Reply to Greg

Greg: I wish I could put my finger on the exact reference to John Cage's
remark about microtonality being a "new wing on the academy." My
recollection is that I read it in the 60's either in Perspectives of
New Music or J. Music Theory and probably not in an article by Cage
himself. If anybody knows the source for this remark, I'd appreciate
knowing it myself.

Thanks for the Coomaraswamy reference. I had thought the source was
Greek philosophy (Lucretius?), but had never sought to track it down,
because, quite frankly, Cage has never been an obsession of mine, though
I have greatly enjoyed some of his music over the years. My first
exposure to Cage was in a lecture by Stockhausen in Germany in 1960
in the context of a historically oriented presentation of "Elecktronische
Musik." I had assumed Cage's embracing of randomness to be one with
aleatorism, total serialization, Stockhausen's "open form," Xenakis's
"stochastic" procedures, and other quintessentially Western approaches to
removing the personality of the composer from the musical product. While
I became aware of Cage's interest in Buddhism and Indic philosophy, one can
derive a preoccupation with random and "chance" phenomena from Western
traditions as well.

Shortly after becoming aware of experimental music, I began seriously
studying biology and quickly learned the difference between various types
of indeterminacy. Hence I became uncongenial with the idea that nature,
on the mesoscale of human existence and perception, is wholly random, nor
did I ever see why art should be, even if the universe is fundamentally
random, chaotic, and meaningless. But I digress.

Anyway, I found your post thought-provoking. While the aesthetics of
John Cage's music are somewhat off the topic for this list, I'd appreciate
references to his original statements and their contexts.

--John


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