John Cage changed my life and Ubuweb brought him back!

I am listening as I type to a 2-hour interview with musical selections and q & a with John Cage that I heard in person at the Exploratorium on January 8, 1987.  It changed my life.  I wrote about it in my PhD thesis, but only from memory.  Now the amazing, wonderful people at ubuweb (see link in blog post list) have posted the MP3 of that very day.

Perhaps you cannot imagine the profound joy this gives me.  The link to this is here: John Cage at Exploratorium in 1987 so you can hear for yourself and then understand.

John Cage changed my life because he said: listen to all sound as music and that his job as a composer was to make the composer obsolete, which was my feeling about my role as a director.  I will type when the music he created (from random chance operations) is playing and will stop typing when he speaks.  This will be my parameter.

I had recently stopped drinking when I first heard him.  I had been having an anxiety attack that evening and my dear friend Christian, my one and only friend at the time who understood what I was doing with my life at the time, brought me to this amazing event.

I had heard of John Cage, but even though I had graduated from a university where he had been in residence in the 1960s was not acquainted with the depth of his thought or achievements.  I had been enamoured of a concert I had seen composed by a friend at Wesleyan in 1986 wherein he tapped a spoon against the concrete Crowell Concert hall, looking mischievously happy in his holey reddish sweater and tousled hair.  That was the kind of guy I always fell for at the time.  Well, still do actually.  I thought: wow, will I ever be that cool?

But, I digress...this was, I realize now, me being exposed to Cage's legacy but I didn't know that at the time.

Interview again...and because the rest is him talking, some quotations from the interview and q&a:

"From my point of view I'm always starting over again."

"...not so much a mood as a desire to hear something I've never heard before...I write music in order to hear it.  And I try to find ways of doing that that will succeed."

"instead of self-expression I'm involved in self-alteration"

"asking questions that are as radical as I can make them...with chance operations...to bring about an experience with sound I've never had."

"Zen monk: now that I'm enlightened I'm as miserable as ever.  I don't mean to say I'm enlightened but I think I am less confused."

"the purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind and thus make is susceptible to divine influences."

"I was making music without intending to...I decided to go in the direction of non-intention."

"to show with the silent piece [4'33"] that there were sounds all the time"

"government could very well lose our attention"

"in sense the connection tends to be single and nonsense is rich and the connections are not fixed"

"each one of us should live originally"

"I do not own a music playing machine.  I just listen to the sounds around me."

***

Having spent the last two hours listening to the artist who perhaps makes me happier than anyone on the planet, I am now happily exhausted.  So I will leave you with these quotes and the link to hear the interview and some of his music.  I am amazed, re-listening to this event 24 1/2 years later, how much it did affect me as an artist and as a person.

My emotional memory from that date was having that quivering sense of recognition one gets when listening to someone who seems to have words for all the inchoate ideas and emotions in one's own soul that have not yet found articulation.  I was outside the main hall, so saw Cage's face on a large screen and it appeared as if he had some kind of halo of light around him.  That sounds crazy religious I know, but it wasn't that.  It was simply a light.  Whatever anxiety I was feeling melted away into the sanity of his words and his music and his presence.

There were 10 minutes cut off from the first sound file, which I am trying to get to play but as my internet connection is glacially slow, I will post this before that happens.  If he discusses some of the things I remember him discussing but did not hear yet, will mention it tomorrow.

For now, I'm just happy I picked a good hero, who has so far not diminished in my eyes.  In fact, he was central to my PhD thesis as a primary example of an artist practitioner who is also a philosopher - through the events he created - and if anything his influence is more profound on me with each passing year.