From the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century and the beginnings of a distinctive American literature, the Gothic has stubbornly flourished in the United States. Its cultural role, though, has been entirely paradoxical: an optimistic country founded upon the Enlightenment principles of liberty and “the pursuit of happiness,” a country that supposedly repudiated the burden of history and its irrational claims, has produced a strain of literature that is haunted by an insistent, undead past and fascinated by the strange beauty of sorrow. How can the strikingly ironic, even perverse, career of the Gothic in America be accounted for? Why has it been so at home on such inhospitable ground?

The most common responses to these questions have recourse to conventional metaphors: the Gothic, it is frequently reasoned, embodies and gives voice to the dark nightmare that is the underside of “the American dream.” This formulation is true up to a point, for it reveals the limitations of American faith in social and material progress. Yet a simple opposition between the convenient figures of dream and nightmare is overly reductive. These clichés, and the impulses in American life that they represent, are not in mere opposition; they actually interfuse and interact with each other. This realization will take us far in understanding the odd centrality of Gothic cultural production in the United States, where the past constantly inhabits the present, where progress generates an almost unbearable anxiety about its costs, and where an insatiable appetite for spectacles of grotesque violence is part of the texture of everyday reality.

According to Northrop Frye, “There has never … been any period of Gothic English literature, but the list of Gothic revivalists stretches completely across its entire history, from the Beowulf poet to writers of our own day.” There was, however, a specific period of Gothic English drama. While scholars have identified Gothic elements throughout the dramatic tradition from Euripides and Seneca to Tennessee Williams and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, it is important to locate the Gothic drama proper in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century (that is, during the period we call “Romantic”),when it rose and fell as a major force on the London stage. During an era when English audiences anxiously lived through a series of political, economic, social, cultural, and literary innovations the Gothic drama provided a major new form of entertainment and of reflection upon a world in major upheaval.

Still, Frye’s point that the Gothic has always seemed belated, always a revival rather than an origin, does apply to the Gothic on stage. Gothic drama arose in England roughly between 1789 and 1832 under a multiple debt of imitation. As Gothic drama, it appeared after and often as an imitation of Gothic novels. As Gothic drama, it struck many as an attempt to revive the conventions and motifs of great Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, or alternatively as a dangerous effort to import the suspect German drama of the Sturm und Drang, a deliberate theatrical style of anticlassical “Storm and Stress” that began with a German play of that name by F. M. Klinger in the 1770s (Mulvey-Roberts, Handbook to Gothic Literature, p. 286). While wildly popular then (as is now its descendent, the horror movie), the Gothic drama has always been found by critics to be second-hand literature: second-rate as literature and secondary to an understanding of the Gothic firmly grounded in the novel. What we need is an account of Gothic drama on its own terms.

This was the way matters stood in 1969 when Robert Hume published “Gothic Versus Romantic: a Revaluation of the Gothic Novel” in the flagship journal of America’s Modern Language Association, PMLA. To reread Hume’s essay today is to be surprised by the modesty of its claims – since it points to conventions, aesthetics, and reading experiences shared by Gothic and Romantic texts and their readers – and by the energy with which these claims were attacked by another scholar, Robert Platzer, in a “Rejoinder” published as a companion piece to it. Their exchange resembles another, better-known dispute between Arthur Lovejoy and René Wellek over the nature of Romanticism. There Lovejoy had attacked Wellek’s holistic definition of Romanticism by pointing to its exceptions. Here Platzer took a similar approach: attacking the fundamental vagueness of the categories of “Gothic” and “Romantic”; allowing for common thematic preoccupations but no closer relation; and arguing for the two terms as part of an overarching “continuum” of print culture. Sharing subject matter and themes, he claimed, did not amount to sharing consciousness, and only the most selective account of both movements could point to real common ground or direct and unmediated influence (Platzer, “Gothic Versus Romantic: Rejoinder,” pp. 270–71).

The attachment of the term Gothic to the literature of terror is quite a recent development - and almost entirely accidental. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto is generally regarded as the first Gothic novel, but when it was published on Christmas Day 1764 it was subtitled simply A Story. The preface puts forward an elaborate counterfeit origin for the text, presenting it as an Italian work printed in 1529 and speculating that it may have been written between 1095 and 1243, at the time of the Crusades, when the story is set. But “Gothic”is nowhere mentioned. It was only when Walpole published a second edition in April 1765 and confessed that it was in fact a modern concoction that the word Gothic was added to the title: The Castle of Otranto: a Gothic Story. The addition was a flippant paradox chiefly intended, one infers, to annoy stuffy critics who objected to the experiment. After all, how could a Gothic story have a modern author?

For Walpole’s contemporaries the Gothic age was a long period of barbarism, superstition, and anarchy dimly stretching from the fifth century ad, when Visigoth invaders precipitated the fall of the Roman Empire, to the Renaissance and the revival of classical learning. In a British context it was even considered to extend to the Reformation in the sixteenth century and the definitive break with the Catholic past. “Gothic“ also signified anything obsolete, old-fashioned, or outlandish.

In the gray early morning of 20 June 1837 the young Princess Victoria left her bedroom in a tumbledown St. James’s Palace, and with it the enclosure of her isolated youth under the authority of Sir John Conroy, to be greeted on bended knee by the Lord Chancellor and the Archbishop of Canterbury with the news of her accession to the throne. The Victorian age began like the ending of an Ann Radcliffe novel: the bad uncles and despotic guardian give way to the true heir, who is now able to preserve and defend her national inheritance. This moment seemed to fulfill the description of the British constitution by the jurist William Blackstone as “an old Gothic castle, erected in the days of chivalry, but fitted up for a modern inhabitant.”

In time the key elements of the Radcliffean Whig Gothic suggested in the above tableau – the politics of liberty and progressivism, freedom from the past, and the entrapped heroine – would indeed be revived in Gothic writing. But in the early years of Victoria’s reign, that was not possible. To some extent this was because of the ambivalence of many social groups toward the institution of the monarchy and the gender of the new monarch, all during the 1840s. The influence of this view of the Queen upon the modes of political and literary sensibility during this time may seem surprising, but it can be amply demonstrated. While

John Cage's visual art, done in the last section of his life, is a collection of forms whose purpose, he often said, is “to sober and quiet the mind.” Cage developed his art with sustained attention, and it became original on its own terms. In a purely visual way it gives a sense of the direction and meaning of his mature thought.

Cage was sixty-five years old when, in 1977, I invited him to come to Oakland, California, to work with our printers at Crown Point Press to make etchings. In reply to my invitation, he told me that he had promised the composer Arnold Schoenberg (in 1934), as a condition of studying with him, to devote his life to music. And then he added another story. He had once received an invitation from a friend to walk with her in the Himalayas, and he had not accepted. “I have always regretted this,” he added.

Because of that regret, he accepted my invitation, and beginning in January 1978, he worked with us for a week or two almost every year, fifteen times before his death fifteen years later. At Crown Point Press, which is now located in San Francisco, Cage produced twenty-seven groups of prints, mainly etchings, and these groups contain all together 667 individually composed works of art. Cage had begun his work as a visual artist in 1969 in New York with a print project, but it was nine years later, with his first Crown Point visit, that his sustained art activity began.

Composition as process

John Cage is rightly celebrated for instructing us all in the pleasures of individuality, variety, and the unexpected. But it is also undeniable that certain consistencies underlie his work, from the earliest pieces to the last. Prime among these was his inclination to partition the act of composing into discrete processes or tasks, undertaken sometimes concurrently and sometimes in sequence. He sought above all to rationalize the creative impulse, to devise techniques and procedures which could be applied in an orderly fashion and which would allow the construction of engaging, useful works regardless of the composer's circumstances or state of mind. In this he differs importantly from other American experimentalists with whom his name is often linked: Cowell, whose theories were often applied intuitively and whose characteristic medium is the sketch; or Ives, a gifted improviser whose basic medium is collage.

Cage's best-known and most enduring systematization of the creative process was his reduction of composition to asking and answering questions: “as a comPoser / i shouLd / gIve up / makiNg / choicEs / Devote myself / to askIng / queStions / Chance / determIned / answers'll oPen / my mind to worLd around / at the same tIme / chaNging my music” (Cage 1988a, p. 15). But this position was preceded in the 1940s by a formalization of almost equal importance, which divided composition into four conceptual domains: materials, method, structure, and form.

The 1950s and 1960s were, arguably, the most important decades of Cage's creative life. During that period, he moved in his work from determinacy to indeterminacy, from conventional notation to graphic and texted notation, from standard instrumental resources to technology and “the entire field of sound” (Cage c. 1938–40, p. 4), from music to theatre, and – in terms of performance space – from the concert hall to the world at large. He also started to engage in a serious way with words and images, and – domestically – moved from the noise and bustle of New York City to the peace and tranquility of Stony Point, in New York State. Finally, willingly or otherwise, he exchanged relative anonymity for relative notoriety, and – for the first time in his artistic life – found himself having to respond to commissions. As he put it in 1971, “Roughly I would say 1952, or perhaps 1954, [was] the turning point. Before that time, I had to make the effort to get [my work] performed. Now other people make the effort and I have to respond by travelling” (Kostelanetz 1988, p. 101). Unsurprisingly therefore, given the importance of this period, many of Cage's multifarious activities of the 1950s and 1960s are subjected to detailed analysis elsewhere in this volume; consequently, the present chapter attempts not to provide a closely argued critique of particular innovations or developments, but rather to create a contextual overview within which can be placed the various facets of Cage's work discussed elsewhere.

John Cage often noted that all of the music he composed between 1951 and the end of the 1960s was written with one person in mind, the pianist and composer David Tudor (1926–96). Unique among Cage's many collaborators, Tudor was a driving force, in ways both concrete and intangible, in the development of Cage's music during its most revolutionary phase, a phase that began soon after Tudor appeared at a pivotal moment in Cage's career.

Cage and Tudor first met at the end of 1949, when the composer was looking for a pianist to make a rehearsal recording for Merce Cunningham. As Cunningham's accompanist, Cage would normally have taken on this task himself. But the piano reduction of Ben Weber's Ballet, Op. 26, subtitled “The Pool of Darkness,” lay beyond his abilities at the keyboard, so he looked for help. His search took him to the dance studio of his friend and colleague Jean Erdman, who introduced him to her accompanist, the twenty-four-year-old David Tudor. Cage had recently heard Tudor and Frances Magnes perform Stefan Wolpe's Sonata for Violin and Piano, and he knew that the pianist was capable of negotiating music far more difficult than Weber's Ballet. Subsequently, he appeared at the door of Tudor's apartment on the lower east side of Manhattan with his request. Tudor consented and, Cage later recalled, played the score with such beauty that Cage was surprised to learn that Tudor disliked it intensely.

John Cage's earliest exposures to music were rather limited, being, for the most part, confined to late nineteenth-century repertoire. Cage began studying the piano at the age of eight, later taking lessons with his Aunt Phoebe James and then with Fannie Charles Dillon, a composer interested in the musical potential of birdsong (Cage 1948a, pp. 27–28). While in Paris in 1930, a concert of works by Stravinsky and Scriabin by pianist John Kirkpatrick inspired Cage's interest in modern music. He enthusiastically explored this new repertoire on the piano and composed several works derived from mathematical calculations, which he later described as having “no sensual appeal and no expressive power” (Cage 1948a, p. 29).

On returning to Los Angeles in the fall of 1931, Cage continued composing, this time through improvisation at the piano. In his Three Songs (1933) with texts by Gertrude Stein, the music closely follows the text. The first song, “Twenty Years After,” consists almost entirely of two motives (D–E–G–A–A and G#–F#–D#) repeated with almost the same rhythms in both the piano and the voice part. These repetitions mirror Stein's poetic style; they are, as the composer later explained, “transcriptions from a repetitive language to repetitive music” (Cage 1989, p. 238). They also prefigure Cage's later predilection for repeated pitch/rhythmic motives in both his twelve-tone and his percussion music. Their texture is sparse. For example, the second song, “Is it as it was,” contains only the voice melody accompanied by a single line in the piano.

John Cage and Asian music

In determining the legitimate impact of Asian culture on John Cage's development, a clear distinction must be made between those influences that are purely musical and those that are philosophical in nature. As to the former, there is little if anything in Cage's music that suggests any kind of compelling interest in the musics of Asia, and even less that might constitute direct stylistic borrowing. Certainly in his early years, Cage had ample opportunity to be exposed to Asian music, whether in California, in New York while studying with Cowell (1934), or through longstanding friendships with others whose interest in this music was pronounced, such as Lou Harrison or sculptor Richard Lippold. Furthermore, during the 1940s it was popular among critics and sophisticated listeners to equate Cage's percussion ensemble works with the gamelan or interpret the prepared piano's delicate timbres as evidence of musical orientalism. Indeed at one point, Cage himself commented that his square-root method of rhythmic organization was in part “a structural idea not distant in concept from Hindu tala (except that tala has no beginning or ending, and is based on pulsation rather than phraseology) …” (Cage 1951, p. 63). However, such comparisons, whether drawn by critics or Cage himself, are actually quite superficial, and no significant structural or procedural affinities between Cage's oeuvre and the music of Asia have been demonstrated to date.

During a lively correspondence with John Cage that took place around 1950, Pierre Boulez recognized parallels between his own development of integral serialism and the systematic procedures Cage used in the Music of Changes (1951). Boulez noted that Cage “has been working on setting up structural relations between different components of sound, and for this he uses tables which organize each component into parallel but autonomous distributions. The tendency of these experiments by John Cage is too close to my own for me to fail to mention them” (Boulez 1952a, p. 135). At that time, with the composition of Livre pour quatuor (1949), Polyphonie X for eighteen instruments (1951), and Structures for two pianos (1951–52), Boulez was intensely pushing the limits of the serial system. He saw similarities between the development of total serialism and Cage's focus on the “individuality of sound,” particularly because the latter took into account all the attributes of sound: pitch, amplitude, timbre, and duration. Cage had reached a crucial point in the evolution of his musical style and aesthetics, the beginning of a life-long preoccupation with chance and indeterminacy. Yet, despite the fact that, on the surface, the determinism of total serialism seems diametrically opposed to Cage's aesthetic agenda, Boulez and Cage had much in common. The relationship among the two composers is symptomatic of a larger historical issue, namely, Cage's place within the development of musical modernism after the Second World War. We shall return to this broader context after examining the evolution of Cage's musical style during the late 1940s and 1950s.

Prelude

Given that he was born, bred, and educated in the United States, the supposition that John Cage's aesthetic outlook was nurtured and majorly influenced by his home nation might seem obvious to the point of redundancy. However, not every American has achieved the same degree of national and international fame and infamy, as has Cage; nor has any other American artist – with the possible exception of Andy Warhol – had such a huge impact on the global development of culture, whether “high” or “pop.” Thus the fact that Cage was arguably unique among Americans – let alone among American musicians – suggests that his particular relationship with America may have been somewhat out of the ordinary.

Each of us, by the time of our maturity, will have defined what might be termed an individual aesthetic locus. Put simply, this is a set of choices – relating to lifestyle, garb, décor, deportment, belief, culture, and so on – with which we (hopefully) feel comfortable; it is also, de facto, the image of ourselves we project to others. Many complex factors will have engaged and entwined during our formative years, in order that such an aesthetic locus may form: some will be genetic, others environmental; some inevitable, others unpredictable. For artists (in the broadest sense of that word) the process is knottier still, for the aesthetic locus is projected not only materially (through clothing, food, or furniture), but also transcendentally (through the artistic objects created by, but existing apart from, the artist).