{"id":2340,"date":"2024-10-22T13:30:38","date_gmt":"2024-10-22T18:30:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rosewhitemusic.com\/piano\/?p=2340"},"modified":"2024-10-22T13:32:03","modified_gmt":"2024-10-22T18:32:03","slug":"talking-about-zen-and-john-cage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rosewhitemusic.com\/piano\/2024\/10\/22\/talking-about-zen-and-john-cage\/","title":{"rendered":"Talking about Zen and John Cage"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Me<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

There has been much written about John Cage and his interest in Zen Buddhism. It is often highlighted as a source of his radically empirical aesthetic, his embrace of silence, and his reliance on randomness in his music. In my own writings, however, I’ve avoided the subject. I devoted a couple of pages to Zen in my book on Cage’s music<\/a>, but that’s about it. My extended writing on Cage’s spiritual journey<\/a> has hardly any mention of Zen at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, like 4\u2032 33\u2033<\/em>, the silent piece<\/a> (another perennial Cage subject that I avoided for years), Zen has been nagging at the back of my mind ever since I wrote that series about Cage’s spiritual journey. Then, out of the blue, the opportunity arose to take a deeper look. I received an invitation from the library at Chuang Yen Monastery in Carmel, New York<\/a> to speak about Zen and John Cage. They were planning a series of concerts and talks on the theme of Buddhism and music, and this was a topic that was of interest to them. I happily accepted the invitation, and I delivered my talk in late July. It’s now available on YouTube<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Preparing the lecture, I immersed myself once again in sources that I hadn’t looked at since I wrote my book on Cage over thirty years ago. Overall, I’m still in agreement with what I wrote then:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The relationship of Cage’s composition to his study of Zen Buddhism was not one in which Zen “influenced” him to act and think in certain ways: Cage’s understanding of Zen was shaped as much by his compositional concerns as his composition was shaped by his interest in Zen.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I’d modify that today to say that Zen didn’t so much shape Cage’s music as it provided him a framework to justify and explain it. As such, I see Zen’s impact far more prominently in Cage’s writings than in his music. I have a lot more knowledge of Buddhism (partly from personal experience) than I had thirty years ago, and the clash between my take on Buddhism and Cage’s was a new development for me as well. As a follow up, I’m planning to write a series of more in-depth essays in the near future about subjects related to Zen and Cage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The lecture is about an hour and was tailored to a non-specialist audience: people who know something about Buddhism but probably not a lot about Cage. A note about the audio: the recording quality of the lecture is pretty good, but the musical examples distort in the louder passages. The lecture lasts an hour, I played the complete Mode recording of Cage’s Ryoanji<\/em><\/a> (starting at about 1:05:30), and then there’s a short question-and-answer period (starting at 1:23:30).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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