“...we need not fear...
” - Expressivity & Silence in the
Early Work of John Cage
RANDAL DAVIS
Portland, Oregon
research@randal-davis.com
This paper was originally presented at the 1996 conference
of the International Society for Phenomenology &
Aesthetics at Harvard University. It subsequently appeared
in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka's The Aesthetic Discourse of
the Arts: Analecta Husserliana LXI (2000). This version has
been lightly revised. The musical and visual examples
which accompanied the original presentation are not
included here.
In John Cage's career as a composer,
spanning nearly six decades, the years 1951
and 1952 provide for many purposes a
convenient line of distinction. From the
earlier year came the Concerto for Prepared
Piano and the Music of Changes, Cage's first
compositions to make extensive use of
chance operations, followed the next by
4' 33" — the "silent" piece. While it is
certainly true that his subsequent works and
methods compel their own attention, indeed
presuming new analytic tools, neither is it
unreasonable to regard these two
compositions as epochal, defining the
aesthetic and philosophical positions which
made Cage the most broadly influential artist
of the second half of the century.
Does the recognition of such a defining point
presume discontinuity? In this case,
historiographically, yes — what could be
written of the "two Cages" might notably
diverge. At the same time, certain features of
Cage's work of the middle and late 1940's
evidence a line of development which may be
followed through the later indeterminate
compositions. To trace this line is, however,
not simply a task for the musicological
apparatus, it is also a question inviting
consideration of a phenomenological project.
Randal Davis “...we need not fear... – Expressivity & silence”
For Cage, the use of chance operations in
musical composition afforded a means of
freeing the work — and, by implication, the
composer, performer and listener — from
tastes, preferences and, taken broadly, the
normative properties of development and
continuity which would, in their various
forms, appear attributes of virtually all
musical expression. In short, Cage sought
through the practice of indeterminacy a
liquidation of, or freedom from, intention. His
use of the term undoubtedly derived from
common denotation, and not its specifically
phenomenological sense, although he would
later elaborate the idea considerably.1 Zvie
Bar-On has persuasively argued for the
importance of the relation between the
colloquial and technical usages, a relation
"neglected," he notes, by both analytic
philosophers and phenomenologists,2 and a
thorough treatment of Cage in this context
would be fascinating, albeit beyond the scope
of this essay.3
Proposed here is an investigation, then,
smaller but perhaps finally no less
significant, an essay of selected instances of
the functions of silence and time-
consciousness in these compositions. In
"Forerunners of Modem Music" (1949), Cage
identified the "opposite and necessary
coexistent" relation of sound and silence,
concluding from this the notionally "correct"
means of structuring composition.4 This
relation also figured the question of
intentionality, as Cage pointed out in
"Composition as Process: Communication"
(1958):
© Randal Davis, 1996, 2000, 2013 1
 When silence, generally speaking, is
not in evidence, the will of the
composer is. Inherent silence is
equivalent to denial of the will...
Nevertheless, constant activity may
occur having no dominance of will in
it. Neither as syntax nor structure,
but analogous to the sum of nature, it
will have arisen purposelessly.5
Purposelessly is sure to invite question, but
it should again be remembered that Cage's
sense of it was more colloquial than
technical.
In this silence, one might "hear each sound
just as it is, not as a phenomenon more or
less approximating a preconception," as he
observed elsewhere in "Composition as
Process."6 This is surely suggestive language,
and in Cage's proposal for "a composing of
sounds within a universe predicated upon
the sounds themselves rather than upon the
mind which can envisage them coming into
being" one may make the translation into
difficult, yet profoundly phenomenological
terms.7
Robert Snarrenberg's somewhat unusual
analysis of Anton Webern's Orchestral Pieces
(1913) provides a useful point of departure.
Departing from the positivist formalism
characteristic of much musicological
research, Snarrenberg sought to document
the "diachronically emergent awareness of
this work's aestheticity" in prose evoking the
refractive and reflexive complexities of
Webern's compressed musical universe.
Snarrenberg's analysis is an admirable, yet
finally only barely successful, attempt at a
phenomenology; "emergent awareness" is
often confused with the euphoria of a rather
prolix impressionism.8
Snarrenberg did, however, succeed in
formulating one fundamental question.
Invoking "the envelopment of silence," he was
concerned to differentiate the condition of
"ending-in-silence as opposed to the more
usual ending-with-silence," correctly arguing
Randal Davis “...we need not fear... – Expressivity & silence”
that "the effect of this enveloping silence...is
a blurring of the characteristic boundary
between a work and its frame of silence."9
Perhaps most important was his conclusion,
again in marked departure from the
methodological conventions of musicology;
this envelopment was not, he noted, "an
experience empirically or rationally
determinable; rather it is an intersubjective
meaning.10
Snarrenberg allows, reasonably enough, that
common performance practice admits a
ready, if trivial, solution to the question by
recourse to visible downbeats or releases.
That pianist David Tudor reversed this
convention for the premiere of 4'33” —
closing the keyboard cover for each of the
three movements — is most suggestive,
repudiating a regard of the work as merely a
neo-Dadaist gesture and, in the specific
context of this analysis, brilliantly
demonstrating the phenomenological
subtlety of the issues raised.
Snarrenberg's “envelopment” is an artifact of
the phenomenological horizon. as Cornelius
Van Peursen notes, in terms resonant with
my purpose here, "the horizon represents
this movement of embracing the world.”11
Another way of understanding this is, of
course, as a simultaneous function of the
movement of the horizon in time and its
containment of relation, as Van Peursen has
it, "in a meaningful coherence."12 Also
apparent, though, and this is the
fundamental question, the being-in and
being-of silence problematizes that necessary
demarcation.
Husserl's familiar diagram of time embraces
while underscoring this difficulty; the basic
model of retention, impression and
protention in time-consciousness is
appropriate to a phenomenology of musical
experience, at least insofar as that
experience is considered to be itself
contained within the horizon of certain
explicitly normative conventions.13
© Randal Davis, 1996, 2000, 2013 2
That is, one's experience of, say, Bach's
Musical Offering as a temporal object names
a "meaningful coherence" of horizon — also
to say a coherent relation of impression,
retention and protention — which the
experience of, to take another example, Earle
Brown's November 1952 is likely to efface.14
In taking the score as the representation of a
space of possibility, influenced by the
sculpture of Alexander Calder and Abstract
Expressionism, Brown's notation scatters
pitch materials through a minimally and
ambiguously bound field. The immediate
casualty of November 1952 or Cage's own
Music for Piano series, using imperfections in
the music paper to determine events, is the
distinction between the primary processes of
impression, retention and protention and the
secondary processes of memory and
expectation. Faced with this collapse, a
deeper question emerges: whether, or in
what sense, might a work such as November
1952 or the Music for Piano be considered a
temporal object?
Jonathan Kramer has proposed that the
metaphor of "motion" in tonal music reflects
an essentially linear and at least implicitly
teleological temporality, a model made
increasingly untenable by the chromaticism
of the later nineteenth century.15 When, as is
common to much experimental music since
1950, and is certainly evident in Cage, the
experience of linearity at even the level of the
phrase is denied, a transformation of time-
consciousness occurs:
The result is a single present stretched
out into an enormous duration, a
potentially finite "now" that
nonetheless feels like an instant.16
This, in Kramer's terms, is vertical time, and
his formulation clearly apprehends the
necessary relation of the questions of the
constitution of the temporal object and the
time-consciousness.
Kramer's model is also consistent with
Bielawka's critique of Husserl, which first
rejects its suggestion of a "punctual,
momentary being of inner consciousness"
Randal Davis “...we need not fear... – Expressivity & silence”
and second, its overelaboration, a
"structure...more complicated than reality
itself."17 Following the line of her second
objection, the familiar model would indeed
seem inadequate for the reality of such
indeterminate works. Less a conclusion itself
than a redirection, one returns to the first of
her objections, which, in contrast to the
"momentary being" presumed in the
diagram, proposes instead the regard of
inner consciousness as "an all-embracing
present."18 Or, put differently, in the specific
terms of this investigation, is it possible to
regard Cage's movement toward
indeterminacy as just such a speculative
phenomenology, a testing of the temporal
horizon?
Four Walls (1944), an hour-long piano solo
with an interlude for solo voice, has an
unusual history; Cage's longest work to that
date, it was also his first major collaboration
with choreographer Merce Cunningham.
Despite these signal attributes, the work was
lost for nearly forty years and largely
forgotten by the composer himself.19 Four
Walls is also interesting for its explicitly
dramatic character — Cunningham's
chronology of his works identifies it with the
subtitle, "a dance play," another unusual
attribute for a collaboration predicated upon
the non-narrative independence of dance and
music.20
Cage's music of the middle 1940's was, by
his own admission, composed with
conventionally expressive intent. The
prepared piano Amores (1943), "concerned
the quietness between lovers," while, Cage
recounted in "A Composer's Confessions"
(1948), The Perilous Night, from the same
period as Four Walls, "concerned the
loneliness and terror that comes to one when
love is unhappy."21 Although its idiom was
surely unfamiliar to listeners of the time, it is
not difficult to hear in the jagged syncopation
of The Perilous Night the tremulous
uncertainties of a lover's anguish. How, then,
might one describe the emotional space of
Four Walls?
© Randal Davis, 1996, 2000, 2013 3
Margaret Leng Tan hears its diatonic scale
"suggesting the influence of Erik Satie," an
observation echoed by David Revill.22 Yet the
overt gestural drama of the repeated chords
and explosions of frenetic ostinati occurs at
great affective remove from the diffidence of
Satie, alluded to by Revill and his provocative
notion of Four Walls as "a case study of
existential placement." I am, however, less
sanguine about his sense of the work as
"seek[ing] balance in the suspended stillness
of contemplative rapture." One's general
impression of Four Walls is surely of a calmer
surface than the feverish intensity of The
Perilous Night, yet its structure is far from
unconflicted.
The circumstances of Cage's personal life in
the middle 1940's were, in a word, difficult.
He had, "acknowledged by his early teens,"
Thomas Hines reports, "that he was
predominantly homosexual," while
maintaining close relationships with several
women.23 Yet in 1935, aged 22, with the
flush of what he remembered as "love at first
sight," he married Xenia Andreevna
Kashevaroff, a liaison to last some ten years.
Cage met Cunningham in 1938, beginning a
relationship which, as Hines notes,
"ultimately far superceded his waning
commitment to Xenia.”24 By the early 1940's,
this had evolved to what Cage recalled to
Hines as an "open marriage" and menage a
trois. It was also at this time, according to
Revill, that "Cage became so disturbed that
several friends advised him strongly to
undergo psychoanalysis."25
I detail the circumstances of this particularly
personal context less because they are
somehow extraordinary, though that is
hardly to minimize the immense anxieties
Cage must have felt at the time. It is rather
the, shall we say, more ordinary aspects that
demand attention.
That is, it is precisely the direct nature of the
representation of this experience that makes
Four Walls anomalous among Cage's works,
and which may indeed account for his later
Randal Davis “...we need not fear... – Expressivity & silence”
disinterest in the composition. Silence,
contrary to Cage's later aesthetics, seems
something to be feared in Four Walls, directly
emblematic of confinement, imprisonment.
The title of In a Landscape (1948), for piano
or harp solo, like Four Walls, invites
programmatic interpretation, although
suggestive of a program of a quite different
sort; the crises of the mid-1940's had
receded, and In a Landscape diffident
meandering melodic line is, in some ways,
quite an antithesis to the staccato Four
Walls. Both, though, may fairly be seen to
anticipate minimalism, as Eric Salzman and
Mark Swed point out.26 Yet within this
minimalism avant-lettre, an important
difference obtrudes.
Wim Mertens argues that "traditional
dialectical music is representational,"
relating form to expressive content, while
minimal work, lacking this "'musical
argument'. ..is no longer a medium for the
expression of subjective feelings."27 Mertens'
distinction is apposite here; redolent of
Cage's fondness for Erik Satie, the
continuous legato of In a Landscape
summons something like the "interior
immobility" suggested by Satie's Vexations,
which when repeated the prescribed eight
hundred and forty times consumes some
eighteen hours.
That the musical surface and substance of In
a Landscape is less conventionally expressive
of "subjective feelings," as Mertens argued,
does not imply that it fails to model a
subjectivity. One may first take the slow
melodic undulations in the pictorial sense,
the contours of a gently rolling landscape;
one may also take, with more interesting
consequences, the line to represent a walk
through that terrain, a notion which helps in
understanding this central property of the
work. The aural terrain of In a Landscape is,
in a sense, continuous: the pervading aural
impression is of an essentially unbroken and
only eccentrically directional line. This is in
profound contrast to the marked fragmen-
© Randal Davis, 1996, 2000, 2013 4
tation of Four Walls, yet there is more to this
relation than simple opposition. If one takes
In a Landscape to represent less the
landscape itself than a certain mode of
experience, a being-in-landscape, it is
possible to hear the work as the spaces — in
pitch and time — between the notes, an
embracing silence, if you will, broken then
only by intermittent chords in the low
register.
The assertion that In a Landscape is, in this
sense, a single silence might at first seem a
willful, even gratuitous, misreading, yet it is
also a deceptively complex composition.
Margaret Leng Tan concisely captures this
quality of openness, a continual becoming, in
noting that "non-directional non-emotive
meanderings and repetitions fuse and fade
into harmonic resonances."28 At once linear,
in Kramer's terms, it also refuses the
teleology of closure in a deeply problematic,
if not in fact paradoxical, continuity, existing
at the boundary where the horizontality of
linear time is poised to assume an
encompassing verticality.
This interpretation of In a Landscape is
directly supported by the String Quartet in
Four Parts (1950), Cage's last major work
composed before the Concerto for Prepared
Piano and the Music of Changes, and his
subsequent reliance on chance operations.
The sustaining capability of the strings is
used to spectacular effect in the quartet; the
first three movements, via the device of a
doubling of the basic rhythmic unit, present
what is in effect a temporal expansion of a
restricted gamut of sonorities. This slow
motion effect is made explicit in the titles of
the movements: "quietly flowing along,"
"slowly rocking," and "nearly stationary."
James Pritchett, with no small
understatement, rightly describes this as
"producting] an ordering of sonorities that
owed nothing to the world of harmonic
progression.”29
In a letter to Pierre Boulez in February,
1950, just after completing the quartet, Cage
Randal Davis “...we need not fear... – Expressivity & silence”
boldly asserted, "there is no counterpoint
and no harmony.”30 This is not, of course, to
say that there is no perceptible verticality
(understood conventionally, not in Kramer's
sense) but that, as Pritchett observed, such
occurrences are more fortuitous than
relational. Hence the unusual title for the
work: one reasonably assumes a quartet to
have four parts, but Cage wished to make
clear that this "line in rhythmic space," as he
described it to Boulez, was the result of four
essentially independent parts.
The notional development of the quartet, in
fact a progressive refusal of the rhetoric of
continuity, manifests Kramer's "single
present stretched out into an enormous
duration." Cage intended the architecture of
the quartet to reflect the passage of the
seasons (summer, fall, winter, spring) and, in
a charming compositional coup, compressed
the time scale for the final movement to
make a delightful quodlibet. With these few
measures, however, Cage bid a final farewell
to any normative continuity. By the later
1950's, even this vestigial landscape had
dematerialized in favor of the continuous
present of what Cage often described as
"simultaneities and interpenetrations."
One might, for example, take the spare
appearance of Winter Music (1957), twenty
unnumbered pages for one to twenty
pianists, as evoking the isolation of the
composer's rural home at Stony Point, New
York. Such a reading could generally shape
the parameters of a realization, although
nothing in the score or its instructions
mandates such an interpretative act.
Significantly, though, even if such global
constraints are imposed, the notational
complexities of the score, allowing different
sequences and overlappings of pages, and
particularly the devilishly intricate scheme
by which chance operations map the notes of
each chord to a clef, guarantees that the
result cannot be other than profound
discontinuity.
© Randal Davis, 1996, 2000, 2013 5
In proposing this model for the analysis and
description of Cage's work I depart from
standard musicological practice, which has
proven unfortunately resistant to questions
of indeterminacy whether, in Pritchett's
terms, "due to conceptual or methodological”
problems.31 Of course, in one sense, those
problems are indeed substantial; in their
extreme form, they appear as Richard
Taruskin's incredulity at Cage's positions,
the equivalent, he exclaimed, of a writer
saying "'the whole lexical aspect of literature
eludes me.'" "Any success that such a
musician might enjoy," Taruskin concluded,
"would devalue legitimacy."32 And it should
also be noted that it was on the use of
chance operations that the artistic
camaraderie and friendship of Cage and
Boulez foundered, as early as 1951.33 Boulez
was subsequently to remark to composer
Morton Feldman, “I love John's mind, but I
don't like what it thinks.”34
It is thus that the familiar conception of Cage
as a notional “philosopher” rather than a
composer or visual artist or, for that, writer,
derives. That Pritchett's own method stands
against this is explicit in the rather harsh
opening remarks of his recent The Music of
John Cage, but this should be read less as a
turning away from the philosophical
challenges of Cage's work than as instead an
emblem of Pritchett's desire for a
musicological recuperation of Cage, a direct
assault upon the critical apparatus which
has for too long regarded Cage as merely a
philosopher.
But it is also true that the philosophical
consideration of Cage and indeterminacy has
hardly proven more adequate; that is a
subject itself far beyond my scope here, but I
will simply cite two recent examples from the
phenomenological literature. Andrezj Pytlak,
construes indeterminacy as synonymous
with improvisation, which is a manifest
error, though indeed a common one; Peter
Simons is a bit more articulate, but in
addressing the "inherent vagueness" of the
identity of musical works he, not unlike
Randal Davis “...we need not fear... – Expressivity & silence”
Pytlak, treats the "vague boundary between
composed works and improvisations" as
strangely absolute, thereby eliding
substantive consideration of indeterminate
works.35
It is precisely the consequence of
indeterminacy that such identity is
undermined, a point generally acknowledged
by the few theoreticians to have made
significant explorations of this area.36 To
refigure the work not as an object but a
disseminative potential is a convenience, in
the best and worst senses; for the former, a
sophisticated critical apparatus of
intertextual theory is mobilized one which
effectively exposes, finally obviating, the
timidities of Pytlak and Simons.37 At the
same time, in the latter sense, a convenience
may be just that, an immediately operational
advantage which does not, finally, advance
fundamental questions.
Husserl, we know, considered the question of
time-consciousness a vital issue for
phenomenology, and these few observations
of the specific issues raised by the role of
indeterminacy in John Cage's compositions
only underscores that primacy. In a recent
discussion of the poetics of intentionality and
the I Ching — interestingly, Cage's consistent
model for, and source of, chance operations
— Gregory Tropea concludes:
To know oneself means at the very
least to know what appears as self.
Because as with an existent being, the
self is changing continually, the work
of knowing oneself is no more able to
be completed than the work of
creating oneself can come to any end
other than the cessation of
consciousness.38
It seems, therefore, only appropriate that one
of Cage's last published texts, a dialogue
with Anne Gibson on the meanings of
continuity and discontinuity, carried the title
"Music Without Horizon Soundscape that
Never Stops."39
© Randal Davis, 1996, 2000, 2013 6
This essay is dedicated to the memories of my
parents, Allene & Richard Duea, and Robert W
Corrigan.
Notes to the text
The title of this essay is taken from John Cage's
"Lecture on Nothing" (1959): "This space of time is
organized. We need not fear these silences -- we
may love them." In John Cage, Silence
(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961):
109-10.
1 See particularly Cage's “Composition as
Process” (1958) and “Composition: To describe
the process of composition used in Music for
Piano 21-52” (1958), both collected in Silence.
2 A. Zvie Bar-On, "A Problem in the
Phenomenology of Action: Are There
Unintentional Actions?," Analecta Husserliana
XXXV (1991): 378.
3 Such an inquiry would begin reading Bar-On in
parallel with Tom Johnson's "Intentionality and
Nonintentionality in the Performance of Music by
John Cage," in John Cage at Seventy-Five, eds.
Richard Fleming & William Duckworth
(Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1987):
262-69.
4 Cage, Silence: 63. See also Christopher Shultis,
"Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the
Intentionality of Nonintention," Musical Quarterly
79:2 (Summer, 1995): 312-350, for a landmark
discussion of the relation of silence and intention
in Cage's work.
5 Cage, Silence: 53.
6 Cage, Silence: 23.
7 Cage, Silence: 27.
8 Robert Snarrenberg, "Hearings of Webern's
Bewegt," Perspectives of New Music 24:2 (Spring/
Summer, 1986): 389.
9 Snarrenberg: 390.
10 Snarrenberg: 390.
11 Cornelius Van Peursen, "The Horizon," in
Husserl: Expositions & Appraisals, eds. Frederick
Elliston & Peter McCormick (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1977). p. 193.
12 Van Peursen: 191.
13 There are numerous restatements of this
exposition, but the most useful is John Brough's
"The Phenomenology of Internal Time-
Consciousness," in Husserl: Shorter Works (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981):
272-73.
Randal Davis “...we need not fear... – Expressivity & silence”
14 One could take here virtually any composition
from the Western tradition from the Renaissance
through, say, Wagner's Tristan. Yet the example
of Bach seems particularly clear for its suggestion
of a musical teleology; the structure of the Canon
a 2 per Tonos, the "endlessly" modulating canon,
makes a vivid contrast with Brown's pointillism.
15 Jonathan Kramer, "New Temporalities in
Music," Critical Inquiry 7:3 (Spring, 1981): 539-
41.
16 Kramer: 549.
17 Maria Bielawka, "Does Man Co-Create Time?,"
Analecta Husserliana XXXVII (1991):59.
18 Bielawka: 59.
19 David Revill, The Roaring Silence (New York:
Arcade Publishing, 1992): 85-87.
20 Merce Cunningham, The Dancer and the
Dance (New York: Marion Boyars, 1985): 204.
21 John Cage, "A Composer's Confessions," in
John Cage: Writer, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New
York: Limelight Editions, 1993). p. 40.
22 Margaret Leng Tan, notes to her recording of
the work for New Albion Records (San Francisco:
New Albion NAO37CD, 1991): n.p. and Revill: 85-
88. Subsequent references to Revill come from
this same section.
23 Thomas Hines, "Then Not Yet 'Cage': The Los
Angeles Years, 1912-1938," in John Cage:
Composed in America, eds. Marjorie Perloff &
Charles Junkerman (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994): 81.
24 Hines: 93.
25 Hines: 95 and Revill: 87.
26 Eric Salzman, notes to the recording of Four
Walls by Joshua Pierce & Jay Clayton for Tomato
Records (New York: Tomato 69559, 1989): n.p..
Mark Swed, notes to the recording of Imaginary
Landscape by Anthony De Mare for Koch
International Classics (Westbury: Koch 37104,
1992): n.p..
27 Wim Mertens, American Minimal Music,
translated by J. Hautekiet (New York: Alexander
Broude, Inc., 1983): 88.
28 Margaret Leng Tan, notes to her recording of
the work for New Albion Records (San Francisco:
NAO7OCD, 1994), n.p..
29 James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993):
55.
30 Pierre Boulez & John Cage, The Boulez-Cage
Correspondence, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, trans.
Robert Samuels (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993): 55.
© Randal Davis, 1996, 2000, 2013 7
31 James Pritchett, "Understanding John Cage's
Chance Music: An Analytic Approach," in John
Cage at Seventy-Five, eds. Richard Fleming &
William Duckworth (Lewisburg: Bucknell
University Press, 1987): 251.
32 Richard Taruskin, “No Ear for Music,” The
New Republic (March 15, 1993): 28.
33 Boulez & Cage: 112. The split was, of course,
famously completed by Boulez with his polemic
“Alea,” in 1957, subsequently translated by David
Noakes & Paul Jacobs for Perspectives of New
Music 3:1 (Autumn - Winter, 1964): 42-53.
34 Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors
(New York: Viking, 1968): 120.
35 Andrzej Pytlak, "On Ingarden's Conception of
the Musical Composition," in On the Aesthetics of
Roman Ingarden, eds. B. Dziemidok & P.
McCormick (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1989): 241-42. Peter Simons,
"Computer Composition and Works of Music:
Variations on a Theme of Ingarden," Journal of
the British Society for Phenomenology 19:2 (May,
1988): 143-147.
Randal Davis “...we need not fear... – Expressivity & silence”
36 The essential texts here are Umberto Eco's
Opera Aperta (1962), published in English as The
Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1989) and Leonard
Meyer's Music, The Arts and Ideas (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1967). Herman
Sabbe's "Open Structure and the Problem of
Criticism," Perspectives of New Music 27:1
(Winter, 1989): 312-16 is a useful summary of
these positions.
37 As Roland Barthes famously put it, "the text is
not to be thought of as an object that can be
computed...the text is a methodological field."
"From Work to Text," collected in Image-Music-
Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill &
Wang, 1977): 156-7.
38 Gregory Tropea, "I Ching Divination and the
Absolutely Poetic Reconstruction of
Intentionality," Analecta Hussserliana XLVII
(1995): 207.
39 Collected in John Cage: Writer, ed. Richard
Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight Editions, 1993):
267-81.
© Randal Davis, 1996, 2000, 2013 8