| 3.
Silent biography
Introduction
to John Cage
I thought that
the best introduction to John Cage would be an 'incomplete'
or 'imperfect' mestostic. 'Incomplete' as I
would like to leave enough space for thoughts. Cage described his mesostic
technique as follows:
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"Like
acrostics, mesostics are written in the conventional way horizontally,
but at the same time they follow a vertical rule, down the middle
not down the edge as in an acrostic, a string spells a word or name,
not necessarily connected with what is being written, though it
may be. This vertical rule is lettristic and in my practice the
letters are capitalized. Between two capitals in a perfect or 100%
mesostic neither letter may appear in the lower case. In the writing
of the wing words, the horizontal text, the letters of the vertical
string help me out of sentimentality. I have something to do, a
puzzle to solve. This way of responding makes me feel in this respect
one with the Japanese people, who formerly, I once learned, turned
their letter writing into the writing of poems (...)"(1) |
My mesostics follow
a vertical line while the horizontal words consist of different quotations
by Cage. Quotations which, in the case of Cage, contain a stronger message
than an encyclopaedic biography. Respecting Cage's ideas such
as experience, silence and non-teaching, I would like to leave the reader
with the following mesostic. In order to make it easier to identify
Cage's thoughts, I used different type faces. To my astonishment,
I found out later that Cage, as a consequence of dealing more and more
with the media, also used various font types in various chapters of
his book A Year from Monday. In the first chapter, Diary:
How to improve the world (you will only make matters worse) 1965,
Cage made use of twelve different type faces, letting chance operations
determine which face would be used for which statement.
| DiSharmony |
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As
far as COnsistency Of |
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I
aM here and |
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ThERe
is |
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iS |
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NothING
To say |
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L |
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E |
SPACE FOR
YOUR THOUGHTS |
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N |
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Thought |
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B |
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sImply |
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GOes
I |
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G |
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HaRmony
we |
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Are |
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Prefer |
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everytHing
is permitted |
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InconsIstency |
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UnacCustomed
to |
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zero
is the bAsis |
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L |
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T |
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H |
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| Empty |
O |
Canvas |
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U |
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G |
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H |
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T |
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| WE
NEED NOT FEAR THESE SILENCES |
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Cage, John Milton, Jr. (1912-92), American composer, who
had a profound influence on avant-garde music and dance. Born
September 5, 1912, in Los Angeles, he studied with the American
composers Henry Cowell and Adolph Weiss and the Austrian-born
composer Arnold Schoenberg. In 1942 he settled in New York City.
Influenced by Zen Buddhism, Cage often used silence as a musical
element, with sounds as entities hanging in time, and he sought
to achieve randomness in his music. In Music of Changes (1951),
for piano, tone combinations occur in a sequence determined
by casting lots. In 4'33" (1952), the performers sit silently
at instruments; the unconnected sounds of the environment are
the music. Like Theatre Piece (1960), in which musicians, dancers,
and mimes perform randomly selected tasks, 4'33" dissolves
the borders separating music, sound, and nonmusical phenomena.
In Cage's pieces for prepared piano, such as Amores (1943),
foreign objects modify the sounds of the piano strings. Cage
wrote dance works for the American choreographer Merce Cunningham.
His books include Silence (1961), Empty Words (1979), and X
(1983).(2)
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To refer back to Cézanne's quotation at the beginning of this chapter--Duchamp
proposes the work of art as an independent creation, brought into being
a joint effort by the artist, the spectator, and the unpredictable actions
of chance--a freer creation that its very nature, may be more complex,
more interesting, more original, and truer to life than a work that is
subject to the limitations of the artist's personal control. >>Next
page
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 1.
John Cage, Quotations found in the Web: http://www.english.upenn.edu/??afilreis/88/cage-quotes.html
2.
"Cage, John Milton, Jr.," Microsoft (R) Encarta. Copyright (c) 1994 Microsoft Corporation. Copyright (c) 1994 Funk &
Wagnall's Corporation.
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