Little did we know what was coming next . . .

You see, I don’t hear music when I write it. I write in order to hear something I haven’t yet heard.      John Cage

Immediately after our September 21^st New Media discussion, I walked to the University Club where Ray Kass, Professor Emeritus of Art, was signing his book, The Sight of Silence: John Cage’s Complete Watercolors. The book documents Cage’s collaboration with the Mountain Lake Workshop and the process of creating a series of works that Cage called the New River Watercolors.

That was Wednesday, and on Thursday afternoon I opened our New Media Reader to the introduction of Wiener’s “Men, Machines, and the World About.” And there was John Cage again.

John Cage? Really? Well, yes, OK. It kind of makes makes sense. Or does it? Hmm. Maybe not. I mean, I am familiar with Cage. While in the PhD program I shared a house with someone who was completely in love with composers like Cage and Philip Glass and Arnold Schoenberg. Me, not so much. Mozart is my guy.

But the New River Watercolors had opened my eyes to the Zen in John Cage. Completely distracted at this point, I closed the book (sorry, Wiener) and set about learning what John Cage was up to in the 1950s and why he would be mentioned in a book about technology.

For lots of reasons, it turns out. He was a good friend of Marshall McLuhan. He worked with Lejaren Hiller of the University of Illinois’ Experimental Music Studio. (In 1955, Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson had programmed the Illiac to compose music.) Cage collaborated with Hiller to take advantage of the computer in his composing. According to John Kobler,

Cage let Hiller program the computer to do the coin tossing for him. This approach is consistent with Lickleider’s idea that computing machines can provide an important service by preparing the way, taking care of routine clerical tasks and leaving humans more time to “digest” information, to think, to decide, to use their intellectual capabilities. By tossing coins for Cage, the computer released him, allowing Cage total unpredictability and randomness, which is consistent with his interest in Zen Buddhism. It is here that I specifically see the connection between Cage’s music and the New River Watercolors, though I think Ray Kass might disagree.

In The Sight of  Silence, Kass says that Cage considered Music of Changes too controlling, [Had he tried too hard to control the process of creating randomness?] and Cage eventually replaced the charts and the coin tossing with a system of time brackets. These allowed performers the flexibility to choose elements such as pitch, timbre, timing, placement, etc. Cage’s goal was greater spontaneity, music as a happening. Brooks says this was Cage’s way of expressing his anti-war sentiments in the 1970s: his Variations “dismantled and disarmed the quasi-military relationship between composer-general and performer-infantry.”²

Brooks’ claim leads me back to Vannevar Bush who, at the end of WWII, was considering the future of the “military-industrial complex.” Bush was working to create a machine that would document relationships and associations among seemingly unrelated ideas. In his own way, I think Cage was using musical composition to establish these same relationships, but among sounds.

P.S.: In my last blog I talked about technology as a tool. My research on Cage revealed as well the value of vinyl – as a tool – to the 1950s composer:

I also questioned whether a virtual environment, or physical space, could truly represent and substitute for the real environment, or lived space. Cage would choose the lived space: “What we need is less information and more direct experience of life around us.”⁴

References:

1. John Kobler (1968, October 19). Experiments in Sound: John Cage: “Everything We Do Is Music.” Saturday Evening Post, vol. 241, no. 21, p. 47.
2. William Brooks (2010). Protest, Progress and (Im)possible Music, Contemporary Music, vol. 29, no. 4, p. 408.
3. Elliott Schwartz (1975, February). Directions in American Composition since the Second World War, Part I – 1945-1960. [Sounds of America: A Bicentennial Series, No. 19] Music Educators Journal, vol. 61, no. 6, p. 32.
4. Kobler, p. 92

Photo credits:

Ryonji Zen garden photo   http://www.gardens-to-visit.com/2009/02/ryoan-ji.html

Rock and feather photo by Ray Kass   http://johncage2012.com/watercolors.html

portion of John Cage, New River Watercolor Series I, #5, 1988  http://arthistory.about.com/od/from_exhibitions/ig/the_third_mind/index.02.htm

This evening when I arrived home I fed Audrey, my sourdough starter, my head full of “just a tool.” I get great satisfaction out of taking care of Audrey, even more when I produce a beautiful loaf from her. I love the yeasty smell, I love the feel of the dough, I love the fact that I now have the ability to create perfectly formed, beautifully caramel colored, crusty, chewy, tart and tasty bread by hand. (I went to bread baking camp this summer to perfect my skills. How many people do you know who are this obsessed about bread?)

I look forward to the weekends when I organize my grocery shopping and laundry and cooking and cleaning and grading and course prep schedule around my bread baking. Twelve hours start to finish. There’s nothing else like it, as far as I am concerned.

Most of the bread I bake I give away; one loaf for me, the rest goes out the door. I try to use bread as a way to get an update on my neighbors, or to make new friends. The experience is always the same, and yet I am never prepared. I offer someone a loaf and what I always get in reply is, “Oh, do you have a bread machine?” I try to take this as the ultimate compliment, figuring people just can’t believe I could produce such a beautiful loaf by hand. Or maybe it’s all they can think to say as a way to begin a conversation. I tell them I don’t have a bread machine and then we talk about the relative value of bread machines, and finally move on to the weather and other chitchat.

Not that a bread machine is all that “advanced,” but this recurring experience says something about our expectations with regard to technology. Because we have technology available, we assume we need to use it. The bread machine would make my life much easier: dump in some ingredients, push the button, and walk away. I would have bread, but I would not have the experience of baking bread. I would not feel the same sense of accomplishment. I would not produce the same quality loaf. And I would probably not be motivated to share my machine-made loaves with anyone else.

Matthew Crawford makes a similar argument in his book, Shop Class as Soulcraft. The best sections of the book are where he describes the satisfaction he gets from doing a job well, bringing a “dead” motorcycle back to life. He believes that most people are too quick to dismiss this work as low class, repetitive, brainless, and uninteresting, when it actually requires knowledge of a wide array of motorcycle brands and models, mechanical expertise, complex problem-solving abilities, and business management skills. On newer models, computers are required, but it’s not always clear whether these high technology parts are a help or a hindrance.

I also think of Juhani Pallasmaa and The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses.

Technology allows us to “experience” space and place in new ways; but the question is whether virtual reality should serve as a complement to, or a substitute for, visual, tactile, olfactory, and auditory experience. Is it possible to understand lived space using the C.A.V.E. or the computer? Or do we only learn about physical space?

I want to know that I am teaching planning students how to become bread bakers. I worry that instead I will just show them how to plug in the planner’s equivalent of a bread machine.

As part of my first blog I wanted to offer up a small anecdote as a foundation for my comments on the Bush article. For several years I directed the Florida Statistical Analysis Center in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and was responsible for all things planning, policy or research. More specifically, my position was situated in the Criminal Justice Executive Institute. I handled publications for the Institute and supervised the student research projects that were part of our Senior Leadership Program.

During one session of the Senior Leadership Program both students and staff completed the Myers-Briggs assessment to find our personality types. We received our results and then the evaluator organized us by type. Everyone else in the room – all of the law enforcement and corrections officers and all of the other staff – sat at one table while I sat, by myself, on the opposite side of the room.

Afterwards I had a conversation with my supervisor, who was a good friend (and is now also a PhD but still their type and not my personality type). He told me the results were not all that surprising to him, and they explained a lot about my frustrations relative to the research project. “Research,” he said, “just isn’t part of their make-up. They are used to ‘here’s the bullet, here’s the gun, here’s how the bullet goes into the gun, here’s how you make a bullet come out of the gun.’ And what you want to talk about is ‘under what circumstances might it be appropriate to use a weapon?’”

Situation and circumstances, then, that’s me. What does that mean for As We May Think?

Bush’s article was published in the July 1945 edition of The Atlantic. We read this piece with knowledge of the Manhattan Project and the bombing of Japan and the ensuing arms race and the threat of nuclear war. But As We May Think would have been written shortly after Truman’s first briefing on the Manhattan Project (April 24, 1945). The magazine would have arrived in the hands of the public before the first test of that “strange destructive gadget,” the atomic bomb (Trinity, July 16, 1945), before Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and before Nagasaki (August 9, 1945). In this context, Bush would not be apologizing or reflecting on the impact of these events. He would not be asking us to move past them and on to new horizons. Bush would be anticipating the future and preparing the rest of us, explaining what ”good” could and would come out of the scientific partnerships that had been created, even as these partnerships would soon result in the loss of life, in the massive destruction of property, in the end of the war. Knowing this causes me to read the article with a new and different perspective.