Cage: "Indeterminacy"; H&N, Sat, 25/6/16, 10:00pm

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Multiple apologies - I was listening to the wrong Cage composition!

- Music for Piano 84, perchance?

[Quarky]

- Music for Piano 84, perchance?

Thanks for bearing with me, ferney. Indeterminacy has given me a better insight into John Cage, who artistically, had a broader agenda than more strictly 'conventional' composers such as Stravinsky and Schoenberg. Didn't Schoenberg say John would never make a composer, or some such?

I guess I'm a 'conventional' listener.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Didn't Schoenberg say John would never make a composer, or some such?

"Not a composer, but an inventor - of genius"; which, as far as I can remember, was the nicest thing he ever said about any of his students whilst they were still alive. There's also the anecdote Cage liked to tell about how Schoenberg was concerned about his student's lack of feeling for traditional harmony, that if he didn't master this he would just be beating his head against the wall. Cage replied that, in that case, he would devote his life to beating his head against that wall.

The latter story is rather contradicted (or, at least, mitigated) by the other one Cage told - included in Indeterminacy - of how Schoenberg would set his students the same Musical phrase to harmonize many times over until they couldn't do so without making "mistakes". At that point he'd get them to work out what all the different "correct" versions had in common. This both indicates that Cage and the wall had made at least a truce, but it also gives us the best insight I know of of Schoenberg's teaching methods - a combination of inculcating technical necessities; and then getting the students to work out for themselves the causes and uses of what they'd achieved.

I think that, in Indeterminacy this story acts as a balance to the considerably more unpleasant one of the female piano student, which I've always found rather horrific. But Cage was devoted to Schoenberg following an act of kindness and generosity on the part of the older composer, which was also characteristic - at a time of considerable financial hardship, Schoenberg agreed to give Cage (who also couldn't afford to pay for lessons) tuition in composition without charge, on condition that Cage was prepared to devote his life to Music. (Schoenberg had done the same thing with Berg at the beginning of the Century - also at a time when money was problematical for both men.) Had Cage not made this promise, he said that he might have pursued his visual Art and literary skills with as much attention as he did his Music, rather than keeping these activities as prominent "background" activities.