By Lucrezia De Domizio Durini
Cage preferred the ideas and works of Arnold Schoenberg to those of Stravinsky. So it was that he became his pupil, and when he had finished his studies, he suddenly found he was an active part of the musical community. This was in the 1930s and in those days it used to be said that an artist “has to have had something to say.” He lived through a unique historical period when there was a craze for “practicing the impossible.” Composing to Cage was like writing a letter to a complete stranger. The noises that he translated into sounds expressed the mysterious Sanskrit of nature. He traveled widely and finally came to rest in New York. He lived in an old loft between 18th Street and 6th Avenue, an inviolable visionary theater. By its history in time it became one of the world’s most famous lofts. It was a simple space, almost bleak, devoid of objects, glowing with light and containing some ninety pot plants. They included his favorite cacti of various shapes and sizes, with which he established a close transcendental relationship. John Cage was deeply attached to his loft. He declared it contained absolutely unpredictable sounds of nature, more so than any other place. The traffic was continuous. Night and day he was fascinated by the honking of the cars, the brakes screeching on the blacktop, the sirens, the burglar alarms... All these sounds and noises were woven into his creative work. The environment he lived and worked in was the total material of his musical compositions, with the space comprising the sum of all the things it contained: silence and noise. He created his compositions out of the gurgling of the water flowing through the pipes by the old skylight, the humming of the food that he loved to cook in special pans, the noises in the street and the meowing of his affectionate black cat. The stones were his interlocutors and he engaged in unpredictable, random, resonant conversations with them.
His mind was intrigued by change and he was always able to establish relations with all the objects around him. He loved gardening and cooking because they were everyday experiences that influenced the harmony of praxis. Cage practiced Zen Buddhism which, like music, he found an interesting function for changing the mind by making it more receptive to experience. He took a deep interest in chess because it acted as a balancing element. He often played with Marcel Duchamp, a close friend with whom he shared the Dada spirit. He did not care for possessions and sought to rid himself of everything. When in the summer of 1954 he moved from New York to Stony Point, a community of friends, he was conducting research into random operations. While wandering in the woods he was attracted to the flora, in which mushrooms abounded. So it was that he relied on the aleatory and fed exclusively on mushrooms. His passion for them was such that he was led to study mycology and became one of the leading experts on the subject. In 1959 he entered the Italian version of the game show Lascia o Raddoppia (Double or Quits) and won the final prize, 5 million liras, a substantial sum at the time. The money came in handy as his finances were always precarious. John Cage always sought to blur the boundaries between art and life, teacher and student, performer and audience, producing works throughout his life which are not intentionally composed. He lived in a unique historical period in which the constellation of his friends, his supportive artistic and ideological traveling companions, included Marcel Duchamp, his master Schoenberg – whom Cage surpassed in ideology with Boulez –, Satie and Varèse, Joyce and Artaud, Busoni and Ives, Rauschenberg and Johns. And it should not be forgotten that John Cage was a member of the Fluxus movement together with great men in the history of world culture, such as Joseph Beuys, George Brecht, Robert Filliou, Dick Higgins, George Maciunas, Nam June Paik and many other famous people. David Tudor and Merce Cunningham were also old friends. With the latter, who occupied the neighboring loft, he had a relationship apart, a special and profound friendship which produced an intense shared work, a passion that lasted until his death.
At this intersection of ideas, we should also remember Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta, a versatile intellectual, architect, composer, photographer and poet. We can describe him as a true artist who was constantly close to John Cage in the last seven years of his life. Cage was teacher, father and friend to him. Emanuel and John were traveling companions in music and philosophy through a profound cultural and human development. Their close relationship also found expression in an interesting exchange of letters. They worked together at extraordinary electronic compositions that were also the basic music for the remarkable works of Merce Cunningham, the 20th-century’s greatest choreographer. I was lucky, thanks to Pimenta, to meet him, become friends and be present at the Lincoln Center in New York in 2002 on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his work.
John Cage wanted Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta to be the only person to venture with his magic lens into the depths of his loft, where his creations came to life. The result is a photographic record, a kind of essay made up of rare and unique images. The unrepeatable story of a human relationship which over the years led Pimenta as composer to engage in a continuous work in progress of innate creativity, attaining the height of his masterpiece by being the first to produce scores for virtual reality.
Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta has continued in his music to devise concerts, drawings, musical scores and exhibitions in many countries around the world. In Italy, at the opening of the MART Museum at Rovereto, on 7 March 2003 he presented a memorable and masterful concert and exhibition titled “John Cage.
The Silence of Music,” with the splendid conceptual installation of his friend’s loft; same title had the book published by Silvana Editoriale. This year, to mark the centenary of the birth of the master on 5 September 1912, the world is celebrating the memory of John Cage, one of the most singular figures in highest spiritual and cosmological spheres of musical and human sensibility.
Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta is actively involved in reconstructing the memory of an inner dialogue that touches the music of the soul in the noise and silence of a magical and fascinating encounter.
John Cage and the Stones
In John Cage’s loft, close to the table with the phone and lampshade and just behind the kitchen, there was a small stone garden.
That lovely garden of smooth stones was, in one respect, the very image of John. “I’ve found each of these small stones in every part of the world where I’ve worked. I would say they have a magical character. They are pieces of the planet, pieces of memory, of life,” he said smiling. “Each of these stones is a little piece of my memory. None of them have any material value. But they are all very important to me. When I look at them I see so many memories,” he would say.
He created a small universe of stone and stone is the supreme temporal interconnector.
The Mexican poet, writer and philosopher Octavio Paz, a great friend of John and of Merce Cunningham, wrote in a famous essay on Marcel Duchamp that for over three thousand years the Chinese had established a sort of art that consisted of finding and collecting small stones at random. When a stone was chosen, once separated from the others, from the world, the work of art was born. Often the one who chose a stone would sign it, so making it, in a way, part of his or her person.
In the exhibition at the MART in Rovereto I, too, wanted to repeat this gesture of love for stones, in memory of my friend and mentor John Cage.
John told me that years earlier he had spoken to Octavio Paz about this Chinese tradition, but added that his small garden had a different meaning. Its meaning was to have no meaning. It was just this and nothing more.
“This garden doesn’t mean anything. It’s there. Just like that. And that’s already too much,” he said laughing.
In an interview with Regina Vater and William Lundberg in 1986, John Cage conveyed some idea of what he thought of music, stones and plants, which were everywhere in his loft. “I continue to testify, through my experience, particularly with sound, to the fact that I enjoy environmental sounds and noises. These ventilator fans are turning because it’s hot. But they help me create what Duchamp described as ‘musical sculpture,’ because each of them defines the point in space where it is placed ... In my life and work, which form a whole, I increasingly involve all sounds, even continuous sounds like burglar alarms ... and so on ... At first, when I heard sounds I didn’t like, I would try and ignore them ... Now, instead of ignoring them, I listen to them and find they convey a pleasure correlated with space ... just the way Duchamp described it ... After my forthcoming trip to Budapest, I’ll go to Basel in Switzerland, where I’ll be giving a concert called Stone Collection ... and those sounds in relation to their location in space ... and also the fact that they’re in different places ... are, as I said, a ‘stone’ ... rather like Duchamp said it would be a ‘sculpture’ ... In the same way some musicians find that by moving to specific locations determined by chance, they keep up a single musical note ... It’s exactly the same thing that happens with a burglar alarm or a fan ... Other musicians at different points in space keep up different tones. This transformation produces a sense of space defined by the sound noise and by other noises... All this becomes a kind of sound sculpture that interacts in space ...”
“I want to talk about stone because here in my loft I live with a lot of stones and a lot of plants ... Wherever I go, I collect rocks ... My life is a series of many things. It has never focused on one single thing. In the course of my life I keep looking out for more and more interests and the most recent ones are stones and plants ... A lot of reflections are stirred by comparing stones to plants ... For example, we know that plants move and are alive. Well, I think that stones too have a vitality of their own, but they move very slowly, so we can’t see them moving.”
In discussing this unusual topic Cage speaks smilingly and continues: “I’d like to relate a personal story. In the past I had a certain opinion, let’s say unfavorable, about sculptures because I thought they were like intrusions into space ... Then through plants, because I love them so much, I understood the meaning of sculpture in space. I lived in the provinces for years among plants, I’d go out walking in the woods ... When I came into town I missed them, I wanted to have a piece of nature around me ... and I’m surrounded by plants. And it was through plants that I started to see the beauty of everything that is introduced into space ... I finally opened my eyes and I also saw stones ... Now I’ve put them in my music.”
Through these words we can understand how in John Cage’s music stones gain a major continued presence, albeit virtual.
After all, if we throw a stone, we’ll never know how and where it will fall... especially if they are pebbles.
In my opinion, through computers and some of the most advanced systems of artificial intelligence, it is impossible to predict exactly where and how a stone will fall.
This is because the formula includes the IP number, an irrational.
These concepts were of fundamental importance to my mentor John, as they were to his friend Merce Cunningham, because they are essential signs of free will. In this sense freedom goes beyond intentions and does not involve the will, as is usually supposed.
This kind of freedom can exist only before the unknown, because only that which is wholly unknown can make us aware of our own knowledge.
In this way we are better able to discover everything we do not know but which exists in any kind of complexity, seeking to implement the understanding, as was wisely said by Lao Tzu, the father of Chinese Taoism.
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