JOHN CAGE

"REMOVE THE CLOCKS TO THE MUSIC"

 

John Cage, 77 years; musician, inventor and scientific.
Scanner of the mysteries of the sound.
One of the few geniuses survivors.
And these incredible reflections on the music of the life.

 

Never I was to the ability because I didn't like the idea of being among a hundred people that were reading the same book that me; it is not the same thing that a hundred people are thinking the same thing that me. My father was inventor and the one said that I was his best invention, they had never studied, they laughed at me when I began to study, clear... I was a clown, a type that goes to the ability he is a clown. I didn't last neither two months.

Anyway one finally finds teachers, for me they were: Thoreau Buckninster Fuller and Marshall Mc Luhan. I spent something when read something of David Thoreau, read something that I had already thought: he wrote my ideas, Mc Luhan also. And he is dead as Thoreau. It is curious, nowadays we live in a situation where nobody really dies, the technology doesn't leave us at least to live the death.

Many times they have asked me because I call flexible music to the music of vanguard: it is because it is the music that has many parts but none is important neither essential. It is music that doesn't need that you pay him attention in any part especially. They are rhythms different with an enormous quantity of simultaneous sounds that don't generate a melodic identity, but every time that I am saying these things I have to remember that all this knows it about my professor Schöenberg, a wonderful man, I loved him a lot and believed in all that he said, but I never got that he liked anything of what I made, when I followed the musical rules on time, he told me: - ¿Why are you so robot? " and when I didn't follow them and was it able to break them, did he tell me - ¿why always these trying to tear you falsely"?. Never conceguí to make it happy.

Now I am working in a music for two pianos, calls himself exactly Two.

One year ago when I was in the Soviet Union, in Leningrado, I met an impressive composer, Sofía Gucbaldulina, she listened a work, my "Music for Fourtein", and he liked but it criticized me the fact that all the musicians used chronometer for the piece. This era a music without director, without pursuits, each musician is only controlled by his own chronometer, she told me that he liked the music but not the clocks, entoces I wanted to remove all the clocks to my music. I began to write a book, How to improve the world (alone I will be able to worsen the things), to write on the no-measure and now I am working in that problem. I always knew that I had that problem: the measure. The music is always measured by the clocks and me I am trying to escape from the clock. The way of which I will begin -no I know if I will end up in that way - it is through the resonance. It will be the own sound who will tell to the interpreter when should begin to play and when should stop to play. There are several ways: when you leave of feeling the resonance you leave of playing, or more timidly, you stop to play before you stop to feel the resonance or because you are daring dejás of playing when you no longer feel the resonance.

There we outline the problem of the time: ¿if we don't use clocks how do we go that is when it is before or later? That is the only question that I want to respond. Without anything neither nobody that determines us what we have to make ¿How we will make it? We will have to travel our own internal sense. We will have to find as well as the sense of the tact, the sense of the time exists. But how will your sense of the time be if it is different from mine? ¿what will we make?¿ will they collide our times? I believe that we are trying to achieve of the music an image of the freedom for the man.

May of 1989.
Notices extracted of the magazine "Cerdos y Peces" N° 45 corresponding at 12/91.