John Cage and Music as An Abstract form of Art

John Cage and Music as An Abstract form of Art
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John Cage and Music as An Abstract form of Art
Introduction and Cage's Background
In 1938, John Cage had regional fame on the west coast in two areas: percussion composer and composer for modern dance. He had a job in 1938 at a school in Settle Washington called the Cornish School, where he was functioning in both of the aforementioned areas of expertise. When a dance name Savvier Fort approached him about music cum dance that she was developing, dance on an African theme, there was a major problem detected. The problem is that the performance space where the dance was to be done was not large enough to bring in percussion and somber. They had small range piano, and there was no room for other instruments. Cage had studied earlier with Henry Cowell, who had experimented through stretching the piano strings directly by plucking them with either the flesh or nail of the finger. He also included stroking of strings by swaying them sideways in his experimentations.[Richard, Taruskin. The danger of music and other anti-utopian essays. Univ of California Press, 2008, 126]
Cage recalled all of these experiments and repeated them but found nothing that he perceived as adaptable for the African dance piece he was working on completing. He went one step further then and started to play objects on the strings of the piano. He recalled later putting pie tins on the piano, which was a promising step, but the piano strings vibrated with a considerable force, throwing the pie tins randomly. He also recalls welding nails on the strings, but the nails also vibrated and fell through the strings. He tried many improvisations, and another trial was to take a simple bolt, something wide enough to be placed between the strings and be held firmly with the strings. It was through the incorporation of the bolts into the strings that Cage invented the prepared piano. As a result, the piano would give different sounds using similar pitches, depending on whether the player stepped on the pedal. When the left pedal or soft pedal is depressed, the action of the piano string moves so that only the right two strings are stroked, leading to a deeper sound since they are the strings with the bolts. In addition, the placement along the length of the string is critical.[Diane, Nelson. "An Introduction to John Cage's Music for the Solo Prepared Piano." The American Music Teacher 36, no. 3 (1987): 42.]
By repeating the same noted and moving the bolts slightly towards the end of the string will result in a change of pitch and timbre. The other material that Cage found useful was a strip of rubber, which is woven between the strings of the piano. The improvisation creates a stop or a woodblock sound. There was also a combination of rubber, bolt, and strip of plastics to create a wide range of sounds when the same note is played on a single piano. Consequently, Cage realized that he did not just change sounds in a piano but rather created a new instrument. In general, the works of Cage demonstrate that a sense of flexibility guided his composition, for he perceived music as abstract art in which there is an infinite possibility of transformation of its form from words, objects, texts, sound, and silence.
Our spring will come for prepared piano Solo (1943)
Cage's work dubbed Our Spring will come for Prepared Piano demonstrates the idea of chance music because his composition allows the development of random sound. The combination of the materials incorporated with strings led to the development of infinite timbres. In retrospect, the piece is a derivative of Cage looking back into the 1940s and described his composition of that time as being intentionally expressive music. Coherently, the piece of work does not have one form of sound. The different types of sounds lead to a sound that would render one to think that the piano is broken. Henceforth, an evaluation of the song leads to the idea of an infinite transformation of components of music to the extent that it becomes difficult to clearly demarcate the meanings of sound, words, music, and objects.[Benjamin, Piekut. "Chance and certainty: John Cage's politics of nature." Cultural Critique 84 (2013): 134-135]
These observations in Our Spring will come for Prepared piano do not conflict with the essence of the music that has been composed, performed, and heard for centuries, and also holds true for the music that is produced in our time. Much of what can be stated in terms of such analysis regarding the compositional process is tied to the understanding of music that comes to us in its final stage as performance. If this process can be deconstructed in several stages, as above, the performance, as the last step in that chain, can be linked to the process of realization of a piece of music and reveal the particular concept in that piece of the relationship of sounds and words; this concept, that is, becomes clear in the process of performance.
Since words are spoken (or sung), the element that constitutes the essence of a song should be heard in context with the music, hence arriving at the understanding once the work, in completed form, has been performed. Although the implications of performance practice for analysis and comprehension can be debated, I consider performance as the last stage of a musical work which must be included in any approach to its deconstruction, most particularly with pieces of music that involve text, and later, as we shall see, "words." Perhaps there is no better example of a breakthrough of "words as music" in recent history than in the lyrical writings of John Cage. In Lieder, we find words and music intertwined.
In the writings of John Cage, words can be viewed as both: words as words and words as music. Throughout Cage's output, we can see a perceptible shift in his way of composing musical "words"; in songs, lieder, writer of musical "words." Perhaps we may see John Cage as the first musician to develop the concept of words as objects; the particular meaning and non-meaning of sounds of words; the non-intentionality of the relationship of, first, a sentence that has its structure, to the subsequent meaning of these elements in the totality of a piece of music that consists of words as beginning, middle, and end, as it is heard in performance. Here we can consider the term "word" as including as integral parts syllables, sentences, paragraphs, or any formations that include letters as information in a semantic context. This obviously connects to one of John Cage's most radical writings addressing the word-sound relationship: Empty Words.
Cage says in an interview with Richard Kostelanetz, "My pleasure in composition, renounced as it has been in the field of music, continues in the field of writing words; and that explains why, recently, I write so much." This simple statement contains much regarding intention and meaning as we approach an understanding of Cage's musical writings. There is no instance in which a composition can be understood as words if words are not treated as sound. Nor has there been any tendency for a composer to write other than to explain a compositional system except in the case of many of John Cage's musical writings, which treat words as sound and transform these into music, as music that is conceived from the standpoint of a single object – the word.[Richard, Kostelanetz. John Cage Writer. New York, 1993, 84]
An example of the treatment of the word as an object that stands as sound and sound that is put into context regarding music elements that are not words is the work Song Books. Although this work does address the concept of words as sound exclusively in its entirety, it is important to address the presence of words as sound as a first parameter for understanding the word as an object. Coherently, in Our Spring will come for Prepared, one hears sounds resembling tins, metal plates vibrating, strings, cymbal, high tom, and snare drum from the same piano.
4'33" for any instrument or combination of instruments (August 1952, Second version 1962)
The work of Cage titled 4'33" for any instrument or combination of instruments also helps to understand the idea of the intersectionality of words, texts, words, objects, and any other factor in the world of art by allowing the audience to decipher that there is also meaning in silence. 4'33" was an outcome of European and Asian culture clashing with American culture. It was not until Cage veered away from European music that he began his masterpiece, 4'33". For ...