John Cage: Teaching Journal

Teaching journal.

In the first part of the class, I got everyone involved in a performance of 4’33”, which most students had heard of. To prep students for the performance, I asked them to listen out for what they can hear if we were all silent—students pointed out the humming of the projector, air-conditioning, and lights. I explained that 4’33” is best perceived as a framework within which external sounds are regarded as the content. During the performance, I performed a series of actions, including vocalizing a downward glissando and placing a music stand on my table. This produced laughter and I explained how the actions could be regarded as part of the content within a musical framework such as 4’33”.

Having introduced students to the concept of unorganized sounds and events as components of a musical work, I then explained the element of chance in Ryoanji. Rather than expressing compositional intention, or a particular emotion (as with the tonal music students are familiar with), Ryoanji is constructed graphically—the score is derived from drawings comprising multiple tracings of the outlines of 15 stones at the titular stone garden in Kyoto, and the number of tracings is determined using the ancient Chinese divination text I-Ching, which provides a chance procedure for determining the binary outcome of masculine or feminine forces (a composite of 6 masculine/feminine forces form a symbol). I presented a simplified explanation of the element of chance, tracing the upper arch of a circle from left to right: when I have drawn half a circle, I noted that I cannot move right to left and draw the lower arch because time necessarily moves from left to right in Western notational conventional. The action of tracing of stones cannot be represented musically because each stone is a roughly a complete circle (which means moving right to left at some point).

To prepare students for the listening experience (we listened to about a third or 20 min of Ryoanji), I asked students to consider their own responses as part of the musical work. Rather than focusing on what is “in” the work (as with tonal music), I asked students to consider Ryoanji as a framework containing both sounds and their individual experiences. I explained the Buddhist conception of interrelation, which embodies a philosophy of interconnectedness: I am in a sense not present, because I am comprised of the water I drank which comes from a tap at home, of the food I ate in a restaurant, of the sunlight which helped the vegetables I ate to grow. I am in that sense an empty framework, just like 4’33” and Ryoanji. This mode of emptiness is counterintuitive to most students and most people in general, because we are constantly browsing facebook, instagram, and twitter. Bearing in mind that Ryoanji is extremely slow moving, I asked students to focus on what they later described to me as their diverse experiences of boredom and sleepiness, or feelings of hauntedness and peacefulness—this, I explained, was part of the beauty of the music. As a further concession, I allowed students—as a last resort, after trying to enter into the spirit of the music—to check their phones or to rest their heads on the table, during the 20-min we spent listening to Ryoanji.

To further develop a conceptual appreciation of Ryoanji, I posed the motion, “Knowing that an artwork is an artwork is just as important as knowing its form in judging its beauty.” Students argued that knowledge of the status of the sounds we are hearing as artwork places a demand on the listener to understand Cage’s creative concept, and to listen to the music with the appropriate mindset. Others argued that music should perhaps speak immediately to the listener without intervening constructs—yet others argued that this kind of naïve listening is prone to lead to misunderstanding of the music. The debate clarified concepts like the artwork and immediate experience (posed as a criterion for judging art in the philosophy of aesthetics).