Title: ‘A Quiet Corner Where We Can Talk’: Cage's Satie, 1948–1958
Abstract: AbstractEven by his own iconoclastic standards, the stance that John Cage staked out with regard to the music of Erik Satie was extreme. Although Robert Orledge notes of Satie that ‘Curiously, rhythmic originality never seemed to concern him’, Cage insisted that his own rhythmic innovations (his use of symmetries and of square root, or micro-macrocosmic structures) derived from similar structures he found in Satie's works. This essay begins with a survey of the documents at the center of Cage's (mis)reading of Satie. It then examines the rhythmic structural innovations that Cage ascribes to Satie. It concludes with a study of parallel developments in the music of both composers that suggest lines of influence between them (some predating his first Satie essay) that Cage himself did not acknowledge. The paper includes detailed analyses of selections from Cage's Five Songs for Contralto and Six Melodies for Violin and Piano.Keywords: CageSatieRhythmic StructureFive SongsSix MelodiesLe fils des étoilesMesse des pauvres Notes[1] See Robert Orledge's assessment of Satie, which seeks to rationalize Cage's reception (Orledge, Citation2000, p. 78).[2] Matthew Shlomowitz notes that ‘Cage's radical interpretation of Satie's music (and Beethoven's) does not seem to have been supported by any one else’ (Shlomowitz, Citation1999).[3] Richard H. Brown confronts a similarly complex issue of Cage and his influences, noting that ‘determining any direct lineage or influence for Cage's intellectual or compositional breakthroughs is difficult, given his proclivity for colourful personal narrative that both simplified and obscured the complex web of influences that shape his career (Brown, Citation2012, p. 84).[4] Cage's engagement with Satie's music continued virtually to the end of his life, culminating in Four3 (1991) and ‘The First Meeting of the Satie Society’ (begun 1985, completed in 1993, after Cage's death). The latter is an ambitious collaborative project ‘conceived as a series of presents for Erik Satie’, described by Cage as ‘a collection of materials for performance, reading, visual examination, etc. some of them musical, most of them literary … [this work] is not a play, though there are three characters and there is incidental music'. From the online catalogue raisonné of Sol LeWitt (one of Cage's collaborators on the project), listed at http://www.sollewittprints.org/lewitt-raisonne-1995--10. Accessed 23 February 2014. See also Shlomowitz (Citation1999).[5] Relevant documents by Cage himself, besides those discussed in this essay, include ‘Grace and Clarity’ (1944), ‘Forerunners of Modern Music’ (1948), Lecture on Nothing (1950), and Composition as Process -- I. Changes (1958), all of which are reprinted in Cage (Citation1961a). The most complete explorations of Cage's own formulation of this taxonomy, and of its application, respectively, in the Sonatas and Interludes and in the String Quartet in Four Parts, appears in Bernstein (Citation2009) and Jenkins (Citation2002). See also Pritchett (Citation1988, p. 61).[6] On Cage's involvement with Black Mountain College, see Brody (Citation2002, pp. 251–257), Harris (Citation2002, pp. 146, 154–156, 226–231), Hines (Citation1973, pp. 74–75, 78) and Patterson (Citation1996, pp. 180–240).[7] Quoted in Kuhn (Citation2012); the letter is in the Peter Yates Papers 1927–1976, MSS 0014, Box 3, Folder 1, Mandeville Special Collections Library, Geisel Library, University of California, San Diego. I am grateful to Heather Smedberg of Mandeville Special Collections Library for providing me with a copy of the original letter.[8] John Cage, ‘Satie Controversy’, in Cage/Kostelanetz (Citation1970, p. 89).[9] Ibid., pp. 91–92.[10] Ibid., pp. 92–93.[11] For an exploration of the chronology and sources of Cage's study of Indian, Chinese, and Japanese Buddhist philosophy and spiritual practice, and their influence on his rhetoric and compositions, see Patterson (Citation1996, pp. 126–179).[12] Christopher Shultis chronicles Cage's disenchantment with, and critique of, his European contemporaries Boulez and Stockhausen in Shultis (Citation2002, especially 33–38).[13] I am indebted to my colleague Dr Robert Peck for his insight into the mathematical underpinnings of Figure 2 (a) and (b), and for his assistance with the graphic overlay.[14] In more formal mathematical terms, the numeric contours above and below the central axis are inverses of one another. Thus, the diagram displays a type of reflection about that axis.[15] Here, the palindromic design of the numeric sequence suggests a reflection about the central vertical axis. Compare the rhythmic structure of the First Construction (In Metal) of 1939: ‘4-3-2-3-4 (16 × 16) with coda of 9 measures (2-3-4)— an exposition (1-1-1-1) followed by development (3-2-3-4) and extension (2-3-4)’ (Cage, Citation1939).[16] Example 1-1 from Pritchett (Citation1993, p. 15). Measure numbers have been corrected to correspond to the 1960 Henmar score.[17] See James Pritchett's pioneering study of the Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra, one of the first studies of Cage's music to make use of compositional sketch material (Pritchett, Citation1988).[18] This is taken from the 1929 piano transcription by Darius Milhaud of the Cinq Grimaces (published by Universal Edition): Erik Satie, Cinq grimaces : pour ‘Le songe d'une nuit d'été’ pour orchestra, réduction pour piano par Darius Milhaud (Wien: Universal Edition 1929, 1956). Subtitles—Préambule, Coquecigrue, Chasse, Fanfaronnade, and Pour Sortir—appear at the head of each movement in Milhaud's arrangement, but not in the orchestral score, which Universal Edition also published in 1929.[19] In addition, the suggestion of palindromic construction in the succession of blocks F-G-G-F might also have interested Cage.[20] Courtney Adams notes that ‘Satie was obsessive in counting bars, as his sketches show’, Adams demonstrates rigorous use of Golden Section principles by Satie in four sets of piano pieces and six single-movement works (Adams, Citation1996).[21] I am grateful to Paul Zukovsky for sharing his thoughts and insights concerning this and related matters. Paul Zukovsky, private correspondence, 4–5 August, 2013. See also Zukofsky (Citation1991).[22] I explore the interaction of Cage's Table of Preparations and other aspects of his compositional technique in Perry (Citation2005).[23] Bernstein (Citation2009) contains a detailed discussion of the gamut for the String Quartet in Four Parts and its compositional deployment.[24] Tomkins (Citation1968, pp. 101–102). See also Revill (Citation1992, pp. 61, 99).[25] Macro/microstructure likewise figures in the unfinished series of works that Cage referred to as The Ten Thousand Things, dating from this same period. See Bernstein (Citation2013).[26] David Patterson's investigation of Asian influences on Cage points to a similar pattern of selectivity and creative misreading in his citation of Coomaraswamy's aesthetic writings (Patterson, Citation2002, p. 45).[27] Cage, ‘[On Earlier Pieces]’ (Cage, Citation1970, p. 127). A reprint of the program note found in the recording of Cage (Citation1958/1994).[28] David Bernstein points to further Schoenbergian influence on Cage's rhythmic language, suggesting that Cage's use of rhythmic schemata may have been a response to Schoenberg's teachings about repetition and variation (Bernstein, Citation2002a, pp. 29–31). Bernstein also traces Cage's rhythmic techniques to his exposure to the music and ideas of Charles Seeger, Ruth Crawford, and Henry Cowell, and to his work with dancers (Bernstein, Citation2002b, pp. 69, 70–71).[29] Satie, quoted in Cage (Citation1961a, p. 76).
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-11-02
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 25
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