{"id":16251,"date":"2015-01-29T20:40:03","date_gmt":"2015-01-30T04:40:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/?p=16251"},"modified":"2015-01-29T20:42:48","modified_gmt":"2015-01-30T04:42:48","slug":"the-revenge-of-the-dead-indians-in-memoriam-john-cage-1993","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/the-revenge-of-the-dead-indians-in-memoriam-john-cage-1993\/","title":{"rendered":"The Revenge of the Dead Indians: In Memoriam, John Cage (1993)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Revenge of the Dead Indians<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Directed by Henning Lohner<\/p>\n

Reflections on <\/strong>Beethoven, John Cage, Music, and Human Connection<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

On the first page of his manuscript to Missa Solemnis, <\/em>Beethoven wrote: “Music is communication, from the heart to the heart.”\u00a0 By extension we might say in general that art<\/em> is communication from the heart to the heart.\u00a0 It is a very deep seated assumption of western cultures for millennia.<\/p>\n

The Revenge of the Dead Indians<\/em> (1993) is an excellent documentary introduction to the music and ideas of John Cage.\u00a0 At the very end of the film John Cage was asked three simple questions interspersed among the credits as they rolled by.\u00a0 The first was, “What is music?”\u00a0 To which he responded, “Music is paying attention to sound.”\u00a0\u00a0 The second, “What is art?”\u00a0 His reply, “Art is being attentive to everything that is there.”\u00a0 And finally, “What is love?”\u00a0 To this he answered, “We don’t know.”\u00a0 These three answers to these simple questions are very telling and key to understanding John Cage’s music and what sets it apart from more traditional western music, represented par excellence, by Beethoven.\u00a0\u00a0 The film delivers a sympathetic and enjoyable presentation of his music and his ideas.\u00a0\u00a0 He was a charming, interesting, thoughtful man.\u00a0 The crux of it, interestingly, came at the very end during the credits when these three basic questions about the philosophical foundations of his art were put to him.<\/p>\n

The contrast between Beethoven’s concept of music as communication and Cage’s concept of music as attention to sound represents two different continents upon which music and art find themselves.\u00a0 Beethoven’s view that music is communication<\/em>, music is a language, means that music is a way to connect people to one another at the deep level of the heart, the emotional and personal center of each person.\u00a0 There is one who creates the music in order to convey something of his inner self to an assumed audience who is receptive and capable of receiving its message.\u00a0 By immersing oneself in a musical experience one merges one’s consciousness through sound and emotive resonance with that of others sharing the same experience.\u00a0\u00a0 Music is a social experience which creates positive bonds between people, inner resonances of emotion and psychic orientation.<\/p>\n

Cage’s concept is entirely asocial, or I would say, narcissistic, in that music is the private experience, or we might say, the condition<\/em>, of being attentive to all of the sound in one’s environment.\u00a0 It is an attitude of openness and acceptance to all the experiences of sound that are available in the world rather than a communicative relationship to other people.\u00a0 We might say that music is an attitude of the self as subject, rather than a bridge between the self and other selves.\u00a0 Therefore music has nothing to do with the meaning<\/em> of the sound or whether the sound originates in some human intention.<\/p>\n

Not all sound communicates.\u00a0 There are huge telescopes scanning the heavens right now listening for communications from other civilizations in far off depths of space. \u00a0These telescopes are picking up all manner of radio signals.\u00a0 But they are not communication, at least not yet.\u00a0 John Cage may call this music because it is attentive listening, but there is no meaningful connection being made to the origins of the sounds and therefore it is not music as far as Beethoven is concerned.\u00a0 It is just sound.<\/p>\n

Sound may have a meaning or it may not, but that is not important for John Cage.\u00a0 Music is not about meaning or interpretation or connection.\u00a0 Music is a way of being<\/em>, that is, a way of experiencing the world of sound.\u00a0 To try to “understand” it is already mistaken.\u00a0 “Understanding” implies that there is some intention behind the sound.\u00a0 In traditional classical music one attempts to grasp the composer’s intentions<\/em> as conveyed by the printed score and then render those intentions to an audience in a musical performance.\u00a0 This is how classical musicians are brought up and how they approach their art all their lives.\u00a0 John Cage is a radical departure from this.\u00a0 The composer’s intentions become irrelevant.\u00a0\u00a0 The sound created can be completely random.<\/p>\n

He talks a lot in the film about chance and how important it is to be open to chance and to allow chance sounds to become<\/em> music.\u00a0 How do chance sounds become music?\u00a0 Through our being attentive to them and accepting them, as opposed to filtering them out in order to hear something else.\u00a0 It implies a calm acceptance of whatever is.\u00a0 The sound of rain tapping on a window may create a feeling of warmth, soothing, calmness, anxiety, distress, or somnolence.\u00a0 But it is not communication<\/em> because there is no communicator originating the sound we perceive.\u00a0 If a sound should give rise to an emotional response in us, it will be due to unconscious associations we make based on our past experience.\u00a0 If someone recorded such a sound and played it for someone else hoping to signify something or elicit a response in them, then it would be music in Beethoven’s sense:\u00a0 a chance sound could become music through selection and presentation by a human subject.<\/p>\n

For John Cage the sound of the rain is a musical experience just by virtue of our listening to it, allowing it to occupy our attention.\u00a0 Such openness and calm acceptance can be very liberating.\u00a0 It disposes of the need to filter sounds in accordance with our likes and dislikes.\u00a0\u00a0 Being disposed to accept whatever may come does indeed reduce stress.\u00a0 But it substitutes juxtaposition for meaningful connection.\u00a0 It is very much a Zen Buddhist idea.\u00a0 Yoko Ono immediately grasped the relationship between John Cage’s approach to music and Zen Buddhism as she stated during her interview in the film.<\/p>\n

Beethoven, on the other hand, is nobody’s Buddhist.\u00a0 Beethoven is about connection, striving, and struggle<\/em>.\u00a0 In the music of Beethoven we see life in all of its many incarnations of passion and struggle: the turmoil, the suffering, the longing, the triumphs, the moments of profound peace.\u00a0 Music has intentionality.\u00a0 Music can and must be understood, or it can be misunderstood.\u00a0 In any case it must always be “interpreted.”\u00a0 There can be disagreements over meanings and interpretations.<\/p>\n

In John Cage’s music there can be no such thing.\u00a0 There is no “interpretaton.”\u00a0 There is only one’s openness to sound and to chance.\u00a0 It can never be the same twice.\u00a0 Whatever is, is ‘right,’ but the concept of right and wrong do not really apply here.\u00a0\u00a0 It is the state of being open that is paramount.\u00a0 The act of selecting is already mistaken.<\/p>\n

On a deeper level it is a repudiation of human intention and even of the human self. By selecting some sounds over others and imbuing them with meaning we assert ourselves and our personal needs and desires.\u00a0 This is contrary to the Buddhist philosophy of simply being, without intention, without desire, without asserting oneself in the world, or toward other people.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This is really what John Cage’s music reflects.\u00a0 It invites you to just be, to simply receive, to expand your awareness and acceptance of all ambient sound.\u00a0 With John Cage each listener becomes a receptacle rather than an active interpreter.\u00a0 The consequence of this is that one loses one’s grasp of music as a communicative language.<\/p>\n

It is not an accident that John Cage answered “We don’t know” to the question “What is love?”\u00a0 He doesn’t have a clue what love is, because love is about connecting with other people through need and desire.\u00a0 But Zen Buddhism repudiates need and desire.\u00a0 It embraces only being.\u00a0 Love is a different world, a world of intensity, of need and hunger and longing and dreaming and desiring.\u00a0\u00a0 For Buddhism love is a world of futility and ultimate disappointment.\u00a0 Most music in the western tradition is about expressing the nuances and varieties of this world of experience as an attempt to connect and resonate with others.\u00a0 This was Beethoven’s understanding, which he took for granted.\u00a0 Beethoven lived in a world of human connection intensely felt.\u00a0 John Cage lived in a world of random sounds acutely observed but devoid of “meaning,” and indifferent to human connection.<\/p>\n

Beethoven’s definition is the greater, I think, because it encompasses the human experience of connectedness, which has been crucial to our survival since humanity emerged as a species hundreds of thousands of years ago.\u00a0 Cage’s music is severely limited by its indifference to the needs of human beings who create sound for their own purposes.\u00a0 This is why Cage’s music will never be as popular or as great as Beethoven’s, because ultimately human beings need and seek connection.\u00a0 It is our destiny from birth and throughout our lives.<\/p>\n

Buddhism cannot be refuted in the sense that there is nothing to tell us a priori whether life is a good thing or it isn’t.\u00a0 There was a time when we did not exist, but we came into existence, more or less by chance.\u00a0 But how should we regard this condition?\u00a0 Is it better to exist or not to exist?\u00a0\u00a0 This question cannot be answered except to say that everything that is alive strives to grow, increase itself, continue its life, and reproduce.\u00a0 This seems to be hard wired into all living things.\u00a0 We are thus accustomed to making the assumption that life is “good,” because we all struggle to maintain ourselves and continue living.\u00a0 Buddhism calls this assumption into question.\u00a0 It does not assert that life is a bad thing, that we should not exist, but it tells us that life is problematic and that the fundamental problems of life cannot be solved — in principle.\u00a0 Therefore all the struggle and tumult of striving to improve our lives and create more of ourselves is fundamentally futile and will actually increase the suffering that is inherent in all of life.\u00a0 John Cage made a series of oral recordings called, “Diary:\u00a0 How to improve the world ( you will only make matters worse),” which is very consistent with this Buddhist idea of futility and passivity.<\/p>\n

Buddhism is based on several observations that I believe are distortions and profoundly mistaken:\u00a0 that all life is suffering, that suffering stems from desire, and that all of our striving to reduce or eliminate suffering only increases it.\u00a0 These are some of the basic falsehoods that are the foundation of the Buddhist outlook.\u00a0 While it is true that all things are transitory, this is not a reason to disengage oneself from life or relinquish all desire for things that must ultimately pass.\u00a0 Transitoriness does not imply futility.\u00a0 What Buddhism fails to recognize is that there is profound satisfaction in the transitory pleasures of life that give us a deep sense of fulfillment within ourselves as well as a sense of meaningful connection to our fellow human beings.\u00a0 This enhances our sense of wellness in life and enables us to impart that sense of well being to others to whom we are connected.\u00a0 We are naturally predisposed to experience life in this way.\u00a0 And while it is true that all such satisfactions are transitory, it is also true that a life filled with those small satisfactions is better than one lived in deficiency and deprivation.\u00a0 One must learn the indifference of Buddhism through long years of self discipline.\u00a0 It does not come naturally.\u00a0 Buddhism is contrary to everything that is natural in life, and it is very hard to learn this mode of experiencing oneself.<\/p>\n

Throughout the film we can see the very powerful impact of Buddhism on John Cage and his music.\u00a0 His use of chance elements in his musical compositions “to free his music from his likes and dislikes,” is totally contrary to Beethoven’s approach to music, which is echoes Nietsche\u2019s maxim in Twilight of the Idols<\/em> : “the formula for my happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.”\u00a0 Yoko Ono saw John Cage as a bridge between western and oriental cultures.\u00a0 But how can there be a bridge between engagement in life and the repudiation of life as a fundamental value, which is what Buddhism does?\u00a0 It is existence without “living.”\u00a0 And the art that it gives rise to is limited and minimalistic and repudiates of all the reasons people create music with their voices, with instruments, and through the incorporation of random sounds.\u00a0 Most people who embrace Cage’s music as a curiosity do not grasp its radical and profound rejection of the very foundations of human existence.\u00a0 This is why it will never have more than a limited following and why Beethoven will continue to inspire and be embraced by people as long as they are able to play and hear him.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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