" Duchamp asked her fellow travelers.
“It's the perfect opportunity to hear a piece of music,” Cage answered calmly. “Just listen." For 20 minutes, the group listened to the machinery’s mechanical rumbles. The occasion was mostly marked by silence from the passengers, but for the occasional tapped accompaniment from Montague and Mikhashof.
"Wasn't that a marvelous piece of music?” Cage asked, after the lights turned on and the elevator doors opened. “My only sadness is that two people were adding dissonances to it."
Four decades prior, Cage’s pupil Christian Wolff gifted the composer a book that would forever change his approach to music. Wolff’s parents were prominent German publishers. His father Kurt was the first person to publish the works of Franz Kafka and Franz Werfel. Among their translations was the first English edition of the I Ching the younger Wolff gave to his teacher in 1951.
One of the oldest surviving classical Chinese texts, the Book of Changes’ impact on Cage was immediate. The composer had flirted with the notion of chance as a tool in previous works, but the arrival of the I Ching appeared to open entirely new avenues of creation. Composed and performed that same year, “Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (March No. 2)” was the first of Cage’s work to be entirely the product of chance.
Written for an orchestra of 12 radios, the work finds a pair of performers assigned to each transistor, with one controlling the frequency and the other volume and tone. While the musical notation is a conventional one, the random nature of the radio programming assures that no two performances are ever the same.
“When I wrote the ‘Imaginary Landscape’ for twelve radios, it was not for the purpose of shock or as a joke but rather to increase the unpredictability already inherent in the situation through the tossing of coins,” Cage wrote years later. “Chance, to be precise, is a leap, provides a leap out of reach of one’s own grasp of oneself.”
Composed later the same year, “Music of Changes” drew even more direct inspiration from the I Ching. Once again, Cage penned the composition in conventional notation. But the 43-minute, four-book work takes its performer on a wild journey, plucking strings with finger names and slamming down the lid, among other non-conventional methods of music making. A heavily modified version of the I Ching’s chart system is consulted throughout the work.
“Among the things I noticed and subjected to chance operation was tempo,” Cage would later explain. “If you look at the ‘Music of Changes,’ you see that every few measures, at every structural point, things were speeding up or slowing down or remaining constant. How much these things varied was chance determined. David Tudor learned a form of mathematics which he didn’t know before in order to translate those tempo indications into actual time. It was a very difficult process and very time consuming for him.”
Now fully immersed in Eastern philosophy, Cage visited Japan the following decade. The trip was made, in part, to attend a lecture by the then-92-year-old D.T. Suzuki. The scholar is credited with helping popularize Zen Buddhism in the West. A year after meeting Cage, Suzuki would be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The composer would frequently relate a story from his teacher. “Before studying Zen, men are men and mountains are mountains,” Cage paraphrased Suzuki’s words. “While studying Zen, things become confused. After studying Zen, men are men and mountains are mountains.”
A confused pupil responded quickly asked the teacher to clarify the distinction between the before and after. “No difference,” Suzuki responded. “Only the feet are a little bit off the ground.”
Sources:
The music of chance https://www.theguardian.com/music/2004/jan/16/classicalmusicandopera1
A mountainous task is conquered https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-dec-06-et-phil6-story.html
Cage Interview, Kirby & Schechner https://www.scribd.com/document/108829044/Cage-Interview-Kirby-Schechner
His own Music https://www.jstor.org/stable/833093?seq=1
Music of Changes https://johncage.org/pp/John-Cage-Work-Detail.cfm?work_ID=134