John Cage: A Rebel Sets Up Shop in Ivied Halls : The Avant-Garde Composer, Using Computers and the I Ching, Cuts a New Path in Lecturing at Harvard

John Cage has long thought of himself as a hit-and-run driver when it comes to the academic world.

Mistrustful of institutions, Cage, who has been challenging conventional musical wisdom for as long as anyone can remember, enjoys the kind of college visit where he can stir things up with his revolutionary ideas and ways of making music and then make a quick getaway.

Those brief academic encounters are rarely forgotten and have had profound influence on countless important artists and teachers.

But sooner or later Cage had to get caught: Harvard persuaded Cage, at the age of 76, to suspend his now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t style. The university invited him to deliver the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton lectures during this academic year, and last month the composer started his series.

The Norton lectures are a long-standing Harvard tradition. Each year a major figure in the arts--the list of Norton Professors includes Thorton Wilder, T. S. Eliot, Octavio Paz, Italo Calvino and Frank Stella--devotes six lectures to the nature of poetic expression, and subsequently the lectures are published by Harvard University Press. Every eight years, the post falls to a musician.

Cage’s predecessors have included Stravinsky, Copland and Leonard Bernstein, each of whom used the opportunity to spell out his musical credo. Stravinsky’s Norton polemic against interpretation is particularly famous and still stirs controversy.

Cage’s appointment, however, is likely to engender far more controversy than that, even if Cage in many ways is a natural for the post; he is in fact nearly as well known for his lectures, which he has been delivering and publishing throughout his career, as for his music. Their influence has gone far beyond music, into the visual arts, dance and literature.

Furthermore, Cage happens to be a particularly entertaining speaker. He is almost as legendary for his affable nature, his good humor and his persuasiveness as he is for his thinking.

But one suspects that Harvard may not have been ready for Prof. Cage. Some years ago, Cage’s lectures stopped making sense, or at least making traditional sense.

Cage writes lectures following the same chance procedures that he employs in making music, and he read the lectures in a manner that approaches song.

As Always, in Levi’s

For the first two Norton lectures, which were held on two Wednesdays last month (there will be another pair in February and a final pair in April), Cage appeared in Harvard’s hallowed and somberly formal Memorial Hall dressed, as always, in working-class Levi’s.

Seated at a table, he read seeming chaotic phrases in a continuously cadenced style, his voice often trailing off into inaudibility, never clearing his throat, never drinking from the glass of water before him.

But there is an elaborate method to Cage’s madness, and there is a special kind of meaning to his meaninglessness. As in all of Cage’s work of the last 35 years, the use of chance in the lectures is not arbitrary, and it does not free the artist from responsibility or effort.

In his introduction to the first lecture, Cage said his conversion to chance involved stopping to make choices and instead asking questions. The questions are asked with the help of the coin-tossing mechanism of the ancient Chinese divination book, I Ching, a process Cage has now had computerized.

“Something strikingly like this occurs for each person when he is conceived,” Cage said in the introduction. “The DNA RNA. The determination of personality. If matters on Earth were more organized than they are, two parents reproducing would always have the same child.”

The lectures are titled--hold your

-”MethodStructureIntentionDisciplineNotationIndeterminacyInterprenetration ImitationDevotionCircumstancesVariable StructureNonunderstandingContingency InconsistencyPerformance.”

On the subject of these aspects, Cage assembled 487 quotations from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Thoreau’s “Walden,” from Emerson’s Essays (which Cage says he couldn’t stomach, although he found five quotations which he could), from Buckminster Fuller, from Marshall McLuhan and from three daily newspapers (the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor).

The quotations were determined by chance operations and they were assembled, with the computer’s assistance, into a poetic form Cage developed called mesostics, a form in which the title of one element of the lecture runs through the middle of the stanza.

The process of finding the quotes and making the mesostics and then preparing a reading of them proved astonishingly laborious. It would seem unlikely, in fact, that any Norton lecturer ever worked harder on his text, took more pains in his performing of it or even paid the devoted attention that Cage does to how the text looks on the page.

Cage and his assistant, Laura Kuhn, a UCLA graduate student, have been working on the lectures day and night since last summer, and they still are at it.

In making the final mesostics, for which there are stringent rules, Cage removes words that he didn’t like, painstakingly examining the reams of computerized strings of words for ideas. He then adds breath pauses to further make a kind of senseless sense.

A Crazy Quilt

The final result turns out to be a crazy quilt of quotations, of thought, all of it having only little resemblance to its original form and placed in surprisingly new contexts. Sometimes there is a kind of repeated Gertrude Steinian nonsense verse:

” . . . my dips are dips just a dip no why no causing. . . .”

Sometimes there are allusions to notions that have long been Cagean concerns: “how to read empty space. . . .” or “ . . . we must learn to reawaken. . . .” or “ . . . all futures are now. . . .”

But most often the lack of syntax, the missing words and the juxtaposition of quotations create evocative new contexts: “. . . no past present or future, just a dark and muggy night. . . .” or “ . . . psychologists define hypnosis as the filling of the field of psychologists let alone their use of that word upon this occasion. . . .”

All of this, of course, proved mystifying to some in the audience, and at both of the first two lectures--each of which was more than 90 minutes long--there was after about a half an hour usually someone heading for an exit at any given time.

There was also a mysterious disturbance part way into the second lecture, when a timer-controlled tape recorder that someone had hidden went off, making a racket that contained what sounded, through the distortion, like verbal attacks on Cage. It was quickly found and shut off, as Cage read on unperturbed. Later the composer said that the incident occurred just at a point when he had thought he would like some musical accompaniment.

The majority of listeners were kept in their seats throughout by the hypnotic effect of Cage’s reading and the beauty of the words, and at the end of each lecture there was cheering. Afterward they lingered, not ready just yet to re-enter the conventional world. They flocked to ask questions of Cage, who makes it a practice to be accessible.

And questions there were; so, Cage, being a professor at Harvard, has decided to act like one. While the Norton Professorship requires only the delivering of six lectures, Cage is supplementing his with a series of six seminars given in the music department. Like the lectures, they are open to the public. Here Cage merely presents himself and for about 75 minutes takes questions. As he put it: “The seminars will make sense. Isn’t that marvelous?”

What proved remarkable about the seminars was the kind of sense they made--the clarity of Cage’s responses, his patience, his thoughtfulness and his humor, despite often unfocused or unreasonable questions.

Throughout the first two seminars, Cage spoke of his love for Marcel Duchamp, for Satie’s music and Thoreau’s thought.

When asked to define art, Cage replied: “I think it must have to do with our placement of attention.”

Asked to defend his political positions--Cage is an anarchist and doesn’t vote--he responded: “I think we could find a way, a humorous way, to embarrass government out of existence.”

What Cage was most challenged on, though, was his use of chance.

“Any way of doing things that removes the thinking, the mind, works,” he replied to one question about its use.

When accused of being inconsistent about his use of chance and choice and the whole paradox of the issue, Cage said: “I have the intention of being nonintentional, yet I use chance at certain points. There’s nothing else that I can do. I try to do it as well as I can.”

The New York City resident also spoke of the sheer difficulty of the task he has set for himself in the Norton lectures, saying that he usually reacts to the endless strings of computer-generated words with a sense of profound hopelessness, fearing that nothing could be made of them. But, he said, he found that “the sensation of hopelessness disappears if I just stay with it.”

“Staying with it” is perhaps the real essence of Cage’s art, and he loves to encourage people to make the art they think they must. He said that he was deeply affected by a Japanese student who once responded to Cage’s criticism of a piece by saying, “I’m not you.”

And that, perhaps, has thus far characterized Cage at Harvard. Anything but the hit-and-run driver of old, Cage is staying with it, showing Harvard what it is to be John Cage. When the composer of the famous silent piece, “4’33”,” was asked, at the end of the second seminar, his thoughts on silence, he paused for a very long time. And then with a smile that lit up the room, said: “I’m enjoying it.”