In 1983 Audio Arts visited New York in order to participate in 'British
Artists' Soundworks, an exhibition/presentation at Franklin Furnace. While
in New York, a series of interviews and recordings were made. Here John
Cage speaks about his appreciation of sounds, his approach to
collaborations, the artists he admires and his views on contemporary
painters such as Julian Schnabel.

William Furlong: John, you composed a piece that was performed the other
evening as part of the Ear benefit concert at St Bartholomew's Church.

John Cage: I called it "EarforEar", thinking of the omission in the Bible
of 'ear for ear'. They say 'tooth for tooth' and 'an eye for an eye', but
they didn't say anything about an ear.

WF: Well, it's been said now ...

JC: I didn't really mean to cut off an ear, I meant rather that this piece
was based on the letters E-A-R and that it was composed and intended to be
performed so that it could be heard rather than seen, except the--what
would you call it--the announcer or the instigator would say 'Ear', and
those responding would be invisible. There's an instrument that is
mysterious in the same way that it gives you illusions about space, the
Japanese temple gong. Do you know that? When it's played as one plays the
glass in a cafe (you know, by dampening your finger and then going around
the edge) in the temple gong, if you take a heavy leather-covered wooden
beater and rub it very slowly around the edge of the gong, even very large
ones, the sound that's generated comes from one doesn't know exactly where.

WF: Just carrying on talking about sound, you've explored sound in a very
broad sense, in many senses, in a total sense, from sound produced by
man-made instruments to sound that naturally occurs in the environment. As
with the Russian Futurists who used the sounds of industrial equipment and
factory whistles and sirens and so on, do you believe that an interest in
using natural sounds stems from the idea that perhaps our Western musical
conventions in themselves can't adequately express and reflect ideas about
the moment we live in, in the contemporary world?

JC: Well, one could have those ideas, but what I was doing primarily was
ignoring the difference between noises and musical tones and trying to make
a larger group which could be called sounds and that would include both of
those. Just as the word 'humanity' includes the rich and the poor, so my
notion of sounds is all of them, not just noises and not just musical tones
but all of them. After hearing a group of sounds, we say the name of the
composer, like Beethoven. I would rather remember the sounds. This stems
from a Buddhist idea that all beings, whether sentient, like human beings,
or non-sentient, like sounds or stones, our beings are the Buddha, so that
we are living in a interpenetration of centers rather than moving towards
one center. Sometimes people get the idea, or get the experience, and it
changes their way of living, and sometimes they don't. I remember a lady
who years and years ago--it was in the thirties when I was just beginning
in Seattle and I had a percussion orchestra and I was working just with
noises--and she had been in the hospital and she came. She's a fairly well
known person, Nancy Wilson Ross. She's an authority on oriental Buddhist
thought and so forth. Anyway, she came to the concert of percussion music
and she was supposed to go back to the hospital but she decided not to, she
simply went home, and other people have told me that after hearing a
concert in which noises are honored as well as musical sounds, that they
listen to the sounds around them with more attention than they had
previously. This is also for me the effect of modern painting on my eyes,
so when I go around the city I look, I look at the walls . . . and I look
at the pavement and so forth as though I'm in a museum or in a gallery. In
other words, I don't turn my aesthetic faculties off when I'm outside a
museum or gallery.

WF: You've mentioned visual arts, and of course you are very well known in
a visual arts context and you've worked with a lot of artists like
Rauschenberg and Johns and so on. Is there something, do you think, that is
specifically to do with being a composer, an avant-garde composer in
America during the period that you have worked...

JC: That it has to do also with the visual arts?

WF: Well, yes, that you've worked very much in conjunction with artists,
perhaps, rather than with other musicians.

JC: I think it must be because, you see, musicians at the beginning would
not accept my work as music. They told me quite frankly in the thirties
that what I was doing was wrong. Whereas dancers accepted what I was doing.
So I was accepted almost immediately into the world of theater and the
world of theater includes the visual arts, includes poetry, includes
singing. Theater is what we're really living in. So that later when we had
that group of David Tudor, Christian Wolf, Morton Feldman and Earl Brown
and myself, I think that the thing that distinguished my work from the
others, if I may say so, I don't know whether they would agree or not, but
I think that what distinguished it was that it was more theatrical. My
experience is theatrical. I like the other arts. I don't like to close my
eyes when I'm listening to music.

WF: I was wondering if you felt there was an intrinsic difference between
working as an independent individual composer or working in collaboration
with others?

JC: You see, I found a way to collaborate with Merce Cunningham so that we
really don't have to collaborate, we simply do our work separately after
the most commonsense agreement, say twenty-five minutes, whether it's a
humorous piece or whether it's going to be a serious piece. Then we simply
work separately and we put it together in the theater.

WF: Do you work with any visual artists at the moment, painters, sculptors?

JC: I have a very good and close friend William Anastasi, whose work I
enjoy, and we play chess a great deal together, but we haven't collaborated
on any actual work though we might. And his friend Bradshaw, I like her
work. I remain devoted to Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and I loved
the work of Mark Tobey and Maurice Graves, though I rarely see Maurice. Did
you know there's going to be a large retrospective of his work? I think it
opens, in fact, tonight in Washington DC at the Phillips Gallery and it
will come to the Whitney Museum here. I think it will be a blessing to see
his work at the present time in the century. I mean a blessing in relation
to, say, the exhibition of Schnabel and other such things, which suggest
the negation of art. I don't like it, I don't accept it. I suppose
Wittgenstein would say I should take a clicker out of my pocket and click
it, in order to transform it into the beautiful, but I think that it's full
of intention on the part of Schnabel, and I think the intentions are wrong
intentions. I think it's intentional work and I do not like it, and I don't
even think the intentions are good, and I don't even think the promotion of
his work by the galleries is good either. I have no further confidence in
Leo Castelli or Mary Boone. I work, as you know, using chance operations,
and all of my work since the fifties can be said to be non-intentional. I
have tried to get--as Thoreau tried a hundred years ago--to get myself out
of the way of the sounds, and that's exactly what Tobey did with his white
writing, and that is not apolitical it's anarchic. It turns out,
politically speaking, to be stronger than any statements such as
Schnabel's. I would say, for instance, that the work of Thoreau, which is
anarchic and which changed India which changed Martin Luther King, which
helped the Danes in their resistance to Hitler--I would say that these
ideas are very strong socially even though they are non-intentional.

william furlong, audio arts, 1983
www.newalbion.com/artists/cagej/silence/html/1997q3/0414.html