The Christopher Small Reader. Christopher Small G.
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for Zen there is no duality, no conflict between the natural element of chance and the human element of control. The constructive powers of the human mind are no more artificial than the formative action of plants or bees, so that from the standpoint of Zen it is no contradiction to say that artistic technique is discipline in spontaneity and spontaneity in discipline.”32 Not even his worst enemies would accuse Cage of lack of discipline; nevertheless, to deny the reality of value is simply to continue the discourse on value on the same level as it has been conducted since the time of Aristotle. What is needed is a new concept of value that transcends western hierarchical thinking, and this Cage, for all the magnitude of his achievement, for all the new freedom he has brought into ways of musical thinking, has not succeeded in establishing.
Since Cage, however, tonal harmony has no longer been a concern to those American musicians whose thinking does not follow that of Europe. American music no longer needs to protest its independence; that can now be taken for granted as American musicians compose their own models of the potential society that owe little to European precedents. I must emphasize again that this chapter makes no claim to being a comprehensive survey of American music, but simply attempts to offer an interpretation of certain aspects of that music in the light of the ideas presented in the earlier chapters, and in particular in the light of the ideal of individual liberty upon which the Republic was founded. With this in mind, let us consider only four of those musicians whose work is making the American scene today so much more lively than its European counterpart. The language may have changed, but the vision of the potential society remains as pervasive as ever.
The principal concern of these musicians seems to be the projection of sounds into time, the loving exploration of the inner nature of sounds, in a world where the structures that contain the sounds are relatively unimportant—a complete reversal, in fact, of the classical European aesthetic of music. The antithesis is summed up neatly in an exchange, reported by the pianist John Tilbury, which is supposed to have taken place between Morton Feldman and Stockhausen:
KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN: Morton, I know you have no system, but what’s your secret?
MORTON FELDMAN: Leave the sounds alone, Karlheinz, don’t push them around.
KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN: Not even just a little bit?33
Feldman, who acknowledges Cage as having given him “early permissions to have confidence in my instincts,” takes sounds, as it were, and holds them up for our pleasure and admiration. The sounds he presents to us are generally quiet and unobtrusive, changing gently, creating stillness and peacefulness. The temporal order of the sounds scarcely matters, so that conventional concepts of musical time have no meaning; one feels that if it were possible to project the entire piece simultaneously Feldman would do so.
La Monte Young is concerned also in the exploration of the inner nature of sounds. He recalls from childhood his fascination with the sound of the wind in telephone wires and says, “I noticed about 1956 that I seemed more interested in listening to chords than in listening to melodies. In other words, I was more interested in concurrency or simultaneity than in sequence.”34 The result of this concern was, for example, Composition 1960 No 7, which consists of the instruction “B and F sharp. To be held for a long time,” and the very long composition The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, in which “Young and three associates chant an open chord of intrinsically infinite duration, amplified to the point of aural pain. Public performances usually consist of two sessions, each nearly two hours in length, within a darkened room illuminated only by projections of pattern-art.”35 Young’s music, then, has little to do with listening in the traditional western sense, and much with absorption in the timeless rituals of Buddhism and Lamaism. The extreme length of time each sound lasts is vital to the awareness of each nuance of its nature; just as the ethologist must sit and wait for a long time for the living community to reveal itself, so Young’s music can be regarded as a kind of ethology of sound, as an observation of sounds when they are allowed to be themselves, not fashioned into shapes determined by human will.
Steve Reich, for long an associate and friend of Young, is also an observer of the behavior of sounds, but sounds not stationary but gradually changing from within, following their own natural evolution. His compositions are, as he himself says, literally processes, which happen extremely gradually, much as a plant unfolds. One often fails to perceive the process happening, but only becomes aware that a change has taken place. Reich compares such processes to “pulling back a swing, releasing it, and observing it gradually come to rest; turning over an hour glass and watching the sand slowly run through to the bottom; placing your feet in the sand by the ocean’s edge and watching, feeling and listening to the waves gradually bury them.”36 Such processes, though fascinating to the mind that is prepared to sit and let them happen, are essentially undramatic; so is Reich’s music, which might be dismissed as monotonous by minds attuned to the violent and dramatic contrasts of classical music. A piece tends to consist of an extremely small amount of material, both rhythmic and melodic, played by several performers (or, in the earlier pieces, on several tape recorders) who are slightly out of phase with one another, so that material is constantly being revealed in new, gradually changing relationships with itself; fascinating and beautiful new melodic and rhythmic patterns are constantly being created. The music is not difficult to play in terms of the actual notes, which tend to be simple repetitions of melodic patterns, but the task of playing the same pattern as one’s neighbor at a slightly different but perfectly controlled speed requires intense discipline and months of rehearsal for each piece. Reich has collected around him a group of musicians who have developed the kind of social rather than individual virtuosity, which is perhaps the most important fruit of his period of study under a master drummer in Ghana. The nature of the processes at work is always perfectly clear to the listener; unlike tonal-harmonic or serial music it keeps no secrets. As Reich says, in the same article, “We all listen to the process together since it’s quite audible, and one of the reasons why it’s quite audible is because it’s happening extremely gradually. The use of hidden structural devices has never appealed to me. Even when all the cards are on the table and everyone hears what is happening in a musical process there are still enough mysteries to satisfy all. These mysteries are the impersonal, unintended, psycho-acoustic byproducts of the intended process. These might include sub-melodies heard within repeated melodic patterns, stereophonic effects due to listener location, slight irregularities in performance, harmonics, difference tones, etc.”37
Reich’s largest and most ambitious work to date is Drumming, a work for tuned tomtoms, glockenspiels and marimbas, with singers, whistlers and piccolo to outline the melodic patterns that are implied as the highly disciplined performers move in and out of phase with one another; it was for me a musical experience of great beauty and joy when it was first performed in London in 1972. Reich’s gift is the ability to set up situations in which, as the sounds unfold according to the rules of their own evolution, they make continuously beautiful and interesting patterns without the apparent intervention of the composer’s will. There is an openness and a complex simplicity about this exploration of sounds that parallels the workings of nature herself.
The music of Terry Riley, a Californian and friend of both Young and Reich, takes place in a similar area of musical sound; it first struck a wide public at least, in this country with In C, where some fifty short melodic fragments, all diatonic on the scale of C, are played by as many instrumentalists as desired; each player plays each fragment as many times as he wishes before moving on to the next, the performance being held together rhythmically by a rapidly repeated high C on the piano. The result is an extremely pleasing music, not unlike Reich’s in sound, but governed more by the whims of the performers than by the internal logic of the sounds; it is a less rigorous, more engaging, perhaps finally less satisfying music than Reich’s. Later works have included tape loops and feedback systems, sometimes with delays built in; the sound is relaxed and slow-changing, and takes the listener again far into the awareness of the sounds themselves.
In these and other ways the ideas of Cage have been taken forward, ways which in the purely musical results are perhaps more sympathetic to the uncommitted ear than those of Cage himself. There has always been a strong didactic, even dogmatic, streak in Cage; one sometimes has the impression that certain pieces were composed more