John Cage

“Art has obscured the difference between art and life. Now let life obscure the difference between life and art”.

It's worth reminding everyone, once again, that this year marks the centenary of the birth of one of the key figures of the twentieth century, John Cage (1912 – 1992). An anniversary that, I become more convinced every day, deserves to be celebrated – and it is being celebrated, as has been happening since the start of the year, in a way that is as singular as it is remarkable, in Bologna and Rimini. In the first case with a long series (“centocage“) of talks, screenings, happenings and exclusive events – including a sleep concert, a “listening walk” through the Pilastro neighborhood, and an evening of pieces performed by children; in the second case (“Everydayjohncage“) with the day-by-day spread of quotes and audiovisual fragments related to the composer, in the press and in public and private spaces around the city. In this and other ways, the two municipalities pay an original and heartfelt tribute to the American composer, with an affection and a variety of content that they probably wouldn't even have devoted to a father figure – which, in many ways, he actually is.

For once, there's reason to marvel at the forms this commemoration has taken, necessarily different from a typical Chopin or Mahler anniversary, to name two recent examples. My involvement in this occasion grows more intense every day, precisely because of the sensitivity local authorities are showing, having understood that devoting the whole of 2012 to this towering composer is the least that can be done. Secondly, because of the ability shown by some organizers to bring out what music was during and after John Cage, and what it can still be so many years on from his beginnings; and this is happening in a joyful climate of cultural dialogue, one that no longer evokes a decrepit concert hall, but rather a genuine traveling circus, a festival of sonic discovery and tasting.

Then again, anyone who has crossed paths, even briefly, with his life and work knows (or can well imagine) that Cage was a truly unique figure, one that can't be filed under any human or musical category. Every attempt to pin labels on his work – coined anew each time, either to place it within some comprehensive analysis or, conversely, to relegate it to definitive marginality – has proven futile; so much so that even attempting a summary, here as elsewhere, looms as a titanic effort, and one unworthy of its subject.

Cage and his music (which, ultimately, amount to the same thing) do not follow a linear evolutionary path: on the contrary, like a newborn, they experience the sonic world unpredictably, welcoming every kind of stimulus in order to then absorb its secrets and imitate it. This is why his already boundless output, largely grounded in the most genuine notion of experimentation, opens itself up to a number of interpretations approaching the theory of parallel universes. A horizon so undefined that it frightens even the most willing listeners, who find themselves at a loss as to where to even begin in order to form a satisfying idea of the composer.

I myself had grown used to the idea that I couldn't really penetrate the (non-)logic of Cage's output, limiting myself to considering him a great idealist and a revolutionary, stoically devoted for his entire life to a music that was, ultimately, ugly. Obviously these were hasty, convenient judgments: it would be far too easy to hide behind the simplest of ideas (but also the most courageous and memorable), namely that 4'33" everyone knows, in order to draw rushed conclusions. It's not my intention to dwell on the historic "tacet", a score that has already been discussed far too much; nor do I intend to deny, or worse overlook, its absolute importance, both for its composer's path and for the history of music as a whole. In his book "No Such Thing as Silence" (2010), Kyle Gann even went so far as to posit the existence of two musical worlds, one before and one after 4'33"; setting aside the plausibility of that theory, the book's real merit lies in clarifying the genesis and possible meanings of this piece, still unjustly regarded today as little more than the prank of an unwelcome provocateur. Suffice it to say that, even now, despite its undisputed fame at every level, few people accept that they themselves can be part of the piece, that they can step into the imaginary frame Cage places around the world for those few minutes, debunking once and for all the equation of silence with emptiness. That's why, perhaps better than any (other) music, it represents and encapsulates the rupture that occurred in the latter half of the twentieth century.

The American composer's stance was also a form of defence against the dominant trend of the postwar years, when the structuralism preached by post-Webernian composers threatened to turn musical expression into the result of cold calculation - not without a certain latent nihilism. In response, Cage had the courage to promote an aesthetic that ran against every expectation and against common sense: on one hand, a quiet and literally simple music, almost entirely playable by non-professionals; on the other, the disordered scores born of indeterminate procedures, grounded in the certainty that chance always provides an acceptable answer. In any case, a "poetics of the irrational" as far removed as possible from the authorial despotism of both his predecessors and his contemporaries ("Personality is too fragile a thing on which to found an art"); so alien to Western logic that it destabilized the ideologies of the decade-long Darmstadt season, reversing the rigorous tendencies of its Neue Musik. Before long, the epicentre of artistic creation shifted to Greenwich Village, home of the happening, of new performance arts and of musical-theatrical avant-garde. It is in this cultural humus that Cage's insights would find support from artists such as Merce Cunningham, David Tudor and the Fluxus collective, until, in 1961, the essay collection "Silence" became a veritable Bible for the minds of that thriving American season.

A coin toss applied to the I Ching (the Book of Changes) as the emblem of a music that "imitates Nature in her manner of operation" and from which it draws an unstoppable creative energy. It's in the 1950s that the composer fully embraces Eastern philosophy, in both word and deed: "Music of Changes" (1951) is the forerunner of Cage's new compositional phase, almost entirely entrusted to chance procedures. Writing the score could only lead to chaotic, non-sequential traces, beyond any admissible form of atonality: but this maximum of disorder doesn't mark a further emancipation of dissonance, but rather the shift from mechanistic tension to peaceful indifference, from tormented determinism to chance.

From then on, Cage's work increasingly opened itself to accepting "discarded" elements, improbable pairings or - by common standards - forbidden ones, which the divinatory techniques suggested to him, with such serenity that "the falling leaf and the storm that submerges Australia carry the same weight" (Paolo Castaldi). Gradually, silence too found ample room, no longer as a brief transition between sections of a piece, but as an autonomous expressive means for a "motionless contemplation of Being".

In Cage's own words, "change means turning the mind away from its prejudices and making it available to experiences other than those it has learned to accept uncritically". Before him, the history of music had followed a gradual evolutionary path, made up of small, necessary "scandals": the change he proposed "is not disruptive, it is joyful", devoid of the subversive intent that great trailblazers often adopt; but to achieve what he had in mind, the most radical tabula rasa was necessary, ignoring the fierce judgments - not to mention the insults - and risking everything to the very end. One thinks of his legendary appearance on the Italian game show "Lascia o raddoppia", where Cage, besides competing as a mushroom expert (and winning), filled the studio with kitchen utensils to perform his "Water Music", under the astonished gaze of host Mike Bongiorno. One could say his life was an endless game of double-or-nothing, an uncompromising path that for a long time even left him living in dire financial straits.

A life of sacrifice and, above all, of misunderstanding. In a 1989 essay, James Pritchett noted that often "in consulting the literature on Cage we find ourselves confronted with misinformation, misleading generalizations and opinions based on hearsay and assumption". To this day we face an immense paradox: the most famous (infamous?) composer of the last century is also the one listened to the least, and yet the one everyone feels entitled to hold forth on, flaunting a scant - though in their own eyes sufficient - knowledge of the subject. Thus, over the decades, all manner of clichés have been kept alive, ready-made for pseudo-intellectual conversation: nothing that comes close to any genuine, more or less critical engagement with a figure who carries cultural implications of unmatched scale.

His teacher Schoenberg had pronounced, not without a touch of contempt, that Cage was certainly no composer, but rather an inventor. Unwittingly, the father of the Second Viennese School paid him the greatest possible compliment: while composers could be found (and still can be found) on every corner of the globe, the same cannot be said of those who "invent" something that endures and leaves a lasting mark on collective memory - above all, the idea that music can be found wherever one chooses to look for it.

Although he did not "found a school" in the strict sense, Cage's legacy survives and continues to be a source of inspiration (direct or otherwise) for today's avant-garde. The individual ideas he developed over his long eighty years - and even more so the wholly independent ideology from which they sprang - gradually laid the groundwork for numerous autonomous movements: from the early forms of American minimalism to the free improvisation of the 1960s and '70s, from field recording to today's Japanese onkyo (where a meditative not-playing often reigns supreme). A legacy so far-reaching it cannot be quantified: essentially, anyone who has taken the freedom to do as they please, whether in composition or performance, owes something to John Cage as well.

So we're left with an enormous body of work, both ideological and musical, which nonetheless runs the serious risk of fading away if it isn't brought back to life through new performances. Because even granting the enormous importance of the many studio recordings (especially the Mode Records series - forever be it praised), listening to Cage's compositions must necessarily go hand in hand with their live, visual dimension. Otherwise, how could we ever realize that what's being "played" are enormous shells filled with water ("Inlets")? Or that the rustling and tiny percussive sounds come from an ensemble of amplified plants ("Branches", "Child of Tree")? The revolutionary, even absurd charge of those insights makes sense above all in the gestures themselves and in those who watch and listen to them. This often accounts for a certain dissatisfaction with some records, a sense of incompleteness akin to hearing a description of a brilliant painting we cannot see with our own eyes. It's hardly surprising, moreover, that the composer was strenuously opposed to recordings, which he essentially described as a deception, a distorted snapshot of what is experienced in real life.

All the more so in his case, since we're talking about a music that, once written down, struggles to break free, pleading to emerge and take on unforeseen, spontaneous forms, shunning any predetermined shape - many pieces were conceived for instruments of the performer's choosing, even "for any way of producing sounds" - or even sequentiality itself, since performances often called for several works to be played simultaneously.

And how many wonderful examples one could cite: scores derived from the imperfections of a sheet of paper or from overlaying star charts onto the bare musical staff; the countless mesostics, poetic streams of consciousness dedicated to fellow artists and friends - at the time even recited by Demetrio Stratos; the all-devouring complexity of the "Europeras" and the tender impersonality of the suites for toy piano or music box (confirming the "childlike spirit" that animated them); right down to the extravagant three-day "prepared train" journey through Emilia-Romagna (1978), whose main stops were, fittingly enough, Bologna and Rimini.

These, and dozens of similar ideas, reflect a precise desire, knowingly embraced as a utopia: the wish to spiritually embrace every sound in the known universe, to push as far as possible beyond the paltry thing that is human understanding. "I believe that we should not act on a single level, in a single way, but in all the ways that our energy allows us. [...] Instead of trying to find the 'right way' or the 'best way' and endlessly arguing about it, we should use all the ways that come to mind". And so he did, with a music that expresses affection for every nuance, every stimulus encountered by (means of) chance and immortalized, if only in passing allusion, within his work.

"You don't need to take it for music, if that word bothers you". His humble warning didn't spare him the scorn of the self-righteous, or of those who felt they had no time to waste on such "oddities". All too often he has been lumped together indiscriminately with his mentor Marcel Duchamp, even though their respective modus operandi were diametrically opposed - in essence, Duchamp's iconoclastic, "destructive" intent toward the very concept of art versus Cage's ambition to expand it to its fullest extent.

So, against the accusations and the a priori mudslinging, I want to reclaim the importance - but above all the understated beauty - of the many pieces I've had the chance to hear and that I believe are well worth discovering. Few, in fact, would imagine the musical awareness reflected in his early works for percussion (such as the famous "Imaginary Landscapes"), often commissioned to accompany modern dance choreography; the same goes for Cunningham's ballet devoted to the seasons ("The Seasons"), almost a miniature version of Stravinsky's "Sacre". Then there are the various scores for prepared piano, another unforgettable symbol of Cage's work: a masterpiece of making a virtue of necessity, from which in turn descend the milestone "Sonatas and Interludes", perhaps the only pieces widely acknowledged as such. And then again, from the fiendishly intricate virtuoso writing for solo violin ("Freeman Etudes") all the way to the so-called "Number Pieces", to which he devoted his final years, returning to the quiet, meditative style of his late friend Morton Feldman. It's curious and rather lovely to think that, shortly before his death, Cage even managed to fulfil his one cinematic dream, One¹¹ (1992): Henning Lohner made a film for him composed entirely of light and darkness, finally free from the "tyranny of the image" and its centrality to the screen; freed from subject and narrative, cinema turns back on itself, returning to its most basic material.

Finally, I'm also glad to recall — again in a completely instinctive way — "The Wonderful Widow Of Eighteen Springs", a Joycean tribute for voice and piano that, inexplicably (and how else?), bewitched me and made me fall in love with all of this.

As Cage did throughout his life, all we can do is try: listening to what each composition has to say (or even not say), beyond whatever judgment we might form of it; taking each of them as a world unto itself, through which he loved to tell the truth about reality without needing to be appreciated for it. We remember him as warm and approachable with interviewers, to whom he would enthusiastically repeat delightful anecdotes and pearls of Zen wisdom; the faint voice, the English aplomb (despite the distinctly American spirit of his era), the infectious laugh captured in so many photographs.

Laughter, that's the real key. From our privileged vantage point, we can see that Cage handed us the possibility of not taking ourselves too seriously and, conversely, of working seriously on things perceived as frivolous. His passion for the everyday and the mundane, his banning of prohibitions, reveals "the usefulness of the useless", the need for a much, much broader view of what already exists and of what is (still) possible.

Like the man who, so many years ago, chose to reveal this secret to us, I too smile at the thought that his surname — now finally celebrated and renowned — is utterly at odds with the true gift Cage gave to music: absolute freedom.

Ride the wave of great music

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