The Metaphysics of Finding
In his effort to create music completely free of personal intentions and expressive elements, of categories of taste and aesthetic prejudices, dislikes, or preferences, John Cage set out to let chance reign in the essential core of his art and his existence. He had already had many years of experience with an attitude toward life derived from the spirit of Zen Buddhism in 1950 when he discovered the "I Ching", the millennia-old Chinese "Book of Changes", whose sixty-four hexagram configurations of strong and weak lines offer us insight into the laws of cosmic contingencies.
Composing all his music, finding it, discovering it, would from that point on be based on chance operations in which the methods of the "I Ching" played a crucial role. Among other works, "Music of Changes" for piano of 1951 made the paradigm shift to composition with an awareness of nonintentionality. Cage determined all aspects of the cyclical work with the aid of binary random decisions made with the "I Ching": the notes, their constellations and densities; their durations, dynamics, tempi; the phases of silence or layers of sound events.
To say nothing of interrogating the "Book of Changes" by means of yarrow stalks, it quickly became clear how much time it took to make many thousand decisions even by flipping coins and using number scales and diagrams. Cage had to find faster and more efficient methods to capture absolute chance in his music.
A kindly disposed fellow composer remarked that Cage had not yet succeeded in "eliminating his highly refined and individual taste from the music derived from the I Ching". The times and the opportunities were not yet ripe for computer-aided interrogations of the oracle. In order to choose his sounds in a mode with the minimum intentionality and control, Cage was soon experimenting successfully with astronomical charts and graphic overlays, with playing cards, and with multiple folds in paper.
When turning his gaze to unwritten, white paper – in 1952, the same year he composed "4'33" and thus discovered that there could be no silence that was not filled with sounds – Cage discovered his most radical solution: "Suddenly I saw that the music, all the music, was already there." He had discovered the basic idea for the multipart series "Music for Piano".
Beat Furrer, Mauricio Sotelo, György Kurtág, Steve Reich, György Ligeti, Toshio Hosokawa, John Cage, Galina Ustvolskaya, Klaus Huber, Franck Christoph Yeznikian
John Cage
John Cage