University of New Hampshire
John Cage’s Music as Models of Sociopolitical Action: Three Approaches to the Piano
For John Cage, Zen Buddhism facilitated a compositional model that envisions a complex network including such elements as sound, embodiment through performance, and the critique of music-genre categories. All of these elements, in turn, contribute to Cage’s overarching project of musical experience as a metaphor for social and political action. His piano music offers particularly compelling examples of this interest because several works demonstrate his ongoing concern to dramatize the relationships in the network involving the actor-pianist, her instrument, and the temporal and social space in which performance occurs. In Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano (1946–1948), the objects modifying the piano’s timbre contradict the pianist’s conditioned response to the conventional musical notation; furthermore, the dialectic between prepared and non-prepared pitch suggests a model of accepting the Other that reflects both Cage’s interest in Zen and his response to World War II. By contrast, Etudes Australes (1974–1975) conceives the pianist’s two hands as separate actors who must negotiate increasingly difficult separate gestures; the physical reality of performance, where the two hands constantly cross over each other, represents the near-impossibility of meaningful political action that occupies Cage’s mind and work in the 1970s. Finally, One5 (1990) contains two separate streams of relatively soft sound-events over the span of 20 minutes; the constrained freedom of time brackets (which allow the pianist to select various options for when sounds begin and end) and the music’s extremely transparent texture heighten an awareness of the network involving the actions of pianist, audience, and environment. Like the earlier works, One5 responds to Cage’s ongoing interest in anarchism, but only in this late composition does he do so in a manner that fully realizes his commitment to Zen.
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Rob Haskins is an associate professor of music in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of New Hampshire. He holds degrees in both musicology and performance, and has been active in both fields. His most recent book is Classical Listening: Two Decades of Reviews from The American Record Guide. He is also working on a short cultural history of the piano for Reaktion Books. As a performer, Haskins served as musical director for Alarm Will Sound’s 2012 production of Cage’s Song Books at the Holland Festival. Mode Records has issued his performance (with Laurel Karlik Sheehan) of Cage’s Two2 and will release a new solo CD of Marc Chan’s evening-length piano work My Wounded Head later this year.