Reflections of John Cage’s thought in 20th century architecture (I)

I. Introduction

Music and architecture have always been, to a greater or lesser extent, related. From the banalized phrase attributed to Goethe, where he refers to architecture as frozen music, to the almost specular version with which Giggs refers to Browning’s thought in his Abt Vogler:
 

In the same way, we can affirm that both disciplines, from different fields, are reflected one in the other. From different languages, both music and architecture, are expressed through elements such as rhythm, texture, harmony, dynamism, among others. However, and through this essay, we will also try to understand how, from the influence of John Cage’s thought, architecture began, implicitly and explicitly, to take other concepts, until that moment exclusive of the musical field, such as silence, chance and indeterminacy, and how this helped to blur the barriers between the two disciplines, starting from the emancipation of their operational strategies, towards depersonalization and desocialization.²

II. John Cage. Silence, chance and indeterminacy.

John Cage and his work have been (and still are) among the most controversial and influential themes in the artistic field of the last century. Son of a journalist mother and an inventor father, John Cage was born in a time full of revolutionary ideas, ideas of change and experimentation in order to overthrow the canons of traditions that made society, politics, and what touched him most closely, the art.

To begin to understand his work, and particularly his reflections in architecture, it is necessary to make a brief review of the context in which he grew up and the influences that were shaping his production throughout practically his entire life.

From the new harmonic experiences that, from the work of Richard Wagner, were explored by Claude Debussy and Arnold Schönberg (who was Cage’s professor), to the highly percussive composition of Igor Stravinsky for Le Sacre du Printemps,³ Cage was immersed in an immense range of new pursuits, among which he would also find American experimentalists. They would represent the ideal form of that concept of the Brave New World, in which composers would explore the infinite possibilities that sound (and silence) could offer them, from angles yet unknown or that had not been treated in-depth, or from positions adjacent to the most traditionalist or academic. Among them, it is thought necessary to mention Henry Cowell, who was also a professor of Cage and would prove a great influence in his early work. It is also important to refer to Edgar Varèse, a composer who, from his vision of sound as a living matter, and from his understanding of noise as everything new or audibly unfamiliar, was one of the greatest influences of John Cage, as in his way of understanding music, and art in general, he endeavoured not to limit its language, but rather to let the aesthetics of the material be.

The work of John Cage could grossly be divided into three stages, whose split responds in a first instance to the different events that occurred in his life during their development, but mainly, these stages are such from his way of conceiving music, and especially how to interpret and produce it.

One of his first periods (1935-1948) was when he began to produce percussion works. Here we could clearly read the influence of Cowell, his teacher, from the timbres sought by Cage in his ensembles of non-formal percussion instruments (tin sounds in 1st Construction⁴ that referenced the sound of the Indian gamelan that his teacher had studied) to its influence for the ideation of the prepared piano (remember that Cowell had already scraped and hit the strings from within, and even placed elements like screws inside). At this point, one might also recognize the influence of Eric Satie, who is known to be an important character for John Cage, and whom he might have taken as background for the development of the prepared piano (Satie had placed pieces of paper between the strings for his timbre to emulate another sound in his work Le Piège de Meduse).⁵

In this period, Cage had a job as a pianist for dance works in Seattle, which somehow led him to enter this rhythmic and percussive incursion of his work.

Towards the end of this period, Cage created an instrument capable of modifying his timbre from different alterations. He would name it a prepared piano, and it would consist of a grand piano, to which the performer would place different elements between its strings to generate sounds alien to the traditional piano. In his first prepared piano work: Bacchanale,⁶ made to accompany an exhibition of contemporary dance, the composer totally denied the timbral nature of the piano and composed a work entirely percussive. Later his work would be increasingly opened, not limited exclusively to percussion sounds, that is, it would go from looking for percussion to paying attention to the new possible sonorities of the piano.

It is in this period that Cage, from the "failure" in the presentation of his work The Perilous Night,⁷ begins to recognize the indeterminacy in his work and all its richness, from the concept to the sound.


Song Books score by John Cage.

From here is where one could say that the indeterminate period of John Cage properly begins. It is now when he realizes that he is not able to control all the sounds of his pieces or the resulting effects. From this, and with great influence of Eastern cultures and philosophies such as Zen and Hindu Buddhism, Cage elaborates for himself a new method of understanding and composing his works. These now become algorithms, pieces in which each knot arises from a question to which an answer must be assigned. In the first instance, this answer was the composer’s decision, however, it subsequently led to the incorporation of another aspect that would characterize this period: chance. At this point, although it is the composer who is still in charge of "asking the questions", the works and their interpretation are almost entirely at the disposal of the interpreter. With these new gadgets (although there was an antecedent in Mozart), Cage sought to erode or block the memory of the composer, his music archive, his desires, his emotions.

At this stage, from an attitude typical of the philosophies that questioned him at that time, Cage positions himself in front of the material from a purely contemplative attitude, without semanticizing it, leaving it to be for what the sound itself was. This is known as the ethics of sound, as that which thinks of the material from within, from its own nature, and without alterations.

In Music of Changes,⁸ 1951, we can find what was one of his first works "completely" indeterminate and built entirely using chance. However, even in this case, the composer proposed guidelines that were indeed determined (composed for David Tudor, looking for unheard music, the system ensures that it is a complex work, all possible chords played by the performer were surveyed, among other things.) 

The works of this period, although indeterminate for the composer, are excessively determined for the performers, who are limited in the accuracy and specificity that these require.

The last of the stages to which we will refer, and which is born precisely in this transition, has to do with his interest in happenings and theatre. Already at this stage, the works composed by him began to have new and different notations, as well as new methods for the interpretation (realization) of whoever played them. In these cases (Atlas Eclipticalis,⁹ Song Books,¹⁰ etc.), the interpreters must, from their subjectivity, construct, decode and write the works, starting from the idea that it is an open work (an idea that also characterized much of the indeterminate period), not only in terms of melodies, harmonies, timbres, occurrences, etc. but also with respect to the assembly of the work in its whole and in the distribution of its parts. This means that the interpreter had to decide whether to interpret the work in its entirety or in parts and what the order of those parts was.

III. Silence in architecture. Contacts and displacements.

Cage’s most popular work is, par excellence, 4'33''. At least for those of us who have a more tangential knowledge of the discipline (even though we are aware of his ever-latent interest in performing his Silent Prayer and the later realization of 0'00"'' [4'33'' no°2]).  This work has transcended all branches of modern and contemporary cultures and has become one of its tropes in relation to the silence of art and culture.¹¹ Both in Cage and in his contemporary peers, the notion of silence is closely linked to the exhaustion of inherited languages and to a constant search, especially in the musical and literary branches, for a recovery of a rather romantic sense, against the pure rationality of modernity.
 

The silence in John Cage’s work (and thought) has developed extensively throughout his life experience and has been a recurring theme since the 1940s. It is impossible to understand his process without recognizing his close relationship with Zen and Hindu Buddhism, which carried him from a spiritual background that was shaping his ideology towards a strong questioning of modern life, valuing stillness, zero and inert acceptance that everything is possible and must be allowed to be. If we add to this the loss of self-referentiality in his work, we come to a key point in which operational strategies cease to belong to a discipline or person, emancipating themselves towards other fields of knowledge.¹³

We could make a cartography of silence in the architecture, which would be by far extensive, but above all, diverse in relation to the approach and the whys of the silence (Van der Rohe, Sejima, Ando, Zumthor, De la Sota). However, much of the canonical architecture has tended to associate silence with emptiness. This is, of course, valid, however, if we try to draw a parallel with Cage’s work, we cannot just stay with that almost imposed transposition of a concept as complex as silence.


White painting [seven panel] Oil on canvas. 1951. White painting by Robert Rauschenberg.

In Cage’s thinking, for example, the knowledge of Robert Rauschenberg’s white paintings weighs heavily. In reference to this, when the composer refers to this work, he recognizes his great mastery of visual silence, but he also understands his intention to eliminate the intervention of the individual altogether. This, so much for the music and the painting, as for the architectural discipline, is an aspect that we cannot let pass to understand the concept of silence. In this context, the composer/architect takes a turn in relation to the positioning of the author in front of the work and the listener/user, and even the interpreter/builder. The success of the work is no longer measured in the fidelity of the construction to the design of the architect, nor in that the spectator receives exactly what the author wanted to express. The hegemonic posture of the omnipotent artist (even more the architect) must be completely lost in front of the silence, in front of the interpreter and the listener, focusing no longer on communicating a message, but that each one can make their own experience from their encounter with the work.¹⁴

Although this is more achievable (as the purpose of a work) for the branches of art linked to the visual arts and music, in architecture it presents a series of challenges linked to the functional and programmatic conditioning of every constructed building.
 

It is common to associate the concept of Cageian silence with the architecture of Mies Van der Rohe. He (Cage) was known to have admiration for the architect and so he explains in Silence (2011): 
 

In fact, Mies referred to the concept of silence, at least implicitly, through his well-known postulate of less is more. However, returning to the whys that motivated Cage’s work, it should be said that this architect, even in his intention to find maximum dispossession in his architecture, has always been highly determined, understanding this in terms of each element of his work being defined a priori (let us not forget another of his famous aphorisms, God is in the details¹⁷), and having an effect on the highly intended user.

Consequently, for this section, we choose to take another path (which is understood more pertinent) and analyze part of the work of Tadao Ando and try to understand what and how the relations between it and John Cage are.


Chichu Art Museum by Tadao Ando. Photography by Kaori Ichikawa.

When Tadao Ando reflects on the value of the Japanese aesthetic concept of ma¹⁸ in his work, he refers precisely to an idea that is very present in Cage’s thought: that chaos and order are not at all opposites, but in the chaos itself there is the possibility of finding order among the elements.

Beyond the importance of the search for austerity (in the language) of Ando’s architecture, his intentions, many times, to disappear in their environments, and even the limited catalogue of materials used in them (particularly his early work), an aspect to be considered, and which is extremely relevant for the purposes of this essay, is the open character of which Ando endows his buildings. When he says to believe that the fundamental role of architecture is to actively stimulate society,¹⁹ is precisely that idea of space buffer that enables other parts (perhaps unknown) of the space and other interpretations challenged by the memory and life experience of the user.

As opposed to this, for example, and making certain parallelism with the work of Mies, Tadao Ando has been responsible for building an important number of churches, chapels and related spaces. In all these cases, he has always referred to silence in some way or another. Either from the memories of the projects or the programs, but above all, from the space strategies used. Many authors have referred, for example, to the Church of Light or the Church on Water as spaces of silence or dedicated to silence. This is clear, of course, however, trying to make this correlation between the concept of Cageian silence and these works, and even with the very concept of ma treated by the architect, it is extremely difficult to find any kind of connection between both, that goes beyond the poetics of silence. This happens, perhaps, because precisely the same program that requires silence as part of the built space, is that which limits the hand of the author, forgetting the idea of programmatic openness, chaos, and even of spatial violence that he presented in previous works such as the Azuma House, where beyond the necessary programmatic requirements (because they are) it is the house itself that both in its abstraction and in its austerity, but more important in the concept from which it is approached, that raises questions for its inhabitants.

NOTES.-

BIBLIOGRAPHY.-