Pretentiousness, Philistinism and Gullibility

“John Cage - 4'33" What pretentious bollocks (I’d rather be dismissed as philistine than a gullible fool).” - Richard Dawkins, tweeted on 19th July, 2015.

The above comment is a tweet sent from the account of Dr Richard Dawkins, once a respected scientist and evolutionary biologist but, in more recent times, a self-important defender of rationality against "pretentious obscurantism". "Pretentious" is a word that Dawkins loves but I wonder if he has ever considered the idea that it might apply to him almost with the truthfulness and precision of a dictionary definition? Whatever the truth of this, Dawkins is one of a modern breed of intellectuals today who gets carried away with his own importance and starts to believe that his views on various topics are not only necessary but important contributions. As a study in a certain kind of modern mind he is a textbook case. Before continuing I should probably point out here that, like Dawkins, I am ​not​ a believer in gods.

I take as my subject today just that sparse tweet at the top of the article. It encapsulates, I think, pretty much all that needs to be said about Dr Richard Dawkins. He rushes to judgment (on the basis of his own background beliefs and seemingly without thinking about it) and would rather be thought of as someone without nuance and thoughtful insight who has been exposed to different forms of culture (a philistine) than be called someone who can be fooled through lack of knowledge (gullible).

And it is knowledge (and its regular companion truth) that are the issues here. Dawkins, as his many public utterances amply show, is a man fixated by these things. He venerates them as surely as any religious worshipper has ever venerated their god. Indeed, I'll go out on a limb and say that he venerates them MUCH MORE than many religious worshippers venerate their god. In his Twitter bio Dawkins refers to "the poetry of reality". This is a gloss to make him seem a bit more artistic and touchy-feely than he actually is. For what Dawkins is really interested in is facts. For Dawkins, facts arbitrate all things. There isn't any real space for poetry - of reality or any other kind. Poems aren't about facts. Poems are about interpretations. You can bet that Dawkins doesn't want reality interpreting. He just wants to know what it is in itself. For Dawkins, facts are completely transparent and need no help from interpretations.

So why should Cage’s 4’33” be thought of by a man who likes to present himself as straightforward, rational and concerned with poetry as “pretentious bollocks”? I really do wonder if Dawkins knows what the point of 4’33” was and what the artistic impulse behind it was. I think he must not for, if he did, he might start to realise that maybe he and Cage have more in common than he first imagined. Cage was a man fascinated with “the poetry of reality” too. In fact, so much was he fascinated with this poetry that he tried to reproduce its chaos and randomness in his music. Not only did he admire the poetry of reality, he allowed room for it in his compositions and the performances of his pieces. So why is Dawkins being so churlish and unkind?

Self-importance and pretentiousness certainly play a role here. Dawkins is a man who is happy to go down in a culture war provided he can happily look at his sinking galleon from the captain’s deck and see the prize of truth still firmly lashed on board. Dawkins is a man for whom a plurality of views (such as poems might give) would be an obfuscation. You are not allowed ​your​ truth and ​your​ experience has no power to mediate anything when Dawkins is in town. William James can go to hell with his ideas that people can believe whatever has the power to convince their will. The truth is one and Dawkins is its disciple (and, presumably in his own mind, its possessor too). So you want to create a piece of music (music for Cage was sounds ​and​ silences) which is different every time because it is focusing on the ambience and sounds in the room rather than a piece played from the stage? Pretentious bollocks! How dare you be so innovative! How dare you think outside of my box! Insight should be coming from the stage and you should be playing the music for us, telling us how it is!

In this we see that for Dawkins - in matters of truth as in matters of art - he holds an authoritarian model. This is based on someone at the front (who possesses the knowledge) and they then spread that out to us who are passive recipients of it. In this, Dawkins is not so much a philistine as just one more example of an old way of thinking. Dawkins is a relic and just one more person taking up the cudgels for a reality based in a certain way of thinking, the way that thinks there is one truth and one way things are (his way). Success is in claiming to know this way and having possession of its supposed truth. In this he is exactly the same as pretty much all the religionists he wants to “good-humouredly ridicule”. He is a dog fighting over the bone of knowledge with those he (in truth) despises. He is not unlike them at all. He just has different gods.

For what is it when a man’s deepest fear be that others will think him gullible? How might one fight off the charge of gullibility? Only, it seems to me, by claiming to have the twin weapons of knowledge and truth at your side. But has Dawkins done the philosophical legwork here? Assuming you have the truth and that you know things is something anyone can do. In many cases the world might even let you go on believing it. Indeed, its something everyone always already does. But its being able to show it with some justification that counts. Surely even a gullible philistine like Dawkins can see that saying you have found the best current way of describing how something works or the best current way to describe the human situation with regard to belief in gods ​does not make that the truth in itself​? This latter epithet is but a compliment you pay to your beliefs that you can’t substantiate, perhaps because you think your views are important, right or because you just don’t think about things very much anymore.

Let’s be clear. All of us are at certain points gullible. None of us possess the required amount of perspicuity. Knowledge and truth are items with disputed values and the status they confer on beliefs is even more disputed than that. But only those who worship knowledge and truth fear being thought of as gullible. The world will keep on spinning even though evolutionary biologists feel free to parcel out their ignorant views on the music of world renowned musicians and theoreticians of music. But it does perhaps behoove a man who claims to represent rationality to be a little bit more rational in his views. As it stands, a tweet such as the one Dawkins put out that day just shows him to be what some of his critics would take him to be: a closed-minded agenda seeking targets, a man so trapped in the network of his own beliefs that he sees infidels everywhere people don’t speak in his rationalist vocabulary of knowledge and truth perspicuous to minds like his, a man so committed to a preening self-regard that understanding and appreciating others has given way to a sterile search for, and veneration of, “truth”. Not only is this an exceedingly arrogant belief, it is philistine in its levels of gullibility.

Back To The Future... with John Cage

In his book "Empty Words," a collection of his writings from the mid to late 1970s, John Cage has a paper entitled "The Future of Music". It is a fascinating paper to read and, to my 2017 ears, very prescient. Of course, the future of music is not a foreign subject to Cage for, since his first involvement with music in the 1930s, he had always had a far-sighted approach to what would be coming down the musical pipe and where we would be going. It was in 1937, in another writing of his, that he had predicted that music would become electronic and that then music, as we previously knew it, would change forever. He was, of course, utterly correct about that. It is strange to read a paper first delivered in 1974 that is about the future for, of course, I writing this and you reading it are in it. This gives us an angle on Cage's thoughts and pronouncements that he couldn't possibly have had for we know what happened whereas he could only look and imagine. Nevertheless, Cage, as I have already suggested, seems to do remarkably well. Even from 1974.

In "The Future of Music" Cage is suitably modest. Were someone else writing the paper and not he they would have good reason to argue that Cage did his own fair share of heavy lifting to bring in the very future he talks about. When Cage refers to others (for he was surely not alone) who have worked to drag the future into the present he does not mention himself but, of course, he would have every right to do so. Cage was one of a number of those who worked early on with electronics. Before that he had invented the prepared piano, something that survives to this day. He had pioneered the usage of other people's recorded music as something to be reused and altered in performance which later would be called sampling and become the basis for whole branches of electronic music. So Cage was no effete thinker sitting and observing what the future might be like as some academic philosopher of music. He was one of those making it, a practitioner, a doer. And not only did he work to smash the barrier between the acceptabilities of now and those that would be acceptable in the future, sometimes he erased the boundaries of musical acceptability too. Even today, in 2017, a time we would regard as much freer musically, there are those who tut and shake their head at Cage's name. His idea that all sound is music is anathema to them and still an unacceptable outrage.

And yet Cage in 1974 begins his paper thus: "For many years I've noticed that music - as an activity separated from the rest of life - doesn't enter my mind." He goes on to say that "Strictly musical questions are no longer serious questions" for him. There is something going on here and it has nothing to do with music as a discreet subject hacked off from life and treated as something you do in a sectioned off portion of it. Music and life are somehow intertwined here, inseparable. Cage, by this time already about 40 years into his entwinement with music, can look back at how music has changed over several decades. He can see how, when he started, people were still fighting for the idea that noises, then thought different to sounds, were something beyond the musical pail. He mentions Edgard Varese and says he fought with him (against the musical establishment) on the side of noises. He recounts how, in the 1930s, the only notable piece of percussion music was a piece by Varese himself ("Ionisation") but that, already by the 1940s, several hundred had appeared. This strikes me as odd but I genuinely think that many of us know little of how radically music changed between the start of the 20th century and when we came into it towards the latter part of it. We reading this now are the electronic music generation but Cage was one of those that brought it to be. He knew music before electricity whereas we do not. A musical comment of Cage's in the paper makes this point in a way I find vaguely amusing: "Sounds formerly considered out of tune are now called microtones."

So between the 1930s and 1970s Cage sees that music has changed and it was because of musicians being brave enough to step outside of its presumed boundaries and just do something different. This was not always an easy thing to do. Cage himself, for example, was often poor and relied on friends or sponsors to survive. His turn to indeterminate music did not help him in this because it made many a respectable musician (or potential sponsor) turn their back to him and regard him as persona non grata. But Cage was not for turning back and would struggle on with his own wayward, indeterminate thoughts in his head. Music for him, and those like him, was an exploration. Electricity made sounds and combinations of sounds possible that could not happen in the natural world and he was determined to explore them. There was a time this was called "experimental music" and Cage did not like this. But he came to accept that description for it. In "The Future of Music" he notes how the work done in the 40s and 50s presaged a change in the way we perceive both sounds and time and that aspects of both became tolerable that formerly were not. The picture as a whole is one of discovery, of widening boundaries. This, of course, will always scare those who perceive of themselves as protectors of the old or of orthodoxy and Cage, as the prime example, is a composer who divides people straight down the middle with his ideas and approaches. Cage notes that, in 1974, "Anything goes" but he states that, even then, "not everything is attempted." 

One interesting distinction Cage makes here, and its one that has come very much into his future and our present, is the idea of music as process. Formerly, Cage reports, the guiding idea was "structure". "Structure," says Cage, "is like a piece of furniture, whereas process is like the weather." He means to suggest that structure is known and can be probed. It is defined and definite. You can look at a table or a chair and see where all the bits go and how they fit together. But with weather this isn't quite so. We can, of course, observe changes in it but we are never quite sure how it fits together or where the beginning and the end of the changes are. There is no sense, at any given moment, just exactly where we are. In structure we would know. We could pinpoint our place exactly on the table. Not so with weather, our symbol for process. Here we are forever in what Cage calls "the nowmoment" but we are never sure how that nowmoment relates to all the other nowmoments that shall be and shall pass away again. This metaphor, applied musically, changes things. This spatial sense seems to change music itself and alter time, a crucial aspect to music, and how you experience it. Imagine not knowing exactly where you are in your musical piece. Imagine being stuck in a moment and then working within that moment to negotiate your way to the next one. A musical structure is an object rigidly defined. But a process is not and neither can process be rigidly defined. Cage notes that "were a limit set to possible musical processes, a process outside that limit would surely be discovered." Process can include objects too but the reverse isn't true at all. If you are thinking this process conception is very much like a view of the world not as discreet objects but as of all nature together as an environment I would very much agree with you.

Cage goes into a discussion of what he calls "closed-mindedness" and "open-mindedness" and this is a very important section of "The Future of Music". He calls the difference between these two "the difference between information about something... and that something itself." He quotes something written by Charles Ives to strengthen this point: "Nature builds the mountains and meadows and man puts in the fences and labels." Cage says that now "The fences have come down and the labels are being removed." That is, if we are open-minded. The closed-minded still take it that men should put up their artificial fences and apply their fabricated labels to the mountains and meadows of music as if they were inviolable elements. For the open-minded, as Cage sees it, they are not. "An up-to-date aquarium has all the fish swimming in one tank" is Cage's musical vision and this is a tank full of all the sounds and noises that are made, and that could be made, and the musics that could be made with them.

It is here that Cage surveys his musical history and gives reasons for why this spirit of musical open-mindedness has come about and they are interesting ones. First, because "many composers" took up battles for new musical expression, casting off old rules in the process. (This is where Cage could have used himself as a prime example but didn't quoting Cowell and Varese amongst others instead.) Second, Cage notes the changing technology which made changes in sound and therefore music inevitable. This is a point I have made in blogs before but regarding a period after Cage had written this paper. Yet Cage is writing about a period in which tape recorders, sound systems, computers and the first properly usable synthesizers were invented. Of course such inventions would change music. Thirdly, Cage notes that even by the 70s there is what he calls "the interpenetration of cultures" happening. In some spheres this is regarded as a bad thing and much political strife has ensued because of it. But, musically conceived, this has opened up cultures to other ways of conceiving things with the result that the whole is changed. It is to recognise that "music" is not how your culture conceives the rules for such a thing to be at all. Cage's final reason for the open-mindedness is that there are now more of us and more ways than ever to get in touch with each other. Cage could not have known in 1974 how this would exponentially increase. Speaking in his time and place writing the paper he was thinking of telephone and aeroplane. Now we can compose together live on electronic devices linked by wifi or over the Internet. We can musically collaborate with people we will never meet in real time. Cage's point is that when we are exposed to others it inevitably changes us. "Open-mindedness" is the inevitable result.

It is here that we begin to intuit again that, for Cage, music and life are not to be separated. There is some sense in which they are an indivisible organism. As life changes, music will change. As in other places Cage will say we should be open to the life, and so the sounds, that we are living, so here the sense is that our changing lives will be changing music and we should not resist this. We should welcome the change and the new experience rather than, scared and timid, clinging on to rules and formulations which give us a false and unnecessary sense of security. Cage's own change in attitude towards music came when he found he could no longer hold on to the orthodox view of music as communication. He found, he reports in an autobiographical statement, that people would sometimes laugh at music he intended to be somber. So for him the communicative model was a failure. Searching around he found within the Buddhist tradition the notion that "Music's ancient purpose (was) to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences." In modern atheistic ears this sounds a bit queer yet we need to remember that Buddhists are not theists either and they believe in no god. So this cannot refer to actual divinities. The question then becomes what it could refer to and this is a riddle I think each musician should tackle for themselves. In any case, it is inescapable that one must recognise that Cage's musical appreciation after the mid 1940s is completely linked to his Buddhist education. Thus, I think, it is unarguable that this is why Cage sees music and life so entwined. But we do not need to be Buddhists ourselves to appreciate Cage's insights which can be taken on their own merits. This therapeutic use of music, if that is what it is, is much in evidence today (Cage's future) as ever more people listen to or play their own music as a means to relax, unwind or simply be taken out of the space in which their daily lives are going on.

Cage builds upon his reasons for open-mindedness and talks about "the non-political togetherness of people". In musical context he sees the future as being about the collapsing of distinctions between composers, performers and listeners. This has to be seen against a historic background in which these roles were rigidly defined and, indeed, separated. One strand here is the invention of indeterminate music (again, he examples others such as Feldman and Wolff as opposed to himself) which gives performers instructions about what to do but not necessarily what to play. So performers, those who have not written the music they play, then become part-time composers in playing within the instructions they have been given. The idea here is of "co-operation" which is another name for what is essentially the making of music socially. Again, and secondly, Cage mentions technology in this regard as it blurs the lines between the roles of composer, performer and listener. Cage, anachronistically to our ears, refers to the people of 1974 who could afford to buy a camera and so regard themselves as photographers. Today we have phones with music studios inside them. Should we not similarly regard ourselves as composers and performers? Cage emphasizes the social nature of this and, indeed, today "phone jams" are possible as people with the requisite technology play together to create music cooperatively on the fly. So Cage got this development bang on. A third way this distinction breaks down is, once again, because many diverse peoples have come into contact with each other. Places where these roles were never very distinct in any case have come into contact with those where they were and a reshuffling of the deck has taken place. Places where improvised music is normal have met those where it was not. And this changes, and opens, minds.

I stop my flow here to note something Cage says in passing. It is perhaps not widely known that John Cage was not a fan of recording his music or, indeed, of recorded music at all. He regarded recordings as, in some sense, dead music. He did not listen to much recorded music and was less than enthusiastic about the recording of his own works. Here he notes that "the popularity of recordings is unfortunate". He thinks this is so not only for musical reasons (think about all that is involved in a musical sense in the idea of setting one moment in time as a repeatable phenomenon) but also for social ones. The sense I get, and he may well make this explicit elsewhere, is that for him music is a living thing, a constant "nowmoment" or cornucopia of possible nowmoments. These happen live and cannot be captured or fettled into some perfect, preserved form (god forbid!). If you think that music is all around us and alive because all sound is music then what could be the musical relevance of saving and repeating some of the sounds when an endless supply is always at hand? The captive form cannot compete with the living, unpredictable experience. Here in this case Cage argues that it is not the task of music to be collected together in some recording so that one person may experience it but it is, instead, the task of music to bring the actual people together, blur the roles of composer, performer and listener and bring all the people together instead. Thus, he will mention with favour the jam session and the music circus.

Cage goes on to note that musical changes have accompanied societal changes and, indeed, the world of the 1970s was not the world of the 1930s and 1940s. This societal change has only increased since Cage wrote and so has the music. Cage, like Morton Subotnick, foresaw a time when ordinary citizens, not composers or musical performers, would have music-making possibilities in their own bags and pockets and, indeed, we are now in that time surrounded by more people of more differing backgrounds than ever before and with the possibility to converse and communicate musically with people from pretty much any country of the world. This cooperative, cross border music-making vision is something that chimes well with Cage's political beliefs as one who thought that the best government was the one that didn't govern (because it didn't need to). But there is another point embedded here in this which needs to be teased out. This is that while Cage conceived that "revolution remains our proper concern" he didn't think this was something we should plan or stop what we were doing to initiate. He thought that revolution was properly that thing that we were at all times already within. This is not simply a political point but a thoroughly musical one as well. It is, as he quotes M.C. Richards, "an art of transformation voluntarily undertaken from within". I wonder how many people conceive of their music as that or how many even realise that their music could be transformative? Is it the case that many are happy with their therapeutic twiddling, unaware of the power that lays in their hands? This is not thought of as an explosive, violent phenomenon but as revolution as evolution, the music that changes us and so the world.

You see, for Cage this all fits together as one organic whole. Music is not a discreet subject for him, governed by archaic and artificial man-made rules. Music is not something you set a time period aside for to do. Music is life and life is music. What you do in one, you do in the other. What you do musically reflects and affects who you are personally and, by extension, socially. Cage sees his band of future musicians as ready for a new world and as taking part in bringing it about. This is a very particular vision and it embroils music in things much wider than itself from the point of view of those who don't see things this way. So Cage is in an entirely different word from people, for example, who fetishize machines or regard what you use as important. We would not find him saying how great this equipment or that equipment is. He would not like the idea of electronic musicians being led by the nose by manufacturers who egg on the notion that unless you have this device then your musical life is somehow incomplete. Indeed, Cage expressly says in "The Future of Music" that "Musicians can do without government." Cage almost seems to suggest that the kinds of music you make will reflect the kind of person you are and the kind of society you envisage. He speaks of "the practicality of anarchy" and of "less anarchic kinds of music" that example "less anarchic forms of society". The message here seems to be that what you are and what you value will be shown through your music. Its as transparent as night and day if you have eyes to see. Do you value the authority figure, the "composer and conductor, the king and prime minister"? Is music for you about being dictated to from on high by the intentions of others? Or is it something else? Cage sides with social, non-authoritative, intercultural music, music that displays anarchic tendencies, for this is how he wishes the world to be.

But this should not be regarded as a dumbing down for Cage explicitly praises the virtues of musical hard work in "The Future of Music". There is a section of this paper in which Cage talks about "the demilitarization of language" which he regards as "a serious musical concern". The metaphor comes because language is regarded as syntactical in nature, like a marching military. Cage says that it dawns on him that "we need a society in which communication is not practiced, in which words become nonsense as they do between lovers, in which words become what they originally were: trees and stars and the rest of the primeval environment." But this concern is a matter of work for it will not come easily. As a former member of the military myself I know that such discipline and uniformity is taught for a reason. It is so in an emergency you will just do what is required without thinking. It has literally been drilled into you. But, when musically applied, this is seen negatively by Cage who, as stated, wanted the intimacy of a lover's communication rather than the syntax of a military language. The response is work to make this so and the realisation that it may take Herculean efforts to bring it about. Cage notes that a number of his pieces are very hard to play and recounts how some of his commissions came with the request that they be easy to perform (which disappointed him) and his eyes light up at the players who, having realised what they are being asked to perform will be difficult, relish the opportunity. He praises those, such as David Tudor, who premiered many of Cage's works before he himself took up composing mostly electronic works himself, as one who worked hard to expand and modify his own playing techniques, in his case on the piano. Cage reserves special mention for the field of electronic music in which "there is endless work to be done". Cage gives his own definition of music (which he was often asked for) as "WORK". This, he says, is his conclusion 40 years into his musical career.

Cage closes his paper on the future of music with a story about Thoreau who, it seems, accidentally set fire to some woods in preparing some food. He ran to try and get help to put out the fire but the nearest settlement was too far away and he was too late and a decent area of the woods burned down. Yet Cage reports that Thoreau noticed that the people who finally came to dowse the flames were happy for the opportunity of an adventure (all except those whose property had burned down, that is). After this episode, Thoreau met someone skilled at burning brush and, observing his methods and talking to him, developed new ways for dealing with fires and fighting them successfully. He also listened to the noises fire made as it burned, remarking that you can hear this same sound sometimes in any small fire you might make yourself for domestic purposes. He also remarked that fire is not only to be regarded as a bad thing. Indeed, it is now more than ever widely understood that fire can serve a cleansing function in the environment. It ventilates the forest floor and provides a new start. It acts as a quite natural cleaning agent if left to itself in a world not bound up with fabricated and artificial human concerns. 

But what's the musical application here you are wondering? It is that "everybody knows that useful is useful, but nobody knows that useless is useful, too." This is a reference to a saying of Chuang-tzu in a book Cage received as he was writing "The Future of Music" and it seemed relevant to him. It is, as is normal for Cage, a reminder not to cast aside things because they are thought irrelevant to what is regarded as music conceived as a canon of ideas, a discreet subject. It is a reminder that music is all and not just some. I have reported here only a few of the ideas Cage mentions in this paper. The paper itself is overflowing with both them and directions for music to take in the future. Cage was truly prodigious, "a genius inventor" as his former teacher Schoenberg called him. It is from Cage that I get the notion that it is the idea that is the primary currency of music. Professionalism be damned! 

I close by quoting Cage and how he himself finishes "The Future of Music". If you "get it" you will perhaps smile. If not, I hope you will think. I hope you will think about what music is, what music means, what music reveals, what music can and can't do. John Cage did all those things and he helped make the future we all now experience as normal and uncontroversial:

"The usefulness of the useless is good news for artists. For art serves no material purpose. It has nothing to do with changing minds and spirits. The minds and spirits of people are changing. Not only in New York, but everywhere. It is time to give a concert of modern music in Africa. The change is not disruptive. It is cheerful.

Music as Education

As far as criticisms of my blogs go, I'm happy to take a few hits. You would need to be spectacularly naive and utterly blind to the world to think that you could write a blog which some might take as criticism and then post it 10 or 15 times on Facebook and Twitter without any comeback. Of course, I try to write my blogs in a detached style. I do not write rants here nor use the language of the street. I try to give a calm and sensible discussion of the points I want to raise with at least the impression given of an open mind and a use of reason and argument. If you treat people fairly they will do the same in return is how I hope it goes. Of course, I can't guarantee this and occasionally I come across a less charitable respondent spilling his bile for my thoughts. I regard that more as his problem and not mine. My only golden rule in all of this is that you can think what you like but you need to be able to rhetorically support it with reasons you are prepared to discuss. 

This point was brought home to me in an excellent and thoughtful comment someone left under my blog, now almost a month old, about gear fetishization on social media forums to the detriment of actual music. This is the most popular blog I've ever written (approaching 5000 reads) and probably the most contentious too since I plonked it fairly and squarely into the middle of many Facebook groups that I'll clearly admit are groups about electronic music equipment as opposed to what to do with it or the music I hope ends up being made with it. (That, in many ways, was exactly the point of the blog!) For many the blog was a stumbling block or a blind spot. Others, and I'm warmed to say it was quite a few, seemed to get the point too. Of those, one by the name of "agustin n" made an excellent point which I'd like to snip from the comments to that blog and post here:

"I think the problem is mainly that, to admire someone else's gear, you just need to open your eyes (and say "good synths bru"). But to admire his/her music you have to open your heart/mind and that needs a lot more commitment. Like engage in a feeling with a stranger (over the www) and, in that, expose yourself. "Hey I enjoy your vision and relate to your feelings" is a lot more committed thing to say and... people are usually afraid of exposing themselves. But, nevertheless, I think its important that we as artists do..."

I've noticed a lot of this since I stumbled into writing blogs overtly about electronic music which I then posted to public forums. I was surprised to find they accrued thousands of reads not least since my music posts still accrue barely any listens. But they are different things and there need not be any translation from one to another. Perhaps, for example, my thoughts are interesting but my music is not. However, what I took on board very much from Agustin's insightful comment was that talking about things, objects, doesn't entail very much. If I like synth X instead of synth Y then so what? Looking at a picture of your gear and purring with desire isn't going to stretch me or anyone else in any way. As desirous creatures its as easy as letting a human drive have its head. But getting involved in their music and its ideas is much more intimate. Or, at least, it should be. And this brings me to why we're here today.

I have long had an itch regarding music that needed scratching. When I started becoming interested in John Cage it itched much more than it had before because of the peculiarities of this extremely interesting man. Cage is interesting not least because he is a composer but he is also someone who completely refuses to stop talking about music as an idea, as a set of ideas, as a bunch of compositional strategies or goals and even as something that is part of a bigger whole, life itself. Already, as I'm sure you will see, we have gone far beyond the customary topics in a Facebook group dedicated to swapping pictures of one or two pieces of gear and saying how much you want them or how much you love owning them. To be blunt, it is my general position that music makers should become more like Cage and less like your average Facebook group member. But this is a digression from my point here today. 

Music of Changes is a piano piece composed by John Cage in 1951 and first performed by David Tudor (for whom it was written) on January 1st 1952. It is described by many as a piece of indeterminate music, in some sense, although in terms of performance it is very determined. It was composed using chance operations (Cage's second piece written this way) but does have a resulting score which the performer is expected to follow like any other. So it is indeterminate in its composition but not in its performance. The more well known 4'33" is, of course, indeterminate in both composition AND performance. I use this piece as an example today because it seems to be one that evokes strong emotions. The You Tube comments under the video that I've linked here refer to it as "bullshit" and "masturbation material" and another wishes to withdraw the description "music" from it as if it did not deserve such an artistic description. (Someone also says its not art.) I first heard this piece of music, by listening to this very video, about 3 weeks ago. I had expected to find it difficult (thank you commenters for making it impossible to come to this with an open mind!) but was surprised when I found myself listening to the whole piece (44 minutes worth) without once feeling the need to stop or switch it off. It goes without saying that I am unaccustomed to listening to piano music on a regular basis.

Now I could not say that I "like" Music of Changes. But I can say that as an intellectual musical exercise I find it interesting and edifying and I can even say that I appreciate it. I'm glad it exists. Others seem to have been enraged by it (as, indeed, by 4'33" which came shortly after this in Cage's career). Now when music provokes such strong reactions we have a reason to ask what is going on here. To some the apparent randomness or abdication of authorial responsibility seems to be the issue. The thought is that if someone does not take responsibility then chaos is the result and chaos is bad. Chaos is irresponsible. Allowing chaos to occur is a moral affront to listeners, a trying to get them to accept that anything goes. And, in more general terms, anything cannot be allowed to go. Not, at least, if one calls oneself a composer and composes piano pieces to be performed at piano recitals.

                                      Autechre performing live

Fast forward 64 years to a piece called Feed1 by Autechre from the album Elseq1-5. What do we have here? To the casual listener it sounds very much like an all electronic version of Music of Changes in general terms. Things are happening (from a listener's ear point of view) very chaotically and perhaps even randomly. (Forget that both pieces are not really random at all if you can.) There seems to be no guiding idea behind it. Some describe Feed1 as "the sound of energy" or "the extreme power of electricity" but another pines that he doesn't really understand what people like about it and he asks for musicians to inform him of its point or value. This is a very good question. What is the point or value of any piece of music? I can't help but think that if more people asked this kind of question before they started then there might be less thoughtless music in the world. And that wouldn't be a bad thing in a world drowning in music.

What I think that both John Cage and Rob Brown and Sean Booth (who comprise Autechre) have in common is that they don't just make music. They also think long and hard about how to make it too. It is not some casual pursuit for these people. It is their life's work and purpose and so they take its arrangement and composition very seriously. Neither of them are joking or being frivolous. I would very much like to encourage this mentality in all music makers but especially in the electronic ones which is the music that I generally favour. As a means to this end I think its important to make one big change in our personalities not just as musicians but as people. This change is to move away from valuing things based on a "like" using a value system in which something I like is "good" and something I don't is "bad". Let me put this another way: we need to change from people who value things based on their appeal to us into people who value things based on their ability to change us. Let me explain.

Six years ago both John Cage and Autechre were just names to me. I knew nothing about them except perhaps that Cage had composed a piece of music which had no music. But in the intervening 6 years I have come to be aware of the music of both of them and interacted with a number of interviews I've read from both of them. I am now acquainted with how they sound and some of their thoughts. It is not the case that I like all or even most of the music that they have produced (although I surely do like some in both cases) but, much more importantly than any of this froth, I see them both as vitally important musical influences. They are interesting and original and this changes me as someone appropriating their work. Of course, the world of social media which works on popularity (because this suits the commercial purposes which are the reason social media exists) will not value them for this. Social media wants us to believe that likes, faves and retweets are all that matter. Popularity is king and numbers are what count. Neither Cage nor Autechre are ever going to be mainstream popular. And I say thank god for that.

Cage and Autechre are worthwhile and of value because listening to them might just change you for the better. Or even change you at all. They are musicians who are going to challenge your preconceptions and make you think about what music is and what it is for and what it should do. In this respect it really doesn't matter after that whether you like or dislike their music. If it changes you and makes you think I would regard this as the far greater service than a stroke of your musical ego. Of course, we are now into Agustin's spooky area for to be changed we will need to open ourselves up to new experiences, new thoughts, ones that challenge our status quo (and I don't mean Rick Parfitt and Francis Rossi here!). In order to change we need to first be open to change and this is what the world of likes discourages for to be taught that something I like is good and something I dislike is bad is to be groomed in musical conservatism and conventionality. This way does not lie progression, growth or maturity. Of course, we may feel happy and safe in our conventionality and want to be left within our boundaries. But isn't life more generally about living on the edge, the thrill of taking a risk, the danger of knowing and feeling that you are actually alive? 

I think that it is and, slowly, over many years now I've been trying to educate and encourage a curious musical mind, one that will listen to music I might not like to try and find the value in it. Utilizing this attitude I've discovered Cage, Autechre, Boards of Canada, the whole world of German Kosmische music and many other things besides, ones that probably no one else has heard of and who will never be on the receiving end of a tidal wave of likes. My musical vocabulary, and my life more generally, have been enriched and educated beyond anything I could have imagined. And this was only in a few years. Who knows how much further it could progress? What's more, I've developed new attitudes towards music and sound, ones I never would have thought of by myself with my likes and dislikes. I've learnt that music is not just an education in sound but in life too. 

I've also learnt that the musical sense is not a given, something to be left as it is. Its something to be trained, educated and explored. Indeed, this is the most beneficial way of using it. So you should give things a chance you don't like. You may end up liking it. I've lost count of the things I used to dislike I now like. Because tastes will and do change and we can and do learn new things from new sounds. Even if we don't "like" something it can still educate us in other ways. What a great service some piece of music would do us personally and musically if it made us more appreciative of music or sound in general. What is a simple "like" beside that? And more, as musicians ourselves we should not be afraid to outrun our boundaries. We should try to do things we consider beyond us. How else are we supposed to grow? We need to "expose ourselves" as Agustin suggested. This might encourage failure. But which is better, the setback we grow and learn from or the stunted safety of never trying?



If you like electronic music, have a thoughtful disposition and are on Facebook you might want more chat like this. In which case feel feel to join my group Electronic Music Philosophy there.

John Cage Once Again

If there is a book that has affected my attitude towards music and has actually materially changed my ideas about music and my own musical practice, and there is, then that book is without question John Cage's book "Silence". Specifically, for I can be specific, it is the section near the beginning headed "Experimental Music". It is not a very long section of the book and it is also one of the parts of the book which, I think, it is relatively easy to understand. Both of these factors are fortuitous for other parts of "Silence" I find so dense as to be impenetrable. The section "Experimental Music" I find so fundamental to an understanding of music that I would count it as a great loss if I had never read Cage's words and understood what he meant by them. Before beginning with the meat of my blog I should, of course, say that Cage was writing in the 1950's. His musical situation was not that of our's today. In the 1950's no one had yet built a viable commercial synthesizer and magnetic tape was the cutting edge tool of the day. Cage, we may say, was at that time creating the future. But he wasn't yet in it and we can look back on specifics that he helped to bring about but could not describe in detail as we can today.

So what is so great about this section of the book? I have written about this before and I recommend that you search through my blog to find those blogs too. They may add to what I say here or re-emphasize things. What is so great, if it is to be put like this, is that Cage is not afraid to get embroiled in the big questions about music that many either assume in their ignorance or ignore in their stupidity. Cage is not afraid to take a stance on what music is and should be seen as. This is an important question and all the more so in the 60 years since he wrote in which any number of electronic musical genres have been invented (and, in some cases, passed away again). A definition of what music even is is important and for at least two reasons. It informs what it is you think you are doing if you make music and it gives hints as to how you should do it.

Most musicians and musical writers, even today, are primarily concerned with pitch. When picking up their instrument or sitting in front of it they primarily intend to affect pitches and weave them into a pleasing union. Indeed, many traditional instruments were made specifically as devices to produce and affect pitches as their primary function. Melody and harmony are the endgame. For such people so fixed can their ideology be and so unthinking can their appreciation of music be that it never occurs to them to think that music might be anything else. Music is melody and harmony as a statute. If something is not melodious or not harmonious then it is not music. It does not take a genius to realize that this definition completely destroys the claims of some forms of music to then be music at all. Specifically, these are electronic ones, ones that were coming to birth as Cage wrote. Fortunately, there are others who see things a different way and Cage was one of these. Cage came to regard such music as happily "experimental", including his own, a judgment many wouldn't quibble at today but which, in his day, was controversial.

The crucial factor in this, Cage finds, having realized that as long as he is alive there will always be some sound even if it is only the flowing of his blood or the high pitched whine of his nervous system, is to turn away from the idea that music is something deliberately done to the idea of music as sounds that are not intended. There will always be these sounds of course and for the musically conventional they would regard their task as to eliminate them as much as possible. But not Cage. Cage sees this fact and these sounds as his orchestra. Cage freely admits that many will see such a turn as giving everything away. If music is not a musician deliberately creating with authorial purpose then it is nothing for many people. But Cage retorts. Cage sees human beings as at one with all the sounds around them. In this context there can be no concept of music as some artificial, deliberate creation. Music is any sounds occurring "in any combination and in any continuity". As I would put this, "Music is any combination of sounds". I summarize Cage's thought here as "Give up music as a collection of deliberately made and organized sounds. Realize that any combination of sounds is music."

It is this "any combination of sounds" idea that seems to scare many people though. And some people do seem bound to their idea of music as something deliberate, an authorial intent, a matter of canonized forms and sanctified approaches. Cage was right to say, even in the 1950's, that some people regard, for example, the use of noise or a random approach to a collection of sounds, as "not music at all". The years between his writing and our present day may have removed some of that anxiety as electronics gave birth to industrial music, ambient music and an appreciation for abstract forms or, alternatively, rhythms which endlessly replicate themselves and morph, seemingly forever. But this is not entirely so. There are still those who regard things without a tune as not music. For Cage I think this would be to focus on the lesser thing (that you can form pitches into melodies) to the exclusion of a much greater thing (that tones and timbres are all around us in any number of naturally occurring combinations). 

For a number of years I have been an enthusiastic fan of the analog synthesizer enthusiast and educationalist, Marc Doty. Doty, known as Automatic Gainsay in the online world and a man who works as part of the Bob Moog Foundation to prosper the legacy of the great synthesizer inventor, Dr Robert Moog, has for a number of years produced demonstration videos for numerous vintage analog synths on his You Tube channel. I freely admit that I have spent hours watching, and re-watching, many of his videos which I find to be both educational regarding the synthesizers he is demonstrating and in relation to synthesis itself. In my way, I have also found many of the videos musically significant as well for I have found music in the tones and timbres that these usually vintage synthesizers have produced. Indeed, I have found no difference musically between the theme songs Marc has written for his videos and his pawing at the keyboard during the demonstrations. Why is this? Its because, like Cage, I am not seeing "music" as the production of deliberately intended tunes. I am not seeing "music" as a matter of deliberation or intention at all. Music is sounds in juxtaposition with one another. And nothing more is needed. 

Of course, it takes a psychological shift to come to this position and Cage sees this. But Cage does not see it as a giving up of anything. He sees it as a gaining of so much more. "One may fly if one is willing to give up walking" is how he puts it. And this is very much how I see it. Recently, not least from watching Doty's videos, I have become somewhat disturbed and a little claustrophobic, musically speaking. I've wanted to shout at Marc as he was demonstrating "Stop flinging all these pitches at me!" I look at the keyboards Marc is demonstrating and there they are in all their fixity with a keyboard attached as the user interface. A keyboard, of course, is an interface primarily designed to affect pitch and in some, but not all, keyboards pitch is all it does affect. How limiting, how narrow, how blind. In contrast Cage talks about "sound space" and the technical possibilities of the use of magnetic tape which, in his 1950's context, was cutting edge. He speaks of being able "to transform our contemporary awareness of nature's manner of operation into art". Now, reading that, can you say that this task is even primarily a matter of pitch? Surely not. 

Lately my own musical output has become what I now refer to as "texture music". When approaching the creation of a piece I look to create the conditions for a piece of electronic music's arrival. But I don't look to play it or even really create it. I try to stand at a remove and let it come to be. I juxtapose things and let them be and let the music come from their juxtaposition just as in nature things are just juxtaposed. You will perhaps not find it surprising that, in this context, I prefer electronic and technological means to do this. Both software and hardware solutions are available today that Cage cannot have foreseen in detail and one wonders what he would have done with them. However, in my own practice I approach music as something primarily of timbral and not melodic interest. I can write melodies and have done so. But this is very rare for me and, frankly, I just find timbre both more interesting and more vast as a range of possibilities. There are only so many notes and people will keep playing them over and over again. But there are endless timbres. So lately I find myself wanting to smash all the keyboards and I want electronic things to play with that make it difficult or even impossible to be precise with. This is not unusual in the electronic arena and instruments from the theremin to certain flavors of modular synthesizer are difficult to play melodically, especially if no precise interface is used. For me the more interesting question is why you would feel the need to play melodically in the first place. Such an urge is surely indicative of cultural teachings and a leaning towards conventionality that I just want to give the finger to. Nature is full of timbres. Our music should be too. I see it as more human.

I see this very much as Cage sees it in the end. Cage talks about a choice between wanting to "control sound" and, on the other hand, giving up the desire to control sound, clearing your mind of "music" and setting about discovering means to let sounds be themselves "rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expressions of human sentiments". I see pitch-based music, music that wants to be a tune, as very much music in the "I am a human who wants to control things" mold. And that kind of music disturbs me. Its not even a question of if such music is "good" or "bad", subjective judgments that are largely meaningless in the end anyway. To me that approach says something negative about human beings themselves and their motives in wanting to act that way. It seems blind to many of the insights Cage raises, not least that we are part of a greater whole and that fitting into this whole, letting things be what they will and being at peace with it, is a greater good than the ability to say "this and this will be so". "Pitch music", as I have started calling it, is narrow music and narrow not just musically but also in terms of what it means to be a human being expressing yourself that way. Cage, of course, did not see music as necessarily about expression and even less so as about meaning. For him sound just was and it was the human task to let it be what it will, to enjoy the intermingling of any and every sound together.

Postscript: I am currently making a podcast series about electronic music, as you may know, and the first podcast came out last Friday. In the course of making the show I have had reason to speak to a few people about putting one of their songs in the show and this has led to fortuitous connections. Thanks to one person I came across the idiosyncratic synths of Rob Hordijk and specifically a little box he made called the Blippoo box. This table top synthesizer seems, to all intents and purposes, to generate random noises which change in entirely unpredictable ways as you either move its 12 knobs or use either the CV inputs (and outputs if you patch it into itself) or the light sensor that is built into the unit. The unit itself is a mix of oscillators, filters, his unique "rungler" circuits and FM possibilities. I've seen more than one comment about this synthesizer that it plays you, you don't play it. I mention the Blippoo box because it strikes me as an instrument encapsulating entirely the kind of musical freedom I was expressing in the piece above. The Blippoo is impossible to play melodically and is nigh on impossible to play in any conventional sense at all and yet it offers seemingly endless opportunities for making sounds you could never imagine and putting them in the context of lots of others. It is an instrument that you can affect but cannot control.

Perfect!

                              Rob Hordijk's Blippoo Box