by Rob Haskins
A critical understanding of John Cage's music has been slow to take shape, in part, because it is difficult to categorize his output. Many of Cage's later pieces are troublesome to such scholars as Brooks and Pritchett; these works show more traditional qualities than those in his best-known compositions, which attempted to undermine all our assumptions about music. Indeed, the better-known works of the 1950s have contributed to the notion that Cage's output is primarily undifferentiated "chance music." By contrast, the quasi-"traditional" examples of Cage's late work invite us to revisit his oeuvre in order to develop a better critical understanding of it. I do not argue for ad hoc "style periods" to discuss and evaluate Cage's music, a project that he would have deplored. However, his vast output might profitably be viewed with respect to his changing attitudes toward the "musical work" (in Lydia Goehr's formulation). In his early career, Cage adhered totally to the musical-work tradition, and his compositions were well understood within this context. In the 1950s and particularly the 1960s, Cage's work rejected the musical-work concept and exemplified what I call the "non-work," while much of Cage's late music evinces a move back towards the musical-work idea. Situating works along a "continuum" between the two poles helps us develop a critical framework for Cage's music which avoids the modes of evaluation that Cage so strenuously resisted, and it helps to clarify Cage's aesthetic, which constantly negotiates and reconfigures the divide separating modernism and postmodernism.
[Presented at the American Musicological Society St. Lawrence Chapter Meeting, School of Performing Arts, SUNY Geneseo, Geneseo, New York, April 6-7, 2002.]