How Cage structured creativity, why Bach was a follower of Cage, and how
all this comes together in a general theory of creativity
By Magnus Andersson, research fellow at the Norwegian Academy of Music and member of
ORCiM
Why should one bother to follow Cage’s meticulous instructions? Why should one spend time
working out chance operations of one’s own and then perform them? If it’s just going to
sound like chance, why not just play something at random? On a question similar to this,
concerning Theatre Piece, Cage answered:
Well, if they do just anything, then they do what they remember or what they like, and it becomes
evident that that’s the case, and the performance and the piece is not the discovery that it could have
been had they made a disciplined use of chance operations.1
In one sense one could say that Cage points the attention away from how something sounds
towards experience. In another sense, one could say that his disciplined chance operations
served to give rise to new sounds. The latter was essential to Cage. Using ever new chance
operations in his compositions, and obliging the performer to conduct his own work with
chance, were to vouch for the emergence of occurrence of new and unforeseen musical
events. In this paper I will question the governing principles of Cage’s chance operations. I
believe that Cage’s chance operations are not a private idiosyncrasy of his, but that they rather
describe how creativity at large is structured. Cage was not just an avant-garde composer that
turned away from traditional compositional craftsmanship. As I entangle how Cage structured
his work, I hope to show that Johann Sebastian Bach, a paramount example of excellent
craftsmanship, to a certain extent structured his own creativity in a similar vein as Cage did.
As these structures are untangled, I will discuss how they are used by the performers that we
often call creative, with or without the performer’s awareness of them.
Cage was not very fond of the word improvisation. He argued that an improviser is a servant
to his memory and his taste. When one improvises, one makes decisions based on one’s
experience. Is that not well then? No, not if you are after creating something new and
unforeseen. Let us assume that you improvise over a tonal melody; then you will be bound by
ideas about which harmonies are adequate to that melody. Of course, we may think that you
try to escape that tonality; that you try to do something altogether different. This
improvisation will still be dependent on your memory and your taste, because what you
1
Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage (New York: Routledge, 2003), 235.
present is a negation of what you already know. Your preferences will always serve as your
point of departure. Cage’s method was to sever the music into parameters. If we concentrate
on pitch, duration and harmony and think them as separate, Cage’s idea was that you change
the parameters independent of each other. But that presents a problem to the improviser. If
you change certain pitches in a melody or if you add notes, chances are that you will also
change the rhythm to make it go together in the metre of the music, and perhaps you will have
difficulties to change the pitch without also changing the tonal structure of the piece to make
sure that the new melody goes well with the harmonies. So, Cage’s remedy of severing music
into parameters was perhaps not of such great value for the performer, and perhaps we can
understand Cage’s scepticism towards improvisation taken into account that it was of such
great importance to Cage to create something new.
On the other hand, to Cage as a composer it must have been excellent. Through writing, the
composer can indeed change one single aspect of music without letting others follow. As a
surgeon or even as a God of music, the composer can change pitches, add durations, and
colour harmonies without making the parameters affect each other. A musician that then
practices the piece would be better equipped than an improviser to perform the same structure.
Even so, this was not enough to Cage because of the basis on which the composer changed
the parameters. To Cage, the composer was always the servant of his ego, i.e. of his memory
and taste. The composer can in some respects come closer than the improvising musician to
make something new arise, but what happens can never be truly unforeseen as it is always the
composer that makes the decisions of which parameters to change. This is where chance
operations get into the picture.
If Cage could let chance determine how the musical parameters should behave, then he
would be free from his ego, wouldn’t he, and would not that also vouch for that unforeseen
musical events arose since it was not the composer Cage that made the decisions, but it was
perhaps dices or shapes of rocks that determined the exact outcome of a composition? Well,
perhaps that is true under certain circumstances.
In every question the answer is latent, or, as Cage’s most influential spiritual teacher Daisetz
Teitaro Suzuki put it: “the very asking is more than half the answering.”2 If one asks for an
either-or, if one asks whether a piece should be loud or soft, then one knows that the piece
will not be mf. This could be applied to far more complicated chance operations, such as the
Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism. Second Series (New Delhi: Munishram Manoharlal
Publishers, 2004), 74. A little discourse on Cage and questions is found in: Marjorie Perloff and
Charles Junkerman, "Introduction," in John Cage Composed in America, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Charles
Junkerman (Chicago: The University Press of Chicago, 1994), 1-3.
2
ones in Cage’s Freeman Etudes. The pieces are horrendously difficult to play and they also
sound rather chaotic. Even so, are they not chaotic in a certain fashion? Yes they are. Cage
used star charts to map out what he called “basic notes”. From selecting a particular star chart,
Cage knew something about the disposition of events. Cage then, in collaboration with the
violinist Paul Zukofsky, divided violin playing into as many parameters as possible.
Subsequently: “Staccato and legato, up- and downbows, bowing locations and styles,
tremolos, vibratos, a wide variety of martellato attacks, and so forth were all determined
individually for every single note in the piece”.3 From his way of submitting these parameters
to chance, we can to a certain extent imagine what the piece would sound like. Of course we
are not able to hum the melody, but we can vaguely imagine what the chaos of the piece
would sound like. There are other parameters as well that could be taken into consideration
here. Cage decided that the piece was to be microtonal, and there were twelve ways of giving
notes different inflections.
Where does this leave us? In my research on Cage I have tried to establish the term ‘metacomposition’ to discuss how Cage determined frames of function and how chance
subsequently established the exact sound structure. Integral in the idea of meta-composition is
a strive away from Cage’s ego, but as he must always pose a question, he will always fail to
become absolutely free of his memory, taste, mind and ego. But the question of success or
failure is not of interest here. Even so, by scrutinizing Cage’s questions we learn much about
creativity.
If we now look back to the perhaps commonplace example of improvising over a tonal
melody, I believe that we can say that the Freeman Etudes is a much more elaborate attempt
at making unforeseen events occur. Why is that so? Because: Cage took such great care in
formulating the questions that his chance operations were to answer. True, the questions can
never fully relieve Cage from his ego, but through having the idea of making star charts so to
speak compose or at least lay out a composition, Cage went far in making something new
arise. Even so, any question could not make this happen.
If the very asking is more than half the answering, then there must be a relation between
questioning and answering. The question must deal within an entity that in one way or the
other, even if it is only metaphorically, can have something to say about the answer. The
question that for example an equation poses is answered by determining the value of units like
x’s and y’s. Question and answer are related and thus meaningful, whereas if the equation
3
James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 198f.
question would be “solved” by stating a colour or naming the capital of a foreign country,
there would be no such relation and the answer would not be adequate or meaningful to the
question. But in a sense it was the latter that Cage did. If we ask about the reasons for why
capitalist bastards exploit proletarians and alienate them from what they produce, we have
restricted the possible answers. We could say that this is how a primitive improviser thinks.
What Cage tried to do was to ask questions where there was no salient relationship between
x’s and y’s, where there was no connection from question and answer. He did it by tossing
coins, rolling dices and spotting imperfections in paper, just to mention a few methods. In
order to make these actions meaningful in a musical context, Cage had on beforehand created
keys and legends so that the coins, dices or whatever chance methods he used could be
understood in his musical context. What Cage did was to let non-musical entities serve as
pointers towards the sound structure of Cage’s music, and the non-musical entities were what
triggered his creativity.
Underneath this lies that Cage let go of control. He did so by asking questions. As the rock
shape answered, he obliged to the result and worked further in accordance to the answer.
Asking questions and acknowledging the answers he got are features found in the core of
Cage’s creativity and artistry. Cage said:
Instead of representing my control, they [the compositions] represent questions that I’ve asked and the
answers that have been given by means of chance operations [c.f. meta-composition]. I’ve merely changed
my responsibility from making choices to asking questions. It’s not easy to ask questions.4
He also once laconically asked: Why do they call me a composer, then, if all I do is ask
questions?”5 Well, is that not what all composers do to a certain extent? Understanding Cage
is to understand how he structured his questions, and arguably, learning how to ask questions
will turn us into more creative artists. Now, without doubt Cage was a unique composer and
there is no Cagean school that has followed him. Even so, I believe that the structure of his
creativity has been used from the dawn of civilization, and I believe that through explicating
the structure we may arrive at tools that may develop us as musicians, improvisers,
composers, or whatever kind of artists we are. Even so, there is one significant difference.
Cage wanted to turn away from his ego, and he did not want his music to tell any stories. I
Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 228. See also: John Cage, "An Autobiographical Statement (1989)," in John
Cage, Writer, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), 241-242.; and Peter Dickinson, ed.,
CageTalk. Dialogues with and about John Cage (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006), 205.
5 John Cage, "Composition as Process," in Silence (London: Marion Boyars, 1999), 48. The question was not merely
rhetorical. In 1989-90 he saw the act of asking questions as his new compositional paradigm: “I compose music.
Yes, but how? I gave up making choices. In their place I put the asking of questions.” John Cage, I-VI.
MethodStructureIntentionDisciplineNotationIndeterminacyInterpenetrationImitationDevotionCircumstancesVariableStruc
tureNonunderstandingContingencyInconsistencyPerformance (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,
1990), 1.
4
believe that this is contrary to how most artists think of their work, but that does not change
the creative model. Let us now briefly discuss how Bach asked his questions in Die kunst der
Fuge.
As we all know, musical life was not as specialized in Bach’s times as it is today. A fugue
could just as well be improvised as written down. Arguably, one could even think of the
written fugue as a substitute for the improvisation, as an example of different improvisational
realizations of fugues or as substitute for those that were unable improvise such a rather
complicated structure themselves. Die Kunst der Fuge was written as a theoretical
treatise???and there is where the creative potential of the work lies. The idea was to create a
catalogue of possible combinations manners to treat the themes of a fugue. That was the
question. Bach first set down the idea, and we could argue to what extent that idea was
musical or extra-musical, or whether it was practical or theoretical. I propose that we here see
that the idea sprung from his mind rather than from his practice as an organist. Some of the
ways he combined themes would be so difficult to perform in practice through improvisation
that even the skills of father Bach would most likely be insufficient. In this sense,
improvisation was not enough, but just as Cage needed the possibility to change the course of
his compositions in writing through chance, Bach needed his intellect and he needed to fix the
structures on paper and through trial-and-error to arrive at the wished for result.
Just as Cage asked for which technical aspects of violin playing there were and then
submitted them to chance operations, so did Bach ask for the ways in which a fugue could be
structured. Had he answered the question through performance, he would most likely have
arrived at different answers, and the most complicated polyphonic work would never have
been performed. Instead, his composition resulted in sound events that a performing mind
could not envisage.
Let us now revise the theory of creativity somewhat. With Die Kunst der Fuge as an
example, we do not have a piece of music that tries to put the shape of a rock into musical
sound. But what we do have is a very intelligent way of asking questions. We have an
unconventional question that is answered through the composition. Prior to writing the piece,
Bach questions the structure of his questions. This is the essential precondition to make the
new arise and to be creative. Another way of describing what both Bach and Cage did was
that they found limitations through which they worked themselves through. One could
compare it with a chess problem in which all pieces are eliminated but the ones that are
essential to demonstrate the ones that are involved in the problem. Then the problem could
perhaps be to capture all the opponent’s pieces through consecutive moves with the knight.
This is not much unlike writing a symphonic movement based on a single interval of a falling
third, where the first note is repeated three times (knock-knock), or to write a samba melody
on a single repeated note. It is not unlike limiting the musical progression to particular uses of
the twelve chromatic notes, not unlike using a single melody that is repeated throughout the
piece in different orchestrations and crescendoing all the time. It is not unlike deciding to use
two keys simultaneously, or to be the first one to decide to improvise on a particular chord
progression instead of over melodies. The last example leads us back to the poor improvising
musicians that are not to be left as scapegoats of this paper.
When Cage criticized improvising musicians, he had the free-jazz of the early fifties in
mind. Despite the prefix ‘free’, this music was heavily burdened by conventions, and it was
those conventions that Cage objected to. When Cage asked the performers of his Theatre
Piece to heed to his instructions, it was to give them an opportunity to silence their
conventional thinking around music. It was to give them new structures to work within, and
those structures would present something new both in terms of sound structures and in terms
of experiences for the musicians that perform the music. To Cage that was how creative
improvisation should be conducted. It should be a disciplined action based on intricate
questioning. Cage was far less critical to the word improvisation later in life. He must have
seen the many creative ways of relating to what spontaneously happen in the moment. There
are indeed geniuses that are able to create something new as they go along playing their
music, but I believe that this is always based on thorough knowledge, or put in Duke
Ellington’s words: “There has never been anybody who has blown even two bars worth
listening to who didn't have some idea about what he was going to play, before he started.”6
Without prior knowledge or experience, the best an improviser could hope for is to produce a
cliché. By using the knowledge for what it is worth, the musician can produce something
impressive, and with a strong enough command over the material, and with the ability to ask
adequate questions, the musician make the music alive and fresh with unique combinations of
the musical parameters.
Is this theory of creativity as the ability to ask interesting questions then only applicable to
improvisers and composers? By no means, and the early music movement provide us with an
excellent examples. People that dismiss the movement altogether are scarce these days, but
just a decade ago, not to mention when it all started, the opponents were many and aggressive
in their criticism. For the musician, the creative structures were the same as with Bach’s Die
Bruce Ellis Benson, The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue. A Phenomenology of Music (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), 142.
6
Kunst der Fuge or with Cage’s work with chance. There were ways of playing Bach that the
musicians knew. Then one started accumulating knowledge about how the music was
performed in Bach’s time. It was discovered for example that the constant legato and playing
all the notes at their full length was not how the music was performed in the 18th century. But
the knowledge did not fit the picture one had at the time. The unconventional was as appalling
for many people’s taste as the shape of a rock was an appropriate foundation for the musical
form of a piece of music. The knowledge was the limitation put to music. It was the chess
problem to solve, and in short, the problem was: how can we make music come alive with the
imperatives of the baroque period mediated through the treatises? Precisely as Cage spoke of
making discoveries and that this concerned both sound structure and how musicians related to
it, so did the musicians not only create new interpretations, but they forced people to change
their listening because the music did not sound well according to the standards of that time.
In a nutshell, creativity is about the ability to ask unconventional questions and giving these
questions answers that combine expressive elements in unconventional ways. I believe that is
the basic structure of most if not of all creativity, and that it applies to composer, performer,
improviser, and even to how a listener organize what she hears. If we are able to formulate
these questions, then we can sincerely make something unforeseen and interesting occur, and
with Cage we can wish the listener: “Happy new ears!”
Benson, Bruce Ellis. The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue. A Phenomenology of Music.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Cage, John. "An Autobiographical Statement (1989)." In John Cage, Writer, edited by
Richard Kostelanetz, 237-247. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000.
———. "Composition as Process." In Silence, 18-56. London: Marion Boyars, 1999.
———. I-VI.
MethodStructureIntentionDisciplineNotationIndeterminacyInterpenetrationImitationD
evotionCircumstancesVariableStructureNonunderstandingContingencyInconsistencyP
erformance. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Dickinson, Peter, ed. CageTalk. Dialogues with and about John Cage. Rochester: University
of Rochester Press, 2006.
Kostelanetz, Richard. Conversing with Cage. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Perloff, Marjorie, and Charles Junkerman. "Introduction." In John Cage Composed in
America, edited by Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman, 1-13. Chicago: The
University Press of Chicago, 1994.
Pritchett, James. The Music of John Cage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro. Essays in Zen Buddhism. Second Series. New Delhi: Munishram
Manoharlal Publishers, 2004.