Monday, October 4, 2010
What do you think about?
If you took all the thoughts that you had in a week and separated them into piles -- as if you were cleaning out a closet or a garage -- you'd probably be surprised at the results. Big piles of thoughts would stack up about work, family, money, memories, worries for the future, kids, bills, to do lists, didn't do lists, and on and on. But would there be a pile for ideas? Just ideas? Crazy ones, small ones, brilliant ones, why didn't I think of that before ones, and what about secret ones. Probably not. So let's start stacking that pile.
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Waiting to see Balanchine's Brahms - Schoenberg Quartet, I naturally started thinking about Arnold Schoenberg. Doesn't everybody?
ReplyDeleteIn the October 4, 2010 issue of The New Yorker, Alex Ross writes about Schoenberg's student, John Cage. It is a wonderful piece, but I was startled by a passage in which he says, "Schoenberg told Cage to immerse himself in harmony. Cage proceeded to ignore harmony for the next fifty years."
Well, this bothered me a little, because it seemed somehow inconsistent, and Cage had a kind of maniacal consistency about certain things, for example, the evident seriousness with which he took the explicit promise that he made to Schoenberg on becoming his student.
Cage was unable to afford tuition. Schoenberg offered to teach him for free, on the condition that Cage promise to dedicate his life to his art. There was no more dedicated artist than Cage, he became a virtual monk, living in the most dire poverty so that he might pursue his various projects.
This led me to think that perhaps Mr. Ross has grasped the right stick by the wrong end. In fact, is it not possible that there is no more faithful, more fearless, more dedicated practitioner of Schoenberg's own harmony than John Cage? He followed Schoenberg's ideas wherever they led him, where no one else would go, into the very realm of nature.
Cage found his harmony not in the Pythagorean spheres, with their perfect ratios and intervals, but in universe itself.