101 Questions and Answers re John Cage1) Do you think John Cage's view of the east is profound? 2) Did you ever listen to the piece Atlas Eclipticalis for piano solo in full length? 3) Are sounds just sounds or are they Beethoven? 4) Do you think that we live in an anarchic society since the information technology revolution? 5) Did you enjoy reading the text Empty Words by John Cage? 6) Would you agree that nothingness in art is not nothingness? 7) Do you think John Cage read the Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes? 8) Do you think Leviathan would have had an influence on Cage's ideas about society and anarchy? 9) Why did John Cage dislike recordings of his work? 10) It is true, and at the same time not true, that John Cage wrote the composition 4'33''. Do you agree that the piece 4'33'' would not exist without the work of Anton Webern and Erik Satie? 11) Despite embracing a certain universality towards all tones (as implied in his "there is no noise, only sound" concept), Cage seems to have practiced a very strict distinction between inventiveness and open-mindedness (i.e. tolerance or intolerance of certain principles for his work), for whenever we see him confronted with music forms bearing any elements of a forseeable kind, or let us say, predictable nature, his open-mindedness drew the line exactly there (as opposed to composers like John Zorn, who help themselves to slices of whatever tickle their fancy) - this adherence to unpredictability seems, in part, to have propelled him towards aleatoric principles. View, in particular, his scathing comments on jazz and its clinging to a rythmic base (as also found in all variations of folkloric influences worldwide, by the way)... Perhaps Cage rejected any relationship with any form of music that leads towards any kind of trance state for his own body of work? 12) Just because he enjoyed Riley and Reich, did not mean he had to create in similiar vein. Did Cage, in general, dislike perpetrating music forms that others had already invented? As in, "it's already been done by others, no need for me to do it as well"? 13) Will new vegetarian dance be as energetic as meat-eating dance has been? 14) If we drop beauty, what have we got? 15) Do you think John Cage is a word-laundromat? 16) Would John Cage have liked to be more famous or popular? 17) Did John Cage like the fine arts more than sex? 18) Why does sex play no role in his work? 19) Is John Cage's work really important? 20) Did John Cage enjoy his guru status? 21) Is it true that John Cage tested mushrooms by feeding them to dogs? 22) Does music need ears? 23) Do ears need music? 24) Do you think good things generate good people? 25) Is a happy twelve tone music possible? 26) Which are John Cage's favorite sounds? 27) Are systems in contemporary music still tolerable? 28) The future of music: John Cage's hobby? 29) If sounds are noise but not words, are they meaningful? 30) Did John Cage like company more than mushrooms? 31) Did John Cage like music more than company? 32) Did John Cage like science more than tape recorders? 33) Did John Cage like Thoreau more than absurdity? 34) Did John Cage like toxic clouds more than collapsed potatoes? 35) Did John Cage like microminiaturization more than a carnival-like atmosphere? 36) Did John Cage like the sounds of spectacular car crashes more than muffled dialogues? 37) Did John Cage like married men more than multilingual menus? 38) Would John Cage rather have looked at a de Kooning painting, than eaten? 39) Did John Cage like Dada more than dada? 40) Do you listen to classical music only when you have company? 41) What is happening to us when we are experiencing music? What defines a musical experience? 42) Do you agree that John Cage was the father of re-decontamination of neo-surreal-dada-ism and neo-artless-art-tao-ism? 43) Is there any exact correspondence between the world outside, and that in our minds? 44) Do you listen to mushrooms in daily life? 45) Do you think that the absence of competition would change the music industry? 46) To which sounds do you listen mostly in your daily life? 47) Did John Cage like questions more then answers? 48) Did John Cage dislike digital jukeboxes more than 18th century painting? 49) Was the Bible a symbol of oppression for John Cage? 50) Do you say sorry to your pumpkin, before you cook it? 51) How many passports did John Cage have in reality? 52) Why did John Cage never finish writing the Emma Goldman opera? 53) Did John Cage actually live his own life? 54) Did John Cage like Zen more then chess? 55) The absence of eroticism in Cage's body of work, suggests he viewed sexuality as something to profane to admit to. Do you agree? 56) If there is no noise, only sound, why did John Cage never write a piece of music, utilising sounds caused by armed warfare (machine guns, mortar fire, explosions)? 57) Do you think Cage's expression "I welcome what ever happens next", is an appropriate way to deal with mortality? 58) What kind of piece would John Cage have constructed out of the material supplied by Sporting Girls, by Faye Rossignol? 59) Was John Cage a Zen-junkie, and therefore not available for re-interpreting such philosophies as those of a Hegel? 60) Is Cage's 4'33" a piece only for piano or for any instrument? 61) Do you think bad experiences generate good presidents? 62) If silence can be seen as a structural element, what does that mean for a philharmonic orchestra? 63) Do you think John Cage lead people into a spiritual supermarket? 64) Do you agree that egoless art is a contradiction, and for most artists impossible to practice? 65) Was John Cage a spiritual burglar, and therefore not available for reinterpreting such philosophies as those of a Derrida? 66) Was John Cage just a product of western Zen misunderstandings, and therefore not available for reinterpreting such philosophies as those of a Merleau-Ponty? 67) Did John Cage dislike Stravinsky more than Bach? 68) Did John Cage dislike nasty sex games more than closed windows? 69) Do you agree that John Cage was the father of all-things-flow-neo-romanticism and the re-Byzantinization of asymmetry? 70) Is it true that John Cage had no records and CD's in his appartment? 71) Do you think experimental music will survive the year 2012? 72) Did John Cage read Marcel Proust's A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU? 73) Did John Cage like playing foreign-language tapes in his car? 74) Do you think a composer of modern music should have a monthly income? 75) What happend to the idea of error in John Cage's music? 76) Did John Cage like the re-de-schematization of spontaneity and variety more than day-in-day-out balancing? 77) Would John Cage have enjoyed Martin Heidegger's book Sein und Zeit? 78) Which list would you prefer: a list of things that make us happy or a list of things that make us unhappy? 79) Do you agree that John Cage was the father of re-undoing the non-objectification of subject and object? 80) Do you regularly listen to your John Cage CD's simultaneously with CD's of other composers (first CD player loaded with John Cage's Imaginary Landscape no. 3, the second CD player loaded with Pierre Boulez's AnthŽmes 2)? 81) Did John Cage know the laws of beauty? 82) Do you listen to oriental music only when you have company? 83) Can a piece of music be a metaphor for society? 84) Which are John Cage's favorite mushrooms? 85) If you hear two sounds at the same time, are they really related? 86) Do you listen to your John Cage CD's simultaneously (first CD player loaded with Music of Changes, the second CD player loaded with Cartridge Music)? 87) Did John Cage dislike an answer which questions, or a question which answers? 88) Do you think ecoligical interconnectedness and economy are contradictional concepts? 89) Did John Cage dislike smal orchestras playing for example (near Boston) for a poolside buffet at noon? 90) If politics affect daily life, why did Cage refuse politics or political statments in his work? 91) Do you think Thomas Edison's inventions like waxed paper, mimeograph, electric light, motionpicture camera, dictating machine, electric vote recorder, storage battery, phonograph record, electric pen, electric railway car, stock ticker, electric railroad signal, light socket, and light switch, changed the way we listen to modern music? 92) Did John Cage have a sense for disharmony? 93) Would you listen to a 52-hour piece of experimental music in full length without any break? 94) If words are sounds, are they musical or are they just noises? 95) Did John Cage like low-level-consciousness more than semi-darkness and imagelessness? 96) Do you enjoy listening to MP3-files? 97) If Mozart would be alive, do you think he would buy a John Cage-CD? 98) Do you think a composer of computer music should pay taxes? 99) If John Cage lived in the 18th century, what kind of music would he be escaping from? 100) Is there a copyright for silence? 101) Why is it so difficult for so many people to listen? ::: ::: ::: "Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing." John Stuart Mill, On Liberty "I use 'oracle' here, as I think Cage did when he referred to his use of chance operations as an oracle, to mean an active principle that allows us to be guided by questions rather than answers, by an opening-out of inquiry into a suggestive dialogue with life principles not unlike the selective intersections with chance that are the morphology of culture as well as biology." Joan Retallack, Introduction to Musicage: John Cage in Conversation with Joan Retallack, p. xv "If you use, as I do, chance operations, you don't have control exept in the way of designing the questions which you ask. That you can control. I mean you can decide to ask certain questions and not others. But if you use chance operations, you have no control over the answers, exept the limits within which they operate." Musicage: John Cage in Conversation with Joan Retallack, p. 124 "One person at Black Mountain pestered him [David Tudor] over lunch, asking questions, and David, never answering, finally said, If you don't know, why do you ask? Normally we would think that's why we ask - because we don't know. But his mind is quite different from ours, hmm? And very, very - (pause) Somehow pointing very much to some important fact about asking questions and knowing, hmm? 'If you don't know, why do you ask?' implies that we should ask from some kind of knowing rather than from not knowing, which evidently the asker was not. He must have been asking stupid questions." Musicage: John Cage in Conversation with Joan Retallack, p. 298 "I am not able to respond to the call, to the request, to the obligation, nor even to the love of an other without sacrificing to him the other, the other others. Every other is wholly other." Jacques Derrida "I give you - a pure gift, without exchange, without return - but whether I want this or not, the gift guards itself, keeps itself, and from then on you must owe, tu dois. In order that the gift guard itself, you must owe. You must at least receive it, already know it, recognize or acknowledge it. The exchange has begun even if the countergift only gives the receiving of the gift." Jacques Derrida "All the philosophical questions remain open, unless they are opening up again in a perhaps new and original way: what is an impression? What is a belief? (...)" Jacques Derrida in: Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Dialogues with JŸrgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida by Giovanna Borradori "Why?: the human being is primarily not the no-sayer (...), but no less is man the yes-sayer, instead man is the why-asker." Martin Heidegger "The concept of a question is reed and water. The question mark fades into reeds and water. The question does not exist." William S. Burroughs, Ghost of Chance, p. 13 "(...) For the questioning is the piousness of thinking." Martin Heidegger © 2001/2004 by Raph Lichtensteiger and George Koehler