1. Cage and Recording

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John age nd ecording

Yasunao Tone

If you closeyour eyes, ou lose the power of abstraction.

-Michel Serres

How does one encounterJohn Cage?It would be problematic to say that I encounter John Cage

in his music, because I do not encounter him, as FJJ. Buy-tendijk in his widely known text Phenomenology f the Encounter

points out, in the way that I encounter a thing in a box. Wasit not Cage who forbade above all else the consideration ofmusic as an object? Even so, we can still encounter him even

though we are no longer able to see him. The idea of en-countering John Cage reminds me of Jasper Johns's remark

The best criticism of a painting is to put another paintingnext to it. I perhaps encounter Cage when I am composingand reaching a point at which I am trying to get beyond hismusic. Cage himself once said that he would prefer to respondto another's work by writing a new piece rather than by writ-

ing a critique. In fact, he once created a piece, Not Wanting oSay Anything about Marcel, n the form of a visual poem insteadof writing criticism of Duchamp. Nevertheless, I have chosen

writing. Needless to say, for Cage categories would not matter.I have to admonish myself not to become Zarathustra's ape bymimicking Cage's discourse, so that I do not become the exact

opposite of Cage.

CAGE AND RECORDS

Cage's antipathy towards recording is widely known; but itseems to me that there has never been an attempt to discussthis phenomenon as derived from his musical ideas. Peopleassume that Cage was against recordings as substitutes for livemusic, in the sense that recordings are copies, with the live

performances as the originals. This assumption would perhapsmake him a vulgar media theorist, if not a reactionary. Cage,who admired Marshall McLuhan a great deal, would not agree

with this assumption. It is true that Cage was against record-ing as a substitute, but in a different sense. I will elaborate onthis topic below. If one closely examines Cage's antipathy to-wards recording, one would find this seemingly contradictoryattitude consistent with his ideas; however, many people havenot fully explored his antipathy toward recording.

For instance, music critic Mark Swed's article in the1995-1996 John Cage special issue of Schwann Opus attracted

my attention. In it Swed refers to remarks Cage made in a 1985British television documentary directed by Peter Greenaway:

Idon't myself use records, Cage says, and I give the exampleof someone who lives happily without records. But I notice thatnobody pays any attention to me. Or maybe a few pay attention,but most

peopleuse records. .. .

[O]neinterviewer

innocentlyasks the question likely to pop into most music lovers' heads atthat point. Isn't a recording at least useful for the purpose of hear-ing music from concerts or performances you simply can't get to?

It's really not useful at all, Cageanswers with a sudden and surprisingimpatience, even anger .... Itmerely destroys one's need for realmusic. It substitutes artificial musicfor real music, and it makes peoplethink that they're engaging in a mu-sical activity when they're actuallynot. And it has completely distortedand turned upside down the functionof music in anyone's experience. ...

We didn't pay any attention to Cageon the subject of recordings then, and

we certainly don't 10 years later.... Itis almost taken for granted by justabout everyone who uses recordingsthat recordings, whether or not theyare the experience of music, havesomething very important tooffer.... And, remarkably, hree yearsafter his death, Cage himself has be-come ... the most recorded of mod-ern composers.... [1]

ABSTRACT

There sgeneral gree-ment hat ohn Cage's ttitudetoward ecords nd ecordingwasambiguous ndnotneces-sarily oherent. owever,foneclosely nalyzes iswork ndhisevolution fthe concept fthe art-that s,from ispiecesforprepared iano o his use ofthe Ching orMusic fChangesto 4'33 ohisprototype fHappenings tBlackMountainCollege n1952-one findscritique fsomethinghat thercomposers ake s self-evident.Cage's ritique frecordingrelates othe representation sre-presentationf music. heauthor ims n hisarticle odiscover/uncover age'scritique fthe metaphysics fpresence hrough iswork ndutterances.

Swed dismissed Cage's antipathy to records as a musician's

typical manner of thinking, disregarding the fact that re-

markably few compositions are made specifically for themedium:

Yet, is there anyone devoted to music who isn't stoppedjust a lit-tle bit short by Cage's remarks about recordings? In the televi-sion and computer age, when the dubious value of virtualexperience is becoming increasingly clear, does anyone really be-lieve that recordings replace music? [2]

Swed continues and points out Cage's contradictory atti-tude towards recording:

Indeed, Cage was involved in recording, in one way or other, allhis life.... He was always generous about allowing his live per-formances to be recorded and broadcast.... And most impor-tant of all, he used recordings.... Recordings, or at least thetechnology of them, were in Cage's blood ... [3]

In the last years of his life, Cage seemed to become more

open to the idea of recordings and was pleased to make record-

ings. He had written a new piece that was composed for theCD medium, which his sudden death prevented him from lis-

tening to. Swed then notes the change in Cage toward record-

ing and concludes:

Did this mean that Cage ... had in the end lightened up some-what about recordings? Well, Cage confessed that he had not,and for the best and most practical of reasons.... Cage chose tolive without music for his mental well-being, just as he chose a

Yasunao Tone (sound artist, theorist, performance artist), 307 West Broadway, New York,NY 10013, U.S.A.

This essay was written for a book commemoratingJohn Cage, entitled Rencontrer/Encounter-

ingJohn Cage, edited by Daniel Charles and Jean-Louis Houchard. Publication of the bookhas been suspended since 1997. Minor revisions were made for this publication. The textwas translated intoJapanese by Toshie Kakinuma and published in InterCommunication 5(NTT Ptblishing division, Tokyo) (2001) pp. 116-125.

LEONARDO MUSICJOURNAL, Vol. 13, pp. 11-15, 2003 112003 ISAST


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macrobiotic diet for his physical well-being [4].

When I read this article I empathizedwith the irritation Cage expressed in thisinterview. For I myself have experienceda similar situation, to which I will returnlater.

THE USE OF RECORDS ANDCREATION WITH RECORDS

Cage's thoughts on records are not sim-

ply the negation of records. The fact thathe sometimes showed apparently incon-sistent attitudes towards records was nota contradiction; likewise, his attitude to-wards records did not change. In fact, ifwe closely examine his work, we find thathis cooperation with the recording of hismusic by other performers is in fact in ac-cordance with his antipathy towardsrecords. For Cage, records existed only

as a problem of preservation and distri-bution. He made this clear when he said,

[I am] more interested in a mediocre

thing that is being made now than I amin the performance of a great master-

piece of the past. The business of the

great things from the past is a questionof preservation and the use of things thathave been preserved. I don't quarrel withthat activity [5]. Accordingly, for himrecords functioned as a sort of museum.

Cage was fully aware of his future placein history as a composer who single-handedly pioneered the liberation of theconception of music from tradition, andhe was not so naive as to believe that pre-serving his work for the future was use-less [6]. Furthermore, considering thenotation of his indeterminate works, it is

quite reasonable to assume that Cageneeded to have multiple recordings of a

piece, lest only one example becomecanonical. That is why his antipathy to-wards recording did not prevent himfrom making himself available to anyonewho wished to publish his records, which

served not only the need for preservationof his work, but also as his obligation tothe future. In any event, I noticed that hewas always pleased to see recording pub-lishers. I remember that once, after a

young publisher had just left his studio,Cage told me that he did not like records,but people liked to publish his records.I then noticed that he himself did not

possess any sound equipment.As Swed points out, Cage did not ob-

ject to the creation f music using records.He composed a piece for the use of

records as instruments as early as 1939.The piece, Imaginary Landscape No. 1, wascomposed for cymbal, piano and twovariable-speed turntables with a fre-

quency record. Credo n Us (1942) he ex-

plained as follows: Interviewer-So theirony is also romantic, classical music

bursting out of the speakers, and that was[the] American idea of culture. Cage-And a jazz solo, a cowboy solo and soforth.... The phonograph is playingTchaikovsky and other classical musicand [the] radio played whatever they put

on the air [7], in addition to percussion.Cage also used other pre-recorded soundmedia up to his last years. For example,Sculpture Musicale (1989) is a piece forfour tape recorders with recorded sound.

Now, I would like to report on my ownexperience using recordings with Cageas my audience. In March 1986, a yearafter Cage's interview for Greenaway'sdocumentary, I gave a concert at the Ex-

perimental Inteimedia Foundation inNew York, during which I premiered a

piece called Music for 2 CD Players. Cage

sat in the front row, and several minutesafter the beginning of the performancehe laughed loudly, over and over, untilthe end. I had no sooner finished the per-formance than he rushed up to me andshook my hand. I think he approved ofmy way of using the CD. The piece I

composed was for prepared classical and

popular CDs on which I had stuck a num-ber of bits of Scotch Tape on the surfacewhere the laser beam hits the discs inorder to change the digital signals. Thisnot only produced totally unexpectedsound by distorting information but alsodisrupted the CD player's control func-tion so that the progression of the CDswas unpredictable. Cage hated repeatingthe known; as he said, Iwrite in order tohear something I haven't yet heard [8].

RECORDS AS A SUBSTITUTEFOR LIVE PERFORMANCEHow are records perceived by the gen-eral audience? I was invited to give a talkto the students of my friend Peter

Zummo, a composer. These studentswere mainly media majors who were in-

terning for radio and TV stations, record-ing companies and the film industry. The

topic was my CD Musica Iconologos [9].I explained to the students that the

piece had not existed before the CD it-self was mastered, because I had designedthe piece specifically for the medium. Inother words, the entire production pro-cess of the CD was a seamless part of mycomposition. The result was noise in allsenses of the word. I explained the pro-cess: The original source material of thepiece was a poetic text from ancientChina. I converted the text's Chinesecharacters into appropriate photo-

graphic images, from which the Chinesecharacters were derived by studying theirancient pictographic forms, which arecloser to images than are their modernforms. I scanned the images into the

computer and digitized them, convert-

ing them to binary code (simple Os andIs). I then obtained histograms from the

binary code and had the computer read

the histograms as sound waves; thus I ob-tained sound from the images. There-fore, I used visualized text (images) as thesource-that is, the message-whichafter encoding was recorded on a CD.Now, when playing the CD, what is re-ceived are not images as message, butsound that is simply an excess. Accord-ing to information theory the resultantsound is nothing other than noise. As theFrench word for (static) noise, parasite,indicates, noise is parasitic on its host,that is, the message. But in this case there

is no host, only a parasite on the CD.Therefore, this CD is pure noise. Tech-

nically speaking, the sound of the CD is

digital noise.What did I intend by this means of

composition? I told the students that Ihad received an offer to publish a CD;however, none of my pieces were suitablefor recording. Certain formal elementsof the pieces-spatial movement ofsound, contrasting acoustic sound with

amplified sound, and the use of visuals-made the pieces simply unrecordable. So

I had to create something totally devoidof live performance, something that onlythe CD as a medium could produce.

In addition, I told the students that thereason Cage did not like records was thatthe spatial element of a performance waslost and the recorded sound was the en-

gineers' re-interpretation of the per-formers' interpretation of the music.However, the students thought I was justbeing grumpy about the lack of accuracyin recording. They presumed I was com-

plaining about the sound engineers' re-

vision of the performers' misplays andtheir removal of noise. That is, theythought I was criticizing recording as me-chanical reproduction in general be-cause it is unfaithful to the original. Suchan idea is not uncommon; their notionof recording is, in short, that it is merelya means of communication. This notionimplies that if a recording is copied ex-

actly, then it is a perfect substitute for liveperformance.

Regardless of Cage's critical view to-wards records, I believe he also thoughtof recordings in the positive sense as ma-terial for study. He mentioned that inIndia, notation is considered as docu-mentation for scholars and not for the

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creation of music; so he probablythought the same of recording. Still, it is

important to question Cage's records ashis music. I would like to discuss here inconcrete terms how recording is disad-

vantageous to one's understanding of

Cage's work.

RECORDS AND SIGNS,REPRESENTATIONS ASSUBSTITUTES

Recording is a process of registering (atechnique of inscribing) vibration of theair on a disk or a tape and making the re-sult multipliable; then, by approximatereversal of the process producing stablesound. The idea of recording presup-poses that each reproduction of the orig-inal is identical, no matter how manycopies are made and how many times

they are listened to. At first glance, this

appears to be a quite objective, physicalprocess. However, this is not the case ifwe examine the phenomenon closely. A

recording is a cultural object that cannotbe separated from its historical meaningand the date of its origin. Throughoutthe entire process of recording-frombeginning to end, from recording to lis-

tening-we can find traces of the West-ern history of music [10].

Most of Cage's pieces would sufferfrom the practice of recording if the lis-tener takes for granted that the records

are simply repetitive and are always den-tical to the original. His work, in partic-ular, that written for indeterminacy,would be marred by such a way of listen-

ing. For Cage, a recording of a certain

piece represents just one fixed versionout of many different possible versions ofthe piece. Even the word version wouldbe misleading. The respective versions

(recordings) of Beethoven's SymphonyNo. 5 by Furtwangler and by Karajan arethe same to a certain degree, but DavidTudor's version (or Cage's own, for that

matter) of Cartridge Music varied consid-erably with each performance. Cage's no-tations are written in such a way that the

performers play the composition differ-

ently each time. Sometimes, as is oftenthe case for many modern composers,the release of one recording of a givenpiece is common. In such cases the au-dience may receive the mistaken im-

pression that the piece always soundedthis way. Therefore, even if a specificrecordingf rfrmnc ofperformance of a scorewas the best among many others, this

recording cannot represent all other per-formances. This means that in the caseof Cage's music, representation as sub-stitution (in place of) [11] cannot be es-

tablished between his notation and one

performance of a piece. Such is the re-

lationship between a live performanceand its recording. Now, it should be un-derstood that the nature of recording-its representative (in place of) functionand the idea that it is a repetition of theidentical-and Cage's music are incom-

patible. Indeed, this is what Cage meant

when he said that a recording of an in-determinate work has no more valuethan a postcard [12].

This point becomes obvious when one

compares a recording of 4'33 and its

performance. I am aware of four record-

ings of this piece, but none of them canbe considered artistically correct ; inother words, they are of no more valuethan a postcard. To produce a record-

ing of a silent piece without destroyingthe concept, one must create some other

piece of music [13].

Recording as representation, as sub-stitute (in place of), is recording as a sign.In the beginning of the chapter Essen-tial Distinction in Logical Investigations,Husserl writes, Every sign is a sign for

something. A sign is about something furetwas); t is in place of [14]. As I men-tioned above, a recording is assumed tobe a representation of live performanceand a repetition of the identical; so, inHusserlian terms, recording is a sign in

general. What Cage was opposed to was

recording as sign; however, it is not

recording per se but Cage's music of in-determinacy that raised questions about

signs. It is only natural that he introducedthe problem of signs, for it was he who

developed graphic notations that werewritten as a logical extension of the pre-pared piano.

In any event, the questions posited byCage on the topic of recording, throughindeterminate and graphic notations and

prepared piano, are uniquely of the1960s. (Cage started working with pre-pared piano in the late 1930s.)

PREPARED PIANO ANDREPRESENTATION

The qualitative change brought about bythe prepared piano has often been over-looked. Michael Nyman, for instance,calls it cannibalization (machines beingdismantled to allow their parts to be usedin other machines), and he describes it,only in passing, in one short paragraphin his Experimental Music. Nyman consid-ers Cage's rhythmic structure (the pro-portionally temporal distribution ofsound and silence) most important in therevolution against traditional Westernmusic [15]. But this structure is simply

derived from Cage's determination thatthe opposite and necessary coexistent

of sound is silence. If Cage had a betteridea, such as the use of the I Ching, thenhe would not have used this rhythmicstructure. That was the reason he gave it

up after he wrote Music of Changes.I think the prepared piano was an im-

portant breakthrough due to its role in

the development of indeterminate nota-tions and event music. Following the first

piece, Bacchanale 1938), Cage wrote 15

prepared piano pieces. In 1951, after

composing the last of these pieces, hewrote Music of Changes, n epoch-makingpiano piece that utilized the I Ching. The

following year, Music of Changes was suc-ceeded by even more revolutionarypieces, 4'33 and Happening at BlackMountain College. By this time Cage hadabandoned rhythmic structure becausehe came to see its critical element, tem-

poral measurement, as unnatural.If we closely examine the prepared

piano, which threw music into a totallynew perspective, we will find it far from

being cannibalization-that is, merely areform. It was a turning point that sub-

jected the entire traditional musical sys-tem to deconstruction.

As is widely known, the preparedpiano consists of the placement of manyobjects-screws and bolts in varioussizes, wood, rubber, etc.-between the

strings of a piano at certain distances

from the damper, producing a range ofunprecedented timbers and sonorities.It was reported that the actual tone pro-duced by a prepared piano playing mid-dle B on the keyboard sounded a pitchthree octaves higher with unknown

sonority. Characteristics of the originalnote are transformed, and a single key-stroke produces multiple sounds; so wefind here a loss of the univocal relationbetween the tone/timbre expected fromthe keyboard and the sound actually pro-duced.

Accordingly, Cage's invention of theprepared piano, which at first glance ap-pears to be a mere technical innovation,caused a rupture between notes (the con-

cept of pitches on sheet music) and ac-tual auditory images (the pitches'representation), which is also a rupturebetween signifier (note) and signified(played pitch). Thus, a written note as

writing (ecriture) and as the concept of anote-signified (signifie)-by this chainof events, called the entire tonal systeminto question.

Saussure wrote, Language (langue)and writing (ecriture) re two distinct sys-tems of signs; the second exists for thesole purpose of representing the first

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[16]. This is surely true when a pianistplays traditional sheet music, which pre-supposes that a written note, as writing(&criture), s reduced to a sound, one stepat a time, until the entire chain of signi-fiers is reduced to the ideality of music.Such a representationistic system cannotbe applied to the prepared piano.

Cage's prepared piano appeared to bea problem of signs, and this was a 1960sproblem par excellence. A strong bondbetween the tonal system and the pianokeyboard was broken; and ultimately,Cage's sheet music for prepared pianotransformed itself into indications for ac-tion. In other words, although a note onthe sheet music indicated a certain pitch,the sound played was a far cry from a rep-resentation of the note, which meant thatin reality it did not require the pianist to

play a sound but to act by depressing acertain key on the keyboard. As a result,sound is merely ex post facto, with the

performance only a few steps away fromevent music or a happening [17].

Cage once talked about Giving upcontrol so that sounds can be sounds

(they are not men: they are sounds)[18]. Simply, he intended to liberatemusic from the tonal system because hewas against the humanization of sounddue to the representationistic con-sciousness. Cage's graphic notations not

only disrupt the univocal relation be-tween written notes and

pitchesbut

also are more open to sound itself,that is, noise. His suggestion to studentswho wished to write an indeterminatescore was to observe the imperfections ofa sheet of white paper. Not only shouldthe signs written on the paper be takeninto account, so should the stains or

smudges on the paper, which are alsonoise.

Now, is it possible for a record (notonly as reception but as an instrument)to be analogous to that of the prepared

pianoand indeterminate notation? That

depends on the audience. It is impossi-ble if the audience uses records in the

way that the manufacturer and recordingcompanies persuade them to, which pre-supposes an exact reproduction ofsounds that a live performance pro-duced. But as we have seen, sound re-

produced by playing a record cannot bereduced to the mere sound that wasrecorded on it. We already use records as

anything but representations of originalperformances, because we are still ableto

identifya record we are

listeningto

even when the volume is turned up ex-

tremely loud and the scratch noises arenumerous.

ERASURE OF NOISEAND RE-PRESENTATIONFor Cage, just as the signs of an indeter-minate score and a prepared piano key-board could not be indicated by a pieceof sheet music, records need not be aneutral reproducing device. Neverthe-less, many of us want to avoid noise in thesituations of

recordingand

listening.Era-

sure of noise in reproduction is similarto the reduction of writing (ecriture) to

meanings, as we just noted in the last sec-tion. The reason why the reduction of a

sound-reproducing system to a neutralmeans is necessary is that the existenceof noise always reminds us that we are lis-

tening through a reproductive devicethat is external to the music. What ismarred by the noise is the immediacyof the music being played and the lis-tener's illusory proximity to the original

music. We then come to see reproduc-tion as repetition of the presence, or

re-presentation. To consider the recordas such is a pretty ordinary view; and atleast it appeals to common sense. But for

Cage the record as performing device(creative use) is one thing, and therecord as a device for representation(re-presentation) is another-he ob-

jected to the latter. I find it hard to un-derstand why many in the musical

profession do not question recording asan alternative to live performance.

Far from doing so, Theodor Adornodeclared:

Shorn of phony hoopla, the LP simulta-neously free[s] itself from the capri-ciousness f a fake opera estival. t allowsfor the optimal presentation of music,enabling it to recapture some of theforce and intensity hat had been wornthreadbare n the opera house. Objecti-fication, hat s,a concentration n musicas the true object of opera, may be linkedto a perception that is comparable oreading, o the immersion n a text [19].

He also mentioned that it is obviousthat Mozart's opera cannot be per-formed in oratorio fashion without an

unintentionally comic effect.Therefore, it is clear that Adorno

found that the LP would make it possiblefor one to be absorbed in the auditorysense, in listening, without any spatialperception-similar to theorique mmer-sion in the text. This is an inversion ofWalter Benjamin. Benjamin saw photog-raphy as the image-writing and hiero-glyphs that cast their spell over themodern

age.His

insightful studyof me-

chanical reproduction argues that, by useof the camera, distance of the perspec-tivistic relationship to the world gives way

to objective closeness [20]. Likewise, aloss of spatiality occurs in the recordwhen used to reproduce sound; andhere, too, the reproduction causes theloss of the aura. Whereas Adorno foundit possible to argue for the objectificationof sound as it is reproduced on LPrecords-similar to the experience of animmersion in books (in his own anal-

ogy)-Benjamin pointed out, accordingto Bolz and van Reijen, that the closenessthat photography brings us to a subjectmeans the end of criticism, for criticism

requires a sense of perspective and the

proper distance. In the face of cinematic

reality, The standpoint of critics' takingand the enjoyment of the impartially in-

dependent observer no longer existed.And tactility and closeness replace a goodeye for distances and critical awareness[21]. Cinema for Benjamin was not an

object for the criticism by the bourgeoisbut a realistic tool for a practice [22].Benjamin's media aesthetics started fromthe mechanical reproduction of the

image and the liberation of writing, the

printed text of the book. Contrary to

Benjamin, Adorno's theorique immersionin the text, the printed book, almostseemed to treat the book as a totality oftranscendental signified (Derrida). Ac-

cordingly, his vision of the LP could not

escape representation; so he shut his

eyes, and his devotion focused only onthe auditory sense, thus giving up allother senses, which only ensured the il-lusion of the presence of sound. This is

nothing other than re-presentation.Such an audience perfectly fit the work

of the European avant-garde composers,Boulez and Stockhausen, to name two,from whom Cage and the experimentalcomposers differentiated themselves.

Boulez emphasized the need to purgehis music of any remnants of a traditionhe considered dead [23]; however, the

avant-garde composers represented byhim and his

European colleaguescon-

sidered concert halls and recording stu-dios as exterior to music. For them,exclusion of the unintentional throughstrict construction of music, exclusion ofchances except those intended throughthe exactness of performances, exclusionof anything that might impede pure mu-sical experience in concert halls (au-tonomous space) and lastly, exclusion ofnoise from music are essential necessi-ties. Their intention was to create musicas a purely autonomous object; and, in

fact,their music is ensured

bythe insti-

tutional framework mentioned above.

They cannot endure the invasion of mu-sical space and time by real space and

14 Tone, ohn Cage and Recording


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time, which are external to music. Cage'sattitude, which emphasized the continu-

ity between the environment and hiswork, was in remarkable contrast withthat of the European avant-garde. Cagewas also opposed to Schaeffer, who in-

corporated noise into the tonal system,because Cage thought this was no betterthan excluding noise; both practices cre-

ate a boundary between music and non-music.Let us return to records and noise

again. Reproduction devices are not ex-terior to music; furthermore, environ-mental sound can be part of music. It isa fact that Cage did not make an envi-ronmentally inclusive record, such as a

Marclay-Paik-type record [24]. Even

though Cage's live performances, suchas 4'33 and his realization of Vexation,pointed in that direction, he neverreached a fully environmental record

[25]. Therefore, people continue to mis-understand Cage's antipathy toward therecord as merely a reaction to the di-

chotomy between live music and its copy,with live music being more important.Both live performance and recorded per-formance are re-presentation-as Der-rida put it in Speech nd Phenomena, The

presence of the present is derived from

repetition not the reverse [26]. Jazz,which is so proud of being an art of the

present, is no exception. Cage was againstjazz improvisations because many im-

provisational performers in successiontend to play a tune in response to a pre-vious performer. If the previous per-former determines the next performer'stune, then the present performer is al-

ready a part of the past. This is nothingbut re-presentation of the past, which ap-pears in the presence of the presentsound.

In the 1960s many artists besides Cage,such as LaMonte Young, Andy Warholand Daniel Buren, were concerned with

repetition. Cage, in particular, was am-

biguous about repetition, as in his atti-tude toward records. First, he was againstrepetition of the past that appears as the

present; but he accepted repetitionunder the condition that [E]ach repe-tition must authorize an entirely new ex-

perience [27]. Thus, he led people in

performances of Vexation, nd he appre-ciated Young's piano piece for repetition,such as 566forHenryFlynt (c. 1961). Rep-etition itself becomes a critique of rep-resentation, as Daniel Buren's repetitivestripe has been a plain criticism of the

metaphysics of representation. Cage, whowas interested in Asian philosophy asearly as shortly after World War II, wascritical of Western metaphysics; this crit-

icality had grown in the process of hisartistic development, as we have seen

through examining his work.

TOWARDS CTIVE LISTENINGJohn Cage left us a voluminous body ofwork, including many records. We-Imean each of us-now have to decidehow to handle his records. One of thecharacteristics of records, multiplicity, al-lows one to choose countless ways of lis-

tening-or, in Cage's term, of usingrecords-as praxis (as opposed to theoriquelistening). Use these records as you wish.You can destroy them or you may play dif-ferent records simultaneously; it's up to

you. At least you should think twice be-

fore you start listening to Cage. He didnot instruct us about how to do it. Nowit is your turn. Remember Duchamp'ssaying, Use a Rembrandt as an ironingboard.

References and Notes

1. Mark Swed, The Cage Records, Schwann Opus(Winter 1995-1996) p. 8A. The documentary filmthat Swed refers to is Peter Greenaway, director, 4American Composers:John age (1985).

2. Swed [1] p. 8A.

3. Swed [1] p. 8A-11A.

4. Swed [1] p. 21A.

5. Richard Kostelanetz, ed., Conversing ith Cage NewYork: Limelight Editions, 1988) p. 207.

6. See Kostelanetz [5] p. 67: Rauschenberg's whitepainting I referred to earlier: when I saw those, I said,'I must: otherwise I'm lagging, otherwise music islagging.'

7. Kostelanetz [5] p. 63.

8. Kostelanetz [5] p. 63.

9. Yasunao Tone, Musica Iconologos, Lovely MusicLCD3041 (1993).

10. See Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, ilm, Typewriter

(Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, 1986), in particular,pp. 2-19 ( Introduction ) and pp. 21-114 ( Gramo-phone ).

11.The proper word for representation in this sensewould be appresentation. On the Husserlian usageof present, epresent nd representation hat follows, referto paragraph 50 in Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Med-itations, Dorian Cain, trans. (Den Haag, the Nether-lands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950).

12. John Cage, Composition as Process, in Silence(New Haven, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1961) p. 39.

13. Christian Marclay's Record without Cover 1985)exemplifies this type of record. One side of therecord contains Marclay's multiple-turntable per-formance, which includes extremely long silences.The other side serves as a label, bearing an inscrip-

tion of the title and credits, with an instruction: Donot store with protective package. The record with-out package is always subject to being scratched andcollecting and attracting dust; so, whenever therecord is played it adds to itself new noises. It is madealmost like a recorded version of 4'33 . I can add onemore example, if not limited the category of music:ZenforFilm (1963) by NamJune Paik. The film pro-

jects an empty loop on a screen lasting for hours; newscratches and dust are always added; the screen nevershows the same images as a result of its accumulationof subtle figures. The concept of 4'33 is the accep-tance of things exterior to traditional Western music,such as ambient noise and incidents from the per-formance situation.

14. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, ol. 2,Tsuneo Hosoya, trans. (Tokyo: Misuzu Shoten, 1970)p. 33.

15. Michael Nyman, Experimental usic (London: Stu-dio Vista, 1974) pp. 27-28.

16. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course n General Lin-guistics, Wade Buskin, trans. (New York: McGraw Hill,1966) p. 23.

17. I made basically the same argument about theprepared piano quite a long time ago; see YasunaoTone, On John Cage, Monthly SD (August 1969),included in the collection of essays Gendai geijutsu no

Iso (Tokyo: Tabata Shoten, 1970) pp. 92-110.18. Cage [12], History of Experimental Music in theUnited States, p. 72.

19. Theodor Adorno, Opera and the Long-PlayingRecord, Thomas Y. Levin, trans., October55 1990)pp. 62-66.

20. Norbert Bolz and Willem van Reijen, Walter en-jamin, Laimdota Mazzarings, trans. (Atlantic High-lands, Humanity Press, 1996) p. 72.

21. Bolz and van Reijen [20] p. 75.

22. Bolz and van Reijen [20] p. 71.

23. Nyman [15] p. 51.

24. See [13].

25. Cage actually tried to make such a record: HisHPSCHDwith Lejaren Hiller, Nonesuch LP H-71224(1969). Unfortunately, the fact that he did not pos-sess audio equipment prevented him from succeed-ing. His instructions are merely perfunctoryapplications of his idea of indeterminacy to the or-dinary use of phonographic functions. He nevermade such an attempt again.

26.Jacques Derrida, Speech nd Phenomena Evanston,IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973) p. 52.

27.John Cage and Daniel Charles, For he Birds Lon-don: Marion Boyars, 1981) p. 80.

Manuscriptreceived 16 October 2002.

Yasunao Tone, afounding member ofFluxusand Group Ongaku, was born in Tokyo n1935 and has lived n New York ince 1972.He is a sound artist, heorist nd performanceartist, whose ecent ctivities nclude group ex-hibitions-Bitstream at the Whitney n NewYork; Yokohama riennale 2001 in Japan; IModerni n the Casselo Museum n Turin-and musicfestivals-All Tomorrow's arties,London; Sonic Light, Amsterdam, 003; andSpectacle Vivante at the Centre Pompidou,Paris, 2002. Tone was a recipient f the ArsElectronica Golden Nica prize n 2002.

Tone, ohn Cage and Recording 15

Documents

1. Cage and Recording