{"id":1501,"date":"2014-08-11T05:58:32","date_gmt":"2014-08-11T10:58:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rosewhitemusic.com\/piano\/?p=1501"},"modified":"2014-08-17T16:26:45","modified_gmt":"2014-08-17T21:26:45","slug":"cage-spirituality-letting-go-completely","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rosewhitemusic.com\/piano\/2014\/08\/11\/cage-spirituality-letting-go-completely\/","title":{"rendered":"8 \u2014 Letting go completely"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Morton
Morton Feldman and John Cage, c. 1950<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

[This is part of the series\u00a0<\/span>Opening the door into emptiness<\/em><\/a>]<\/span><\/p>\n

During his stay in Paris in 1949, John Cage met Pierre Boulez. Cage was energized by the younger composer’s zeal and ferocious music. They carried on a lively correspondence over the next few years, and there is no doubt that this exchange with Boulez\u00a0was a factor in Cage’s musical path at the start of the 1950s. But however similar their interests may have seemed at that time, Cage and Boulez were on fundamentally different paths, and their brief period of shared enthusiasm was doomed to break up fairly quickly. There was another younger composer from this period who\u00a0shaped\u00a0Cage’s music much more strongly, and with whom he\u00a0had a much deeper and longer-lasting friendship: Morton Feldman.<\/p>\n

Feldman and Cage met in January of 1950. Feldman had just turned 24 years old and was composing music he later described as “vaguely modernistic,” in “the sound world of a Schoenberg or a Berg.” Like both Cage and Boulez, he was excited about the work of Webern, and he attended a performance of the Webern Symphony by the New York Philharmonic. Having heard what he came to hear, Feldman left the concert after the Webern and \u00a0ran into Cage, who had done the same. Feldman\u00a0followed up with a visit to Cage’s beautiful, austere apartment on the Lower East Side, and soon moved into another apartment in the same building.<\/p>\n

Feldman and Cage found that they had much in common, and they moved through\u00a0the stimulating New York art world together. They spent long hours together discussing their music and hanging out at the Cedar Bar to talk some more with artists there. \u00a0“I can say without exaggeration that we did this every day for five years of our lives,” Feldman recalled. As implied by their having been introduced through a mutual admiration of Webern, both composers were exploring a sparse world where sounds were heard\u00a0in crystal clarity against\u00a0a field of silence. Boulez and Cage had shared an interest in systems and discipline; Feldman instead was closer to Cage spiritually, believing in the significance of sound in itself, its inherent mystery. He\u00a0wanted to move\u00a0beyond compositional rhetoric\u00a0and to find ways to project sounds directly into time. One can easily imagine Cage wanting to discuss such matters for hours on end.<\/p>\n

One evening in late 1950,\u00a0possibly after just such a conversation, Cage\u00a0went into his kitchen to cook some wild rice; Feldman sat in the next room and sketched on graph paper while he waited for dinner. What Feldman created was the graph notation of his first Projection<\/i>. When Cage emerged from the kitchen, Feldman showed him empty rectangular spaces representing sounds to be produced in general\u00a0registers (high, medium, low). None of the specific pitches or rhythms were notated at all. It was the graph notation that would become his\u00a0first\u00a0Projection\u00a0<\/em>for solo cello.<\/p>\n

\"Morton
Morton Feldman: Projection for solo cello<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Seeing Feldman’s empty squares,\u00a0Cage was astonished. His musical and spiritual journey seemed to lead to this very moment. He had been unsatisfied with his life as an ambitious composer, and this unsatisfactoriness had led him to ask why he wrote music at all. He had seen that the true purpose of music must be to connect the individual to the eternal, and that in order to do this, he had to let go of ambition, loosen his ego\u2019s hold on his music. As he worked through his compositional approach, he had seen that it was systematic procedures that could produce a space within which his musical continuities could take on more freedom, producing moments of pure sonic experience that touched something larger. And now Feldman demonstrated at one stroke the extent to which freedom was possible: one need only step out of the way and let the sounds emerge from the silence of their own accord. With regards to creating musical continuity, there was literally nothing that needed to\u00a0be done. Feldman\u2019s graph notation was radical for Cage not only because it showed that relinquishment of control could be taken further\u2014much further\u2014than he himself had done so far, but also because of the way in which Feldman did it: casually, effortlessly, completely, in an idle moment while waiting for dinner.<\/p>\n

Feldman’s Projection<\/em>\u00a0was a revelation for Cage, the\u00a0opening of a door to an entirely new world, \u201cnot just the musical world outside of you\u201d, as he\u00a0later described it, \u201cbut the musical world inside of you.\u201d He now saw how to make the last movement of his piano concerto, how to bring piano and orchestra together and have them both follow the silent voice of chance.\u00a0Feldman never saw the graph notation as embracing chance or randomness, but Cage saw it\u00a0in the context of his own journey, and chance music was the path it pointed out to\u00a0him. Spiritually, he saw Feldman’s remarkable notation as\u00a0the discovery of a hidden wisdom achieved through a brave\u00a0act of self-negation. Feldman, of course, saw this\u00a0differently as well.\u00a0When Cage excitedly described Feldman as \u201cheroic\u201d to the Artists\u2019 Club in January of 1951, Feldman\u2019s response was \u201cthat\u2019s not me, that\u2019s John.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read the next post in this series: 9 \u2014 Opening up another world<\/a><\/p>\n

Sources & asides<\/h2>\n
\n

Morton Feldman recounted his early experiences with Cage in liner notes for a 1963 album on Time Records, republished as “Liner notes” in\u00a0Give my regards to Eighth Street: Collected writings of Morton Feldman<\/em> (B. H. Friedman, editor, Exact Change, 2000), pp. 3\u20137; and in the title essay from that same collection (originally published in in 1968), pp. 93\u2013101. Feldman also reminisces about this time in an interview with Alan Beckett of the\u00a0International Times<\/em> in 1966, reprinted in\u00a0Morton Feldman says: Selected interviews and lectures 1954\u20131987<\/em> (Chris Villars, ed., Hyphen Press, 2006), pp. 30\u201333. \u00a0The story of the wild rice appears in Jan Williams, \u201cAn interview with Morton Feldman\u201d, originally in\u00a0Percussive notes<\/em>, September 1983, republished in\u00a0Morton Feldman says<\/em>, p. 153.<\/p>\n

John Cage describes Feldman as having “discovered a world” in conversation with Feldman in \u201cRadio happening I\u201d, recorded at WBAI, New York, 9 July 1966. Transcript published in John Cage and Morton Feldman, Radio happenings I-V<\/i> (Cologne: MusikTexte, 1993), p. 17. Cage notes the difference between his own characterization of Feldman’s work and Feldman’s self-view in the\u00a0introduction to \u201cLecture on Something\u201d, Silence<\/i>, p. 128.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Morton Feldman’s “Projection” showed John Cage the destination of his musical-spiritual journey. It was a revelation, the opening of a door to an entirely new world, \u201cnot just the musical world outside of you\u201d, as he later described it, \u201cbut the musical world inside of you.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[14,12,46],"class_list":["post-1501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cage","tag-cage-2","tag-feldman","tag-spirituality"],"yoast_head":"\n8 \u2014 Letting go completely - The piano in my life<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Morton Feldman's "Projection" showed John Cage the destination of his musical-spiritual journey. 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