Everyone seems to agree that this presidential election is unpleasant, depressing, stressful, etc. So if you’re sick of listening to all the political bullshit, allow me to give you some very different bullshit for your listening pleasure!

If you’ve taken a music appreciation class, you’ve probably had some John Cage forced on you. I should point out that I like the guy, and I like musing over and talking about his ideas. At the same time, I don’t actually enjoy listening to his music; I think it’s main value is not aesthetic but philosophical.

Among the many cool ideas he had (I say “cool” because I don’t think it’s necessarily “good”) was to remove the human composer from the act of composing as much as possible. From here he began exploring other ways to challenge our ideas about music composition and creation (and, about ourselves and our social interactions). His piece Indeterminacy is a recording of Cage reading random sentences from selected stories, while his friend David Tudor makes random musical sounds with various instruments.

If the music were more typical, and the spoken words made sense, this recording would be same-old-stuff, perhaps something akin to a children’s story accompanied by music. But since both music and words are nonsensical, our initial response is “what the hell is this?” But, to a non-human, both same-old-stuff and the nonsensical-stuff might sound exactly the same. Who gets to define what is music and what isn’t, anyway?

 

 

Mention the name John Cage, and you’ll get a smirk out of every former music appreciation student.

“John Cage? Oh yeah, I like his music. I especially like his 4’33”, heh heh.”

Even if Cage’s music isn’t exactly the kind of stuff you turn on to relax at the end of a difficult day, he does make you think. Another of his famous philosophy-based compositions is “Music of Changes“. There is an ancient Chinese divination book, the I Ching, in which you toss three coins six times to determine your fortune. (you can use the I Ching online!) Cage took this idea and translated it into a compositional device. So instead of thinking, “I think this piece needs a quarter-note G here,” Cage used the I Ching to tell him what notes to put where – in a manner of speaking, removing the composer from the compositional process, and leaving every choice to a coin toss.

This idea of reducing the control of the composer is known as Indeterminacy, and was a reaction to a style called Serialism, in which the composer carefully organized everything with inflexible mathematical structures. The irony is that both the random Indeterminate music and the ultra-organized Serialist music both sounded the same – inhuman, confusing, and difficult.

So, what happens when a composer says “Let It Go!” and writes music based on chance alone? Listen: