| John Cage (1912--1992) is probably best known for works that challenge the fundamental definition of music---groundbreaking works like 4&feet;33&inches; and the Black Mountain Event, commonly acknowledged as the first Happening. In the last six years of his life, however, he wrote forty-eight compositions now known as the Number Pieces---works, usually scored for conventional Western instruments, that often contained precisely defined pitches. Each performer in one of these pieces performs his or her music in a strict order, but the actual start- and stop-times for each musical event vary because of a notational system the composer employed called "time brackets." While the time bracket system ensured that the total time for a performance would always remain the same, it allowed sufficient flexibility to the performers in the spirit of Cage's indeterminate aesthetic---the brackets made the music became "earthquake proof," as he put it.; In these works, Cage claimed to have discovered a way of writing harmony that finally pleased him: a harmony that had no rules, a harmony that existed simply by noticing sounds appearing together. He also cited them as metaphorical examples of anarchic communities that would be better than democracy or other present forms of government. His apparent reconciliation toward harmony, a musical element he had long resisted, makes it necessary to consider the role of pitch and pitch class in this music. Moreover, his explicit assertion that the pieces demonstrate anarchic communities warrants a detailed historical investigation of his reception of anarchism and anarchistic ideas throughout his career. Finally, the series as a whole remains little known, and their various aspects clarify details of Cage's aesthetic project; as a result, the Number Pieces invite a general re-evaluation of his oeuvre, particularly with respect to his changing attitudes toward musical objects. Through much of his career, Cage favored process over object; he explicitly cites the Number Pieces, however, as a reconciliation of these two concepts.; The dissertation is organized in three parts. In Part I, I introduce the Number Pieces and revisit the totality of Cage's oeuvre in order to develop an alternative approach to its critical description (Chapter 1). The first extensive survey of the works follows (Chapter 2), as well as a detailed description of sources and the various approaches to compositional method that he used for the series (Chapter 3). In Part II, I trace his reception of the concepts "harmony" and "analysis" (Chapter 4) in order to lay the groundwork for an analytical methodology drawing from post-tonal theory, recent literature on intersections of p-space and pc-space, and contour theory (Chapter 5). In Part III, I explore the rich primary sources of classic anarchism that Cage knew and explain how anarchistic principles are embodied in his work, particularly in the Number Pieces (Chapter 6). Finally, I comment on aspects of reception and historiography raised by the Number Pieces, aspects that I believe affect our understanding of the composer's significance (Chapter 7). |
