Records ruin the landscape: John Cage, the sixties, and sound recording

John Cage's disdain for records was legendary. He claimed not to have any in his home, and repeatedly spoke of the ways in which sound recordings were antithetical to his work. Yet Cage was a pioneer in using records for performances, he was one of the first composers to work in the medium of tape, and he participated in recordings of his works. He is among the most widely recorded composers of the twentieth century.; Numerous artists associated with 1960s musical avant-gardes shared Cage's vexed, complicated relationship with sound recording. New genres that emerged in this decade---including indeterminate musics, minimalism, live electronic music, sound installation, and free improvised music---to varying degrees defined themselves in opposition to the possibility of being represented in the form of a recording. What innovations resulted from attempts to overcome the aesthetic tedium of the fixed medium of the record? Accordingly, commercially available recordings of works from these genres were relatively scarce in the 1960s.; In the intervening decades, a significantly greater number of recordings of 1960s avant-gardes have become available. Compact-disc technology ushered in a large number of releases of archival recordings in the 1990s, and online archives of downloadable sound files have made access to these recordings considerably easier. Even though many artists in the 1960s derided recordings as contrary to the spirit of their work, listeners and scholars increasingly encounter these works in recorded form. In "Records Ruin the Landscape," I consider the challenges implicit in historicizing 1960s musical avant-gardes in the context of an increasing number of recorded artifacts.