The Rest Is Noise Series: Brave New World: The Cold War and the Avant-Garde of the Fifties. Alex Ross
the sound of the surrounding space. It was at once a head-spinning philosophical statement and a Zen-like ritual of contemplation. It was a piece that anyone could have written, as skeptics never failed to point out, but, as Cage seldom failed to respond, no one else did.
The bourgeois piano having been silenced, the age of the machines could begin. On his European trip of 1949, Cage encountered several pioneering technicians of electronic music, who had set in motion the most sweeping of all postwar campaigns against the musical past.
The previous year, Pierre Schaeffer, an engineer at the French national radio network, had devised five electronic Études of Noises, one movement of which consisted of the huffing, chugging, and whistling of six locomotives that he had recorded in the Batignolles train station. Schaeffer worked initially with phonograph discs, but he soon realized that magnetic-tape recording, which German engineers had perfected during the war, allowed for the making of sound collages by way of cutting and splicing bits of tape. (His initial research into musical acoustics had actually taken place during the war, with the approval of the occupying German forces.) Schaeffer went on to create, in collaboration with another Messiaen pupil, Pierre Henry, an extended collage work titled Symphony for a Solitary Man. Schaeffer dubbed his work musique concrète and developed his tape fragments with contrapuntal intensity—playing them backward, speeding them up, slowing them down, slicing off the attack, or turning them into loops.
When Cage came to Paris, Boulez, knowing of his long-standing fascination with electronic gizmos, introduced him to Schaeffer. A few years later, in New York, Cage gained access to German-style magnetic-tape recorders, and, at the studio of Louis and Bebe Barron, he laboriously put together the four-minute tape collage Williams Mix, one of a group of pieces that emerged from the collaborative Project for Music for Magnetic Tape. The material came from an enormous heap of tape fragments, which were distributed in six categories: city sounds, country sounds, electronic sounds, manually produced sounds, wind sounds, and “small” sounds. Cage subjected these to I Ching manipulations, producing constant jumps from one sound to another or buzzing, scrambled textures of up to sixteen simultaneous layers. Notwithstanding the emotional detachment of the method, Williams Mix has the air of a world gone berserk, of modernity imploding on itself.
Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951), for twelve radios, partakes of the same mad house atmosphere: two players are positioned at each radio, one switching stations according to patterns specified in the score, the other making adjustments to volume. A more pointed satire of media-saturated society could hardly be imagined, although, as ever, the composer’s attitude is studiously deadpan. Some part of Cage longed for pretechnological, even preindustrial life. In his 1950 “Lecture on Nothing,” he quoted a woman from Texas who told him, “We have no music in Texas.” He then said, “The reason they’ve no music in Texas is because they have recordings in Texas. Remove the records from Texas and someone will learn to sing.”
All this was too much for Boulez, who was soon speaking as with-eringly of Cage as he had of so many others. By the seventies he was calling his former friend a “performing monkey” whose methods betrayed “fascist tendencies”—thereby putting Cage next to Strauss, Sibelius, and Stravinsky in the crowded room of composers who had been labeled fascist for one reason or another.
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