Review Summary: That’s just, like, your opinion man.
Disasterpiece Series No. 5
The point of western music, if not all western art, it seems to me, is to be a medium through which something, anything, can be communicated. This is true, I think, for all acoustic genres. The maxim applies to both the biggies like classical and jazz, and to genres of the avant-garde like experimental, atonal, serial, and minimalist, etc. To illustrate, in an albeit rough fashion: Bach and the Baroques used music to turn humanity’s collective conscience towards God, Mozart and the Classicists used music to reconcile reasoned form and proportion with high art, and Chopin and the Romantics used music to explore the untraversed peaks and valleys of unadulterated emotion. The maxim even applies to Schoenberg and the Atonalists whom in a rebuke of western music’s harmonic and rhythmic traditions, demonstrated that music can be, if not should be, something more than dictated to by the tyranny of the downbeat and the relationship between the dominant and the tonic. I could go on, but you probably get the point.
If there’s one overarching narrative here, it’s that over time the scope of the medium has almost exponentially broadened and deepened; each successive era had asked themselves but one pertinent question, “Can music do more？”, and the answer to that question had always been, and probably always will be, a resounding, “Yes!” This point leads me to the not quite a musician, but not quite not a musician, the Modernist hero, John Cage. Ah, yes, Mr. Radical, Mr. Chance, the guy who stuck tools in his piano, composed a piece of pure silence, and quite literally asked the gods how they wanted his music to sound.
So, what is it that John Cage wanted, or wanted music, to say？As a man disillusioned with the idea of music as a means of personal communication, Cage was determined to take the composer out of the composition process, and to prove that “real” music is written by the stars and is profoundly beyond anything our human frailties, with all our pettiness and egomania, is capable of allowing. All of this is, of course, to say that “real” music doesn’t actually say anything, and that all of our notions about music are akin to those perceptions about reality held by the dwellers in Plato’s cave.
That on Cage the irony was utterly lost—what is a more emphatic and therefore personal proposition than to rebuke nine hundred and fifty years of musical dogma by inventing a wholly new process of composition？—is not part of the purview of this review. What I do want to dissect, though, are Cage’s conceptions about music, and to do this through a discussion of the musical and philosophical failures of Cage’s “Organ²/ASLSP”, or “As Slow as Possible”.
First, a bit about the piece: it was composed in 1987 and for the Organ, it consists of a series of eight short sections—any seven of which are to be played—, repetition may occur anywhere in the series although it does not have to, its lowest note is Ab two, and it was written in space notation and therefore has no tempo or rhythmic markings. Insofar as the notes and their ordering are concerned, it’s exactly what you might expect from John Cage; there is no order, just dissonant non-harmonic tones randomly placed: some tri-tones here, some minor seconds there, some major thirds here, some minor thirds there, some pedal tones here, some held tones there. That’s it, just harshness and noise. This is the first failure of ASLSP, and indeed of much of Cage’s chance music; there is barely any aesthetic difference between itself and serialism. Put on anything by Webern and you’ll see what I mean. Cage should have been forced to admit that music determined by serialism can mimic the music of reality equally as well as music determined by chance procedures. Moreover, it would seem that Cage’s goal to mimic reality is no different than the goal of Debussy and the Impressionists.
But in a piece titled, “As Slow as Possible”, the tones become irrelevant. This brings us to the meatier part of the discussion, the tempo, the lack of which is the second failure of Cage’s ASLSP. Unless Cage asked the
I Ching (a divination text used in ancient China which Cage adopted for virtually all of his post-1950 compositions) whether or not he should use a tempo marking, and to my knowledge he did not, then he made a formative decision to impart his own will onto the piece. If this is the case, then the one facet of the piece that makes it compositionally worthy has actually been determined by the composer, for if it is true that “real” music must be dictated to by chance alone, then ASLSP is not “real” music. For a thinker of Cage’s stripe, he should have known better.
The biggest failure of ASLSP is in its performance. Since the only tempo indication is indefinite, “as slow as possible”, then the performance of the piece is necessarily determined by the will of the performer. As this is the case, Cage did not even meet his goal half way. Not only was the composer not removed from the composition process, but the performer, necessarily a human being, was not removed from the performance process. That there’s only a one in a billion chance that any two performances would ever be the same demonstrates exactly how the music, as it flies through our ears, is communicated through the means of a human, not all of whom may share Cage’s opinions on the proper performance of chance music. One may interpret melody, a monster no-no, and another may not.
But just how slow is as slow as possible？As it pertains to the performance of a piece of music, any answer to that question is necessarily arbitrary, for no species, let alone a single human, can perform for infinity. Performances have lasted anywhere from twenty to seventy minutes, nine hours, twelve hours, fifteen hours, twenty-four hours, and, wait for it…six hundred and thirty-nine years. Yes, you read that right. Given that an organ imposes no time restrictions, in 1997 a gaggle of musicologists and philosophers got together to discuss the implications of “as slow as possible”. Almost as arbitrarily as possible they decided that the answer to that question is six hundred and thirty-nine years. Their rational？1361 saw the instillation of the first permanent pipe organ, six hundred and thirty-nine years before the proposed start date in 2000. The piece began with a seventeen-month rest and note changes take place every couple of years. The novelty impressed upon a mere mortal should wear off real quick. If only I were a demi-god.
John Cage seems like the kind of guy who would tell me that all my subjektivities r belong 2 discursive regimes uv power, or that my critiques of his music are “just like, your opinion man”. And I’m sorry, but you have to be an asshole to think you are getting divine permission to compose in a non-traditional manner. Did Cage expand the scope of the medium？Sure. But that doesn’t mean he’s not a one-trick pony.
