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The Sound of Philosophy
The musical ideas of Milton Babbitt and John Cage.
Milton Babbitt and John Cage, two of the most notorious postwar American composers, are often thought to be antipodal figures. ... Cage–who died in 1992–was gay, goyish, politically left, and Californian, a genial fruitcake whose enthusiasms ran toward astrology, mushrooms, Zen, and anarchist politics. ... Cage’s music, by contrast, is scrupulously disorganized, composed randomly–for instance by tossing coins or tracing astronomical maps onto music paper. ... Cage, who never graduated from college, was an auto-didact (more or less), and has had at least as much influence on visual arts and popular music as on the world of academic musical composition. ... Leave aside the fact that even expert listeners sometimes have difficulty distinguishing Babbitt’s sophisticated musical puzzles from Cage’s mystical soundscapes. The important point is that Babbitt and Cage straddle the line between philosophy and art. ... ) This means that the critic of Babbitt and Cage’s music needs to be a critic of their philosophies–which is to say, a philosopher himself.
In fact, if Babbitt and Cage are to be believed, it is almost beside the point to talk about whether their music sounds good or sounds bad. ...
Cage’s approach to the problem of taste was very different. ... Suzuki, from whom Cage took courses at Columbia University in the early 1950s] said Zen wants us to diminish that kind of activity of the ego and to increase the activity that accepts the rest of creation. ...
In other words: to say that Cage’s randomly composed music "sounds bad" is to engage in the un-Zen practice of making value judgments. Instead, we are supposed to use Cage’s random music as an opportunity to get beyond our likes and dislikes. By abandoning traditional composition, using random procedures rather than making intentional choices, Cage virtually ensured that we would approach his music as part of his quasi-Buddhist project of overcoming our values. ...
Many critics have for this reason concluded that Babbitt and Cage cannot be understood as composers in the traditional sense. ... (Indeed, the editors of the New York Times at one point insisted that a critic describe Cage as a "music philosopher" rather than as a composer. ... For while Cage and Babbitt’s music is intimately linked to the ideas that produced it, there are–as we shall see–reasons to be deeply suspicious of those ideas. This means that if we are to appreciate Babbitt and Cage as "musical philosophers," it will be despite major reservations about whether their ideas are in fact correct. ... Thus we may find that in thinking about Babbitt and Cage, we recapitulate in the aesthetic realm an important debate about the nature and purpose of philosophy itself. ...
Cage is in some sense a less complicated figure than Babbitt, but this is in large part because he is more successful. ... Inspired by the Buddhist project of eliminating desires, Cage decided to write music from which his own likes and dislikes had been excluded. ... As with Babbitt, Cage’s music almost transparently represents the views that produced it, if only because there is little else there that might distract you from those views. In the case of Cage’s most famous piece, there is literally nothing else in it at all:
I think perhaps my own best piece, at least the one I like the most is the silent piece [titled 4’ 33"]. ... Unless we adhere to Cage’s religious point of view–and he was always a little vague on whether this was a requirement for enjoying his music–it is unclear why we should want to get rid of them. At the same time, our desires are not completely plastic: it may well be impossible for human beings to come to feel, as Cage exhorted, that "the sounds of their environment" are "more interesting than the music which they would hear if they went into a concert hall. ... A central question in thinking about Cage’s music is whether this first step is also the last.
Nevertheless, Cage was quite shrewd to choose music as the medium for his quasi-Buddhist message. ... Imagine, by way of contrast, two hypothetical Cages: one who worked in the medium of cooking and used randomly created food to help us to try to overcome our own desires; and the second, a painterly Cage, who randomly splashed paint on canvas with a similar end in mind. Now Cage the chef would no doubt meet with failure, simply because the prospect of eating random flavors is completely unappealing–most of us would much rather engage in traditional Buddhist meditation then expose ourselves to the prospect of noxious or galling food. But Cage the painter would likely meet with the opposite sort of failure. ... ) Cage the composer managed to find a medium in which we had some, but not too much, attachment to our taste–and in this sense it is an ideal arena in which to explore Buddhist renunciation.
We can, then, listen to Cage’s music (unlike Babbitt’s) more or less as he intended it. Listening to Cage, one can try–and one does try, inevitably–not to dislike what one is listening to. ... And one can think about Cage himself, our postwar Thoreau, isolated in a tiny musical cabin of nondesire and coin-tossing. ... Or that Cage’s music is good because Buddhism is one of the world’s great religions? ... And, if so, should we judge that Cage is a better composer because he made a better translation? Or should we just forget about philosophy altogether, and simply focus on Babbitt and Cage’s music in itself? ... (One can, of course, make the same argument about Cage, and some critics, such as James Pritchett, do, by arguing that Cage needs to be understood as a composer rather than musical philosopher. But the pressure is less acute, since Cage’s philosophy is less badly in need of repair. ... The problem is that there are two seemingly reasonable principles which suggest that we may not be able to evaluate Babbitt or Cage except by way of their theory. ...
At the same time, it is equally difficult to appreciate Babbitt and Cage as philosophers. The problem, it seems, is that we cannot disconnect Babbitt and Cage’s music from the ideas that produced it; but at the same time (unless we follow Babbitt’s positivism or Cage’s Buddhism) we cannot fully endorse the philosophical views of the composers themselves. ... Quite the contrary: many of the philosophers that our culture most admires, from Plato and Kant to Nietzsche and John Rawls, have at least occasionally made questionable assumptions and suspicious arguments. ... ) Babbitt and Cage fit neatly into this tradition of compelling speculations: each propounded radical, extreme theories about the world and music’s place within it, and each managed to live those ideas, changing the musical world in the process. Furthermore, Babbitt’s and Cage’s views push us to think very deeply about music (or more generally, art) and its place in our society. Indeed, I would venture to guess that most contemporary composers have thought seriously about Babbitt or Cage, and that many of these have had their views about music changed in the process. ... This represents a challenge to the rest of us–not only to say where the two of them went wrong, but also to develop our own ideas about music to the point where they can rival those of Babbitt and Cage in their ability to compel conviction.
Approximate Word count = 6197
Approximate Pages = 24.8
(250 words per page double spaced)
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