Book review: Kay Larson on the zen of Cage
[ by Charles Cameron ]
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Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists, Penguin, $29.95
Dropping silence into a concert turns things upside down: it brings the solo performer or group of performers into the position of audience, makes listeners of them – and makes keener listeners of the audience — perhaps with a touch of unease or self-consciousness, but with an unusual attentiveness, too.
Dropping John Cage‘s piece of silent music into a book right around the beginning… well, it has a similar impact. And that’s what Kay Larson‘s book Where the Heart Beats does, on the page numbered xiii so you’ll know the book hasn’t even started properly yet. Larsen points you, without giving you the URL, to YouTube, where you can find Cage’s most shocking, and thus his most famous piece, 4’33”, performed by the London Symphony at the Barbican, in three movements, all silent as demanded by the composer’s score – with breaks in between the movements for the usual coughing and fidgeting.
And how to say this? During the silence, you could have heard a pin drop? Or you could hear, as Tom Service said on the BBC, the “very distinct high hum” of the Barbican’s electrical system, and the occasional cough too – “you could cut the atmosphere with a knife, and every cough, every tiny noise was absolutely amplified, made into a massive musical event”.
Listen:
You can tell the audience was delighted – self-satisfied perhaps, too? – from the hearty applause, and they had listened, had presumably taken onboard the idea that pauses – silences – are as much a part of music as sounds.
But what if I said that wine was just as much a part of drinking as glasses, and poured wine for my guests with no glasses to contain it?
The thing about John Cage’s 4’33” is that it straddles the line between the emperor having and not having clothes, between group assent and dissent, between “either” and “or” -– if it turns us from self-obsessed self-expressives into attentive listeners, it has reached into us musicically and carried us beyond the limits of music. And if it’s a bunch of boring minutes while an orchestra gets paid to SFU, it’s plain idiotic.
Which means that John Cage composed it right at the tipping point between the stupid and the profound.
I want to express it that way, and not tell you that Cage composes where the mind is fresh and inspiration flows, because it is stupid as well as fresh and profound.
As Hitler might have said, if he’d been asked…
And we haven’t really begun the book yet.
**
There are three stories here:
There’s the rigorous thread of western classical music, from its origins in the mist via Jewish cantillation and Gregorian chant into Polyphony and the Baroque, Classicism proper, Romanticism and the Modern. The music of Cage is the culmination, here, of this theme.
There’s the circling yet nonexistent circle, drawn as it were on glass with an ink brush dipped in water, of Zen, a “rebirth with neither beginning nor end”…
And there’s the world of the contemporary arts, centering in New York, with Cage a leading light.
They comes together when various characters have what Larson calls “life altering moments” — Larson herself, John Cage, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac in the first few pages alone, with the two Suzukis, DT Suzuki and Shunryu Suzuki Roshi and their experiences hovering in the background.
Zen is the pond, the emptiness, the silence, the stillness waiting into which like so many varied pebbles, the themes are character off the book will drop, in which their ripples will intersect…
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