By doing away with the presence of a single uniform and continuous temporal metric, Cage was in all likelihood seeking out exactly the kind of sacralized perceptual orientation, and what the psychedelic generation might celebrate as expanded consciousness, that Marshall Mcluhan wrote had been suppressed by the invention of the mechanical clock. As always, reinforcing his claims that modern electrical man is ever becoming more psychically attuned to habits characteristic of tribal man, rather than industrial/mechanical man, Mcluhan theorized that the mechanical clock had the effect of relating all phenomenon to repeatable, uniform units. Whereas tribal man experienced time as the durations between a plethora of often unrelated events, mechanical man learned to relate all events to a single ‘tempo,’ as it were. And as Cage dismissed the very notion of a tempo, along with it necessarily went the division of the music into salient, discrete units. This is another departure from the earlier Music of Changes.

If one is able to imagine the host of perceptual/aesthetic consequences that go along with the dismissal of a unifying metric, and if one is able to similarly dismiss the completely unrelatable bias that artists obligatorily represent autocratic, privately-expressive viewpoints, than one can celebrate Cage for being the tuned-in psychonautical expeditionary that he was. Moreover, in Etudes Australes the dismissal of a unifying centrist orientation goes far beyond merely the temporal aspect. Cage, in a late interview with Joan Rettalack, expressed his preference during the early decades of his career towards all notes existing in their own dynamic strata, in other words not related to a common unifying dynamic orientation. The Etudes don’t contain a single dynamic marking, but if one understands the principle of non-centrist art than one will automatically situate each note on different levels. And even if one doesn’t understand that principle, and insists on remaining a simpering, obsequious servant to notions of authority and artistic legitimacy, thoroughly un-Cagelike as it is, one can at least soothe the paranoia about doing something wrong because Cage himself recommended that particular kind of performance practice – as he put it, “this way each note is at its own center.” Though if one is leaning on authority that way, that person is caught in a center-to-margins relationship with whoever he thinks is supposed to be some kind of authoritative viewpoint, that person should really be playing more industrial-oriented music anyway.

Now, the replacement of center-to-margins relationships with the simultaneous inter-referential neural network of differentiated information is in fact the very crux of Marshall McLuhan’s life’s work, and I would argue of Cage’s as well.

Etudes Australes Book I by Augustus Arnone is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Etudes Australes Book I by Augustus Arnone is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Natural Selection by Augustus Arnone is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Music Of Changes by Augustus Arnone is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

NATURAL SELECTION (NAT-SEL) a real-time performance environment for computer and midi-equipped acoustic piano, 1996-present.

In Natural Selection, the musical syntax was conceived in parallel with the development of an ‘instrument’ comprised of a piano interfaced with a large interactive computer program running on a Macintosh computer with the Max programming environment. The software for the piece consists of a set of tools that can be configured to match changing performance situations. While all performances of Natural Selection exist within the same landscape of possibilities, each performance is unique and original. Nat-Sel is a meta-compositional environment that combines a new hybrid instrument (computer and piano) with that of a control structure. The environment is constrained but flexible and capable of expansion and evolution.

The original software was developed by Tom Mays with support from Richard Dudas. Later Edmund Campion became the primary developor with help from several graduate students including Jeremy Hunt.

In Natural Selection , every detail of the electro-acoustic surface is initiated from some action on the part of the pianist. The computer compares incoming note streams and chords to a pitch matrix which upon positive identification outputs an influence variable. The influence variable may or may not be used by the patch to generate a response. There is no linear or prepared score for Natural Selection . The computer and the composer follow one another in accordance with a fixed set of constraints that bind the actions of the two. In addition to pitch information, the computer also analyzes and is influenced by velocities, delta-times, key-splits, etc….

In performance, the pianist/composer is able to control all aspects of the patch by the use of harmonic ‘types’ or sets. Certain sets of pitches will enable and/or cancel certain effects. In this way, the hands of the composer/pianist never leave the performance instrument to initiate or trigger some response from the computer. In Natural Selection , the composer is free from the mediating responsibilities of coordinating with an ensemble, tape, or computer. Most importantly, he is liberated to interact with the computer’s response in an instantaneous fashion. This immediate feedback is highly generative and is a major source of inspiration for the entire work.

Natural Selection was commissioned by IRCAM in 1996.

Cage here is referring to his chamber works from the numbered series, which he was working on very late in his career. In those works the individuals are playing parts where the only time indications are brackets indicating ranges of possible start and end times. So there is a degree of variability in possible timings, happening in numerous parts at the same time, naturally the music will never come out the same way twice. The players thus are not together in the conventional sense then, simply because they are not each adhering to one uniform metric orientation. As Cage puts it “the one thing they would be in agreement about would be something that everyone is in agreement about … they would agree that the clock is correct.” When Cage uses the word “together” in the above passage what he really means is happening simultaneously, sounding at the same time.

This is yet another example of art in the electronic age that avoids the individual fixed point of view — in this case that which would’ve been manifested in the form of a conductor, or barring that a uniform metric pulse — in favor of the panoramic field of simultaneous multiple, and contradictory, perspectives. It is, like the music of Milton Babbitt and Iannis Xenakis among others, exactly the kind of art that Marshall McLuhan declared made inevitable by the advent of electronic technology, but at the same time unique in that Cage was directly influenced by McLuhan’s writings. It is an aesthetic that shares a great deal in common with Schoenberg’s non-uniform harmonic procedures and the rhythmic techniques employed by the Grateful Dead, both of which I discuss in my post Schoenberg is a Gothic Cathedral.

The revolutionary artistic hypthesis embodied by this approach, and by the countless other artists working in countless other genres and mediums who consciously or unconsciously seek out ways of relating ideas in a non-linear a non-uniform fashion, is that the fixed, singular viewpoint, as a psychological/perceptual habit in the contemplation of an artwork or any other form of media, is not in fact a necessary, let alone unavoidable, condition for psychic organization. Yes, private expression, the sacred cow of Classical art, might be dispensed with altogether, in favor of another kind of perceptual bias. This is the great divide which separates even contemporary art in this day and age, and certainly the gulf that isolates a great deal of that art in the domain of the unapproachable, save by the handful of dedicated adepts who undertake a scholarly obsession with it (another sacred cow).

Shadows of a sailor, forming winds both foul and fair all swarm.
Down in carlisle, he loved a lady many years ago.
Here beside him stands a man, a soldier from the looks of him,
Who came through many fights, but lost at love.

While the story teller speaks, a door within the fire creaks;
Suddenly flies open, and a girl is standing there.
Eyes alight, with glowing hair, all that fancy paints as fair,
She takes her fan and throws it, in the lions den.

Which of you to gain me, tell, will risk uncertain pains of hell?
I will not forgive you if you will not take the chance.
The sailor gave at least a try, the soldier being much too wise,
Strategy was his strength, and not disaster.

The sailor, coming out again, the lady fairly leapt at him.
Thats how it stands today. you decide if he was wise.
The story teller makes no choice. soon you will not hear his voice.
His job is to shed light, and not to master.

“Evidently melodic progressions like [these] from the third movement [of Opus 10] cannot be accompanied by tonal triads, and if at all by chords, they would have to be transformed by alterations. Instead, one finds accompanying voices whose purpose is not harmonic at all; they even do not aim for chord production. Their function and derivation might, in the near future, be discovered as its author found them psychologically comforting when he wrote them. (Schoenberg CD 43)”

Interestingly, Schoenberg had evidentally not abandoned the idea that the resultant vertical structures might be construed as a series of functional harmonies, though this consideration was lacking in their composition. It seems to have not occurred to him that he was working within a non-linear medium. Nevertheless, at the same time that he was moving away from reliance on functional harmonic progressions he became ever more concerned with unity and inter-reference between parts, which took the form of continual transformation and reformulation of motives. His own self-admitted aesthetic aim at the time was
“how to create variety out of unity; how to create new forms out of basic material; how much can be achieved by slight modifications, if not by developing variation, out of often rather insignificant little formulations.”
This concern with interrelation would only intensify over the course of his career, taking the form of the inversions and retrogrades in his 12 tone rows, and eventually his combinatorial hexachords.

Heightened emphasis on pattern formation is precisely the result that Mcluhan declares as inevitable following from that dissolution of linear logic brought on by electric media’s ascent and proliferation.

“Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay.”

Mcluhan is emphasizing a dichotomy here between two different modes of psychological organization, one that separates and groups elements into contained areas or concepts (hence classes), and one that apprehends the various elements of a given environment as integrated and interrelated. The earlier quote by Schoenberg belies the fact that he was intuitively wandering, seemingly unawares, away from the habit of classifying his harmonic materials within contained, functional chord structures. When one studies Mcluhan’s extensive research and commentary on the nature of these two modes of thought, it becomes obvious that Schoenberg’s drive towards unity and interreference was intrinsically linked to his abandonment of vertical considerations.

Mcluhan deals with the question of containment as an organizational principle in a discussion of cathedrals during the first several centuries of the second millenium as contrasted with those of the Baroque. Bear in mind that he explains the tendency towards specialized parts rather than integration as an effect of the proliferation of printed media, and so the centuries prior to the Gutenberg press did not exhibit the same perceptual bias. The fact that Gothic cathedrals have more in common with Schoenberg’s or Babbitt’s music than even nineteenth-century cathedrals stems from the overthrowal of print’s visual bias by twentieth-century electric media.

Mcluhan opens this discussion in The Gutenberg Galaxy with the statement: “Scribal Culture and Gothic Culture were both concerned with light through, not light on.(105).” With regard to the Gothic cathedral he’s referring to the use of stained glass and only partial walls to circulate light throughout the whole of the interior, rather than walling it off into separate rooms. In the words of Medieval scholar Otto von Simson:

The Gothic wall seems to be porous: light filters through it, permeating it, merging with it, transfiguring it … Light, which is ordinarily concealed by matter, appears as the active principle; and matter is aesthetically real only insofar as it partakes of, and is defined by, the luminous quality of light.(105)

Thus, in the Gothic cathedral the special objects, activities, and content pertaining to the various areas of the interior were not separated from each other, one did not wander from room to room taking in each specialized space one at a time. Rather, one took in the entire space as a panoramic whole, observing the interplay among the various contents scattered throughout the whole interior. “After Gutenberg,” Mcluhan explains, “the new visual intensity will require light on something. And its idea of space and time will change to regard them as containers to be filled with objects or activities. But in a manuscript age …space was not a visual container.(107) So by “light on” as opposed to “light through” he’s referring to the literal example of the use of light in these spaces, but really he’s talking about principles of apprehension and imagination that separate the age of print’s dominance from the ages before it, and from our own age dominated by electric media. The ramifications of this example can be extraordinarily illuminating when approaching contemporary aesthetics, musical or otherwise.

The Schoenberg example deals specifically with the organization of pitch. It very much demonstrates the principle of light through rather than light on in that groups of pitches are not “walled off” from each other and situated within functional harmonies. A chord itself is a kind of container, an exclusivity if you will – these pitches, not those pitches. His twelve-tone system of composing decimated the notion of pitch exclusivity, and thus of specialized harmonies or key areas, just by virtue of the fact that all the pitches were present all the time. Individual voices were free to infiltrate any part of the pitch spectrum, much like the latticework of light through the gothic cathedral, rather than coming together with the other voices to form specialized pitch content.

I’m sure this passage speaks to a lot of different people on a lot of different levels. I myself find it profoundly relatable to the deeply conservative musical environment I encountered during my conservatory/university years. Musicians coming of age in this time are faced with the challenge of having to enter into this environment and then deciding to what extent they will let the sightlines of their musical development be shaped by the demands placed on them by the environment. In a musician’s life of uncertain place or position, perfect adaptation to the institutionalized musical world can certainly have its appeal,  and so the struggle for artistic development becomes the struggle for anticipating and realizing the ideologies of whatever professors and panels/committees/adjudicators to whom they’ll apply for conferral of legitimacy and status. And for those that go through it and do adapt, their position as a kind of musical leader will depend on the acquired values and conventions which were the product of that adaptation. Naturally such a person will be quite hostile to any kind of innovation or change, for it will amount to the renunciation of precisely that accrued ‘knowledge’ which is the foundation of their claim to musical merit. Those panels and committees aggressively promote shared values, as anyone coming up in the academic music world can attest.

A person can become so preoccupied with optimal functioning within this environment so as to really have no aspirations or direction, or even value (if I may be a little unkind) apart from it. What is an artist really if not an expeditionary? There’s a Kafka parable which gets right at the heart of it, the one where the people have a choice to be kings or else to be couriers of kings. They all choose to be couriers and so go around shouting meaningless messages to each other.

Economics is a good word for it, It’s a bit like investing in stock, if everyone invests in something it has great value, if people stop investing in it then the holders find themselves with very little. I encountered this when I started to study 18th and 19th century performance practice and learned that many of the performance conventions that overwhelmingly predominate in our time are based in habits that formed around the mid-point of this century, and seem not to resemble much of what we can know about the musical cultures in which these classical works were spawned. Naturally, those venerable professors whose sole source of acquired knowledge rests in the perfect absorption of mid-century performing conventions are incredibly hostile to such sentiments, or to any suggestion that we (the people) should stray the slightest bit from prescribed and collectively accepted performance concepts. Of course, predictably a new economy has sprung up around the acquired knowledge of performance practice, with values just as deeply conservative as any more traditional conservatory example.

It’s why so many people admire Bob Dylan actually, the quintessential example of avoiding at all cost any kind of static terminus. How does the song go…. “you must leave now, take what you need, you think will last.” The kind of adaptation Mcluhan talks about precludes the possibility of any thought of “leaving.” In a letter to Milton Babbitt I found myself saying “I realize I’m speaking to the original Magi captain himself.” Gosh, we need people like this!