When God speaks to John Cage

When reading the Taruskin assignment this last week, I was especially drawn to a William Lyons Phelps quotation within the chapter:

“When we see the Sistine Madonna, or read Hamlet we admire the extraordinary power of Raphael, of Shakespeare. But when we hear the Ninth Symphony, we are listening to the voice of God. Beethoven was more passive than active, the channel through which flowed the Divine Will.”

I was preoccupied with Phelps’s perspective for a number of reasons, but I was chiefly enthralled with his idea that music has inherent transcendental properties that are not necessarily found in other art forms.
I am no philosopher, nor do I have any extraordinary insight into the works of Emerson or Thoreau. So my interpretation of Transcendentalism is obviously flawed. Feel free to pick my argument apart. Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, my jist of this philosophy it that God’s will is made manifest on earth through our instinct. The trick is to learn to decipher what is really instinct and not prior learning tainting one’s worldview. In this post, I am not concerned about music as means of communing with God. Rather, I believe Phelps’s quote reveals much about how the West views the purpose of music and how cultural tradition affects innovation, specifically innovation in aleatory music.

According to Phelps’s view, music has a higher purpose than entertainment. It has a message, divine or otherwise. I am reminded of the post-Romantics like Liszt who believed musicians were superhuman: see ‘The Artist is the Bearer of the Beautiful’ and ‘For the formation of the Artist, the first pre-requisite is the development of the human being’ for further details. In others words, Artist is Man 2.0. Because music is important and has a message, much of Western music of the past 300 year has ingrained specific gestures that connote certain emotions and evoke various atmospheres.


(Oh, by the way, if you saw Clint Davis’s presentation on the New York school, it was fantastic. I’m basing much of my post off of his hard work.) The main innovation in the New York school is conceptual. The tradition that preceded this school insisted that music had a higher purpose, and that the composer used musical gesture to connote emotions, certain ambiences, narratives. The tradition also insisted that the composer’s personal ideas played an integral role in creating the meaning and message of a piece. This where the New York school’s innovation is especially apparent. Composers of aleatory music, such as John Cage and Morton Feldman, divorced emotion and message from their creations. They relinquished control by creating a framework for performance but removing their personal influence from the interpretation of a piece. Aleatory composers relished the gray area between the composer’s ideas and the performer’s interpretation whereas many composers seemed to want to eliminate this uncertainty by specifically dictating their ideas through clear notation.

The interpretation of their work could fall into two main camps. 1. Music does not have a message; it should it be appreciated merely for the sounds being created. 2.Or, if music does have divine meaning, does the composer have any personal influence on that message? The first interpretation shows that their philosophy is complete rejection of the transcendental property of music, a belief that has been present throughout almost all of Western music history. The second implies that musical message, if music is a vehicle through which we understand God, has become encumbered by composers who refused to take a more passive role.

Or I could be completely off base. Any thoughts?