A Note on Cage and Genre

An observation: the traditional form or genre in which Cage was most innovative was not the sonata, quartet, or concerto — although he made genre-challenging examples of each — but the oratorio.  I take the word oratorio here liberally, but literally, as a musical vehicle for the elevation of a text with didactic and/or narrative character.  His own experiences as an orator began in High School, and certainly were associated his first career ambitions, to preach (his Los Angeles High School classmate, the poet Josephine Miles, told me that he had a good voice for public speaking because it was high-pitched and carried well (oh those days before universal electronic amplification)).  It followed through his own public lectures, which were very much the work of a composer, often sharing structures and methods with his musical scores, and really established itself with Lecture on the Weather, Empty Words, and Roaratorio, all works in which Cage's own performance as a public speaker treating source materials of great value to the composer are made musical in large scale.  I dodge around the issue of whether these were sacred or secular oratorios, but note that a thematic concern with nature in these pieces is shared with the work generally identified as the first oratorio, Emilio de Cavalieri's Rappresentatione di Anima, et di Corpo (1600) to a libretto by Agostino Manni.

Great Expectations

I'm quite fond of the series of novels (four, to date) by the (pseudonymous) James Church featuring the Pyongyang-based Inspector O. On the surface, they are detective novels with an exotic setting, but just below that surface they're something rather more, with proper resolution of the police procedural seldom on offer (the North Korean system inevitably makes that impossible) yet carried by the real mystery in the motivation and character of the central figure, O, and actually quite a lot of beautiful prose, much of it so tangential to the plot that the books sometimes seem like experimental literature.

Indeed, in the third of the novels, Bamboo and Blood, there is one of strangest formal moves I've encountered in a work of fiction. At the end of a chapter, just about in the middle of the novel, O is sent to New York City. Naturally, from the perspective of a western reader, this very unusual trip for a North Korean police inspector ought to be something very important, something truly momentous, and all expectations are for a detailed account of the unlikeliest adventures in the Big Apple. However, the next chapter instead begins with O already back in Pyongyang, as if nothing momentous at all had happened and, indeed, the fragments of information we receive in the rest of the book about the New York visit add up to very little. Church not only makes a surprising formal move, disappointing our expectations for significant, plot-driving action, he plays with expectations based upon our deepest biases. It's our conceit that we simply expect a North Korean police inspector to be impressed, if not overwhelmed by the city that never sleeps. Instead, from what we can gather, the inspector was so much more annoyed by the interference in his quiet and careful life at home and in the office — not to mention the possible personal risks associated with the opportunities of foreign travel — that O simply refuses (a) to let much happen in New York and (b) to register much about the city that he might take home in memory subject to interrogation.

In the play of expectations in a musical work, an example like Inspector O's laconic trip to NYC is a very useful one. A satisfying piece of music is not necessarily about satisfying musical expectations. It's also not necessarily about holding back material or an event (a lot of 12-toners made a big deal about "saving notes", often confusing a useful tactic with an all-too-obvious strategy; let me be clear: saving a note is a musically useful notion, but it's inadequate to sustain an individual career, let alone a repertoire*). But it can be about seriously disappointing expectations and offering something totally outside of the framework we had assumed the piece was operating within. And that moment in which we suddenly become aware that our assumptions weren't even wrong is a wonderful one.

_____

* Paradoxically, perhaps, the opposite strategy, of allowing all the marbles to fall from the very beginning, allowing all material to be available — the gamut-based pieces of Cage come to mind — can be powerfully disarming to expectations. You think that you know all of the furniture in your living room, but switch the positions of the sofa and the coffee table and it might feel as if the earth has shifted just a bit on its axis.

Waiting for the repetition

In ninth grade, Mr. Tackett, an English and Drama teacher and my school's resident hipster, handed me a copy of Waiting for Godot with the instructions: "Read.  Now." I started immediately and read during, and with complete disregard for, whatever classes I had that day, and by the time I'd finished the second act, realized something fairly profound about form that is as true for music as for theatre:  You have to be careful to get the repeats right.  If you get them right, you necessarily go beyond simple reproduction, as the experience of the repeat changes the memory of the original.  

The grand audacity of Godot is not that it's a play in which little is said and less happens, but it is a play in two acts in which little is said and less happens, twice.*  The repetition here is not exact, but pseudo-repetition, combining the feeling of worn routine with the sense that the repetition occurs in a world in which time has really passed and the world and the actors and audience in it are all a little more worse (but not necessarily wise) for wear, thus nothing can ever be exactly the same.   The edgy discomfort and awkward laughter of the audience during the first act takes on an entirely different edge when the formal repetition of the second act invites expectations which are inevitably disappointed.  But disappointment is erased, no, transcended, by the joys of variation, whether in major changes (can the blinded Pozzi of Act Two see any less than the sighted Pozzi of Act One?)  or in the smallest details.  

The game here has everything to do with memory, particularly the tension between the memories of the audience and the fragile, fractured memories  of the characters (has the boy come before?)  Moreover, the second act is perfectly scaled down in duration from the first, picking up that trick from slapstick or story- and joke-telling, in which a sequence of quasi-repeated actions gets acted out or told in progressively shorter durations (I wouldn't be surprised if Beckett — intuitively — hit on a golden proportion here), scaled to maximize our attentions.   The effect is uncanny:  even less happens after intermission than before, yet the laughs lose their awkwardness and become relaxed, honest, tender, and sympathetic and the scant bit of hope  that closes the act is just enough to leave one half-hoping for a third act, another day, of similar uneventfulness.

_____

* None of my observations here are particularly novel.  Wikipedia quotes the critic Vivian Mercier: "a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats. What's more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice." (Irish Times, 18 February 1956, p. 6.)       

Sonata, que me veux-tu?

In a review of a new anthology of sonnets, Ron Silliman (boy, do I learn a lot from his blog) writes of poets who

...have seen in the sonnet precisely the dynamics of constraint that elsewhere drives Oulipo toward its amazing proliferation of forms. The point of the sonnet therefore is not to put oneself up against the likes of Shakespeare or Ben Jonson, but rather to see the sonnet for our time as a series of powerful literary devices that can open the present up completely.

Isn't this amazing proliferation of forms quite like that, for the sonata, found in Cage's Sonatas and Interludes, Lou Harrison's early Six Sonatas for Cembalo, or Gordon Mumma's Sixpac Sonatas, or in the profligate sonatas of John White or Boudiwijn Buckinx (also here)? One of the reasons that these pieces are so rich in spite of their brevity — and especially in comparison with the longer modern sonatas based on late classical and romantic models — is that they take the form to its roots, prior to the establishment of the tonal model of the classical sonata movement, as a canzona per sonare (an instrumental work in which sonic quality is emphasized) or the elementary binary form in which the fundamental compositional problem is that of the repeat which is able to lead both back, Ouroboros-style, to its own beginning, as well as forward to something else.

Holding Things Together

A brief note about Paul Auster's novel Man in the Dark: After finishing the book something about the form nagged at me so much that I couldn't sleep until I had read it all through again. It's a compact novel about telling stories: a fiction told to oneself to fight insomnia, stories shared about important women (sister, wife, daughter, granddaughter) in a man's life, stories about innocent men thrown into desperate and strange environments, the story of Nathaniel Hawthorne's daughter Rose (a failed poet, Rose changed the narrative of her own life and became a nun, founding an order dedicated to the care of incurable cancer patients).

Auster has always featured coincidence and parallels in his work, as phenomena that are sometimes essential to the narrative, sometimes peripheral, and sometimes uncertainly swinging between those two possibilities, but here he introduces a number of parallels which function at a formal level, holding the text — and the worlds imagined within it — together.

Here's one example of a parallel which seems a minor detail, but actually helps to sustain the structure of the whole novel: in a story told to himself, the narrator, August Brill, imagines a fictional America in which 9/11 does not take place, but instead, after the election of 2000, the nation separates and enters into civil war. Brill's hero in this story, a man travelling between timelines, is named Owen Brick. Later, Brill tells a story, set in the novel's (implicitly, our own) "real" time line about his own granddaughter's boyfriend, killed in (a post 9/11) Iraq while in the employ of a company named BRK.

(Similarly, Auster draws a parallel between a breakfast — which, in perhaps a small homage to Buñuel (Auster knows his films), repeatedly doesn't come — in Brick's war-torn timeline and the narrator's own full breakfast, which is to come sometime after the book ends.)

That coincidence of names (Brill, Brick, BRK) is surely no accident, but a perfectly crafted example of how real details infect and feed our imaginations, and sometime vice versa. Indeed, the very last words of the novel, quoting Rose Hawthorne's odd and wonderful line "as the weird world rolls on" are suitable closing words for each of timelines in the book, and certainly in our own as well.