John Cage’s Organ Music (Mode 253–54, 2013)

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I sometimes find myself wondering why John Cage produced, comparatively speaking, so little organ music. He fondly recalled that David Tudor, having learned all of the organ repertoire by the time he was in his teens, decided to turn all his attention to the piano. Knowing how much Cage esteemed Tudor, I might suppose that he took Tudor’s rejection of the organ as evidence that the instrument couldn’t offer anything truly modern—that it wasn’t, as Cage was fond of saying, useful. Perhaps, too, Cage felt that churches, the usual venues for organ recitals, suggest a certain sense of mystery and ritual that make performances of organ music dangerously beautiful by remaining too separate from everyday life. Or perhaps Cage, ever mindful to ensure a performance for any music he made, simply lacked for organists willing and able to champion his music and commission new works. The four organ pieces he made—Some of “The Harmony of Maine” (Supply Belcher) (1978), Souvenir (1983), ASLSP (1985), and Organ2/ASLSP (1987)—all date from a time when he fulfilled many commissions for musicians and organizations that often lacked the familiarity with his music Cage could expect from Tudor and other close friends and colleagues. Of these, the 1978 and 1987 works were made for the German organist Gerd Zacher, an important and very sympathetic champion of new music.

It’s a pity, though, that Cage hadn’t been asked for new organ works sooner. The King of Instruments seems to me an instrument ideally suited to Cage’s aesthetic. With all its various stops (found in countless dispositions on as many organs), one can think of it as the ultimate prepared instrument. Also, the very fact that sound emanates from a number of pipes all placed at discrete locations in space nicely accords with Cage’s idea that the separation of sounds in space proved desirable for new music. It surely represented a vast multiplicity of possibilities that could be released into sound through the use of chance operations. For this reason, I believe that Cage’s organ music occupies a small but quite important place within his output.

Some of “The Harmony of Maine” forms part of a family of pieces that Cage made beginning with Apartment House 1776 (1976). In the earlier work, one element consisted of a series of pieces Cage dubbed “harmonies”; he selected eighteenth-century hymns by William Billings, Andrew Law, and Supply Belcher and altered them by extending certain tones and removing others through chance operations so as to attenuate the functional harmony underlying them. The process fixes a listener’s attention on the individual pitches so that they become self-sufficient, each—as in Buddhist thought—the most honored of all, and likewise the heightened presence of silence in the music reaffirms the important role of ambience in Cage’s work: not so much a lack of sound that articulates or makes more dramatic the sounds around it, but rather (again, borrowing from Buddhism) a nosound that forms, alongside sound, an eternal unity: perceiving the Śūnyatā (emptiness) in the world facilitates the awareness of the world’s Tathatā (suchness). Here and there, melodic fragments from the original hymns remain; these further underscore the fact that, in Cage, the sounding music continues to present the unpredictable, no matter how it is made.

Each of the thirteen separate pieces in Cage’s organ work draws exclusively from the 1794 collection The Harmony of Maine by the American composer Supply Belcher (1751–1836). The titles in the original, which Cage retains, include in most instances an abbreviation that refers to the metrical structure of the words (useful when one wants to use the musical setting of one hymn for the text of another): thus, C.M. (common meter) refers to a quatrain with a syllable count of 8–6–8–6; L.M. (long meter), to one of 8–8–8–8; S.M. (short meter), to one of 6–6–8–6; and the especially Cagean P.M. (peculiar meter), to one that is irregular. An awareness of meter (interpreted as phrase length) is helpful in this work since Cage tended to respect the phrase boundaries of his source material in his compositional process and probably does so in the organ work as well.

In order to capitalize on the organ’s innate ability to create an extraordinary variety of timbres, Cage also employed chance operations in Some of “The Harmony of Maine” to make a complex series of registration changes, which must be effected by no fewer than six registrants. (However, Gary Verkade recalls that he performed as one of only three registrants in the first German performance, noting that the number of registrants depends on such factors as the size of instrument and the amount of space found in the organ loft.) Stops are referred to only by number, allowing the work to be performed on a great number of instruments. This aspect is very much in keeping with Cage’s approach to composition: to learn all the possibilities of an instrument (or device, in the case of, say, the film One11) and then use chance to select new and previously unimagined combinations of those possibilities.

Cage made Souvenir (1983) in response to a commission by the American Guild of Organists. After receiving half of the commission fee, he learned that the organist who would premiere the work wanted him to make a piece that was similar to the 1948 piano composition Dream. Never one to repeat himself literally, he returned the commission fee, but it was remailed to him with assurances that he could make whatever kind of piece he wished. Thus liberated, he decided to comply with the original request, which he later claimed (in an interview with the English composer and pianist Peter Dickinson) resulted in “a rather poor piece.” Cage was too hard on himself; although Souvenir does indeed resemble many of his earlier works, other factors—among them the threefold repetition of the entire piece and the unexpected intrusion of harsh tone clusters—make the piece sound new, rather as if Cage treats the material of his earlier work as he might a found object, calling attention to its anachronisms in order to reveal an unexpected freshness in the material.

An aside: Some viewers of the DVD following the recording with score in hand might notice that Professor Verkade plays one pedal passage on the manuals instead. As he explains, “The short, and only, reason is range: the pedals in many parts of Europe only go up to high f, most American organs include the f-sharp and g above that f and Cage uses that more-American (also French) range. In order to render the passage as a whole (not just looking for a solution to that single high g), I made the decision to register the main manual as I might have registered the pedals and to play the entire passage on that sound.”

The title of ASLSP (1985)—originally written as the twentieth-century test piece for the University of Maryland’s William Kapell International Piano Competition in that year—refers to a passage from the last paragraph in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (“Soft morning, city! Lsp!”) and also the tempo designation for the work, “as slow as possible.” It contains eight pieces that must be performed in the order given, with the caveat that one of these must be omitted and that another must be repeated at any point in the series of seven remaining ones (possibly even before its numbered appearance in the series). The notation follows that of Cage’s masterpiece for solo piano, Etudes Australes (1974–75); as in that work, Cage treats right and left hands as separate from each other and disallows one from assisting the other to simplify the separate musical parts that he creates for them. In the one new refinement to Cage’s notation, the precise length of a sound is indicated by extending a straight line from the notehead; the performer reads his score as a succession of proportionate time points (“just as maps give proportional distances,” Cage observes). Since the organ can sustain a tone as long as an organist’s finger remains on the key, Cage’s refinement concerning note length has an important effect on the way the piece sounds when played on this instrument. The sounds for each hand—single tones and chords containing as many as five notes in total—range widely in character: highly dissonant sonorities co-exist with very traditionally consonant ones, demonstrating, once again, Cage’s wish to include and honor every kind of sound in his music.

Cage returned to the compositional method of ASLSP to make his final organ work, Organ2/ASLSP (1987). This piece is not simply a variation or arrangement of the old one, but rather a completely new work that retains many elements from ASLSP. As before, the work comprises eight movements, but now all eight must be played and the performer has the option to repeat one of them anywhere within the series of eight. On the whole, sustained sounds appear more frequently (and last longer), and Cage treats right and left feet as separate performers in the same way he treats the right and left hands. As in ASLSP, dynamics and registrations are not indicated, which allows for any number of possibilities (particularly if an organist wishes to avail himself of many registrants as in Some of “The Harmony of Maine”).

Naturally, duration isn’t indicated, either; indeed, Organ2/ASLSP has become one of Cage’s best-known works in recent years because of a provocative performance in the German city of Halberstadt that began on September 5, 2001 and is scheduled to conclude in the year 2640: a performance, in other words, lasting 639 years and involving human beings only to the extent that they are required to add and remove weights for the organ keys that activate the sounds. I have written elsewhere about this event (see my John Cage [London: Reaktion Books, 2012]), criticizing it as an exasperating instance of the mantra “Cage would have approved” and reminding readers that Cage always intended his music to be performed by human beings; but if, as he hoped, the world becomes a very different place in 2640—one in which people finally have what they need to live and are no longer afraid of the oppression created by economic want or harsh political systems—then perhaps a 639-year performance would be the best possible way to celebrate its advent.

John Cage, One9 and 108

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The history of Western music shows us that a few composers distinguished themselves in other fields of creative endeavor: Guillaume de Machaut’s poetry is as famous as his music, for instance, and Carl Ruggles supported himself during his final years as a painter. John Cage (1912-1992) wrote poems and prose every bit as distinguished as his music for most of his career.  After producing isolated examples of visual art (notably the plexigram/lithograph series Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel of 1969), he turned decisively to printmaking and watercolor in 1978 thanks to invitations from Kathan Brown of Crown Point Press and Ray Kass of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.  As the distinguished appointee of Harvard’s Norton Professorship in the 1988-89 academic year, Cage produced the imposing and diverse poems of I-VI, the crowning achievement in a series of literary works that exemplified “a way of writing which comes from ideas, is not about them, but which produces them.”[1]

There certainly are examples in which Cage’s compositional procedures carry over from music to painting or vice versa—for instance, the series of works inspired by the Ryoanji garden in Kyoto.  But more generally, both the writings and prints from his late years offer a helpful context for his final musical compositions—above all, the forty-seven completed works known collectively as the Number Pieces.

From 1985 until 1992, the date of his last session at Crown Point, Cage used smoked paper for his prints—a fire was built on the bed of the press and damp paper ran through it, which extinguished the fire and left elegant, swirling patterns on the paper. The images then added to this paper came from a variety of sources. For instance, teapots were used to brand circular shapes onto the paper in the series called Fire (1985), while the 1991 group called Smoke Weather Stone Weather shows tracings of stones. In these works particularly, we can see a striking continuity between the gestural quality of the tracings and the more neutral environment of the smoked paper. Cage admired this continuity very much:

I wanted to have an ambiguity between the smoke and the images. I was afraid at the beginning some of the marks were going to be too strong. But as we continue . . . even the strong marks lose anything that you could compare with impact.[2]

The twenty-second print from the series shows this ambiguity very clearly. Cage’s tracings, while they show the degree of his skill and keen visual sense, has a certain muted quality that asserts itself as surely as time’s passing. The gentle swirls of the paper, though unobtrusive, make an unforgettable impression.

Turning to Cage’s late poetry, we see that the incredible heterogeneity of I-VI echoes another important theme in his work: the bringing together of elements conventionally considered incompatible. Compare this remark from Silence: “It goes without saying that dissonances and noises are welcome in this new music. But so is the dominant seventh chord if it happens to put in an appearance.”[3] The presence of so much variety helped Cage to guarantee that no one component of his work could dominate and overshadow the importance of the rest. His art is like a map in which every path taken leads to a marvelous destination.

Cage realized variety in I-VI with a library of found sources including newspapers and writings by Wittgenstein, Emerson, Thoreau, and himself, among others. A combination of chance operations and his own choices determined the final content of the work. Although there are moments that approach the pattern and gesture of conventional poetry–notably the final section of Part IV with its repetition of the words “equally loud and in the same tempo”–the majority of I-VI has an unusual mixture of the prosaic and the profound, an almost disconcerting blankness:

           alwayS ’
               iT is
        not pullEd
        philippiNes would ’
          talks Convert
  something alwaYs
      all ’ prevIous
        circle aNother
        from whiCh
  bullfighting tO
               iN nature ’

[4]
Analogies with Cage’s Number Pieces show themselves readily. The sounds emerge from and recede into a silence as neutral and as elegant as the swirls of smoked paper in the final prints. Indeed, silence does not so much articulate the musical material of the Number Pieces as it offers another kind of sound to listen to—or put another way, the sounds of Cage’s music are only something considerably easier to hear than the silence which surrounds them. And just as I-VI alternates between the evocative and the everyday, so too the Number Pieces generally alternate simple pitches and even conventional chords with inexplicable noises and dissonances. The transparency that characterizes most of the works in the series even allows us to pay attention—with an unusual level of awareness—to the attacks of sounds, their tunings, or their particular timbre. All in all, they demonstrate Cage’s quiet reconciliation with harmony, which he now defined as “several sounds . . . being noticed at the same time.”[5]

Of course, the Number Pieces differ from Cage’s printed poetry and his visual pieces in the amount of variability that can occur from performance to performance—variability made possible by the composer’s use of time brackets specifying ranges of start- and end-times for every sound in one of the works. So long as the performer observes these ranges, she can make a sound as short, long, loud, or soft as she wants. The unchanging durations of the time brackets ensure that the playing time of the composition remain the same and that the events of those pieces occur in more or less the same order.

Short, loud sounds in performances of Cage’s Number Pieces always remind me of the brandings or tracings in Cage’s prints—they are more gestural, more demonstrative than the longer sounds and silences. Sometimes I find the loud sounds annoy me—they remind me too much of another kind of modern music that seems at odds with the Number Pieces. But their presence helps to keep the music unpredictable and astonishing, qualities Cage surely sought in his composition. And in the best performances of these works—almost magically—they somehow join with everything else to create a continuity, an environment in which every type of sound has its place.

Cage scored 108 (1991) for the largest number of players in any of the Number Pieces. Its duration of 43’30” makes an oblique reference to his groundbreaking 4’33” (1952). And the work can be played on its own or with either of two solo works from the same year, One8 (for cello) and One9 for the sho, a mouth organ with bamboo pipes that acts as one of the harmony-producing instruments in Japanese gagaku. Both solo works were composed for artists very important in Cage’s final years. The cellist Michael Bach had invented a curved bow that permitted him to play sustained chords, while Mayumi Miyata had pioneered the sho as a contemporary concert instrument. Cage first met Miyata during his historic return to the 1990 Darmstadt summer course; the composer was enchanted with the sound of her instrument and produced in all three works for her. (The second of these works, Two4, has been released on Mode 88.)

As was his habit, Cage wanted to learn as many possibilities for a new instrument or medium as he could before composing a work, and among his papers are copious notes indicating all of the single tones and clusters (aitake) that the sho could play, both familiar and unfamiliar. Once this material was in place, he could then use chance operations to choose which of all these possibilities would become the sounds for his new pieces, thus producing results that he hoped would surprise and interest him when he finally heard them performed.

As I mentioned, when either One8 or One9 are performed with 108, they become concertos much in the same manner as Fourteen (1990), for bowed piano and instruments. Even so, the concerto formed by One9 and 108 is a very unusual one indeed, and a fine example of Cage’s aesthetic. The delicate sounds of the sho enter almost imperceptibly, reminding me of Cage’s suggestion (in the performance notes for 101) that tones be “brushed into existence as in oriental calligraphy where the ink (the sound) is not always seen, or if so, is streaked with white (silence).”[6] Both orchestra and soloist remain completely silent for the first minute and a half of the piece.  The orchestra disappears again in other two sections, but not to herald a grand cadenza: the sho music continues much as it had before, a quiet, serene, almost timeless utterance. Indeed, the regal simplicity of the sho makes it an ideal instrument for Cage, who tried to make his final work like writing on water—an action, incomparably graceful, that would leave no traces.[7]

Reprinted from the Mode Records CD: John Cage: One9 and 108. Mode 108 (www.mode.com)

[1]Cage records this idea for the first time as part of the “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) Continued 1973-1982, published in X: Writings ’79-’82 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), 163.

[2]Quoted in Kathan Brown, John Cage Visual Art: To Sober and Quiet the Mind (San Francisco: Crown Point Pres, 2000), 117. For more on the technique of smoking paper and Cage’s visual works from 1985 onward, see pp. 97–124. Cage probably would have disagreed with my characterization of the tracings as gestural. He thought of them as something neither non-gestural nor gestural, but rather “something else.” See Joan Retallack, ed., Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art, Music. John Cage in Conversation with Joan Retallack (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 127–28.

[3]From “Experimental Music,” in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 11.

[4]John Cage, I-VI (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1990), 73.

[5]Musicage, 108.

[6]Reproduced in Richard Kostelanetz, ed., John Cage: Writer (New York: Limelight Editions, 1993), 198.

[7]This principle is one of the “whispered truths” in Tibetan Buddhism. Cage discusses the idea with Joan Retallack in Musicage, 163 and 189–91. Read more