La Cage Aux Folles

A new biography of the American composer John Cage (1912-1992) is out and as I read a review I remembered when I first learned of him.  I took a course in music appreciation as an undergrad in the 1970s and when the teacher played a recording of one of Cage's pieces I winced.  Then, as now, I was just enough of an ignorant country boy to not feel the need to pretend that I either understood or appreciated anything about what I had just heard.  To me it was nothing but noise.  But then nothing (try his 4'33") and noise is what made Cage famous in the first place.

To be sure, he wouldn't have called it noise, nor would have most of the sophisticates who celebrated his work.  But to any common understanding of the distinction between music and noise, it was noise.

Of course, it was also something more than just noise.  That something was that it was an important part of the whole post-modern (POMO) rebellion against "form" in the arts.  For your average POMO enthusiast, "form" is at best a construct (something just made up) and at worse a freedom-denying construct. While sophisticates get this, les bourgeois don't.  In fact, they can't, trapped as they are by a false consciousness which is itself a product of a construct.  One of the best ways for the sophisticates to demonstrate their superiority over the otherwise hapless middle clas is by participating in épater le bourgeois, that is, by shocking them.  In this case, what better way to shock them than by calling noise, or silence, music.

A major problem with this practice for the sophisticates is that the bourgeois are not always shocked.  Sometimes they're just puzzled, puzzled to the point of nervous laughter and wondering whether or not someone is simply pulling their leg.

If you have a few moments, please watch this episode of the old TV game show I've Got a Secret from 1960.  (How many of you are old enough to remember that show?)  The contestant is none other than composer John Cage.  His "secret" is the nature of his composition "Water Walk", which he performs for the panel and the bourgeois audience.  What is interesting to me is how host Garry Moore is at pains to convince everyone that this is serious, that Cage is serious, and how the audience reacts to the performance.  They want to know, "Is he putting us on?"

My guess is that a hundred years from now, there will be no new biographies of John Cage as no one will have ever heard of him. Nor will they have heard of most anyone else who has championed this period we might call "the post-modern moment."  ("Era" is too grandiose.)  For a moment, and little more, what it offers may seem interesting, even a bit clever.  But it soon wears out its welcome, much like the adolescent humor it resembles.

The good, the true, and the beautiful, however, will endure.  When the "real" music of Bach and Beethoven was first performed, sophisticates recognized it immediately for its genius.  But then so did the bourgeois, and I suspect even the yeomen of the day.