Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - Christian Wolff, Page 11

For one’s own working, experiment entails certain dispositions, I think. For example, unwaveringly close attention to everything: no dimension of the material to be neglected or taken for granted, not necessarily that all of it be used but that it be there as a possibility. A readiness for invention. Cornelius Cardew, writing about the experimental improvisation group AMM, of which he was a member, spoke of “the virtues that a musician can develop,” namely: simplicity – but “you have to remember how you got there”. Integrity – a total relation of what we have in mind and what we do. Selflessness – “to do something constructive you have to look beyond yourself”; self-expression is not an aim. Forbearance – starting with the relations among fellow musicians and the music they make; we might now call it openness. Identification with nature – using “the interplay of natural forces and currents to steer a course”. An identification of “the musical and the real worlds”. Finally, acceptance of death. This was with particular reference to the intensely ephemeral nature of improvised music. I think it applies to all live performance of music which at its vital core involves a high-wire act of improvisation. A number of these qualities or “virtues” are clearly akin to Cage’s ideas, and one could add two more that he especially liked to evoke in later years: the exercise of intelligence and of conscience.

Cage evoked, in connection with his music, principles of spiritual discipline. He cited the idea, apparently from classical Indian thought, that the purpose of music was “to sober and quiet the mind thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences”. This he later modified to be more simply human: “to change the mind so that it (becomes) open to experience, which is inevitably interesting”. The raising of ethical issues is a new feature, I think, in the history of experimental music. In spite of this music’s having a very low profile on the larger cultural horizon, it insists on an intrinsic relation to social life. This in turn is linked to an explicit sense of the music’s being made through performance, that is, at the point where music realizes its public presence. (The notion that cultural and moral issues are closely related is, of course, very old – in the classical Indian, Chinese and Greek worlds, for instance, though it’s a relation usually evoked to counter cultural innovation, in the cause of conservatism.)