Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - Christian Wolff, Page 4

The art scene in New York from the 40s on was very much part of our world too. Cage had been close to artists on the West Coast already in the 30s – notably Morris Graves and Mark Tobey. In New York it was the abstract expressionists, the sculptor Richard Lippold and, by 1954, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns (at that time Cage admired Marcel Duchamps only from a distance). Feldman, through Cage, became especially close to certain painters, above all Philip Guston. Earle Brown had before coming to New York a particular interest in the work of Calder and Pollock. Though I met some of these artists through Cage, found Rauschenberg and Johns agreeably friendly and was very taken with their work, my direct involvement was intermittent. By 1951 I was off at college in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Before that I was too young to be staying up late drinking at the Cedar Bar on University Place where the artists and musicians regularly gathered. Before meeting Cage I had been particularly enthusiastic about Paul Klee.

The close connection to these artists was one of the things that marked us off from the rest of the contemporary music world at the time. The artists and their followers felt like, and often were, the primary audience for our music. We shared a sense of doing new work, and were mutually interested and supportive. The art was in a relation of difference to traditional art that paralleled the relation between our music and the traditions of classical music. So the opposition of abstract to representational in the art had implications for the music as did the art’s immediacy of gesture as against the planned formality of traditional art. The latter had close affinity with Feldman’s highly intuitive and subjective way of working. Cage, on the other hand, was more concerned with a distancing of the self and self-expression which were characteristic of Rauschenberg and Johns. These two also introduced new uses of ordinary, everyday material, literally in Rauschenberg’s case (the newspaper and magazine scraps, a bed, stuffed goat, etc.) and representationally in Johns’s (the flags and targets). This had some relation to Cage’s and my willingness to welcome ambient sounds – impossible to ignore because our music had a lot of silence in it – as part of a musical event. Cage also made use of "found" sonic material, recordings of standard music and whatever was being broadcast on the radio. To be sure, the conceptual conundrums of Johns’s work had no equivalent in ours, though they engaged and tantalized us. Cage’s accounts of his ideas, however conveyed (directly, through stories, in musical structures), were explicit, coherent and transparent.

We took it for granted that we were part of a community that included visual artists. And dancers. Foremost among them, Merce Cunningham, but also Jean Erdman (both had started in Martha Graham’s company), their students and company members. We all did music for dance, where also new ways of working were being explored.