In the popular imagination, the composer John Cage is linked with Freedom and composer Xenakis with form. I believe that this largely stems from their respective manifestos. Formalized Music by Xenakis deals with mathematical models for the creation of sound and is filled with undecipherable equations. By contrast, the main theme of Cage’s book, Silence, is the mantra “everyone can create music.”
Generations of musicians have found inspiration from Silence. Blue Gene Tyranny remarked that that he and his contemporaries read it like the bible. The most common reading of this book is one of freedom. This is backed up in some of Cage’s work, especially later endeavors like the musiCircus in which hundreds of musicians play all at the same time without listening to each other.
In Silence, Cage raises the point that anything can be music. What, then, differentiates music from non music? Something, by this logic, is music if the composer says it is music. Therefore, even 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence can be music. But how does a composer say something is music? Of course, he or she declares it by writing a score. But how does one indicate the borders of silent musical piece? When does it begin? When does it end? The composer, therefore, relies on the form.
Cage’s interest in form goes back to his very early works, including the Constructions in Metal and the Square Root pieces. This interest stays with him even when he turns to chance operations as his primary means for generating sounds. Pieces like Fontana Mix allow total choice of sound production to the performer, but the score imposes a form. Cage’s interest in form is made directly obvious in his Lecture on Nothing. A whole section of the lecture does nothing but outline the form. The lecture itself is form without meaningful content.
Cage, then, relies on form as the most important principle in his pieces. His use of chance operations and even silence show that form is the fundamental building block of music. However, when students want to study form, they turn away from Cage and his reputation for freedom and turn to the more restrictive-seeming composer, Xenakis, whose book, Formalized Music, has pages and pages of mathematical formulas, explanations of stochastic theory, and seeks to translate music into mathematics or vice versa. Xenakis uses formulas to generate material and is widely seen as more rigorous than Cage. However, this perception is in error.
In his piece Horos, Xenakis uses cellular autonoma to generate pitch material. However, he uses it for only part of the time and he uses the generated autonoma out of order. In all his pieces, he makes extensive use of bricolage: he fits things together using his taste inventing and improvising as he goes. Indeed, this is how composers usually work. However, it is not mathematically rigorous, instead relying on unquantifiables like aesthetics and taste. This is directly opposed to the philosophy of Cage who makes no use of taste whatsoever in his later works and simply accepts the outcome of his chance operations.
There are those music students who reject the work of Cage as a charlatan and instead turn to the perceived rigor of Xenakis. However, Xenakis’ best known invention is stochastic music. In this music he (sometimes, when not using bricolage) uses stochastic formulas to determine density and pitches, etc. However, stochastic formulas determine probability and chance. What is the difference between using a chance operation to pick notes and using stochastic formulas to pick notes and densities? In Cage’s version, you spend a lot more time casting the iChing and in Xenakis’ version, you spend a lot more time computing formulas. Both, however, are the use of chance, although Xenakis’ use is more abstracted.
Therefore, both composers are making extensive use of chance, but the more rigorous composer is Cage, who is also the composer more interested in form. When these composers are placed in opposition, however, it is Cage who is cast as the free-wheeling, anything goes proponent of total freedom and Xenakis who is cast as being rigorous and obsessed with form. This can only be attributed to a difference in writing style and a difference in their followers. John Cage, the anarchist, wanted everyone to create music. Xenakis, the communist, wanted discipline. Cage has been taken up by all sorts of people, both inside and outside art music. Xenakis is firmly within the academy.
The biggest error, however, is not misattributing form, rigor and freedom, but rather placing the composers in binary opposition. The greatness of one does not diminish the greatness of the other, nor should students have to pick between them. I feel that this error stems from an even greater error and that is the general disregard of American composers.
