Rob Haskins

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The Harmony of Emptiness: John Cage's Two²

by Rob Haskins

1 In most of Cage's Number Pieces, a series of works that occupied the composer’s attention between 1987 and his death in 1992, pitch--even harmony--takes pride of place.  This fact poses a paradox, even a contradiction, because harmony as such had hardly ever been central to Cage’s concerns.  In fact, while Cage’s early studies of harmony and counterpoint with Adolph Weiss and Arnold Schoenberg between 1933 and 1936 proceeded satisfactorily enough, there came a time when Cage’s studies reached a point of crisis.[1]  One of his anecdotes about his work with Schoenberg stands, probably, as his most famous expression of that crisis:

After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, "In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony."  I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony.  He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass.  I said, "In that case I shall devote my life to beating my head against that wall.[2]

To understand what harmony meant to Cage in his final years, we need to understand what it meant to him earlier.  I have spent some time locating all of the remarks Cage made about harmony in his published writings and some of his interviews.  Taken in toto, these remarks show a richer--and what at first seems contradictory--viewpoint than has been generally assumed.  First and foremost, I think Cage saw himself in opposition to tonal harmony, with its predictable (and arbitrary) rules of voice-leading and harmonic progressions.  By learning these rules, listeners condition themselves to expect the harmonic progressions that establish tonality; any deviations from those progressions--for instance, an unexpected modulation or a simple deceptive cadence--would be understood in terms of the "expected" norms.[3]  To Cage, listeners so conditioned would never hear sounds as sufficient in themselves--would not, in other words, be able to hear with the kind of open mind that he felt was essential.  What's more, as Cage wrote, the rules of tonal harmony foster "old-style" European thinking which stresses understanding all single events as the causes or consequences of other single events: Cage called the succession of musical events in a composition a "continuity," and this old-fashioned way of thinking simply "making that particular continuity that excludes all others."[4]

2        In the 1940s, in particular, Cage began to criticize harmony on other counts too, especially for its capacity to move music away from the ideal of tranquility to which he thought music should aspire: "I now saw harmony, for which I had never had any natural feeling, as a device to make music impressive, loud and big, in order to enlarge audiences and increase box-office returns."[5]  For Cage, harmony was a device that composers used to manipulate the audience, to make them feel certain emotions instead of others; for that reason it served the personality of the composer more than it did the sounds themselves.

3    Cage proposed replacing this type of thinking with the Oriental concept of interpenetration.  He explained the idea in his lecture "Composition as Process" by recalling one of Daisetz Suzuki's references to it in his lectures at Columbia, which he attended:

Interpenetration means that each [idea] is moving out in all directions penetrating and being penetrated by every other one no matter what the time or what the space.  So that when one says that there is no cause and effect, what is meant is that there are an incalculable infinity of causes and effects, that in fact each and every thing in all of time and space is related to each and every other thing in all of time and space.[6]

Each sound, pitched or otherwise, carries with it the same amount of significance as all other sounds.  When we hear them, we are overwhelmed by the infinite complexity of their interrelatedness; our awareness might focus on a fractional part of this complexity but never take it in entirely.  And in another hearing, we might choose to focus our attention on something else yet again.  Cage pursued these ideas with far-reaching implications in the late 1950s and '60s--for example, by separating instruments spatially so as to help ensure their sounds would be perceived as "sounds in themselves" and, in several works from the Variations series, by leaving undefined the types of sound chosen for a given performance. 

4    Too often, I feel, we have been admonished that paying attention is beyond the point in Cage's music--that because all events cause all other events, it's unnecessary to focus our attention too specifically.  But if we don't pay attention, surely we run the risk of coming to the superficial conclusion that all of Cage's chance music sounds alike. Furthermore, it's worth recalling that Cage occasionally admitted the possibility of finding relationships or continuity in his music, an activity that could only take place when we pay attention:

I would assume that relations would exist between sounds as they would exist between people and these relationships are more complex than any I would be able to prescribe.  So by simply dropping that responsibility of making relationships I don't lose the relationship.  I keep the situation in what you might call a natural complexity that can be observed in one way or another.[7]

The awesome complexity of interpenetrating sounds set in motion can never be comprehended in its entirety.  But by observing that complexity "in one way or another," we experience what we can; we might even share that experience with others, without suggesting that our experience is superior to anyone else's.[8]  What pleased Cage was the way in which his chance operations prevented him from imposing a single continuity of his own design in the music, and thus opened up the possibility for any number of equally valid continuities.  A given performance would reveal different patterns to different listeners; indeed, the same listener might make different connections in a subsequent performance--further approaching, but never totally comprehending, "the incalculable infinity of causes and effects."

5    In later years, Cage extended his interest in all the sounds around him to tonal harmony itself--for instance, he tried to liberate such harmony from its rigid syntax in works like Hymns and Variations (1979).  In this and similar works, Cage took traditional pieces by William Billings and other eighteenth-century American composers and subjected them to chance operations so that certain tones were prolonged and others removed altogether, replaced with silence.  In this way Cage retained the "flavor" of the original music but made it possible for listeners to hear it in a new way--to hear the individual sounds and silences as equally important, relating to each other in countless ways that could not be explained or predicted by rules and habit.

6    Finally, in the Number Pieces--particularly those involving the piano--Cage returned to harmonies entirely produced by chance operations and unrelated to past music.  More important, Cage discovered a way to use harmonies in such a way that they could not suggest any single pattern of coherence.  In most of the Number Pieces, all the performers have some freedom through Cage's use of time brackets, flexible measures that show a range of possible starting and ending times.  The time bracket system of notation used in most of these works allows a certain amount of flexibility in the performance: individual notes or chords may always occur in the same general time frame, but their specific order and duration varies slightly and unpredictably from performance to performance.  In this way Cage could create a new kind of harmony, a harmony that, as he described in a 1991 interview, simply "means that there are several sounds . . . being noticed at the same time."[9]

7    Though Cage had pursued the idea of multiple unusual and flexible connections between elements in many ways during his career, his literary works of the 1980s supplied some elegant examples of the principle--examples that I believe are particularly relevant to the Number Pieces.  One form that he referred to over and over again was renga, a Japanese poetic design of 5, 7, 5, 7, and 7 syllables expressed at least 36 times.  In the introduction to Themes and Variations, Cage's description of renga shows the powerful affinity that it shares with his own work:

Traditionally renga is written by a group of poets finding themselves of an evening together and having nothing better to do. Successive lines are written by different poets.  Each poet tries to make his line as distant in possible meanings from the preceding line as he can take it.  This is no doubt an attempt to open the minds of the poets and listeners or readers to other relationships than those ordinarily perceived.[10]

While Cage did not adhere to the syllabic structure of renga, he clearly embraced the idea that sequences of words which did not make conventional sense could, nevertheless, be meaningful.  To help create the illusion of the many poets characteristic to renga, he began his work by writing a "library" of source mesostic poems.  (Cage's mesostics have a central vertical string of letters, all capitalized, which spell out a name or idea that may or may not be connected with the horizontal lines of poetry.)  Once he had written a large number of poems, Cage selected individual lines through chance operations to form new mesostics that make a "fuzzy" kind of sense:

                        writing Music
                         in imitAtion
                     beyond affiRmation beyond negation
                      as it was Known
                            or aT least
                               yOu
                                By many physicists
                              OpEn

              nothing's changed Yet
                              soMething immense
                                Asking

                          guntheR stent

                             to Keep me
                       au couranT
                            is nO dust

                              a Basic list
                      of magazinEs

                              drY ink[11]

The passage begins with what seems to be an allusion to Cage's belief that art should imitate nature in its manner of operation, something indeed "beyond affirmation, beyond negation."  Yet the sense of the passage quickly disintegrates into a freer succession of ideas.  Particularly fascinating is the intrusion of words or phrases of a distinctly mundane tone: "a Basic list/of magazinEs." 

8    In Two² (1989), written for the pianists Edmund Niemann and Nurit Tilles performing together as the piano duo Double Edge, Cage unites these two themes--a new kind of harmony and renga--in a marvelous way.  One finds all manner of sonorities in this work: various triads and seventh chords, triads with other added notes, dissonances with two, three, or more notes, even single tones.  More interesting, however, is the fact that so many chords--even identical successions of chords--recur in the piece, and so many others are clearly related to each other.  The manner of their overall succession, of course, is determined by chance procedures and performance, which guarantee a "fuzzy" ordering that offers a modicum of coherence without any predictability whatsoever. And so the "logic" of recurrence in Two² resembles the way that our different friends and acquaintances pass in and out of our lives--a continuity that doesn't make conventional sense but is meaningful nevertheless. 

9    Cage expresses the renga idea in Two² in several ways: first, each line of music is divided into five measures, just like the five lines of the poetry.  The first measure contains five separate musical events--chords or single tones, usually shared between the two pianists--which correspond to the five syllables of the first line; the second measure has seven events, and so on.  And there are a total of 36 such five-measure sections in the piece.  The pianists proceed one measure at a time.  They must read the music in their respective measures from left to right; and while they can take any amount of time to perform each measure, each must wait until both performers have finished the same measure before proceeding to the next.  In this way, the order of the "syllables" composing one "line" almost always occurs in an unpredictable order.[12]  Of course, one can also hear the music itself as renga: dissonant chords cohabitate amicably with simple triads and ambiguous, neutral single tones: some sonorities are sublime, while others seem the product of harsh, even unformed technique.  Every time we think we settle into the mode of Cage's discourse, some unexpected sound--a simple seventh chord or even a seemingly banal augmented triad--suddenly intrudes, throwing us off balance and disorienting our reactions.  And yet that mingling of "incompatible" elements is fundamental to Cage's aesthetic and, I think, the very source of its magic.  This mixture of the generic and the exquisite evokes what Cage admired in Duchamp's work, its ability to resist becoming a mere "art object," though Cage was rarely able to achieve a Duchampian ideal.[13]

10    Two² stands apart in the sequence of number pieces because it has no time brackets; the two pianists are directed simply to play the music in their respective measures at their own speed, taking care not to continue to the next measure until both have finished playing the music for that particular measure.  (In this way, too, Cage respects the analogy with renga by keeping one line of poetry--expressed as one measure--separate from another.)  As Cage explains in his performance notes for the work, his decision not to incorporate time brackets owed itself to a remark made by the soviet composer Sofia Gubaidulina, whom he had met in 1988 at the Third International Festival of Contemporary Music in Leningrad: "There is an inner clock."[14]  This gives the pianists the luxury of playing the piece at the speed that suits them best; in the finest performances, the freedom also allows them to discover surprising new relationships between the sounds--relationships unexpected even to them, no matter how much rehearsal time they spend preparing. 

11    There is one final topic to discuss in Two², and that is the relationship of the two performers.  I have always sensed something intimate--even erotic--in all of Cage's Number Pieces for two musicians.  More than other works in the series, I think, they act as a metaphor for a healthy, loving relationship between two people.  In connection with this theme, we might turn to Cage's own (few) words on the subject to deduce the nature of that relationship.  As early as 1966, Cage wrote, "The most, the best, we can do, we believe (wanting to give evidence of love), is to get out of the way, leave space around whomever or whatever it is."[15]  He later simplified this formulation to "love = space around loved one."[16]  The composer talked about intimate human relationships rarely, but when he did, it was clear that he had considered such relationships deeply all of his life.  In a conversation with Joan Retallack from October of 1991, he describes friendship using similar thoughts: "It isn't a fixed thing that you come to and keep.  It's something which is not dependable.  Even if you think it is, it isn't, hmm?  And it gets richer as it encounters obstacles and surmounts them."[17] 

12    To leave space around loved ones, we must learn to let people live their own lives wherever that life may take them--that having or possessing the person is beside the point.  Similarly in the Number Pieces for two individuals, and perhaps Two² above all others, our performance is a time in which we agree to come together and be in each other's company--a time which we expect to be happy but which holds no guarantees.

Thanks to Laurel Karlik Sheehan.

Notes