texts

Excerpt from 'Cage's Influence'

Maryanne Amacher, 2001



Contribution to essay collection Writing Through John Cage's Music, Poetry, Art (University of Chicago: 2001)



      New visual and aural experiences are being explored as a result of recent advances in multisensorial and immersive technologies, some unlike any past experiences, particularly those being created for converging media platforms, such as 3 D sonic imaging and graphics, telepresence, and cyberspace.

      Modeling Cage's telescopic perspective, we can ask: How will such developments affect our thinking about the content, duration, and presentation of experiences in the works that we create? How will we take imaginative account of these and other developing trends in planning new work for the future? I believe that it is especially urgent to give serious attention and recognition to groundbreaking innovations in the field of the "emerging arts."

      Today media exist that begin to approach the range and subtlety of our perceptual modes. As immersive technologies expand and grow to mirror the sensitivity of our responsive energies, will the auditory arts delve consciously into these expansive sensory worlds? And in what ways? Or instead, will our sonic worlds be created with simpleminded .variation makers" computer software that makes subtle or not so subtle variations and developments of preexistent musical materials?

      In "The Future of Music: Credo," Cage described percussion music as a contemporary transition from keyboard influenced music to the "all-sound music of the future." A similar transition is occurring now, as we move from concert, CD, and DVD temporally based music to media with infinitely greater memory. instead of the availability of all sounds, it is the availability of vast memory that will make possible an unprecedented expansion of musical time and influence a new course of composition: the "all time" music of the future.

      The development of this expansive time spectrum in emergent technologies is for me today what an extended sonic spectrum that included noise was for Cage in 1937. As the possibilities of the "all sound music of the future" were to Cage, the possibilities of "all time music" are to me. In the twenty first century, new time worlds will be explored just as composers in the twentieth century explored new sounds.

      Music will be filled with extraordinary surprises. These will be achieved through a new mastery of time, which composers will gradually acquire. To paraphrase Cage, the present methods of writing will be inadequate for the composer who will be faced with the entire field of time. I believe that there will be magnificent changes in how we create musical forms over time. Completely new worlds of musical experience will be produced in the next fifteen years.

      What becomes exciting to think about in creating this music is that it will require the creation of completely new ways of thinking about duration and structure developing over time. Composers will "sculpt new time" in totally new ways. Long standing time conventions that have applied to the creation of musical experiences will no longer apply. We may choose to keep them, but there will be an infinite range of temporal choices: a complete "spectrum of time dimension" in the reproduction of music. For example, there will be the possibility of creating multisensorial or entirely musical worlds to be experienced over twentyfour hours, or over much longer or shorter periods of time. In theory, years, months, weeks, days, minutes, seconds will be possible. As Cage said in his "Credo": 'The principle of form will be our only constant connection with the past."

      But more significant and ultimately more intriguing than the extension of the macro time dimension will be the advent of something unprecedented in musical experience. It will no longer be necessary to produce music as uninterrupted sound, to have it continue nonstop, as in the past, or as on current CD and DVD formats. This will be the most unique feature of the new musical worlds produced with advanced memory technologies. Expansive memory will allow composers to create sonic worlds that may last many hours yet include long periods of silence. For example, music might sound for ten minutes, followed by a long span of silence, say an hour or two, and then maybe three minutes of sound. in any given twenty four hours, for example, there can appear many wonderful musical surprises. Music will now take on a totally new dimension, similar to our experiences of time with its events in life.

      I think of this unprecedented feature as a magnificent temporal magnification of 'musical form," as though using a macro or telephoto lens to expand the silence and differentiation of phrase structures, enhancing their scale and presence over time. The challenge of composing its dimensions is very exciting. It will involve learning a number of new composing skills.

      Advanced memory will inspire new ways of presenting music. Imagination is no longer limited solely to pieces, or continuous sonic installations, and nineteenth century concert halls. Even now, I compose "Sound Characters" that interact with each other in different ways, depending on the architectural staging of my installations. One of the most vivid things I learned from Cage is how much everything we do is taken for granted and that we have to turn it around, discover other views. I remember shortly after having read Silence, I was preparing to present one of my first works, but I did not like the hall where the concerts were being given. I thought, "Why do you have to produce your work in this concert hall? Go out and find a beautiful space, a wonderful architecture." Right now we have no buildings dedicated solely to sonic experiences, other than frontal concert stages built for presenting nineteenth century music. This has been a serious problem, even in the last half of the twentieth century, alive with electronic media, multi loudspeakers, and interactive media.

      Rather than being staged frontally, as in traditional concerts with the audience seated, immersive aural architectures are often best experienced interactively, as the audience explores the sonic world by listening at different locations in the space. There is a critical need for buildings that are dedicated completely to these new musical and sonic worlds, just as galleries are to the visual arts. And I believe in the immediate future we will be able to provide the kind of enriched public experiences of these new musical environments that can only result from architectural staging, and that are absolutely impossible to experience in one's home, even with multichannel systems.

      All possible sounds and their modifications are available with current technologies. However, there remains one area of sound that has not been fully explored, though I anticipate it soon will be: specifically, the tones and patterns our ears produce in response to music, which is unfortunately referred to as "psychoacoustics." Produced interaurally, these virtual sounds and melodic patterns originate in our ears and neuroanatomy. In fact, recent scientific experiments at Johns Hopkins have shown that our ears continue to emit sound for a few seconds after death, establishing that our ears not only receive and absorb sound, but also emit sound (referred to by researchers as "otoacoustic emissions"). Such response tones exist in all music, but they are usually registered subliminally, often masked by complex timbres. They are a natural and very real physical feature of auditory perception, similar to the fusing of two images resulting in a third three dimensional image in binocular perception, and they play a crucial role in the experience of music. I like to think of our ears acting as neurophonic instruments, sounding their own tones and melodic shapes. I expect in the future more composers will want to release this music produced by the listener, to bring it out of subliminal existence and consciously make it an important sonic dimension.

      Jim talked about Cage introducing at a historical moment a real focus on the experiential. This focus is also very much part of our time. No longer limited to writing notes on paper, with current sound technologies composers may access real time auditory experiences. In the process of composing, they can investigate in depth the aural worlds they create; they can examine different ways of hearing, whether sound is very far away, very close up, vibrating an elbow, appearing on top of their head, or "inside" their head and streaming out of their ears into space in front of their eyes.

      Amazingly varied, abundant possibilities exist for creating interactive worlds in art and popular entertainment. (How different from today's CDs played over and over again.) Instead of preparing scores that only musicians play, composers will prepare new kinds of 'scores" for listeners to explore at home. We have seen how the emphasis shifted with Cage from the composer to the musicians who perform the score. Here it will shift from the composer to anyone who might have the "score" in their living room. With recent developments, we may delve into even more intense possibilities: entering the interior of the music in startling new ways, perceptually. Composers will soon learn how to develop the 'perceptual geographies" that will become the maps for vivid, personalized experiences in the sonic worlds of these "home scores".

      A widespread conception about music is that it has to be for millions of people, whether in the form of pop music or art music. Beethoven in every bar, Bach in every bookstore. In the coming decade of customization, the expectation that music be created for millions only, will no longer exist. Of course, it will still be an option, but composers will also be able to tailor sonic experiences, individualizing them for specific rooms, architectures, and listeners. I think there are many exciting possibilities to think about and to think about them as Cage would have. Imaginative narratives and experientially adventurous, compelling scenarios can be created in stunning, transformative worlds.