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Oh, hi there.

Now, may we have our next contestant? Please will you come in?

Will you tell our panel please

what your name is and where you from?

My name is John Cage. I am from Stony Point, New York.

Mr. Cage and he is from New York. Mr. Cage is a musician, he is a composer,

he teaches a course in music at the New School here in New York.

He is probably the most controversial figure in the musical world today

and when you will hear his performance ― if you will forgive me ―

you will understand why. Will you tell us quite seriously,

whether or not you consider what we are about to hear music?

No tongue and cheek, but seriously.

No, perfectly seriously I consider music the production of sounds.

And since in the piece, which you will hear, I produce sounds,

I would call it music.

Inevitably, Mr. Cage, these are nice people,

but some of them are going to laugh. Is that alright?

Of course, I consider laughter preferable to tears.

I’m with you, boy. All right, let’s see this instrument.

That’s it!

The title of the composition is what, Mr. Cage?

“Water Walk”, because it contains water and because I walk during its performance.

And the cut we want is from one thirty-three to one fifty-three.

Oh, I see. So this is actually the beginning because it is the second part.

- This is the beginning. - Okay.

There will be a film.

I thought that it was going to exist

as the making of a chance-determined film.

And the film that we took is simply raw material.

The cuts make a continuity determined by chance operations.

It seems to me that the activity of modern music

has been to open the eyes and the ears of people to things

that they were not aware were beautiful,

for instance in music particularly to noise.

John Cage? Politician?

- Yes. - John Cage. - The musician? - He is a composer.

It was actually at a dance show that I went to see,

some of his music was being performed.

And so, that is just how I know the name.

Pretty interesting, nothing like I have ever heard before.

“Water Music” by John Cage, the score.

You can see it isn’t a traditional score

but it’s far more exact than you’d think.

You use a stopwatch.

This is like a timeline.

Here are the times and here it says what’s to happen when, when it starts

and when it ends. There are piano chords,

sometimes strange things, like playing a duck whistle in water,

here’s a water warbler,

here you have to shut the keyboard lid, and a radio should play at all times.

It has to be set to a specific frequency and you’ll just have to see what comes out.

What mattered to him was that everything has its own sound.

Not just the conventional musical instruments that you know,

but every single object and also water, of course.

Pouring water into different receptacles has its own sound.

He wanted to mix the artificial instrument that is a grand piano,

though slightly altered,

with the natural sound of water, which plays an equal part in the music,

and the technical sound from the radio.

That’s how he created a collage

from these three completely different worlds of sound.

For a lot of composers

this opened up the whole idea that anything could...

that any sound could be used in a musical composition.

And it was a tremendous kind of freedom.

He thought seriously of becoming a painter.

And for several years he couldn’t quite make up his mind

whether he would be a painter or a musician.

And when he studied with Schoenberg, he had already made his decision

at that point that he was going to dedicate his life to music.

Well, I guess I did have an aversion ― I certainly had no feeling for harmony.

And Schoenberg thought that that would make it impossible for me to write music.

I asked him why I wouldn’t be able to write music and he said:

“You’ll come to a wall; you won’t be able to get through.”

And so I said: “I will beat my head against that wall.”

John came up to Stony Point, I guess, more or less in the mid-fifties,

which was a little community outside of New York up the Hudson,

about an hour plus drive from the city.

He’d grown up pretty much in urban environments: Los Angeles,

a little bit time in Chicago and then New York.

And he just sort of jumped in and took it. And as you know,

he worked on building the place and he arranged it,

so that there would be a big glass window looking out into this area right here.

And I think he just got interested, you know, and curious and started to check it out.

And then when he looked out here and saw this sort of miscellaneous array

of ― in this case ― fallen leaves and rocks and stones and trees,

all coming up more or less by some kind of chance,

I think that gave him an image or corresponded to an image

that he was beginning to have of what his music might be doing.

To prepare a piano is nothing more than setting it up.

You put objects in between the strings to change the sound.

Cage wrote it all down

in a very exact way: screws, eraser,

a coin, a bit of plastic and God knows what else.

And he didn’t just write down what, but also where.

This is the one-cent sound.

I don’t use an American cent, but a European one.

Nowadays you can rely on the Euro at least in this respect.

Earlier preparers had it easier. If you bought the score

you got a plastic bag from the publisher containing all the materials.

I don’t suppose it was worth their while,

so nowadays you only get the score, and with that

you go to the hardware store.

Originally he invented it as a stopgap.

He’d prepared a work for percussion ensemble

to accompany a choreography,

but at the rehearsals it turned out the hall was too small.

There was no room for a percussion ensemble which was a real problem.

So as a kind of stopgap he prepared a small piano with elastics

to imitate percussion instruments. Then he got a taste for it

and composed several, 20 pieces of music for prepared piano,

sometimes more, sometimes less prepared,

but always in connection with dance and choreography,

usually done by Merce Cunningham.

Cage was very popular at that time. He came to Peters in 1960

and his contract was exclusive with Peters for all of his music.

Since I arrived the sales have grown.

I don’t know exactly what the pace was,

but to say that they have increased by tenfold would be pretty accurate ―

or more, in twenty years.

In Cage’s lifetime, he was selling a respectable amount of music

but certainly not enough to exist on.

He primarily made his livings from commissions and personal appearances.

But now he could live comfortably on his royalties alone,

without any commissions or personal appearances.

He is by far the best seller

and brings in the most income among American composers.

John Cage’s most important works are in this area, actually.

For example there is “Aria”

which is a pretty interesting work to see.

And...

there is 4'33" ― probably his most famous piece.

These are all works that came at the same time into the Peter’s catalogue.

That is why they kind of congregated in this one area.

And here is the “Sonatas and Interludes”.

This is probably one of his most popular pieces.

It incorporates his use of prepared piano.

This is the “Song Books” by Cage

and these are the instructions for the performance of “Song Books”.

This is a very important piece of his.

Part of it incorporates a map

of the area around Walden Pond, where Thoreau lived.

Cage was very interested in the writings of Thoreau at this time.

And this is a drawing of Thoreau.

And I don’t know exactly how you use those two things

to create a performance but somehow or other you do.

You know, he had gotten to the point in 1960,

where people were really demanding his music. And he decided one day

that he wasn’t going to write another note

until he got a publisher.

And you probably know the story: he called Walter Hinrichsen

and he had gone down the Yellow Pages

and came to Peters and called Walter Hinrichsen

and Hinrichsen said, ’I am so glad you called me.’

’My wife has been wanting me to publish you for years.’

Cage came to Peters

and they signed the contract ― agreed on the contract that afternoon over lunch.

Peters was always the top of the list in terms of attention and care, quality...

And that was so good for John, wasn’t it? He was so careful and precise

in what he did.

Hinrichsen took on everything that Cage had written

or was going to write for the next ten years.

- Well, that’s unusual for a music publisher. - Very.

Throughout the ’40s and ’50s

he was doing his early percussion works and his prepared piano pieces.

They were well received, even by the general public.

People liked it. He had concerts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

He was doing quite well.

And then circa 1952, he decided to start using chance operations

and that was very unpopular.

And a lot of people, who were fans of Cage up until that point,

totally rejected the move to composing by chance operations.

Each shot is being cut at least once

and some are cut twice and some are cut three times.

- And that is all the result of chance operations. - Mm.

That’s what these numbers have to do with.

Where do the numbers come from?

They come out of the computer in a program that simulates the “I Ching”.

- You know the “I Ching”? - Mm.

Sound is great.

Since I was already committed to music,

instead of proceeding in my involvement with Zen Buddhism to sit cross-legged,

I decided to continue sitting at my desk

but changing my work from the making of choices to the asking of questions,

which would be answered by means of chance operations.

And that’s I’ve done for now between 35 and 40 years.

The “I Ching” is an ancient Chinese book of oracles.

I think it dates from maybe 2000 BC, somewhere in there.

I knew from conversation that John was very interested in oriental philosophy.

And so I thought, well, this is something he might really be interested in.

I brought it along and that was one of my presents for him.

It is used for consultation, on usually occasions of some importance:

you have a decision to make or you have a crisis in your life

and you want some help with it, you consult the “I Ching”.

It is a series of texts, which are accessed by means of a chance procedure.

There are actually 64 chapters, so to speak, of text.

And you toss the coins or there is a more complicated way of using yarrow sticks.

Your need to get one of these hexagrams, so you have to toss the coins six times.

This time we have two tails and a head.

And that’s a number seven, that’s a straight line. Okay.

Now, when John first started to use this, whenever he had a spare moment,

you’d be in a restaurant waiting for you order or whatever,

he’d always have his coins out and would be...

because this takes hours, you know,

because for a page of music you’d need like 60 sets of tosses.

So, he had this notebook

where he would accumulate hexagrams just to have for later use,

and he would use any spare instant he had to be doing this.

And that’s two heads and a tail ― that is a broken line.

Okay, so know we get this hexagram:

this is the bottom three lines ― these are the various possibilities there ―

and these are the top three lines. And then you cross reference

and you get the number there, which is the number for the text that you go.

But Cage in a sense initially had no interest in that part at all.

He was simply interested in the fact

that he was going to get one of 64 possible possibilities

by tossing the coins in this particular way.

And for the rest of his life that’s what he used to compose with.

I hope that comes out to five minutes,

- thirty times ten seconds? - Sure.

I think the reason I am so fascinated about numbers is

that I don’t really understand them.

John’s idea was that chance was an opportunity

not to let your subconscious emerge in the work, as the Surrealists did,

but to get completely beyond yourself,

to really evict self-expression from what you were doing,

and that the piece of music would be more interesting as a result,

or more like life ―

more like “nature in her manner of operation,” as he said.

This is another kind which is also good:

Collybia radicata.

So, yes John, when he first got here, he just sort of explored the place

and got out into the woods and up here and so forth

and then noticed that things grew and some of them were quite interesting looking

and they were mushrooms and he discovered that you can eat some of them

if you were careful about which ones

and began to inform himself

and eventually of course became, you know, a word class mycologist.

Nothing happened as far as I was concerned with mushrooms until the middle ’50s

when I moved away from New York to Rockland County near New York

in a community situation. And I had been used to New York

to more or less the privacy you have in a big city.

Whereas in the country, there were six of us all living in the same farmhouse,

waiting for places to be built for us.

So I took to walking in the woods

just to get a little solitude.

I thought I would pick some berries,

but the ground was absolutely covered with mushrooms of many different colors.

And like a child I was drawn to them.

I’ve been hunting mushrooms since that time,

whenever I have the opportunity

and all over the world.

Once I was hunting with my father

and we weren’t finding anything

and he said, “Well, we can always go and buy some real ones.”

I have come through my music to enjoy the sounds

that are in my environment wherever I am.

And I wouldn’t say

that I understand the environment. I simply experience it.

I’ve given up that whole idea of value judgments.

That’s what our education gives us.

But through Zen Buddhism I came to want to increase my enjoyment

of all the things that I can experience.

Listen to what is going on around you, pay attention ― that’s good.

But I have the feeling that Cage wants not a more up-to-date dictionary;

he wants no dictionary at all.

He wants there to be no distinction whatsoever

between natural or ambient sound on the one hand

and organized sound on the other.

And I am saying without that distinction,

I can’t pay attention to something as music.

I think that Cage’s influence is an openness to technology;

it’s an openness to the self and how one experiences things,

so a kind of experiential approach to composition and art making.

It’s, you know, the sheer novelty of things that one can do,

using your environment to create a composition.

So I think it could all be put under the rubric of giving permission;

you know, that Cage was a great permission giver.

I think the question that Cage raises

― at least for me ― is whether I am capable of responding to it

in the way which I respond to pieces of music.

And I think that Cage makes it almost impossible to do that.

Now, this isn’t to say that he is not an artist,

he may well be a performance artist,

or these may be terrific pieces of theater and they may cause

interesting reflection on the nature of music,

without themselves being music.

Well, I always thought of Cage’s music

as something very friendly

and ultimately unanarchic.

Because it doesn’t want to subdue the opposite side.

It is quite unrethorical. It is very unrethorical music,

that leaves the opposite side free reign and lets it be free unto itself.

I don’t feel it as part of that old story:

melody, harmony, rhythm.

I don’t feel it as that sequence

of debt, repudiation, innovation; think of Beethoven and Mozart.

There’s plenty of repudiation of Mozart, but the debt is there.

And I find in Cage, in the most difficult works, not in all of them,

but the most problematic works, just repudiation.

So I find it more political

than musical.

I use elements of chance

in just about everything I do.

Things obviously happen when you use chance

that pushes it somewhere other than your aesthetic prejudice of the moment.

And most of what we do

is involved with our aesthetic prejudice of the moment

and I try to circumvent it, to go somewhere else.

This is a painting that’s part of a project

that was started two or three decades ago,

to do a painting of the first thunder clap on the first page of “Finnigans Wake”.

Cage was fond of “Finnigans Wake”

and it was something I had read and was fond of

as something we talked about;

it was something we had a different relationship with it.

The letters are projected from the book, in fact.

They are exact blow-ups. You see...

half or a little more than half of an “N”

and next to it is 99 percent of the next “N”

as chance determined it.

This “N” is almost complete here.

So, what area I am going to fill in as it were,

I throw a pair of dice.

So, I’ll work in this area. And...

I would choose either paint by chance ― blind without looking ―

and then I might just kind of...

close my eyes and choose a place

and work really just...

this way.

With my eyes closed ― I’d wear sunglasses

so people won’t think I am really a lunatic.

I have usually two pencils or two pens in my hand

and in my lap there is a pad

and I try to meditate.

I always liked them better than drawings I make when I am looking, frankly.

The photograph of John Cage looking out over the rock garden

is one you see very often.

What do you think he heard here?

He would have been listening

to the sounds of nature, I think.

The sound of the rain is beautiful today.

It’s like you’re becoming more and more immersed in the world of sound.

When you play Cage I feel the same way. Beside the sounds

many moments of silence emerge

until, ultimately, you hear sound itself.

The sounds are not so insistent

as to rob you of air.

Every single one of them seems to start existing in free space.

Just like every single stone here exists

separate from one another,

and every rock has its own sound.

Cage once said

he wasn’t a composer, didn’t he?

He didn’t want to be a composer but a listener.

He said he wanted to point his antennas at the sounds of the world

and listen to them.

“Composer” is a modern-age term invented in Europe.

I suppose he wanted to free himself of that.

We Japanese have always admired Western contemporary music

and Western modernity, and have even tried to emulate it.

If all of this is turned upside down...

...that’s pretty heavy.

But there’s an entire world you can only hear if you do just that.

If you look at it that way, he is someone who opened up a new world to us

and reminded us of an old world at the same time.

In Japan too he is considered a very important composer.

In other words, it’s not like he is treated as

“oh, that avant-garde somebody” ― you know.

I mean, they do understand Cage’s work

and they really respect his work.

Food was one of the central focus points for Cage.

And if he was in the kitchen chopping a particular kind of mushroom or whatever,

this was part of the sound that was there.

He was always aware of the sound.

I heard that he was having some difficulty

with his arthritis

and I’m sure he was getting the regular kind of medication for arthritis.

I sent John a macrobiotic cookbook,

because I knew that he was a very incredible cook, actually.

And so that was a way that I thought maybe he might want to get into:

macrobiotic ― and he did. And it was amazing.

I just respect his attitude of always being open to new things.

- All our technology is an extension of what we are, don’t you think? - Mm, yes.

So, to record sometimes ― I guess, you must do it as well ―

I use different microphones for different songs.

Well, I have always used one, but since I am going to be singing so much...

- Yeah, you make some experiments... - I am going to use...

- And if you get old microphones... - You have never heard me sing?

- No. - Are you gonna sing for us? - No, I don’t think I will

because it’s with the microphone I should sing and I don’t have a microphone.

Yes, I understand. So you let the spirit,

- the microphone actually acted as a vocal cord, the spirit. - Right.

- That’s what you’re doing. - I could do a little for you.

But I don’t think it will mean anything for you.

- You want me to do some? - Well, I think everything means something.

Yeah, it would be nice just to do it.

Mm, beautiful, I like that.

- Do you like it? - Yes. Got right through to me.

- I just go on and on for hours. - Aha, yes.

I would say he was the most special person I knew.

He really radiated. He made everyone feel that they were part of the experience.

And he was always difficult with decisions.

He never wanted to make decisions.

It was up to you to make the decision.

Yes, there were several, normally shall we say in the “Freeman Etudes”,

let’s say places where “I Ching” went wrong.

Like you would have an open string and he would write vibrato on it.

I mean it’s possible to do something.

But this happens a few times in the “Freeman Etudes”.

I approached him once at a concert because I wanted to know

if something new was coming out. What’s the new record?

And he said, “Well,”

“these musicians were playing these new works of his very beautifully”

“and no one seemed interested to record them.”

Although he didn’t have a clear input on how something should be recorded.

He knew exactly who the right performers were,

so they would be done correctly,

in the right spirit, in the right type of interpretation...

Or there were questions of how things were to be played.

- And he would always say to me “Can I hear that?” - “Yes.”

So I would play it to him one way and the other way.

I mean convincingly,

sometimes I would play for composers one way very unconvincingly,

to make them take the first way.

But with Cage he was such a nice guy, I loved him,

I couldn’t play games with him at all.

So I played really the best I could both ways.

And there was a silence and then he would say:

“I like both of them.”

There you are.

- So that’s the next shot. - That’s the next shot.

- Got that? - Yes.

That’s beautiful.

I had been playing chess regularly and started playing with Bill.

So we were playing at home and since John loved to play chess,

he invited Bill to play with him.

It was on that very first day at Bank Street

that he said, “Do you play chess?” And I said, “Yes, I do.”

“I haven’t played for a while, but I do enjoy it when I play.”

He said, “Well, we should play a game sometime.”

And that’s what we did.

So after a while it was chess at five, seven days a week.

And that went on for 15 years.

That’s 10,000, more than 10,000 games.

Surprisingly, Cage treated me as an equal.

He was very pedagogic, although he said to my mother:

“I hope you don’t mind, I think of Dove as the daughter I never had.”

Bob Rauschenberg had said to John,

that it wasn’t possible to do a hundred percent chance composition for a painting.

That it was all well and good for John in music but not for the visual arts.

So, I took that as a challenge and I thought

I would try to see whether I could make a composition using pure chance.

In the early ’80s I was working with silver.

And silver changes anyway with light, air and humidity.

But I added to the change by putting a chemical on called liver of sulfur.

It is not only chance-based because of the composition,

but it’s also indeterminant in the sense that the chemical will change the surface.

When John was very young, one of his first ambitions was to be a minister.

And I think that kind of leadership role

went deep and went into his later artistic life as well,

because certainly he led the New York art world and then later the world

in aesthetics in the second half of the 20th century and on into this century.

The freedom that he encourages for performers is extraordinary

and makes for a situation where one can feel one’s own creativity,

which he also envisions that the audience should feel that creativity too.

John didn’t like improvisation. A lot of people think that

because he is anarchic and he is so free and so on

that improvisation is exactly up his alley. It wasn’t.

He very much controlled.

When he wrote a score, he wanted people to follow it very precisely.

Improvisation brings you back to what you know.

And he always wanted you to go beyond to territories that you didn’t know.

I find in my experience with music

that I enjoy more sounds than I ever did.

Recently, for instance, I’ve come to like sounds that don’t change,

things that I used to try to ignore.

Now I actually enjoy them and offer them to other people to hear.

I think our aim should be to have more and more access to the enjoyment of life.