From: smoliar@argon.iss.nus.sg (stephen smoliar)
Subject: Re: John Cage is Dead
Reply-To: smoliar@iss.nus.sg (stephen smoliar)
Organization: Institute of Systems Science, NUS, Singapore
Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1992 23:57:11 GMT

In article <1992Aug28.124510.4944@cs.rochester.edu> steyn@cs.rochester.edu
(Gavin Steyn) writes:
>In article <Btopq6.L4I@quake.sylmar.ca.us> brian@quake.sylmar.ca.us (Brian K.
>Yoder) writes:
>
>>Tell me...just what thoughts so you think a Cage listener is supposed to
>>have?
>>Do you think they are good/true thoughts?
>
>This question doesn't really make any sense for a few reasons.
>  
>  First, if I (or Cage) could just have written down what his music was
>supposed to make you think, he wouldn't have bothered writing the music.
>
>  Which leads us to the second point, that what music makes you feel is
>often not expressible in words, and even when they are, the words will be
>different for every person.  (For example, I ran across one description
>of the Bach Tocatta and Fuge in D minor as "playful," but if I ask
>someone who's just seen _Phantom of the Opera_, that's not the first
>term they'd think of).
>
>  Third, I rally have a problem with this equation of good and true thoughts.
>They're not the same thing at all.  (Not all true thoughts are necessarily
>good, and there are a lot of lies that most of us believe in to good
>effect).
>
This was all very well put, Gavin (even if your points never register with
Brian).  However, there is another angle of approach I would like to explore
for the calmer minds here.  I think that, at some level, it DOES make sense
to talk about dispositional mental states which are induced by a musical
experience.  I certainly do not believe that such states are, in any way,
universal across all listeners;  but sometimes it probably DOES make sense
to ask if the induced state shares anything with the mental state of the
composer.  Let me try to explore this point with an anecdote.

The only time I formally studied under Cage was when I took a class he offered
one summer when the Cunningham company was in residence at the University of
Colorado.  The course was entitled "Music and Mushrooms" (and I turned out to
be half of his student body).  The course consisted of driving into the country
around Boulder to hunt for mushrooms and talking . . . about anything we wanted
to talk about.  (In other words we talked about music when we wanted to;  but
none of us--including Cage--ever felt obliged to do so.)

The one thing I remember about these little excursions with Cage was that he
could take almost ANYTHING, point at it, and say, "Isn't that marvelous?"
(This was in 1968, long before Billy Crystal had trivialized that word.)
As is often the case in child development, that is the sort of habit one
picks up;  and I realized that much of his music was similarly disposed
(to return to the word with which I started this argument).  A great example
of this is "Inlets," his conch shell piece.  Ultimately, performer and listener
come to share Cage's sense of wonder and the sounds made by water in the shell;
so I think it DOES make sense to talk about a sharing of mental state in the
experiencing of Cage's music.

Mind you, I have never managed to quiet my mind quite to the point where I
could live the way Cage did.  After I returned from Colorado, I realized how
hard it was to react with that same sense of wonder to all those sea gulls on
a massive pile of garbage along the New Jersey Turnpike.  However, I guess that
was the summer I first learned about sharing mental states;  and at least the
basic principle has never left me, even if I can not always put it into
practice.
-- 
Stephen W. Smoliar; Institute of Systems Science
National University of Singapore; Heng Mui Keng Terrace
Kent Ridge, SINGAPORE 0511
Internet:  smoliar@iss.nus.sg