Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - Christian Wolff, Page 5

In the immediate background there were also a handful of scholars and writers’ about Asian – Indian, Chinese and Japanese – religions and thought: Joseph Campbell, not yet the television personality but a disciple of the distinguished Indologist Heinrich Zimmer and just beginning his comparative studies of myth; Daisetz Suzuki, whose classes on Zen Buddhism at Columbia Cage attended; and Alan Watts, promulgator of the lessons of Zen as it related to Western mystical traditions and then, more directly, to contemporary Western life. The ideas and understanding of Eastern thought of all three, as well as of the Boston based scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy, engaged Cage intensively at this time, a time, I only later learned, of personal and artistic crisis. All I saw then was his changing of how he composed, by introducing the use of chance procedures, and how he thought about and explained this, mostly in terms of Eastern thought. I don’t think I saw this change as particularly extreme because of the context of his previous music, which was already unlike anything else I knew, with its sound world of percussion and prepared piano and its tendency towards an overall static and non-directional feeling. The rest of us knew Campbell (whose wife was the dancer Jean Erdman) and Watts too, who took some interest in the music, though more for its connection to Cage and his involvement with the Eastern ideas. This involvement with non-Western modes of thinking, like Cowell’s ethnomusicology, again provided a wider context for our musics’ seeming to call into question Western classical music assumptions about what might be understood as music. At the time our work was often accused of not being music at all.

Neither Feldman nor Brown were interested in Eastern thought. Feldman expressed his thinking in a highly, often very funny, polemical way, measuring himself against the contemporary music establishment, or else poetically with wide reference to painting (new and old), stories, aphorisms and thoughts variously out of Jewish tradition, Kierkegaard, Kafka and many others, mostly European. Brown had a more technical-scientific background. He had studied engineering and mathematics and had devoted himself to the work of Joseph Schillinger who devised mathematical procedures for analyzing and writing music (one gathers, with practical success – his students included George Gershwin and Glenn Miller). Brown was also actively interested in contemporary jazz.

For Cage the involvement with Eastern thought was a way of dealing with his personal crises, in which aesthetic and life questions were found to be inseparable.