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).

In June 1975, John Cage was a guest composer at Morton Feldman's first “June in Buffalo” seminar. At regular meetings during the week he had the attending young composers talk about and play their music, and he would comment. Since there were too many composers for the allotted time, Cage assigned everyone a number and used the I Ching to choose which composers should speak. One young woman was incensed by the arbitrariness of this method, and every day became more vocal opposing it. The other young composers, myself included (for I was there), regarded Cage's slightest whim as divine mandate and considered the young woman a pain in the neck. Opinions that she should shut up abounded between sessions. Finally, at one of the sessions Cage entered and began by saying, “I've been thinking it over, and I've decided that Mary's right. We'll drop the chance operations, and whoever wants may talk about their work.”

Of all the lessons I learned from Cage, that was the biggest, the most startling, and the most profound: the Confucian principle that ideas exist for the sake of people, not the other way around. Mary probably was right, but our unquestioned assumption of Cage's greatness threw any disagreement from so obscure a source into relief as a falsehood not worthy of examination. Cage was more open-minded than any of us. Nor was the lesson primarily, or at least exclusively, an ethical one.

Postmodernism is best understood as an ensemble of discourses that is not only internally diverse but also contradictory in its relationship to modernism. For postmodernism is both a rejection of modernism, because it jettisons the modernist fascination with system and form, and a transformation, in the sense that it reveals aspects of modernism that were previously undervalued. Given that the range of influences which contributed to the career of John Cage is as tangled as the diverse currents that feed postmodernism, it is not difficult to find parallels between Cage's aesthetics and the postmodernist ethos. Add to this Cage's apparent appetite for unresolved paradoxes, and it is tempting to argue that this is the sense in which Cage is most consistently postmodernist. However, not all Cage's contradictions are postmodernist contradictions. Indeed the difficulties presented by trying to decide whether Cage is modernist or postmodernist, demonstrate just how hard it is to draw a rigid line between the two mindsets.

Before considering further the affinities between Cage and postmodernism, it is necessary to map some of the salient features of postmodernism, while noting that Cage's activities are not only described by this category but also contribute to its formation. The postmodern response to the rationalizing processes of modernity falls into two main strands. One offers an intensification of modernity, drawing on the energy of post-industrial new technologies and comfortably inhabiting the increasingly manufactured worlds we have created. The other strand counters the incursions of technocratic systems on nature and communities and is characterized by, for example, the ecology movement and new-age beliefs. Of course, there are many shades and variations of opinion between these hyper-modern and anti-modern extremes.

John Cage's first substantive essay was written in 1928 and delivered in Los Angeles as a prize-winning speech at the Southern California Oratorical Contest. Entitled “Other People Think,” it addressed “American Intervention in Latin America” – in particular, the control of Bolivia's finances by a cartel of American bankers and the Marine Corps’ military intervention in Nicaragua. It was hortative and predictive: “We must learn that the day is coming when no one will need our aid … our posterity must not be slandered as the devotee of a Golden God” (Kostelanetz 1971, pp. 48–49). Cage liked it.

Cage was revising his final essay, “Overpopulation and Art,” at the time of his death, having delivered it at Stanford in January 1992. It too is hortative; indeed, it is remarkably directive in its admonitions: “first the wOrld's prime / Vital / problEm is how / to multiply by thRee … / … / … the overall / Performance realizations of the world's / comprehensive resoUrces … / … / next instead Of ownership / indiVidual / 24 hour usE of facilities / … / and then stOpping / the remoVal / of fossil fuEls / fRom the earth / … / third alOng with / the remoVal / of nations thE / Removal of schools …” (Perloff & Junkerman 1994, pp. 28–30).

John Cage was an American original. His inventiveness, which he claimed as originating from his father, has an “American-ness” that has a long history, dating back to the very beginnings of European migration to the “new world.” Historian Brooke Hindle asks, “how could the custodians of an empty continent, far distant from the economic power centers of Europe and from its busy workshops and rising factories, move on to take leadership in one line after another of mechanization and innovation?” (Hindle 1981, p. 3). While that question requires an entire book for Hindle to answer, by the time Cage was writing music, the notion that the United States was an important source of newness, innovation and invention was well established. Cage's sense of invention–whether it be the discovery of new sounds through percussion or the creation of the prepared piano in the 1930s and 1940s, or the more (in)famous explorations into chance and indeterminacy in the 1940s and 1950s – is the stuff of legend and, as well, the very things most strikingly not European in Cage's work.

Other so-called American originals intentionally grounded their work in a way that differentiated it from Europe. Authors that later became especially influential to Cage, Ralph Waldo Emerson and particularly Henry David Thoreau, saw themselves as writing a way out of European influence. Emerson wrote, “It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans” and “why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model?

In the summer of 1952, a remarkable theatrical presentation took place in the dining hall of Black Mountain College in rural North Carolina. The audience – students and faculty at the school's summer session – were seated in a square broken by aisles into four triangles whose apexes merged toward the center. On each chair sat an empty cup, purpose unspecified; many people used them as ashtrays. John Cage (according to his recollections a decade later) stood on a ladder at one edge of the square dressed in a black suit reading from his “Juilliard Lecture.” Another ladder served as a podium for M. C. Richards and Charles Olson, who ascended it to read poetry. Suspended from the ceiling were four all-white paintings by Robert Rauschenberg, providing the backdrop for slides and a film by Nicholas Cernovitch. Rauschenberg stood below them operating an Edison horn record player, switching scratchy recordings on and off. Merce Cunningham danced down the aisles followed by a dog, and David Tudor played the piano. According to Cage, the performance lasted 45 minutes (the time it took to read his lecture), at the end of which the cups – even those used as ashtrays – were filled with coffee.

In later years, Cage's 1952 Black Mountain Piece would assume epic proportions, touted as the first of many mixed-media, multi-disciplinary, anti-establishment “happenings.” At the time, though, it seemed far less momentous. “I laughed a lot,” recalls Lou Harrison. “There was so much going on and it seemed so absurd” (Harrison 1995).

Throughout his career, John Cage was an active author, his first musical essays dating from around 1937, and few American composer-authors can rival him in terms of the sheer quantity of musical prose that he generated (Copland and Sessions come to mind as potential peers). Even fewer equal him in formulating an explicit, thoroughly detailed aesthetic, and those who are content with the simplistic image of Cage as the all-permissive composer who espoused a goal to “let sounds be themselves” need to recall that he ultimately wrote several hundred pages' worth of essays and lectures qualifying exactly what he meant by that statement. His first twenty years' worth of writings became available to the general public only in the early 1960s, concurrent with or even before the publication of most of his compositions. Historically, therefore, these prose works were not read by Cage enthusiasts as tangential afterthoughts but served as the initial springboard by which many were first introduced to the composer, sometimes long before the actual opportunity to hear one of his compositions ever arose. In fact, in the context of Cage's total creative output, these writings are not to be regarded as mere peripheral supplements to his music, art or poetry, but as the central means to the comprehension of such works. It would be impossible to accurately summarize the aesthetic parameters of Cage's writings in the brief space of this chapter.

Levinas survived the Second World War under difficult and humiliating circumstances, while his family, with the exception of his wife and daughter, perished. These experiences may well have shaped his sense that what is demanded of us is an 'infinite' willingness to be available to and for the other's suffering. 'The Other's hunger - be it of the flesh, or of bread - is sacred; only the hunger of the third party limits its rights', Levinas writes in the preface to Difficult Freedom. To understand fully what Levinas means here would be to understand his whole philosophy. I want to make a beginning at such an understanding.

LEVINAS’S MISSION TO THE GENTILES

Levinas’s audience is typically a gentile audience. He celebrates Jewish particularity in essays addressed to Christians and to modern people generally. He is fully aware of this. Thus he writes ‘Lest the union between men of goodwill which I desire to see be brought about only in a vague and abstract mode, I wish to insist here on the particular routes open to Jewish monotheism’ (df 21–2) – and again,

The main text for addressing the concept of 'substitution' is Levinas's essay of the same name. The essay exists in two versions. The first version was delivered as a lecture in Brussels in November 1967 and was revised for publication in the Revue Philosophique de Louvain in the following year (bwp 79-95). Although the essay was published on its own, as a lecture it had been preceded the day before by a reading of 'Proximity', the contents of which are familiar from the text of 'Language and Proximity' (cp 109-26). The second and better known version of 'Substitution' was published in 1974 as the central chapter of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (ob 99-129). I shall focus on the first version of 'Substitution' in the conviction that Levinas's train of thought is more readily identified in his initial formulation of it, referencing the second version only when it departs from the first in some significant way.