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Cage and SatieAuthor(s): Michael NymanSource: The Musical Times, Vol. 114, No. 1570, (Dec., 1973), pp. 1227-1229Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/954719Accessed: 18/06/2008 05:10

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Cage and Satie Michael Nyman

1 rather think that influence doesn't go A-B-C, that is to say, from [Satie] to someone younger than [Satie] to people still younger, but that rather we live in a field situation in which, by our actions, by what we do, we are able to see what other people do in a different light than we do, without our having done anything.

(Cage, 1965)

It is important with Satie not to be put off by his surface (by turns mystical, cabaretish, Kleeish, Mondrianish; full of mirth, the erotic, the wondrous, all the white emotions, even the heroic, and always tranquility, expressed more often than not by cliche and juxtaposition.)

(Cage, 1951)

Imitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery; how much more (or less) flattering and sincere is cheap imitation ? Cage's Cheap Imitation is the most tangible recognition of Satie's indispensability ('It's not a question of Satie's relevance', Cage wrote in 1958. 'He's indispensable'), and interestingly provides a direct link with the first available evidence of Cage's musical connection with Satie.

In 1945 Cage made a two-piano arrangement of the first movement of Satie's Socrate for Merce Cunningham's ballet Idyllic Song. In summer 1969 Cunningham approached the work again with a view to completing it, by adding the remaining two movements. Cage finished the complete two- piano arrangement in October 1969. However, permission for the use of this arrangement was not granted by the copyright holder. So Cage chose to imitate the original, with great care and respect, but cheaply-by his accustomed resort to the 'I Ching' (as a mechanical rather than inspirational guide). The 'I Ching' was basically used to answer two questions for each phrase of the melodic line of Socrate: which of the seven white-note modes was to -be used, and beginning on which of the 12 chromatic notes. The original Cheap Imitation (1969) is for solo piano and was first used for Cunning- ham's dance Second Hand in 1970. The orchestral imitation of the piano version was made in 1972, using the 'I Ching' to decide which of the 24 obligatory instruments capable of playing the melodic line at any point should do so and for how long. (A maximum of 96 instruments may be used.)

To return to the history of Cage-Satie: three years after Idyllic Song Cage organized a mammoth, 25- concert Satie Festival at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, which included a star-studded performance of Le piege de Meduse with Buck- minster Fuller as the Baron and sets by de Kooning. During the 1950s he continued his publicity for Satie largely on paper: in 1950 and 1951 he indulged in verbal (and conceptual) fisticuffs in the letter columns of Musical America with a critic, Abraham Skulsky, while his best-known appreciation of Satie, the 'imaginary conversation' in Silence, dates from 1958.

When that article first appeared in Art News

Annual it included (for the first time in the US) the MS of Satie's Vexations for piano, a piece which proposes 840 repetitions of a 52-beat, unbarred motif, made up of four sections all over the same 13-bar bass theme, in the order: bass alone, bass + two upper parts in rhythmic unison, bass, bass + reversed upper parts. In 1963 Cage organized a posse of pianists to give what must have been the first performance, at the Pocket Theatre in New York, and another with students at the University of California, Davis in 1969. Of late Cage has pursued the connection with Satie through Cheap Imitation and the gigantic Song Books, Solos for Voice 3-92 (1970) which is a musical-theatrical exploration of a chance remark he made in the 1969 continuation of his Diary: How to Improve the World (You will only make Matters Worse): 'We connect Satie with Thoreau'.

An analysis of the musical evidence for the Satie- Cage connection is crucial for understanding both composers, and goes deeper than that attempted by Peter Dickinson in a Music Review article of 1967 (which, incidentally, includes the first English publication of Vexations). Dickinson points to both composers' hatred of traditional attitudes which leads them 'to the point of declaring anti-art doctrines'; to Parade, Mercure and Reldche as precursors of 'the kind of Dadaist happenings that have interested Cage and the avant garde'; to Satie's love of incongruities leading him to exploit whatever is to hand 'in a deliberate employment of accident' (that is more to the point, if it is true); while he found the combination of music, words and draw- ings in Sports et Divertissements 'close to the recent aleatory music where the performer is given a series of indications and diagrams without precise interpretation'. (The instructions to Vexations provide a more relevant parallel: 'Pour se jouer 840 fois de suite ce motif, il sera bon de se preparer au prealable, et dans la plus grand silence, par des immobilites serieuses'.)

The essence of the matter is contained in the lecture 'Defence of Satie' which Cage delivered during the Black Mountain Satie Festival in 1948. Here Cage indulged a style of logical and polemical argument that he abandoned in his later aphoristic- mosaic lecture-writings. After giving his most convincing exposition of the distinctions between structure, form, method and material, he concluded that it is only structure (the work's 'parts that are clearly separate but that interact in such a way as to make a whole') that today's composers should come to 'general agreement' about, the other categories being free.

The music by, and influenced by, Beethoven, defined the structure of a composition by means of harmony. Before Beethoven wrote a piece, Cage maintains, he planned its movement from one key to another; that is, he planned its harmonic structure. The only new structural idea to emerge since

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Beethoven is to be found in the work bf Satie (and early Webern), where structure is defined in terms of time lengths. Before Satie wrote a piece he planned the lengths of its phrases. Whether this is true of all Satie's music, his sketchbooks certainly contain complete pre-compositional rhythmic structures for the ballet Mercure and for Cinema, the sound-track for Rene Clair's film Entr'acte included in Reldche.

Cage, of course, had based all his music on proportional rhythmic structures since the mid-30s, after having been introduced to oriental rhythmic systems by Henry Cowell and having found no comfort in Schoenberg's pitch manipulation system, which provided only a method and was restricted to musical sounds based on the chromatic scale. The rhythmic structure technique allowed Cage to formulate this revolutionary concept (since it very simply but radically contradicts the traditional attitude towards form and content): 'in contrast to a structure based on the frequency aspect of sound, tonality, that is, this rhythmic structure was as hospitable to non-musical sounds, noises, as it was to those of conventional scales and instruments'. (These 'noises' were for Cage initially the sounds of the percussion orchestra and its 'reduction', the prepared piano, but later, notably in the so-called silent piece, 4' 33", were any, including environ- mental sounds.) Cage found this 'hospitality' in Satie too: 'Just as Klee was willing to draw people and plants and animals, so into Satie's continuity come folk tunes, musical cliches, and absurdities of all kinds; he is not ashamed to welcome them in the house he builds: its structure is strong'.

Since Cage was closely involved with Satie's

music in the late 1940s it is not unremarkable that the music he was writing at the time of the Black Mountain lecture should have many features in common with Satie: melody-modality, stasis, flatness of movement (an inevitable consequence of rhythmic pre-planning) and unpretentiousness. (This latter is important: compare the respectful restraint of Cage's handling of Socrate with the way Stockhausen imposes himself on Beethoven in Op.1970.) Significantly the very singular melodic line of Cheap Imitation is reminiscent of the 1948 monody of Music for Marcel Duchamp and A Dream, which shares with Cheap Imitation even the occasional intrusion of 'harmony' in the form of melody notes sounded and then sustained.

Even though Cheap Imitation may refer back to the style and purity of Cage's pre-chance music, it is in no way a nostalgic throwback to the earlier, highly attractive modal symmetry. Interestingly, Cage has chosen to randomize that parameter which is freest of the almost palpable rhythmic structure found in the accompaniment to Socrate, namely the flowing vocal line (and the instrumental top line when the voice is silent. (Cage, around 1960, came 'to no longer feel the need for musical structure. Its absence could, in fact, blur the distinction between art and life. An individual can hear sounds as music (enjoy living) whether or not he is at a concert', and has renounced symmetry in favour of 'interpenetrating multiplicity', and the multi-modal, multi-transposi- tional treatment of Cheap Imitation is fully in tune with Cage's musical experiences of the last 20 years.

If the rhythmic plotting of Satie's theatre and film music is closely related to Cage's own number

The London Sinfonietta Greater London Council

Queen Elizabeth Hall Director: John Denison, CBE

AN AMERICAN CONCERT

Friday 7 December 1973 at 7.45 pm

Elliott Carter John Cage Earl Browne

Double Concerto (for piano and harpsichord) Cheap Imitation (1st London performance) Centring (LS commission: 1st London performance)

HANS ZENDER (conductor) DAVID WILDE piano HAROLD LESTER (harpsichord)

Tickets: ?1.40, 90p, 55p from Box Office, Royal Festival Hall, SE1 (01-928 3191) and usual agents

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manipulation, so the static, non-developmental style of Satie's music relates to another important aspect of Cage's musical aesthetic. Roger Shattuck points out that typical bars of Cinema lend them- selves to 'infinite repetition and do not establish any strong tonal feeling': that is, sounds are treated as separate objects in themselves, not as passing links in a musical continuity. For Cage, Satie's empty time-structures bring about 'a time that's just time', which 'will let sounds be just sounds and if they are folk tunes, unresolved ninth chords, or knives and forks, just folk tunes, unresolved ninth chords, or knives and forks'.

Knives and forks were sounds instanced by Satie in a statement quoted by Cage earlier in his Silence article, where he maintains that we should bring about a music 'which is like furniture-a music, that is, which will be part of the noises of the environ- ment, will take them into consideration. I think of it as melodious, softening the noises of the knives and forks, not dominating them, not imposing itself'. This 'working in terms of totality, not just the discretely chosen convention' again brings Satie and Cage close aesthetically. Yet their awareness of the usefulness of environmental noise-sounds leads in opposite directions. For Satie, furniture music would be 'part of the noises of the environment', whereas for Cage the noises of the environment are part of his music; for Satie 'it would fill up those heavy silences that sometimes fall between friends dining together', while for Cage ambient noise filled those empty silences that regularly fell between the notes of his music until about 1960.

Furniture music was designed to be unassuming, not drawing attention to itself. This may in fact be 'anti-art' (depending on how you define art), since the traditional attitude is to be interesting and dominat- ing at all costs. No piece could be more barren, undernourished and monotonous (on the surface) as Vexations-a veritable Ring cycle totally devoid of any but accidental variation, the complete antithesis of the climax-ridden bleeding-chunk music of the time (Patrick Gowers has dated Vexations 1893 on stylistic evidence) where variety would appear to guarantee the impossibility of boredom.

Boredom is a double-edged sword. Satie wrote: 'the public venerates boredom. For boredom is mysterious and profound ... The listener is defense- less against boredom. Boredom subdues him'. Cage raises the question of boredom in a recent Diary: 'As we were walking along, she smiled and said. "You're never bored, are you ?" (Boredom dropped when we dropped our interest in climaxes. Socrate. Even at midnight we can tell the difference between two Chinamen)'. Boredom is also a paradox: for most listeners boredom began when climaxes disappeared and they lost most of their signposts.

In an essay entitled Boredom and Danger, Dick Higgins (a pupil of Cage at the New School of Social Research at the time of the 1958 Satie article) drew attention to the end of Satie's Vieux sequins et vieilles cuirasses, where an eight-beat passage evocative of old marches and patriotic songs is to be repeated 380 times. In performance the satirical intent of this repetition comes through very clearly, but at the same time 'other very interesting results begin to appear. The music first becomes so

familiar that it seems extremely offensive and objectionable. But after that the mind slowly becomes incapable of taking further offence, and a very strange, euphoric acceptance and enjoyment begins to set in'. He goes on to say that, if it can be said that Satie's interest in boredom originated as a kind of gesture-there is a certain bravura about asking a pianist to play the same eight beats 380 times-and developed it into a fascinating aesthetic statement, 'then it can be said with equal fairness that Cage was the first to try to emphasize in his work and his teaching a dialectic between boredom and intensity'.

Cage has never interested himself in such naked repetition, being 'averse to all these actions that lead toward placing emphasis on the things that happen in the course of a process'; yet the ethical seriousness of performing Vexations is fully in tune with the devotion that his own music demands. Cage set an invariable, ritualistic 'rhythmic structure' for the Davis performance, which began at 5.40 one morning and was to go on till 12.40 the next morning. Each player had to play for 20 minutes, and prepare himself for his stint by a 20-minute period of silent contemplation sitting to the left of the currently- playing pianist. To fill the allotted 18 hours 40 minutes performers had to play 15 repetitions over 20 minutes, each repetition being timed to last exactly 1' 20".

Although the processes involved in making a version of any of Cage's indeterminate pieces enable the performer to choose any duration, whether two seconds or two days (the performance has to fill the time available, as in the 1969 Vexations), it may have been the extremely liberated attitude towards time expressed by Vexations that led Cage to have faith in longer durations over the years. Although he maintains a lofty impartiality, he did admit in 1966 that 'I very much enjoy our current ability to listen to things for a long time, and I notice this becoming a general practice in society'.

Today Cage is concerned with society on a rather more fundamental level, as it is mirrored in micro- cosm in the symphony orchestra. For in Cheap Imitation nothing is left to chance (in performance, that is). A strict rehearsal schedule is prescribed (for the first time in Cage's music): for the first week all players must familiarize themselves with the whole 30-minute melody, while during the second week each player plays his part as specified. A special way of listening is required; if any player is not up to scratch he is asked to leave, and if the quorum of 24 cannot be made up then the per- formance has to be cancelled (as was the first performance in Amsterdam). But just as Cage claims he wants to improve the world but is convinced that things will only be made worse, so he seems to be aware of the unrealizability of his proposals.

Satie would have been flattered to know that through his music, the most radical, 'anarchistic' composer of the century should be exercising his mind with such problems. A wry smile spreads over his face ...

Cage's 'Cheap Imitation' will have its British premiere at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, on December 4, and its London premiere at the EH on December 7; it will be played by the London Sinfonietta.

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