Labor and Anarchy in John Cage’s First and Last Compositions

A pause disrupts the customary fabric of social relations, confounding authority and subjugation, which are otherwise mutually reinforcing. In his first speech and many future works, Cage called for a pause as the self-determination of a singular entity—a stance he conceived as anarchy. By the mid-twentieth century, self-determination became the main principle of his work, with chance as a prime mover of composition. Beginning in the early 1950s, the composer developed protocols for chance operations, enabling inductive data processing through the application of a series of questions addressed to the specific material, which could be musical, such as the length of musical phrases and instrumentation; lingual, as in text compositions assembled by deconstructing and cross-sectioning selected texts; or spatial, determining the placement of objects in compositions for museum, such as Rolywholyover   A Circus for Museum by John Cage (1993). The specific aspects of each composition were determined by chance operations that do not imply a priori knowledge, hypothesis, or tradition. Chance does not follow the laws of tradition or aesthetic habits, and rather than simply disrupting those systems, it exposes the inherent indeterminacy within rationalist reasoning. For Cage, “composition” meant creating an aggregate that nonetheless preserved the autonomy of its parts, as the indeterminacy of chance operations ensures their self-determination.

Cage’s chance-operated compositional method disrupts the dominance of the author and his authority, establishing and acknowledging the independence of all involved. He established the participants’ autonomy during his breakthrough year, 1952, in compositions including Theater Piece No. 1, which comprised timed segments allocated to self-determined contributions by the participants, and 4'33", which captured nonmusical sounds in space-time, encompassing performance and audience time. These coeval pieces continued to evolve; in 1960, Cage removed the time brackets of a sound event denoted in the title, 4'33", and opened up the instrumentation of the piece in the annotation of the published score, writing that “the work may be performed by an instrumentalist or a combination of instrumentalists and last any length of time.”2 In 1962, he opened 4'33" further in the iteration 0'00", a solo of indeterminate duration meant to be performed in any manner by anyone: “In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action.”3 Cage premiered 0'00" by writing its score in an amplified concert setting, and later added notes regarding the piece’s performance. In these notes he allowed interruptions of the action, prohibited repeating the same action in another performance, and stipulated that the action was not a performance of a musical composition. On the reverse of the concert score, the composer noted that the action was performed to fulfill “an obligation to another or to oneself without regard to the situation” (author’s emphasis). This score marks a tendency in his practice to superimpose composition, performance, and reception, affirming individual self-determination as a condition for a decentered social organization.

Cage demonstrated anarchic disregard for organized labor in one of his most public performances, Water Walk (1959), presented in 1960 on Henry Morgan’s CBS show I’ve Got a Secret. This composition for a solo television performance involves many properties and a single-track tape. Its gamely orchestration calls for various household instruments related to water, including a mixer with ice cubes, a stove with a pressure cooker, a tub filled with water, an iron pipe, an ice bucket, a Campari glass, a soda siphon, a vase with roses, an exploding paper bottle, a garden sprinkler, and a mechanical fish. This array is activated by a performer who has to move deftly and purposefully around the stage to play the instruments in a timely manner according to the score, which allows some wiggle room as to the timing of actions—“Start watch and then time actions as closely as possible to their appearance in the score.”4

The resulting performance is a calculated comedy, and its TV production did not merely capitalize on the fun factor; it touched on the status of labor implicated in Cage’s work. Although the composer included radios in the array of live instruments, they remained mute, due to a union dispute over who was responsible for plugging them in, which had not been resolved before the show’s start. In his remarks before the show, Cage explained how he would modify the performance ad hoc: he would hit the tops of the radios with his hand instead of switching them on, and shove them off the table instead of turning them off. This absurdly comical solution stems from Cage’s individualist anarchist stance toward organized labor. Likewise, those employed to execute his artistic intentions did not always share them.

Cage long sought to decenter a musical event and dispense with the orchestral hierarchy, proposing instead an assembly of independent participants and parts to be performed in a self-organized manner, such as Etcetera (1973), which begins with the orchestra members as soloists, inviting them to “volunteer their services from time to time to any one of three conductors.”5 He pursued self-determination within a group in a crowdsourced event, Musicircus (1967), encompassing numerous performers and ensembles who share time and space in an unscored, self-organized event. Keenly aware of the authority inscribed in and administered by a score, the composer chose to forgo it, offering a pretext for an event rather than regulating production. He confirmed this intention by not publishing Musicircus and thus keeping it free from authorship restrictions upheld by copyright: “A number of pieces recently are not given to Peters because I wish to keep them free of copyright restrictions e.g. Musicircus. Furthermore, it is doubtful whether my work in connection with that piece is as integral a part of it as the work of all the actual performers of it.”6

The author’s intention to challenge the hierarchy and economy of authorship and to provide a framework for the production of what he deemed “anarchy” was clarified several years later in a letter to a former editor of Studies on the Left, Eleanor Hakim: “In harmony with the separation of this work [Musicircus] from conventional economics, I have not made a score nor have I published one of course.”7 Cage envisioned a self‑organized array of many simultaneous events, preserving their mutual autonomy in performance. The inaugural Musicircus was held at the Stock Pavilion at the University of Illinois—a campus building used for cattle shows—on November 17, 1967. The various musical acts comprising Musicircus were situated on platforms near the bleachers so the public could move freely around the arena. No directions were given to anyone. Among the participating musicians, David Tudor and Gordon Mumma amplified the building’s ventilation system, making the infrastructure sound. Cage connected contact microphones to the lighting switchboard, so that changing the lights would trigger sounds. James Cuomo and Tony Zamora joined the circus with their respective jazz bands. A baroque orchestra played its usual repertoire, along with individual programs by the electronic composers Salvatore Martirano, Lejaren Hiller, and Herbert Brün. Percussionist Michael Udow played Morton Feldman’s The King of Denmark as quietly as possible. Norma Marder sang Cage’s Aria as many times as she wished. Dancer Ruth Emerson responded to the soundscape. And mime Claude Kipnis pantomimed a struggle against a wall of sound. Drawings on the blackboard were visible under blacklight, and giant balloons floated in the air. At both ends of the pavilion were stands offering apple cider, doughnuts, and popcorn. Filmmaker Ronald Nameth contributed a screening of films and a slideshow, projected simultaneously on screens installed around the hall’s perimeter; he also filmed the proceedings.8 The surround sound was at a high volume. One of the participants, Bruce Zumstein, wrote in the student newspaper after the event that “sounds pervaded the senses and drove headaches into numbness. Lights flashed incessantly, and the pavilion momentarily darkened in relief when the lights were turned off. An absurd number of hands played unrelated music.”9 The musicians played whatever they chose simultaneously, taking breaks as they pleased.

The last Musicircus with Cage present was produced at Stanford University on January 29, 1992. Like all Musicircuses, it was organized via an indeterminate process, without remuneration, where volunteer musicians were assigned fixed time slots and positions for the performance. The organizers acted as “utilities,” facilitating the work of others by subjecting the event to certain oppositional rules sustaining nonlinearity. It resisted cognitive totalization by distributing space and time nonhierarchically, refraining from mapping the discreet events or indicating a distinct beginning or end of the entire event.10 The organizing “utilities” were to provide what was needed to sustain this creative assembly, protect it from falling apart, and ensure that the event as a whole did not straighten into a conventional festival. Yet the figure of the author loomed; Cage read his Empty Words, a text composition resulting in the sound of deconstructed word fragments, in a darkened room, evading the transmission of any knowledge. In this situation—like in any composed situation—we may choose to focus on the author or to pursue the paratactic relations emerging in the process of production. The Western tradition centers the author, and although Cage, under Zen influence, purported to decenter himself, he nonetheless acted within the bounds of authorship upheld by the very tradition whose course he sought to alter.   

In the context of the late sixties, Musicircus was categorized as a happening, despite Cage’s efforts to refuse this designation. He tried to make the difference between happenings and his own approach evident in his Theater Piece (1960), which emphasized the autonomy of participants and their contributions to his events, as opposed to performers executing functions determined by the author of a happening. The score was composed in indeterminate notation using Cage’s Fontana Mix scoring set.11 The material for this composition is textual: each participant makes a list of twenty nouns and verbs to guide the actions they will perform; this list is then modified using a graph placed over the list of activities, which determines the duration of each action. Using the score set, performers compose their parts, which together comprise a thirty‑minute program unique to each performance. Performers become the composers of their performance, thus distributing the function of the author. The premiere performance of Theater Piece at the Circle in the Square Theater in New York included dancing by Merce Cunningham and Carolyn Brown, light by Nicholas Cernovitch and an assistant, singing by classically trained contralto Arline Carmen, trombones by Frank Rehak and others, tuba by Don Butterfield, piano by David Tudor, and time‑keeping by Cage.

Because Cage was lumped in with the Happenings movement—an association abetted by some of the students in his “Experimental Composition” course at the New School, including Allan Kaprow and George Brecht—his works of the time were not always afforded a broader interpretation on their own terms. Cage’s works turn on the potentiality of autonomous entities coming together for a period of time, avowing and performing autonomy and mutuality without a score. Judith Butler has written powerfully on the performative power of assembly:

We have to study those occasions in which the official frame is dismantled by rival images, or where a single set of images sets off an implacable division in society, or where the numbers of people gathering in resistance overwhelm the frame by which their size is supposed to be cut, or their claim is transformed into uncivil noise. Such gatherings are not the same as democracy itself. We cannot point to one provisional and transient gathering and say, “that is democracy in action,” and mean that everything we expect of democracy is emblematized or enacted at such a moment. Gatherings are necessarily transient, and that transience is linked to their critical function. One could say, “but oh, they do not last,” and sink into a sense of futility; but that sense of loss is countered by the anticipation of what may be coming: “they could happen at any time!” Gatherings such as these serve as one of democracy’s incipient or “fugitive” moments.12

Cage’s ethos of anarchist individual liberty was not always compatible with the collective labor of music production. Composer Cornelius Cardew, in his 1972 polemic “John Cage—Ghost or Monster?,” denounced Cage’s avant‑garde appropriation of the circus (traditionally popular entertainment for the masses) as a model for a classical orchestra (“high‑class” entertainment).13 Orchestra musicians sabotaged performances of Cage’s music by not following the score and not rehearsing, and even by destroying electronic equipment they regarded as a threat to their training, status, and livelihood. Cardew described this resistance “as spontaneous expression to the sharply antagonistic relationship between the avant‑garde composer, with all his electronic gadgetry, and the working musician. This contradiction has many aspects, but beneath it all is class struggle.”14 Cardew correctly identifies Cage’s antagonism toward the classical orchestra, a stronghold of tradition which he attempted to dismantle. But Cardew’s claim that the musicians were engaged in class struggle is less persuasive. They behaved as they did to preserve the power of tradition and its tangible benefits; they were hardly joining the workers’ revolution. Performances of Cage’s compositions relied on negotiations between his anarchic intentions and the practical steps required to realize them.

In his late compositions, Cage increasingly tested the limits of bodily perception, with its socially trained—disciplined—aesthetic sensibilities. He invoked composition as something that was beyond the human faculties, a constantly changing “cognitive assemblage,” to use N. Katherine Hayles’s concept.15 Cage’s late compositions center on the interplay of what Gilles Deleuze called mediators—objects real or imaginary, animate or inanimate, including people and other animals, plants, artworks, texts, and technologies.16 Cage’s exploration of mediation manifested in One11 (1992), a ninety-minute film composition featuring spotlights that move and change in intensity according to a screenplay-score composed using chance operations.17

The score for [html One11 was written for the specific dimensions of the TV studio and ninety minutes of screening time. One11] can be shown in any setting, viewed in its entirety or for just a moment, and audience members can do whatever they like while viewing it.

It can be “silent” or paired with the orchestral piece of the corresponding duration, 103 (1991). Like [html One11, 103 is divided into seventeen sections of the same length. Each instrumental part is scored as single tones indicated by time brackets and played without a conductor. One11] and 103 premiered as a live performance by the Westdeutscher Rundfunk Orchestra in Cologne on September 19 and as a TV broadcast on October 10, 1992. Cage had died in August of that year.

The scoring instructions for [html One11] were programmed into a table showing “begin” and “end” time brackets for each take, most including lead times during which successive takes overlapped. Other specifications designated the type of camera lens to be used in each take and the movements the camera should make, if any.

Time bracket list for One11, marked by Van Carlson during shooting. © John Cage and Henning Lohner.

Camera graph for One11, marked by Van Carlson during shooting. © John Cage and Henning Lohner.

Time bracket list for [html <em>One<span style=font-size:small;vertical-align:super;>11</span></em>], marked by Van Carlson during shooting. © John Cage and Henning Lohner.

Lighting for each scene was determined by a diagram specifying whether floor or ceiling lights should be used. Many decisions were left to the studio operators, such as the rotation of the camera crane and the shape and diameter of the lights. The composer conceived of the camera as an instrument; the camera operator, Van Carlson, had the same freedom to play this instrument that a skilled musician has. Describing the filming process, Carlson said that “it’s not the takes that take time, but the time between the takes that takes time.”18 As denoted in the title, [html One11] is a performance for a single camera; in a screening, the projectionist becomes a performer.

Cage’s work in dance theater with Merce Cunningham was the basis of his experience with theatrical lighting, which he used functionally in his compositions for opera completed at the same time as [html One11], including Europeras I and II (1987), Europeras III and IV (1990), and Europera V (1992). Yet it was his compositions for museum where he introduced lighting as an independent actor. From 1985 to 1991 Cage developed a light and sound environment called Writings through the Essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” which was commissioned for Documenta 8 (1987).

John Cage, Writings through the Essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” 1985/91. Kunsthalle Bremen—Der Kunstverein in Bremen, John Cage Trust. Photo: Marcus Meyer Photography.

Its vocal sound is generated from stratified recordings of Cage reading his mesostics composed from Henry David Thoreau’s essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. The resulting multilayered vocalization is transmitted through thirty-six loudspeakers installed in chance-determined positions on an overhead grid; the intensity and concentration of sound change throughout the soundscape. The light from fifty overhead spotlights moves slowly throughout the space, following the plan determined by chance operations; they do not focus on anything in particular and they change throughout the day as the daylight streaming through the windows changes.

The subsequent composition for museum, Changing Installation, commissioned for the 51st Carnegie International (1991) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, included camerawork. This chance-operated installation of artworks and chairs was illuminated by natural light that changed in the gallery throughout the day. It featured a camera that was repositioned daily according to a chance‑generated score, chronicling the scripted and incidental occurrences of the changing display—positions of artworks, chairs, and light. The camera eye in this composition, as in [html One11], performs a posthuman mediation beyond human-centered production, extending itself to the inhuman techno- and biospheres. Jean-François Lyotard’s description of the “metaphysics of development” applies to the camera eye in this context: “It is reproduced by accelerating and extending itself according to its internal dynamic alone. It assimilates risks, memorizes their informational value, and uses this as a new mediation necessary for functioning. It has no necessity itself other than a cosmological chance.”19

In [html One11], Cage used the instrumentality of information and decentered networked communication as means to detach subjectivity from totalizing, colonizing ontologies, as well as from identity politics. The aim was to reconfigure human and unhuman instruments as trans-mixers of codes, with unpredictable and biologically and phenomenologically unstable results.20 Philosopher Achille Mbembe described this trans-mixing of codes in animistic terms as a “vibratory act … characterized by its straddling and going beyond the given and its constraints. This is how it participates in technical activity, where such activity is understood as the capacity to actualize, deploy, and manifest a reserve of power.”21 Cage’s composition of vibrant indeterminacy addresses the contemporary orientation toward the posthuman, encompassing “zoe,” “bio,” and “techno.”22 Starting with his first oration, “Other People Think,” Cage forged a path to liberation via indeterminacy throughout his life’s work. He sought to decenter—deauthorize—thoughts, rendering them more like sounds. To do this, he started with silence.