Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity - Macba

John Cage classes at the New School for Social Research, 1958
(left to right: John Cage, George Brecht, Al Kouzel, Jackson Mac Low, John Cage,
Al Hansen, center, and Allan Kaprow, back wall)
29. As Pritchett notes, “The sounds
of the concerto are both independent
(in the way they occur in time) and
simultaneous (in the way they exist in
the chart).” (Pritchett, p. 75). Importantly,
Cage introduced means of retiring
and replacing sounds within the chart
technique of Concerto for Prepared Piano
and Chamber Orchestra. Nevertheless,
at any given moment, the charts were
static and complete. See Cage’s comments
to Boulez in Nattiez, (ed.), p. 94.
30. The Concerto profoundly altered
Cage’s notion of musical continuity;
nonetheless, he employed several
means by which to produce transpositions,
symmetry, and other correspondences.
See Bernstein, pp. 195–96
and 202–3.
charts, in the eight-by-eight configuration of the I Ching, which
contained arrays of simple moves interspersed with empty cells
representing silences. Cage then tossed coins to obtain the
hexagrams by which to read these additional charts in order to
determine the moves to be made on the one containing sounds.
Since the charts Cage used in composing Concerto for Prepared Piano
and Chamber Orchestra included already complete and precisely
notated sound complexes, composition essentially consisted in
using chance operations to determine the sequencing of the sounds.
Thus, to a certain extent, the Concerto is a linear equivalent of the
charts that, at any given moment, represent the totality of available
sounds. 29 In this respect, Cage’s procedure had not advanced all
that far beyond Duchamp’s or Tzara’s random drawing of materials
out of a hat or bag. 30 In Music of Changes, by contrast, Cage’s separation
of the sound’s various components into multiple charts – one
containing sonorities, one containing durations, and one containing
dynamics – allowed him to surpass the limitations of compositional
preconception not merely in the sequencing of the sounds, but in
their very identity. More than simply arranged according to the laws
of chance, each defining parameter of every acoustical event within
Music of Changes was determined by chance operations.
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