TUNING digest

I very much enjoyed Brian Mclaren's recent posting on Cage's music. While his article retains all of its
considerable entertainment value, regrettably, its argument collapses completely on his confusion of the
terms "randomness" and "indeterminacy". Randomness is simply lack of predictability of outcome. We
sometimes perceive as random, totally predictable events (a recording of psuedo-random numbers
mapped to pitch (predictible since it will be the same each time)), so what we are often judging from an
aesthetic view is not randomness but the flux of information in a piece of music - as well as our ability to
observe patterns in this flux. Different people have different thresholds for information, thus music with
very high information density in rhythm, harmonic complexity, tuning structure and so forth will be
interpreted by some people as noise. This has certainly been the case with high information masterpieces
such as Beethoven's late string quartets, Ives' 4th Symphony, Varese's Ameriques, or Richard James'
Auto Hangable Lightbulbs.


Why is this all irrelevant to Cage's music? Because indeterminacy refers not to randomness, but to lack of
pre-determination of elements of a musical performance. It is clear that almost all music has elements of
indeterminacy. Bach's scores do not specify the rate, depth and pitch bend pattern for vibrato, nor the
deciBel intensity level for each instrument, nor the precise size and dimension of the performance hall, nor
tuning in Hz or cents nor hundreds of other of factors contributing to a successful realization of the score.
What is striking about Cage's indeterminate music is that most aspects of the performance are
indeterminate, particularly aspects which have previously been composer-predetermined such as pitch,
rhythm and instrumentation. Rather than follow the 20th century trend towards hyperspecification
(perhaps most extreme in Ferneyhough's scores), what Cage did is provide contexts and attracted
phenomenal musicians such as David Tudor and Gordon Mumma to help realize his designs. Cage was
well aware of the difference between performances by artists of this caliber and indifferent hacks and
spoke of "disciplined" performers much as Morton Feldman did with his wisecrack "my boys are
everywhere". While I do not admire Cage taking the lion's share of credit for inherently cooperative
ventures, I enjoy the successful outcomes from his activities. Mclaren describes the music as garbage.
Fine, that's his opinion. To me, Tudor's prepared piano performance of Variations II sounds poetic,
sinuous and terrifying. It does not sound "random", suffused as it is with performer sensitivity, focus and
vision.


Eric Lyon

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