A critic remembers John Cage
balletAlastair Macaulay writes movingly about a musician he greatly admired:
John Cage (1912-1992) died thirty-two years ago today, a few weeks before his eightieth birthday. Merce Cunningham, his life partner, came home from rehearsals on August 11 to find that Cage, lying on their kitchen floor, had had some kind of stroke. Cunningham called a friend with medical skills, who observed Cage’s eyes at the moment when matters became irreversible. They and others accompanied Cage to Saint Vincent’s Medical Center, where he died the next day. Cunningham, though he took some persuasion to do this, spent some time alone with Cage before his death.
Cunningham, always a worker (like all the men of his family), used some of the time to make notes for the dance he was then preparing (Enter). On the day after Cage’s death, he returned to work with his company, initially on rehearsing older choreography.
Various company legends sprang up, not least that he inserted into Enter (for the dancer Alan Good) the precise physical position on the floor in which Cunningham had found Cage on August 11 – but this is erroneous. The position that Cunningham gave to Good – before Cage’s death – was one observed in a Maillol sculpture (River) in the sculpture garden in the Museum of Modern Art.
It’s fair to say that, though Cage had not been active in the daily matters of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for some years, his death had a profoundly destabilising effect on that company: within the next eighteen months, half the dancers left. The connection of his death to their departures is neither simple nor obvious: few (perhaps only two) had known him remotely well. But Cage was some kind of anchor. Without him, Cunningham – despite his immediate return to work – found it excessively hard to make certain high-level administrative decisions: a situation that was not resolved for several years.
Cage was a strong personality. I hope it is true, as has been said, that Cunningham said the following very Beckettian words about his death “I come home at the end of the day and John’s not there. On the other hand, I come home at the end of the day and John’s not there.”
Read on here. The beautiful bit is yet to come.
John’s been gone thirty years. Golly, time flies. Seems like yesterday.
Perhaps 4’33” can be renamed: 30 years and counting, and let John Cage’s ideas and music rest from the noise of now, for all eternity.
John had a way of thinking out loud when in the presence of legitimate artists:
“Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck
passing by a music school?
Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical?
What if the ones inside can’t hear very well, would that change my question?”
Sometimes it’s best to seal the lips and go 4-3-3.
A telescopic time capsule from a time and place when nihilistic charlatanism was very fashionable and made good money: Cage, Cunningham, Warhol, Pollock, Rothko, etc. Who would take that stuff seriously nowadays?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrwhOLCQkI8
Cage was a charlatan and a prankster, who tried to compensate his lack of musical talent with nonsense jokes and ‘philosophy’ subtracted from Zen without understanding its background. The nihilism dressed-up with entertaining nonsense resonated with generations of wayward mental victims in the West during the Cold War, especially in the US.
But we have to be very grateful to this critic to offer us this little view. What would we be without critics? They don’t have to produce anything like art or music, their insights are enough, to lead artists and audiences the way. And then, how modest this one is, to only mention two occasions where he was praised to the heavens, which critic could have restrained himself so much? I think critics should get statues, all of them, everywhere, to remind future generations whom they have to thank for the wealth of culture defining Western civilisation.
During my college times while aiming to get my Percussion Performance Degree in I often was forced to rehearse and perform stuff from John Cage…and I could not understand why I am being forced to do so…
I can fully agree with the comment above from Mr. Borstlap.
Some of the work of Merce Cunningham is brilliant, and was certainly neither nihilistic nor charlatanistic. And, happily, is still being performed.
So interesting and moving! Thanks for posting!
Many years ago, I bought a copy of the score of 4’33” for £5.25. I felt badly ripped off. It seemed obvious that the fair price should be £4.33.