John Cage: 'Bad Boy' of Modern Music

John Cage was an American composer most noted for pioneering so-called ‘chance music’, and electronic music, and is certainly one of the leading figures of the post-1945 avant garde. He was also influential in the development of modern dance, through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, Cage's partner. Cage is best known for his notorious 1952 composition 4′33″, performed without a single note being played by the performers. The composition is to be perceived as sounds of the environment that the audience hears while it is “performed”, rather than merely as four minutes and thirty three seconds of complete silence, and the piece became arguably the most controversial composition of the immediate post-war period. Cage is also noted for the prepared piano (a piano whose sounds are altered by placing various objects along and between the strings), for which he composed numerous dance-related works and some concert pieces from the late 1940s onwards.

Taught by Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1933–35), Cage's major influences later came from Eastern cultures. Through his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the 1940s, Cage came to the idea of aleatoric or chance-element music, which he started composing in the early 1950s.
A very important determinant in Cage's later music from the 1950s came from the East, yet was not a musical style or idea but the ‘I Ching’ (ancient Chinese classic text on changing events), Cage's compositional tool for virtually the rest of his life. Whilst his music has been a source of curiosity for many, its abstract and extra-musical schematics have polarized views on his output’s purely musical worth, and alienated audiences in general. Unsurprisingly he has been enormously influential on subsequent generations of composers the world over.

Alan Hovhaness: Composer of Two Worlds?

Alan Hovhaness is among the lesser known of America's "East West" pioneering composers who emerged in the post-war years, but should perhaps be better known.  Of the same generation as Harrison and Cage he too was a fearless explorer of world music traditions and incorporated them into music over a period of half a century.  Much of his mature work is as much a product of Eastern traditions as Western. Rather aptly, he was of Scottish and Armenian descent, and his first mature works of the 1940s exhibited a strong Armenian flavor, apparently with Indian inluences too.  Later he got to visit India (1959), Japan and South Korea (early 1960s), and channeled these diverse influences into a unique syntax of East and West whilst remaining highly popular with audiences.  His music employs Near Eastern, Indian and Japanese scales, as well as his own modal amalgams where these overlapped.

Although, like Harrison, he experimented with 12-tone rows, he was fundamentally a melodist and never embraced the full-blown avant garde tendencies of, say, John Cage.  Like Henry Cowell, Hovhaness often employed traditional Western counterpoint (such as fugal and hymn-like writing) alongside his more exotic writing, but unlike Cowell he could merge these techniques into the same piece - and somehow it nearly always works!  In this respect he certainly achieved a true fusion of east and west without sounding trite.  A good example of such fusion might be his Fantasy on Japanese Woodprints, an entertaining and popular marimba concerto. The Hovhaness biography page also points out that he was an unusually prolific composer, reaching several hundred opuses, as did Henry Cowell, and this excludes early bonfires of music he was not satisfied with.
Another aspect of Hovhaness's individuality was his apparent invention of a technique called senza misura (literally 'without measures') whereby different instruments would repeat their own short lines without synchronous playing to the rest of the group, receiving only start and stop signals from the conductor.  This technique was (probably independently) taken up by others in 1960s Europe.

Lou Harrison: New Tunings and Instruments

Lou Harrison was one of the America’s twentieth century musical pioneers.  He explored  alternate tuning systems, as well as inventing a few new instruments. Born in 1917 his youth was spent on the West Coast before moving around Northern California, eventually settling in San Francisco. There he studied with the eclectic modernist Henry Cowell (see post below). While still only in his twenties, he wrote extensively for dance and percussion insturments. With another of Cowell's students, John Cage, he established what must have been the first concert series devoted to new music for percussion.

Harrison moved to Los Angeles to study with the famous Arnold Schoenberg at UCLA in 1942. Having assimilated the atonal avant garde of Schoenberg's school (12-tone music), he settled in New York the following year, making a name for himself as composer and as music critic where he wrote for New York’s Herald Tribune. Harrison published a study of the music of American atonalist Carl Ruggles, and the influence of Ruggles, as well as former teacher Schoenberg, came through in works such as his Symphony on G and the opera ‘Rapunzel’. However, New York living led to a nervous breakdown in 1947. John Cage recommended him to Black Mountain College in rural North Carolina, where the idyllic environment proved conducive to Harrison's new interests, Asian music and tuning.

In 1961, he attended the East-West Music Encounter, a conference in Tokyo, which proved a decisice point for extensive studies of Asian music, first in Seoul, then in Taiwan. The 1960s saw some of his best known works incorporating these influences, including ‘Pacifika Rondo’ and ‘Young Caesar’. In the last, an elaborate puppet opera, he used for the first time instruments designed and built by his new life-partner, Bill Colvig.  It should be mentioned that a contemporary of Harrison’s, Harry Partch, was also a builder of his own instruments and ruthless pursuer of a new music based on alternate (but not Eastern) tuning systems.

Henry Cowell's 'Mosaic Quartet' and 'Ongaku'

Mosaic Quartet was Henry Cowell Third String Quartet and, whilst not specifically Eastern sounding, is an important American work because it employed a quite loose and somewhat revolutionary open form, which could perhaps be dubbed ”aleatory structure” or "free form". 

Composed in 1935 and described as a “crazy quilt of 5 patterns”, the self-contained mosaics are performed quite literally "in any desired order," as per the composer’s instructions,  As in the strophic structure of a hymn, this mosaic divides into two halves; each verse is five phrases long not the perhaps expected four phrases, and the harmonies are noticeably dissonant, with the exception of straight-out majors (at the beginning, middle, and coda). The four other mosaics are miniature texture studies.  Thus no two performances will sound the same, a notable innovation for the mid 1930s.

Cowell's ONGAKU, on the other hand, is one of his most Eastern-inspired works and an important (late) orchestral work of the composer.  He wrote the following description of it:

"I write as a Westerner, for Western orchestras, but my Ongaku is music in which I have allowed myself to be influenced by the sunny splendor of Japanese music, as other Americans have subjected themselves to the influence of German, French, or Italian traditions.

The foreign music strangest to Western is certainly that of the Far East; China, Korea and Japan. But the strangeness to me seems largely superficial, a matter of tone color and performing technique rather than musical structure. That the music of the East and West are related is attested, I think, by the fact that Western orchestra performers will find nothing particularly surprising in their individual instrument parts for Ongaku (except for the overblown technique for the flute), in spite of the unfamiliar general style in which the music is couched.

Ongaku is in two movements, the first very slow and stately, related to the ceremonial Gagaku music of the Japanese court. The second movement is somewhat faster, lyrical but precise, and it owes something to a more recent style of Japanese ensemble music called Sankyoku"

A Musical Shift to the East

Down the centuries many Western classical music composers took elements of Eastern traditional music to color their own, as exotica had always provided a big fascination for Western audiences, and did so at least until the present age of cheap air travel and global communications - in effect making our world a global village.  In the musical arts this meant composers could, and often did, easily add interest to pieces either through certain non-Western scales, or appropriate choices of instrumentation.  Only rarely, however, was it anything much more than the composer dipping his toes in.  Perhaps one of the earliest classical composers to truly respect Eastern musical ideas was the Frenchman Claude Debussy, whose unorthodox chords and ethereal orchestrations earned him the reputation of a musical enfant terrible.

But it was in America, further from the East than Europe, that a true understanding and wider embracement of Eastern musical ideas first began to take serious hold, and it was around the middle of the 20th century.  Several emerging composers rejected the so called Neo Classical European style, its American offshoot of "Americana" (of which perhaps the popular works of Aaron Copland are the archetypal example), and also the European import of serial or 12-tone composition.

In the 1940s some American composers looked Eastwards with great seriousness for their creative wellspring, and this was effectively the beginning of a slow, but steady surge of interest and acceptance of Eastern music into the Western classical music mainstream.  According to the literature, the principal American figures credited with this direction are Henry Cowell (the "elder statesman" of the group), Lou Harrison, John Cage and Alan Hovhaness - although there were many others of course.

These composers, amongst others, have been hugely influential in setting the scene for younger composers who embraced Eastern musical concepts from the start of their careers into their musical DNA - composers we all know of such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich.  In this blog I shall enthuse on certain works of the first generation of American composers looking Eastwards, when it was rather scorned upon by the musical establishment of our American academic institutions and concert halls.