Silencing the Sounded Self: Christopher Shultis and Joel Weishaus in Conversation, 1999 (Part II)

Here is part two of my internet conversation with Joel Weishaus, which we worked on during my Fulbright year in Heidelberg (1999-2000). It foreshadows much of the research I've been involved with since, some now finished (time I spent personally with Norman O. Brown and careful study of his work in relation to John Cage), some not yet (my book length study, "The Dialectics of Experimentalism" was already taking shape during the time when Joel and I had this conversation). Now that my work on that book is nearing completion, it has been interesting to revisit this. I find often that the research I do begins with an intuition about something and much of this conversation is still at the intuitive stage. That doesn't mean I'm exploring a "hypothesis" which is then tested. Anyone who has read my book Silencing the Sounded Self, which is discussed in this part of our conversation, knows how I feel about that. Instead, intuition leads to a time of free associative thinking about something I'm especially curious about, after having immersed myself sufficiently in order to at least be knowledgable about what I'm exploring. Fifteen years later, I'm still exploring much of what gets discussed in this conversation with Joel!

 JW: I find it commendable that "discovery or experience," rather than "knowing and understanding," is a foremost concern of yours, because what we think we know or understand can be, and usually is, an impediment to living in the flow of our reality. One's life then becomes dynamic, rather than mnemonic. It's a strange fact that one can't recall the actual sensation of (physical) pain. We can only say, "I was in pain," or emphasize with someone in pain, without being able to feel their pain. As you know, I, too, went through a period of acute pain that originated in my neck and pooled in my arm, not too long after your experience. So that I became sensitive to people who experience, as you say, "the (daily) difficulty of suffering," yet make a worthwhile life in spite of their disability. Or, as in your case, find a way to use pain to spur creativity.

You speak of "approaching the silence," and then refer John Cage, who was instrumental in introducing the Japanese concept of silence into Western aesthetics, and of whose work you've become a noted scholar. When did your interest in Cage begin?

CS: My interest in Cage began in 1980 when I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois. I was studying percussion with Tom Siwe, who just recently retired from the University of Illinois, ending a decades-long history of percussion being taught as an artform that was at least partially grounded in what is often called the "American Experimental Tradition."

There are so few percussion programs in the United States who have ever been actively involved in the idea that percussion has such a tradition that I'd like to at least briefly say what an enormous influence Illinois was in general and Tom Siwe in particular. Anyway, what I learned there was that much of the early percussion music (that written in the 20s and 30s) came from the United States--composers like William Russell, Johanna Beyer, Henry Cowell, George Antheil, and even those who weren't--the French composer Edgard Varese and, especially influential, composers from Latin America like José Ardévol and Amadeo Roldán-had important early performances in the United States. I learned all of this in a percussion literature class that Tom Siwe annually taught at the University of Illinois. I also learned that one of the first percussion ensembles to play this music and, in many cases commissioned it, was directed by none other than John Cage. He himself was writing percussion music as was a close friend of his, Lou Harrison, who is also an important composer. My first exposure to Cage was through this music and I still think it's some of the best music I've ever heard especially the music William Russell (also at that time a good friend of Cage's) wrote in the 1930s. Russell's Three Dance Movements, which was published with several other percussion pieces in an issue of New Music Orchestra Series, Number 18 (1936) that composer Henry Cowell published, should be much better known as one of the seminal pieces of that era.

I loved all of the 1930s music that later became known as part of the American Experimental Tradition, which Henry Cowell thought began with the music of Charles Ives. My interest in Ives (as found in my book on Cage and the experimental tradition) came later as did my specific interest in Cage. But my first exposure was more general and saw all of this music as part of one large movement in experimental music. My specific interest in Cage was the result of having directed a performance by the University of New Mexico Percussion Ensemble of his Third Construction (1941). The students had done a superb job (most of them have gone on to have individually successful performing careers) of preparing the piece. They built their own racks for the instruments and took great care to find the right instruments including the use of intelligent substitutions when originals couldn't be found or afforded such as the Native American drums that substituted for the original Chinese. The performance was so spectacular that I sent a tape of it to Don Gillespie who is a Vice President of C.F. Peters, the publishing company that handles John Cage's musical works. Gillespie liked the recording so much that he sent it to Cage who in turn wrote a nice letter back saying how much he liked the performance and then saying that he'd like to hear our work live someday (probably a reference to the fact that he so often said how little he liked recordings). Here's a photograph of that letter:

In any case, it sounded like an opening for an invitation so, since we have an annual Composers Symposium at the University of New Mexico, I asked then-directors Karl Hinterbichler and Scott Wilkinson if it would be possible to invite Cage to the 1988 Composers Symposium. They agreed, Cage accepted, and I then got down to the business of preparing a concert of works by Cage for the symposium.

My philosophy concerning performance at the time was that to play someone's music required knowledge not only of the music but of the composer who wrote the music. Even more specifically, knowledge of, as much as possible, what might have influenced the composer at the time he or she wrote what he or she wrote. Since I had decided to prepare a concert that included both a retrospective element (including works from several decades) as well as a focus on what I regard as his most difficult period, from the 50s through the mid-70s, and since Cage was notoriously always referencing his influences in interviews and books, I had quite a task before me. I began reading the books, listening to the music, and looking at the art that Cage had been responding to over the years.

By the time of the concert that following March, I was steeped in that world, a world of Marshall McLuhan and Norman O. Brown, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, as well as his close associations with Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Most important, because of my already deep appreciation of the experimental tradition generally, I began to see connections and differences between the artists and writers Cage was especially interested in. And I also noticed that there were some normally considered to be part of that tradition about whom Cage was not especially interested.

I now look in retrospect and see that what I was doing as an artist was the beginnings of finding my own place in that tradition. But at first, I saw Cage as a point of contact in that tradition and I was, more than anything else, passionately interested in learning all I could about Cage and his world. When I went back to school and got the Ph.D. in American Studies at UNM my intention was to formally study with experts in all the areas of art, history, and culture that Cage's work touched. I thought then, and I still do, that musicians living in the United States could greatly benefit from finding a perspective vis-à-vis their own work by a careful study of Cage (whether one ultimately agrees with Cage or not is another matter) and the experimental tradition that both precedes and follows his work. My book is basically the result of that study, which I see now as having had two purposes-the first one intentional, locating Cage within the American Experimental Tradition, and the other nonintentional--locating my own place in that tradition.

JW: I want to discuss your book, and the "American Experimental Tradition." But I remember at the time Cage was at The University of New Mexico, Kevin Campbell, a mutual friend of ours, told me he saw Cage sitting in the empty auditorium where most of his works were to be performed. That image of Cage alone and silent seemed almost mythological to me. What personal impressions did he leave you with?

CS: Cage was so busy when he came to the Composers Symposium in 1988. And he always seemed to be attentively about the business of doing something--including moments like what you've described above. That (and it's of course only my impression) sitting in an auditorium quiet and alone would still be doing something. I do know, however, that he participated in every single event during the symposium--according to his own wishes because he wasn't required to attend anything other than what he was involved in. And he was probably savoring that moment alone and was likely by then exhausted from the constant activity and needed a rest from it all!

But enough speculation. What I do remember are a few stories of my interactions with Cage that might be interesting. I remember especially how Cage had dinner with Leslie and I, and we had brought along our then one-year-old son Mike. At the crosswalk between the campus and where the Nob Hill area begins, Mike had to be carried in his baby carriage across the street and Cage immediately grabbed one end of the carriage. It's really one of my fondest memories--seeing Cage so immediately behave in such a helpful way. I doubt I'll be able to do so when I'm 75 years old. He seemed like such a "regular guy" in that moment.

And, for me, that's an impressive legacy for such a great composer and artist to leave. One not of any sense of the artist as an elitist separate from the everyday but one of being in community with the world and everyone who lives in it. I didn't know Cage personally very well but I know a lot of people who did and what is especially remarkable is how much they loved him as a human being. He was apparently a very likeable person and, in my experience, such is not always the case with great artists.

I also remember asking Cage during dinner about the "death of the avant-garde" that was such a buzz (at least in my circle) around 1988. His answer was that there would always be an avant-garde because there would always be people who wanted to do something new. I was thirty at the time and his remark both influenced me then and still does. And I would add something else to it: what makes things new is the person who makes them. Whatever we read or hear or experience, when it enters our original consciousness (because one of the beauties of experience I think is that our consciousness is original) newness is thus inevitable. And avant garde!

Finally, I remember sitting at one of the symposium concerts with Cage. Listening to a piece that, for me, was excruciating to hear. After the performance, I was irritated beyond belief. Cage, on the other hand, welcomed the end of the performance with gracious, perhaps even what seemed to be genuinely appreciative, applause. Later outside the auditorium, I talked to him about it and said "I can appreciate your wish to find something interesting in every experience but (alluding to what we'd just heard and probably expressing my still intense distress over it) how do you do it?" He said, "It's very hard." And then laughed in the inimitable way everyone close to Cage would have immediately recognized. I admired that and still do. But I myself still can't do it!

My memories of Cage are social and related to my work as a performer and interpreter of music. I've got a few others but maybe the above will suffice for now. When I began to study his work as a scholar, I worked alone and didn't really contact him after that. I had been strongly influenced by a remark my friend Thomas DeLio made after having finished his book on composer Morton Feldman. I asked him if he had talked to Feldman while working on it and he said "Why would I do that?" Meaning, I guessed, that the work was what he was studying and not the composer. I felt the same way about my study of Cage. He had plenty of friends and associates in the late 80s. But very few people were preparing serious studies of his work. I decided to concentrate on the latter. And, besides, I knew he was busy and didn't really want to bother him unless it was necessary. When I was a performer sometimes it was. As a scholar, there was much to do and already more than enough printed information to consider. I was also concerned about not being overly influenced by his enormous charisma as a person. Consequently, I devoted myself to the work, not the person, and the occasional visits after I made that choice were always just circumstantially moments where we were both in the same place.

JW: The question of the artist's charisma, as opposed to the aura of his work, has always fascinated me. From what I know of Vincent Van Gogh, for example, he didn't have charisma, yet his paintings are endowed with it. I get the same feeling from Henry David Thoreau, whom you pair with John Cage in your book. I also know of people who have charismatic personalities, but whose work is not at all attractive. Charisma manifests in myriad ways.

CS: Apparently Thoreau was not, as you mention, charismatic although his one-time mentor Emerson (whom I pair with Charles Ives in my book) was. Scholars compare their success as public speakers--Emerson was successful, Thoreau wasn't--in this regard. I also find it interesting as to what comes first in the creative process. Just about everything Thoreau published was first written in his Journal, whereas Emerson's publications usually were sermons and lectures first that were then later written into publishable form. I find Thoreau to be a much better writer than Emerson--I'm not considering content here--I simply mean what I regard as the superior writing of Thoreau. I think he was an absolutely terrific writer and I never tire of reading his work.

My appreciation of Emerson came later through the work of Norman O. Brown who you probably know as the author of those great books, Life Against Death and Love's Body. I also love his last book, Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis, especially the first essay "Apocalypse" which was a Phi Beta Kappa lecture Brown gave at Columbia University, modeled after Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa lecture at Harvard called "The American Scholar." I think Brown is a great and poetic scholar and I recommend his work--which I like to read as a single piece--to everyone I meet. I discovered Brown in the 80s while working on Cage, who stayed in touch with Brown (different though they so obviously were) from their first contact at Wesleyan in the early sixties, where they both had fellowships, right up until Cage's death in 1992. The relationship between Brown and Cage is a continuing passion of mine and I never stop thinking about it. In the original manuscript of my book I include a footnote to the effect that Brown is among Cage's best critics because his research is capable of seeing the "religious dimension" (or something like that) of Cage's work. His Marxist and Freudian background, as well as the generalist scope and range of his scholarship, enables him, I think, to see the dualisms (intentionally used in plural!) that lurk behind Cage's nondualistically co-existent aesthetic views. In fact, it's maybe obvious to the reader of my book; but if not, I'll mention here that my pairing of dualistic and non-dualistic aesthetic approaches (Emerson/Ives versus Cage/Thoreau, Objective versus Projective Verse) is meant not to privilege one or the other but instead to place the "both/and" to coin a phrase often used in Cage criticism (myself included!) between those two approaches rather than in one camp or the other. Or as Cage in his "Lecture on Something" put it, "something and nothing ... need each other to keep on going."[1]

I think Cage knew that his co-existent world would always be paired with a controlling one; that control and co-existence were thus the something and nothing respectively that needed each other. His disagreement with Brown (and it was a strong one) was I think based--and I think this is the case with Boulez too, as I'll mention below in response to your other question--more on a feeling that his side of the "dialectic" (my words not Cage's) was not being considered as an equal partner in the discourse.

In other words, when Brown said that Cage was "Apollonian" (in the Nietzschian sense) in the lecture he gave at Wesleyan for Cage's 75th birthday celebration (a lecture that apparently upset Cage), it is possible, and I'm only speculating here at the moment because my work on this is still very much "in process," that Cage was upset by the way in which Brown seems to say that his work is inadequate because it doesn't in itself synthesize Apollonian and Dionysian opposites. I don't think ultimately Brown's lecture is saying that-it is instead saying something much more complex and interesting.[2]

But I do think there is something about those who choose to disagree with Cage who cannot accept the possibility of such disagreement actually being where those opposites are supposed to remain. Without resolution. Between the two--or even more than two perhaps--the reality of "between-ness." I suspect that Cage, who really liked, or better yet, appreciated and respected work that differed from his, including the work of Boulez and Brown, had to have been disappointed when his critics couldn't see that his work stood in relation to the work of others. That it was not the fully self-contained Nietzschian work of art and, in fact, shows us how such conceptual attempts by artists always fail because of the fact that the world outside is ever outside. Only the individual's perception joins the world to the work and it is never collective. As such it can also be said that the world inside, our individual consciousness, is, regardless of various idealistic theories to the contrary, always apart from the world around us. It requires our intentional connection to it, I think, regardless of whether one considers us initially separate from the world or if one instead wishes to see us as initially connected.

The last chapter of my book ends where it does because I think Cage in some sense had, when he finished writing Empty Words, played out his co-existent, non-dualistic experiments in literature and music. In article form that chapter was subtitled "the intentionality of non-intention." Because Cage's desire to remove intentional meaning from language required directly intentional decisions on his part. Not just the framing of questions then subjected to chance operations, which is the way Cage usually described his compositional process, but instead a decision that came before any of those processes were set in motion. So that, in Empty Words, the text I consider in this regard, Cage first removes phrases, then sentences, then words, then syllables, so that finally all that remain are letters and silences. Cage, in other words, does intentional "violence" to the chance-governed process in order to get what he wants, because he discovered that chance operations in themselves could not remove meaning from language because those operations are more than willing to allow linguistic meaning to exist. In other words, he had to take control of the process. And after writing Empty Words, I think Cage's continuing to allow more and more intention into the compositional process is a direct result of that experience. He still uses chance until the end of his life but in a way that I would call "chance with a stacked deck." Subjecting to chance pre-selected materials with which one has an affinity will inevitably produce results that remain in accord to those affinities. Others have addressed this in Cage's work--such was especially the case at a conference that Cage attended at Stanford University in 1992. The partial results--missing a terrific and brilliant lecture given there by Norman O. Brown--can be found in Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkermann's John Cage: Composed in America.[3]

Cage's late compositions, where intention and non-intention more freely co-exist, are among his most beautiful. And it is interesting, I think, that this late work, as well as his early pre-chance compositions of the thirties and forties, is the most universally accepted of Cage's long compositional oeuvre. Both periods contain music I consider to be beautiful in the very traditional sense of the use of the word; not at all requiring new aesthetic criteria, but instead beautiful in the sense that so much of late Beethoven (who Cage didn't like very much) is beautiful. Austere. Introspective. Quiet--both in terms of its actual volume much of the time, and in the meditative sense. A music that sounds with a depth of experience you can actually hear. Cage's late so-called number pieces are as deep as Beethoven's late piano sonatas and string quartets. And the former are as unmistakably Cage as the latter are Beethoven.

It's funny, in fact, that my first introduction to these late pieces was a conversation I had with Cage in Santa Fe in 1990 that led me to believe I would hear just the opposite of what I've described above. Cage had asked me to perform his percussion piece Branches, which I did with two fabulous percussionists, John Bartlit and Doug Nottingham. We constructed a one-hour version that we played twice--outdoors as part of an art opening that included works by Cage and Santa Fe artist Doris Cross. Cage came to the opening, and at the party afterwards talked with me about a number piece for percussion he had written for the percussionist Fritz Hauser.[4] His description of the number pieces included the notion that he believed he had found a way to write music that eliminated himself entirely from the experience of hearing it when actually performed. How ironic then, and yet profoundly appropriate I think, that that very act produced what just about everyone I know thinks are his most personal and intimate pieces--music that is more recognizably Cagean than perhaps anything else he ever wrote!

This gets at something I find fundamental to most of the art I appreciate--the way in which it fails to achieve what the artist intends. That the greatest works of art are in that sense always failures. I remember a lecture given by Hanjo Berressem, a terrific literary scholar who is presently a Professor of Amerikanistik, in Köln; but who at that time was working in Aachen. He showed how selected paintings by Salvador Dali represented certain Lacanian theories of psychoanalysis. Lacan, in effect, exhausted Dali's work in direct relation to his ability to explain what it meant. I learned in that moment a big lesson in art appreciation. I think Gertrude Stein addresses this in her fabulous lecture "Composition as Explanation."[5]But my favorite anecdote in this regard is much shorter--from Charles Ives, whom I'll have to paraphrase because I don't have my library with me here in Heidelberg. It goes something like this: Better to aim at Beethoven and miss every time than to hit a thousand bulls-eyes aiming at Richard Strauss. I love that--as I do the work of all those artists who intentionally aim so high that they must inevitably fail. [6] Ezra Pound is, I think, a classic example of that, and his record of that failure, his 116th Canto, is, as a result, in my opinion one of the great masterpieces of this century's English language poetry.[7]

I see Cage's failure as an artist and composer, which I think Brown's lecture clearly emphasizes, as the means by which the music and texts succeed as great art. And I think Brown's lecture, more implicitly perhaps than the criticism of Cage's intent, emphasizes that as well when he criticizes Cage's view that "nothing is accomplished by listening to a piece of music," by writing that, as a result of listening to Cage's music at the Wesleyan conference: "I don't think it is true that nothing is accomplished by listening to a piece of music. The events of this week will bear me out. Our ears will be in much better condition."[8] Brown's "fight" with Cage was out of deep respect for the work. In fact, his response to the last chapter of my book was that, by emphasizing Cage's choices to such a degree, I had not perhaps given enough consideration to the role of chance in Cage's work.

Brown was then, and I suspect probably still is, continuing to explore that dimension--what I would see as the way in which chance can remain Dionysian, free and uncontrollable, even in the Apollonian ways in which Cage predeterminately stacks the deck. Brown once told me (he's said so also in print somewhere) that he worked in the "space between Freud and Nietzsche." At that Stanford conference, Brown, too, talked about his own failures and regrets. I see myself presently living in the space between Brown and Cage. And it is, for me, an incredibly rich and complex place to live. If I were to construct a non-resolving dialectical aesthetic it would be between those two. I often describe that space as being between two magnets of like polarity placed together. In other words, the space where the magnets are no longer able to get any closer--I see myself occupying that space. And I suspect others live there too![9]

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[1] John Cage, Silence, 50th Anniversary Edition. Middletown, CT: 2011/1961, p. 129
[2] Norman O. Brown, "John Cage," in Duckworth, Fleming, eds. John Cage at Seventy-Five. Bucknell Review, Vol. 32, No. 2. pp. 97-118.

3] Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman, eds. John Cage: Composed in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

[4] John Cage. One⁴ for solo drummer. New York: C.F. Peters, 1990.

[5] Gertrude Stein, "Composition as Explanation" in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, Carl Van Vechten, ed. 1946. New York: Random House, 1962, pp. 453-464.

[6] "A thousand bulleyes" is my extemporaneous exaggeration of Ives's use of "often." Here's the actual quote, found in the Epilogue to his Essays Before a Sonata: "A man may aim as high as Beethoven or as high as Richard Strauss. In the former case, the shot may go far below the mark--in truth, it has not been reached since that 'thunder storm of 1828' and there is little chance that it will be reached by anyone living today--but that matters not; the shot will never rebound and destroy the marksman. But--in the latter case the shot may often hit the mark, but as often rebound and harden, if not destroy, the shooter's heart--even his soul." Charles Ives. Essays Before a Sonata and Other Writings, Howard Boatwright, ed. New York: Norton, 1970. pp.82-83.

[7]  From Canto CXVI: "To confess wrong without losing rightness: Charity I have had sometimes, I cannot make it flow thru. A little light, like a rushlight, to lead back to splendour." Ezra Pound. Cantos. New York: New Directions, 1970, pp. 809-811.

[8] Norman O. Brown, "John Cage." p.99

[9] I didn't finish my research concerning Cage and Brown until years later: "'A Living Oxymoron': Norman O. Brown's Criticism of John Cage," in Perspectives of New Music,  Vol. 44, No. 2, 2006, pp.66-87.