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Long before I knew anything about new music I fell in love
with sound. "Suppose I listened to the sounds around me as if they were music,"
I wondered 16 years ago, unaware that John Cage had ever thought anything similar. But
Cage and I had opposite ideas. He wanted his music to be like the sounds around him,
proceeding from one moment to the next without order or intention. I thought the sounds
around me might be as coherent as the music I'd always known. One day I started to listen,
and decided I was right. People talking in restaurants echoed the rhythm and intensity of
conversations on the other side of the room, and filled in the pauses of the conversation
at the next table. Sounds that reached my window from the street below seemed linked in a
loose but unshakable web, no part of which could change without tugging, however slightly,
on the rest. Sounds are music, I thought, but with a subtler rhythm, more
changeable flow, and more profound counterpoint, in which -- like lovers whose thoughts
are always of each other, even though they're far away -- two or more independent parts
move forward together without ever marching in step.
Lately I've thought I wanted
to hear these sounds again, and so on a sunny Sunday afternoon I went to Washington Square
and started to listen. At first I thought I was drowning in soup; there were more strands
of sound in the music of the park than I'd hear in a dozen orchestras. Soon, though, I
noticed radios, rhythmic, insistent, and distinct. After a while other sounds detached
themselves from the stew: whistles, honks, the screech of brakes, a babys cry. The
radios moved from place to place; a crowd watching a comedian in the fountain cheered.
Soon the sounds began to connect. A knock or a slap -- someone spinning on a skateboard --
provoked a whistle 50 feet away. Another knock introduced applause from the crowd around
the fountain, which in turn was echoed in a lengthened vowel from someone speaking right
behind me. Three emphatic words jumping separately from three nearby conversations rose in
volume and in pitch, like hammer-blows reaching a climax, one-two-perfect three, in
rhythm. A Swedish girl behind me fit her next remark between two cries from a distant
child. Someone matched a peak of music on the radio with a squeal. "Over there
someplace," said a girl in a bubblegum accent; she paused for two slaps from a
skateboard and then happily resumed. The park had a rhythm, and everyone with anything to
say found themselves joining in. Only the radios got in the way, imposing a rigid beat on
the much freer flow of the collective improvisation. I thought of Cage, who once said that
"everything becomes confused" in rock. "It's wonderful!
that
regularity disappears if the amplification is sufficient. You no longer have a rhythmic
object, shaken like a rattle. You are inside the object, and you realize that this object
is a river.
" And when the amplification's not sufficient you do have a rhythmic
object shaken like a rattle, which obscures those wonderful sounds around us.![little stone](stone.gif)
Cage was on my mind because I'd been thinking of a piece of his called Roaratorio,
subtitled An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake. As part of his ongoing tribute to
James Joyce he'd planned to record sounds at a random sampling of places mentioned in the
book, and to combine these recordings with his own reading of passages from the book that
refer to sounds, and with a "circus" of traditional Irish music. That's not a
bad recipe for stew, I guess, even if it's weakened by a dispensable downtown piety, in
this case the belief that sounds of birds and brooks necessarily take on special meaning
when you know they were recorded in places mentioned in Finnegans Wake. But I
digress. I thought of Roaratorio because on the final tape the sounds, readings,
and music are combined more or less by chance. Cage, as I've said, wants to imitate the
sounds he hears around him; he relies on chance to free his work from any conscious
control. But to me the noise around us sounds coherent. Can a collage put together partly
by chance produce the same effect?
So I listened again to Roaratorio,
or rather to the half of it broadcast by RadioVisions, a public radio series of a few
years ago, which I have on tape. It seemed lively enough, with more varied textures than
the sounds in the park; at times the flow thinned to nothing more than Cage's voice and
the persistent thunk of a recorded drum (a suspiciously "composed"
effect, but let it pass). I kept thinking, though, that it sounded stiff. I know that, as
Cage says, I shouldn't feel any "obligation to make a judgment." But when I hear
shouts and banging garbage cans in the street they seem to merge; the sounds in Roaratorio
seem to stand blankly alone. The drum persists, undisturbed by eruptions of church bells
or factory noise. Cage's reading isn't disturbed either. The sounds in Roaratorio
produce no reaction. They aren't linked; they seem to come from a world in which things
don't affect each other.
Oddly enough, that doesn't
seem to be what Cage has in mind. When we model music to the sounds around us, he says, we
"get out of the clutches of the egomind and get into this larger mind that
involves everyone else and everything else." That's my emphasis; if the sounds we
hear really are linked by a larger mind. you'd never guess it from Roaratorio. You
might deduce it, though, from conversations in the broadcast between Cage and his
associate John Fullerman, accompanied by the sound of Sixth Avenue traffic. Cars go by,
trucks go by, and Cage and Fullerman talk -- adapting their speech to the noise from the
street. Fullerman pauses as a truck accelerates, then pauses as another truck goes by;
Cage breaks the silence when the noise of the second truck is at its peak (cf. the squeal
in the park, timed to the radio). Cage speaks faster when the street gets noisy. He pauses
during what sounds like the screech of brakes, and pauses again as if he wanted to make
room for a pair of high-pitched taps: "That," he says, "uh [tap tap] seemed
to me
" The effect of this lies above all in a rhythm that's impossible to
reproduce here, but which unmistakably melds Cage and the taps together into a single
phrase. At one point Fullerman echoes the winding contour of a complicated traffic noise,
not precisely -- which would make him sound like a puppet -- but with a freedom that shows
he doesn't know he's doing it. Roaratorio is designed to imitate the sounds around.
us, but it's in the unplanned conversation surrounding it that we hear these sounds as
they actually behave.
(one of my columns from the Village Voice, sometime
in the early '80s)
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