Burmese Days: Caged

by Bob Moses

The opening passage of the lecture notes set the agenda:

“It was here at Harvard not quite forty years ago that I went into an anechoic chamber not expecting in that silent room to hear two sounds: one high, my nervous system in operation, one low, my blood in circulation. The reason I did not expect to hear those two sounds was that they were set into vibration without any intention on my part.
That experience gave my life direction, the exploration of nonintention. No one else was doing that. I would do it for us. I did not know immediately what I was doing, nor, after all these years, have I found much out.
I compose music. Yes, but how? I gave up making choices. In their place I put the asking of questions.”

The notes outline a fiendishly complex structure based on chance operations Cage applied to a text called "Composition in Retrospect" (1981) that had 12 parts, each composed of seven mesostics (From Cage’s "Autobiographical Statement," published by Southwest Review in 1991: “I don't know when it began. But at Edwin Denby's loft on 21st Street, not at the time but about the place, I wrote my first mesostic. It was a regular paragraph with the letters of his name capitalized. Since then I have written them as poems, the capitals going down the middle, to celebrate whatever, to support whatever, to fulfill requests, to initiate my thinking or my nonthinking”). He then applied chance techniques to texts such as Thoreau’s Walden, Emerson essays, Finnegan’s Wake, and Fred Hoyle’s musings on The Nature of the Universe, all fed into a computer program called Mesolist to generate mesotics. The result was similar to the work we puzzled out in Cage’s books Silence and Empty Words. As he concludes, “All six lectures have been planned in detail but I don’t know what they’ll be. I’ll find that out by writing them.”
John Cage's notes for his Norton Lectures
I mostly remember his soft voice in sing-song rhythm, the heat in the auditorium, his humor, and as he would have directed, the sounds of the street from the open windows as I was more or less conscious of the performance itself. And it was a performance. At one point, I recall Cage being goaded by students with a boombox introducing their own randomness into the proceedings. Roger and Martin probably remember more clearly. I was mostly happy just to have witnessed the event. You can sample some of the experience in the playlist to the right; the complete recordings are linked below.

I think Cage is the key to Burma’s real legacy. Not a thousand-band movement, but a thousand possibilities for future bands to pursue.

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Roger Responds:
Two comments on the John Cage lectures:

1. What impressed me most - what made me realize that Cage was true to his very soul - was when that boom-box bomb went off, chained to an upper balcony, loudly and suddenly harassing Cage, his calm sing-song voice DID NOT WAVER ONE BIT. Anybody else would at least have skipped a beat when that challenge came out of nowhere, but he was totally where he was. Unfazed. Amazing.

2. My son Chance was born the night after one of those lectures. The following lecture (a month later), I was, in fact, introduced to John Cage by the Harvard presenter, as "the Father of Chance!" Doesn't get much better than that!

An aside: Su, Chance and I went to the 4'33" “concert” when Chance was somewhat under a half a year old. We carried him in his car seat. Some stupid men nearby looked at him disapprovingly as if he was gonna “wreck” the concert - I mean, if he had screamed the entire time it would have been just a "good" of a concert as if he made no sounds. The irony was that he made no sound at all, he was totally awake and at peace - I swear he was catching the vibe - but those same men who were irritated by his presence coughed and shifted in their seats the entire time! And, as far as I was concerned, they didn't damage the concert one iota. A great musical experience was had by all!

For more:
Burmese Days: Catch It. Draw It. Mark It Off to Keep It Holy
Burmese Days: Living in Peggy's World
The Norton Lectures on Ubu, an online resource for avant-garde arts and music

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