Luna

Cohen-Solal
BA (Hons) Music and Visual Art
University of Brighton
January 2013

A discussion and evaluation of the impact of Eastern

Philosophy on the ideas of indeterminacy, and chance
promoted by John Cage.

I want to be as though new-born, knowing nothing, absolutely nothing about

Europe. John Cage, in The Forerunners of Modern Music, quotes Paul Klee to express his
idealistic wish to detach himself from Western traditions.1
Cages interest in Eastern philosophy had a profound influence on his work as a
composer and music theorist.2 In the mid nineteen forties, he started investigating
Indian and Chinese philosophies, particularly Zen Buddhism, and the elements of
indeterminacy and chance consequently became prominent features of his work.3
In order to understand the evolution of Cages conception of composition and
performance of music, it is necessary to work out how determining Eastern philosophies
were to his approach to chance and indeterminacy.4
Before anything else, a clarification of the vocabulary would be beneficial.
As James Pritchett explains in his book The Music of John Cage: In Cages terminology,
chance refers to the use of some sort of random procedure in the act of composition.
[.] Indeterminacy, on the other hand, refers to the ability of a piece to be performed
in substantially different ways.5
The aim of this study is to explore the implications of John Cages explicit
references to Eastern philosophy. In the past twenty years since his death, music
scholars have shed a new light on his engagement with Indian and Chinese thought.
The intention of this essay is to unpick the debate: how indebted to Eastern thinking was
John Cage? What aspects of his work and ideas contradict his claims to owe them to
Indian philosophy and Zen? Why did he not acknowledge the connections between his
work and Western art traditions of chance and indeterminacy?
This essay will discuss the concept of non-intentionality in relation to cagean
silence, and its role as the bedrock of John Cages search for indeterminacy. After
analysing the phenomenological aspect of Cages approach to knowledge, it will
investigate the origins of the composers engagement with chance and indeterminacy, as
well as his reservations about referring to the influence of Western art on his work.
Lastly it will consider examples of chance and indeterminacy in Western art history.

1 John Cage, Forerunners of Modern Music. Silence: Lectures and Writings. London:
Marion Boyars, 1978: 65.
2 John Cage, born in Los Angeles in 1912, started studying music as a child, but it was not
until he went on a trip to Europe that he starting composing, at the age of 18. He went on
to study with Arnold Schoenberg, to compose music for modern dance, notably with
choreographer Merce Cunningham, and became famous for his new approach to music
and composition, utilizing unconventional instruments and sounds -including silence.
3 Buddhism is a religion and a philosophy that has its origins in the teachings of
Siddhartha Gautama, dating back to the 5th century BC. Zen is a branch of Buddhism that
arose in the 6th century in China; it emphasizes on enlightenment and the practice of
meditation. Cage also looked at Taoism, a Chinese philosophy that emerged around the
same time as Buddhism appeared in India.
4 Cage also used chance in his visual art and his literature, however this essay will
concentrate on his work in the field of sound.
5 James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)

108.

At the root of the notions of chance and indeterminacy is the idea of non-
intention, which is itself drawn from the ideal of a disinterested artist. What this
archetype entails will be discussed later on. First and foremost, John Cages aim was an
appreciation of sounds for their unique sensory qualities, independent of the intention
that produces and interprets them.6
From the moment when his friend Christian Wolff gave him a copy of the I Ching,
an ancient Chinese book of wisdom that operates with chance, John Cage started using it
as a tool for musical composition.7 To understand the motives of Cages use of chance,
one needs to go back to his reflection on silence. A decisive experience for John Cage was
his visit to the anechoic chamber at Harvard University in 1951. It is a room as silent as
technology will allow it. But once in the chamber, Cage heard sounds; he was told it was
his nervous system and his blood circulation operating. He came to the conclusion that
there is no such thing as silence: there are only intentional and non-intentional sounds.
As a consequence, he started using the I Ching as a device for achieving non-intentional
sound.
Using non-intention and chance, Cage wished to eschew the artists subjectivity.
But this intent is questioned by the fact that Cages pieces brought the attention back to
the figure of the composer because of their unconventionality. It is thus debatable
whether his work contributed to put the figure of the composer aside or if on the
contrary it put the artist in the spotlight. 433 is a good example of that duality. On the
one hand, inasmuch as no musical sounds are intentionally produced during the
performance, it demonstrates a detachment from the artists compositional identity. It is
consistent with the Buddhist concept of annata or no-self, in the same way as the
chance pieces composed with the I Ching are disconnected from notions of selfhood.
According to Buddhist philosophy, one should not cling to the sense of
individuality on the grounds that it gives rise to unhappiness. For John Cage, it is more
about approaching music in a new way, detached from feelings and tastes. This is to be
carried out from the perspective of the composer as well as that of the listener. On the
one hand, the use of the I Ching enabled Cage to withdraw intentionality and subjectivity
from the compositional process, as he explains in the documentary I Have Nothing to Say
and I Am Saying It: I use [the I Ching] as a discipline, in order to free my work from my
memory, and from my likes and dislikes.8 Some early compositions show a wish to
communicate feelings but they were failures, as Cage himself admits: I had poured a
great deal of emotion into the piece [The Perilous Night] and obviously I was not
communicating this at all.9 Discovering the philosophy of Zen gave him a new insight:
Then it became clear that the function of art is not to communicate ones personal ideas

6 N. Katherine Hayles, Chance Operations: Cagean Paradox and Contemporary Science.
John Cage: Composed In America. Ed. Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994. 230.
7 Constituted of sixty-four ideograms with accompanying text, the I Ching, or Book of
Changes, is used to help decision-making or to give an insight on a particular situation
or problem. The chance operation of throwing fifty yarrow stalks or tossing three coins
produces one or two hexagrams. The user is then directed to an ideogram, the meaning
of which can be interpreted as revealing the dynamic of the situation. The book hinges
around the idea that change is inevitable and inherent to life.
8 John Cage: I Have Nothing to Say and I Am Saying It. American Masters. Dir. Allan
Miller. UK, 17 Sept. 1990. UbuWeb. Web. 20 Dec. 2012.
9 Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors. New York: Penguin, 1968: 97. Qtd in
Shultis, Christopher. Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the Intentionality of
Nonintention. Musical Quarterly. 79.2 (1995): 316. JSTOR. Web. 27 Jan. 2013.

or feelings but rather to imitate nature in her manner of operation.10 At the other end of
the creative process, the listener should apply the same principle. The sounds should not
be interpreted as metaphors and feelings but rather heard sonically, like they are in
nature. 433 illustrates that idea: it prepares a setting that enables the audience to listen
to ambient sounds. For the duration of the performance, listeners are letting sounds be
what they are and perceiving reality and life as art. As Douglas Kahn points out in Noise
Water Meat, the piece achieves shifting the production of music from the site of
utterance to that of audition.11 What endows the sounds with the attributes of art is not
their origin but the decision of the listener to experience them aesthetically.

On the other hand, the apparent distancing from the composers identity is
contradicted by the fact that never has a composer focused the audience on his
personality as strongly as John Cage did in his 433, as art historian Horst Bredekamp
puts it in his essay John Cage and the Principle of Chance.12 Indeed, the
unconventionality of Cages project caused the public to turn their attention to its
creator in an attempt to make sense of his creation. Bredekamp goes further by arguing
that 433 performs a tabula rasa as it reinvents music as the ability to experience
sound as art, and by showing that this endeavour is deeply grounded in the tradition of
the artist as second God.6 This attitude is reminiscent of Robert Rauschenbergs White
Paintings, one of Cages main inspirations for his piece. (Figure 1) Both works show an
absence of content that constitutes a groundbreaking affirmation of artistic identity.

Figure 1: Robert Rauschenberg. White Painting. 1951.
House paint on canvas. Collection: the artists estate.
Web. 27 Jan. 2013. http://artintelligence.net/review/?p=497

10 John Cage, Changes. Silence 20.
11 Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: a History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999) 158.
12 Horst Bredekamp, John Cage and the Principle of Chance. Music and the Aesthetics of
Modernity. Ed. Karol Berger and Anthony Newcomb. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Department of Music, 2005. 103.

Writing about pieces composed using chance operations, John Cage argues that
they identify the composer with no matter what eventuality, meaning that the
composer will be associated with whatever comes out of the chance process.
He consents to claim responsibility, if not authorship, for the work produced.13 But no
matter how indeterminate Cages composition process is, the pieces are precisely
notated, as the score for Music of Changes shows. (Figure 2) Their performance is thus
highly determinate. What John Cage writes about composer Alan Hovhaness in his
article The East in the West could be applied to his own case. The disregard for
harmony is characteristic of Eastern music but the aspect that the piece is notated and
can be played more than once is Western.14 Although chance appears to be the paragon
of freedom, the discipline of using chance operations is nonetheless a rule and the
determinacy of the performance ties in with the Western figure of the authoritative
composer. In the lecture Indeterminacy that he gave in Germany in 1958, Cage
confirms this by drawing a parallel between his chance pieces, which are Frankenstein
monsters because they revolve on the idea of an inhuman product -chance- controlling
a human being, and Western music pieces, which are Dictator[s] to their performer, as
a consequence of the strictness of their notation. For that reason, if chance epitomizes
freedom or subservience, liberation or constraint is yet to decide.

Figure 2: A detail of the score for Music of Changes.

From Todd Tarantinos article John Cage: Music of Changes (1951).
Web. 27 Jan. 2013. http://toddtarantino.com/hum/cage.html

Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, John Cages exploration of non-intention
evolved from the arbitrary to chance, to indeterminacy. The Concerto for Prepared Piano
and Chamber Orchestra, composed between 1950 and 1951, used arbitrary geometric
moves on charts, and its last movement was Cages first use of the I Ching to achieve
randomness.
Music of Changes is the first piece of music Cage composed making extensive use
of the I Ching. Cage did not utilize the content but the structure of the Book of Changes:
he built three charts (referring to sonority, duration, and dynamics) containing sixty-
four cells related to the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching; and he tossed coins to
determine every aspect of the composition.15


13 John Cage, Indeterminacy. Silence 35.
14 John Cage, The East in the West. Asian Music. 1.1 (1968-9): 16.
15 Another unusual characteristic of this piece is that duration is expressed on the score
in terms of space and not beats. Incidentally, this bears more resemblance to the
consideration of space in Chinese calligraphy than to Western treatment of rhythm.

While on the subject of Music of Changes, another element of debate about the
relationship between Western and Eastern cultures can be raised. Cathryn Wilkinsons
lecture Reflections on John Cages Music of Changes makes a point of the opposition
between the importance of change in Eastern philosophy and the emphasis on stasis in
Western thought.16 Indeed, change is the concept that underlies the I Ching, The Book
of Changes after which Cage named his composition. On the other hand, Western
philosophy considers concepts and objects in themselves, and not as changing entities.
However, at the scale of the structure of the composition, traditional Western music
foregrounds progression, whereas Eastern pieces tend to linger on an emotion, and to
move freely and continuously, ignoring the notion of climax. This example shows the
complexity implied by a comparative study of occidental and oriental thought and music.

In spite of being the result of chance operations, Music of Changes did not achieve
absolute indeterminacy: the contents of the sound charts were entirely the product of
Cages taste: he simply sat at the piano and invented sounds that he liked.17
He experimented with new chance techniques and notations but, as James Pritchett
points out: It was only after 1957, perhaps inspired by the experiments of his younger
colleagues [Christian Wolff among others], that Cage fully explored the possibilities of
indeterminacy in his work.18 He stopped writing scores in the strict sense of the word,
and created what Pritchett calls tools.19 Indeterminacy, as a general concept, replaced
the use of chance in composition as a way to connect with the infinite, completely non-
dual space of unique but interconnected sounds that constituted Cages vision of
sound.20



One of John Cages main concerns was to remove the ego from the composition
process. Nevertheless, personal experience holds an important place in his conception of
knowledge. In his performative lectures, Cage seeks to express his ideas in such a way
that the audience experiences them. Furthermore, much of his evolution as an artist
stems from his experience. His visit to the anechoic chamber, at the root of a significant
development in his approach to silence, is an example. Cage thus endorses bodily
experience and subjective cognition as a basis for knowledge, a position which
epistemology traditionally distinguishes from objective knowledge, at work in the field
of science.21 This observation balances the impression of detachment conveyed by the
image of a composer showing no personal connection to his body of work.



16 Cathryn Wilkinson, Reflections on John Cages Music of Changes. Philosophical Ideas
and Artistic Pursuits in the Traditions of Asia and the West: An NEH Faculty Humanities
Workshop. Paper 5. DigitalCommons@C.O.D. 2008. Web. 17 Jan 2013.
17 Pritchett 190.
18 Pritchett 109.
19 Pritchett defines them as works which do not describe events in either a determinate
or an indeterminate way, but which instead present a procedure by which to create any
number of such descriptions or scores.(126) They could take the form of
transparencies showing points or lines, to be layered and arranged in any manner at
all.(137)
20 Pritchett 76.
21 Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that studies knowledge.

John Cage always publicly explained his work in terms of his engagement with
Eastern philosophies. However, music theory has brought to light the importance of
Western art and culture in the development of his ideas.
When studying the genesis of 433, music scholar Douglas Kahn made clear that
Cages usual account of his ideas as being entirely derived from Eastern thinking did not
cover the totality of the facts. Indeed, a number of the steps leading to Cage creating 433
stem from his involvement in Western culture. In a conversation with Peter Gena, the
composer relates that the first time he thought of doing a silent piece was when working
as a recreation leader in a hospital, where he had to entertain children without
disturbing the patients with any sound.22 So Cage already had the idea for a silent piece
in the forties, but it was not until he encountered Robert Rauschenbergs White
Paintings, also displaying an absence of content, that he ventured to carry it out. It is
thus unreasonable to disregard the context of Western art in the fifties, when
minimalism and reductionism were prolific currents.23
Furthermore, a precise exploration of the work reveals that the original genesis
of Cages silence would be Indian and not related to East Asian, or more specifically Zen,
sources as has often been noted in discussions about 433.24 A brief account of Cages
encounter with these philosophies is necessary at this point in the discussion.
In 1946, John Cage started tutoring Gita Sarabhai, an Indian musician who came
to the United States to learn about Western music. She taught him about Indian music
and philosophy in return, and gave him a copy of The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, a book
that served as his introduction to Indian philosophy, as evoked by James Pritchett.25
He also attended D.T. Suzukis lectures on Zen Buddhism. Pritchett presents Suzuki as
the Japanese philosopher and scholar who was instrumental in presenting Zen
Buddhism to the West.26 Edward Crooks, author of a thesis entitled John Cages
Entanglement with the Ideas of Coomaraswamy, goes further and argues that Suzuki
was not neutral, but rather operated a modernization and Westernization of Zen.27
In any case, these encounters had a major influence on Cages work, and pieces like
Sonatas and Interludes, The Seasons, and String Quartet in Four Parts investigate ideas
from Indian philosophy, such as the aesthetic of rasas or permanent emotions, which
Cage studied in the writings of art historian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy.






22 After Antiquity: John Cage in conversation with Peter Gena. A John Cage Reader. Ed.
Peter Gena and Jonathan Brent. New York: Peters, 1982: 169-70. Qtd in Kahn 167.
23 In Samuel Becketts 1952 play Waiting for Godot, nothing happens, and the characters
are observed waiting for Godot much like the 433 unknowing audience is waiting for
sound to be played.
24 Kahn 169.
25 Pritchett 36.
26 Pritchett 74.
27 Edward Crooks, John Cage's Entanglement with the Ideas of Coomaraswamy. PhD
thesis. University Of York Department of Music, 2011: 30. White Rose eThesis online.
Web. 25 Jan. 2013.

John Cages lecture A Composers Confessions provides a case study of his

behaviour towards communicating his influences.28 This lecture reveals that the
philosophy at the source of 433 would be more accurately called perennial than
oriental. Yet, as he declares in a 1982 interview, Cage did not wish to publish it, even
thirty-five years after its delivery.29 One can wonder if this is due to the composers wish
to avoid revealing that the ideas behind 433 were not entirely derived from Eastern
thought.
As stressed by Kahn, in A Composers Confessions(finally published in 1991),
two Western texts play an important role: Carl Jungs The Integration of the Personality
(1940), and Aldous Huxleys The Perennial Philosophy (1946). The notions addressed in
these books, whether it be the Leibnizian philosophia perennis or Jungs collective
consciousness, are concerned with cross-cultural perspectives.30 They go beyond
Eastern sources and promote the idea of a cultural material transcending the opposition
between East and West.
Jung, in The Integration of the Personality, talks about the Taoist concept of wu-
wei, which Cage applied when he left it to chance to decide upon the characteristics of
his pieces. Wu-wei can be translated by the phrase absence of deliberate action.
According to Tao philosophy, the world functions by its own inherent agency and man
should not work against it but rather attempt to act in harmony with it. When embracing
the outcome of chance operations, Cage shows acceptance of the natural forces of the
universe, rather than a wish to bring order out of chaos [or] to suggest improvements
in creation.31 However, this idea was not exclusively Eastern, as Carl Jung mentions:
Some Occidentals, also, have known what this not-doing means; for instance, Meister
Eckhart, who speaks of sich lassen, to let oneself be.32
Meister Eckhart is a German mystic of the Middle Ages, whose concept of
unselfconsciousness and quieting of the mind as a means to attain spiritual knowledge
corroborates Cages belief that the purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus
making it susceptible to divine influences.33 Although Cage encountered his ideas in
Coomaraswamys book The Transformation of Nature in Art (1934), Eckhart and by
extension Cage belong to a European tradition of negation of the self, non-
intentionality, and chance. Coomaraswamy also borrowed the quotation Art is the
imitation of Nature in her manner of operation, that Cage so enthusiastically linked to
Indian aesthetic theory, from the Italian theologian and philosopher St Thomas Aquinas,
who was himself quoting from a philosophical tradition going back to Plato and Aristotle.

28 It was delivered at the National Inter Collegiate Arts Conference held at Vassar College
on February 28, 1948.
29 Stephen Montague, John Cage at Seventy: An Interview. American Music. 3.2 (1985):
213. Qtd in Kahn 168.
30 The term philosophia perennis, or perennial philosophy, was used by German
philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) and by English
writer Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) to describe the idea of a universal experience and
more specifically of a fundamental truth to be found at the core of all religions.
31 John Cage, In This Day Silence 95. This idea is developed in many of Cages
writings: in Changes, a lecture about Music of Changes, he explains that his intention is
to move away from ideas of order towards no ideas of order. (Silence 20)
32 Carl Gustav Jung, The Integration of the Personality. Trans. Stanley M. Dell. London:
Kengan Paul, Trench, Trbner & Co, 1940: 31-32. Qtd in Kahn 171.
33 John Cage, An Autobiographical Statement. New Albion Records. N.p. n.d. Web. 28 Jan.
2013.


For Douglas Kahn, the cagean idea of letting go of the self through non-
intentionality and indeterminacy has its roots in the notion of disinterestedness, which
Cage associated with the East. In "A Composer's Confessions", he rejects self-expression,
and affirms that music must be made, "as the Orient would say, disinterestedly."34
However, he also mentions disinterestedness about a concert by occidental composers
Ives and Webern, and as Kahn indicates, disinterestedness is also associated with
Aldous Huxley's explanation of self-mortification and nonattachment in The Perennial
Philosophy."35 It thus becomes clear that Cages early utterance of the notion of
disinterestedness, which was later replaced by chance and indeterminacy in the
enterprise of letting go of the self, is equally rooted in oriental and occidental cultures.
On the whole, the study of A Composers Confessions shows that Cages work
was informed by a diversity of artistic and philosophical sources, both Eastern and
Western; and the fact that he withheld this text from the public reveals his predilection
for Eastern references and his relative denial of being indebted to the Occident.36
Not only do theorists draw attention to the supposed transparency of Cages
oriental thought, but they also point out that his treatment of Eastern sources is tinged
with orientalism.37 Disregarding Cages positive rejection of orientalism as mere taste
for the exotic, Edward Crooks argues that his language was tangled with the
affirmative Orientalism of the Traditionalists.38 Horst Bredekamp supports that idea,
putting forward that the I Ching, or at least its German translation of 1923, on which was
based the English translation Cage used, is a product of German orientalism.39

Regardless of John Cages discourse about Eastern philosophy, it is necessary to
look at the spatiotemporal context in which he worked, as well as artistic antecedents of
chance and indeterminacy.
Cages work lies within the framework of progressive American music and art,
and his person is associated with other composers, sharing similar artistic values and
ideals.40 As James Pritchett recalls, John Cage, Morton Feldman, David Tudor, Christian
Wolff, and Earle Brown have been sometimes referred to as The New York School, thus
drawing a parallel with the similarly-named group of Abstract Expressionist painters
active at the same time.41 American composer Morton Feldman used graph notation as
a self-negating discipline before Cage did; and the latter compared Feldman to a
heroic figure for changing the responsibility of the composer from making to
accepting.42

34 Cage, A Composers Confessions. N.p. Qtd by Kahn 173.
35 Kahn 173.
36 This statement can be qualified by the fact that, in Lecture on Something, Cage hints
at a fusion of Eastern and Western thinking: Actually there is no longer a question of
Orient and Occident. All of that is rapidly disappearing. He holds up as an example the
writings of Meister Eckhart, Alan Watts, Reginald Horace Blyth and Joseph Campbell.
(Silence 143)
37 Kahn 169.
38 Cage, The East in the West 15; Crooks 121.
39 Bredekamp 102.
40 Crooks 31.
41 Pritchett 105.
42 Pritchett 67.

Had he wished to, Cage could have rooted his ideas in the numerous uses of
chance in Western art. Many artists have used chance, randomness and indeterminacy
as a process and as a theme; I will only cite a few. Dadaists used chance in an attempt to
break free from conscious control and question artistic virtuosity. The work of French
artist Marcel Duchamp, particularly his readymades, challenges artistic identities and
questions notions of self-expression and taste. Duchamp used chance operations to
complete pieces such as 3 Standard Stoppages (1913-1914) and Musical Erratum (1913),
a piece of music the notes of which were drawn from a hat. A slight difference in
perspective can be noted: whereas Duchamps work seemed to result from philosophical
doubt and to focus on the notion of possible, John Cages ideas on non-intentionality
derived from his wish to let nature speak for itself through his work. Nevertheless,
Duchamp can be considered a mentor for Cage, as Kyle Gann articulates it in No Such
Thing As Silence.43 Automatism, which can be considered a variant of chance, was the
linchpin of Surrealism and aimed at releasing the creative potential of the
unconsciousness. A similar approach is involved in the work of Jackson Pollock, whose
dripping techniques raise accidents to the level of creative principles.
There is no shortage of examples of occidental artists whose work embraces
chance and indeterminacy. Even so, John Cages prevailing attitude did not foreground
the relation of his work to occidental art and culture, but rather magnified the
contribution of Eastern philosophies to his thinking and practice.



In the Foreword to Silence, John Cage makes clear that his work cannot be
explained only in terms of his engagement with Zen, but that it would not be the same
without it. As James Pritchett puts it: The relationship of Cages composition to his
study of Zen Buddhism was not one in which Zen influenced him to act and think in
certain ways: Cages understanding of Zen was shaped as much by his compositional
concerns as his composition was shaped by his interest in Zen.44
Cages relationship to oriental thought is complex; it is more an appropriation
than a simple application. His thinking sometimes shows internal contradiction, and his
public claims concerning his Eastern inspirations run counter to the reality of his ties to
the art and philosophy of the Occident. However, what can be retained from this study is
the image of a multifaceted and prolific artist, whose main characteristic was his need
to embrace new ideas and new techniques.45
An explanation of Cages act of turning to another civilization to find backing for
his ideas of indeterminacy might be found in the ability of the Eastern culture to
embrace chance as an essential part of life. In the occidental world on the contrary, it
tends to be considered as an interesting exception to the rules established by the
rational mind, and finding meaning in randomness is belittled as superstition.




43 Kyle Gann, No Such Thing As Silence: John Cage's 433. (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale
University Press, 2010) 85.
44 Pritchett 74.
45 Pritchett 173.

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