John Cage and the Past, Present and Future of Music
'The Future of Music: Credo' as scenius, not genius
In this and the next few articles I’ll be examining John Cage’s The Future of Music: Credo as a ‘multi-authored’ text that sums up around 30 years of thinking on contemporary and future music by Henry Cowell, Edgard Varèse, Luigi Russolo, Carlos Chavez and many others. The writers Leta E. Miller, David Nicholls and Richard H. Brown have all provided convincing evidence that Cage’s The Future of Music: Credo draws heavily from his reading and research in this period; instead of being a personal prophecy concerning the future of music, the text is in fact an overview of modernist and ultramodernist thinking (and that of music academics, critics, scientists working on sound etc.) on how music may progress with new knowledge and electronic instruments. These ideas can be found in books, journals and other writing on music from the first decade of the twentieth century onwards - if not before. As such, it is better to view Cage’s text as a product of the early twentieth century ‘scenius’ of those working on new developments in musical composition and aesthetics, music technology and the science of music. Brian Eno in 2009 discussed his preference for the notion of cultural scenius rather than individual genius when thinking about artistic and historical/cultural developments:
I was an art student and, like all art students, I was encouraged to believe that there were a few great figures like Picasso and Kandinsky, Rembrandt and Giotto and so on who sort-of appeared out of nowhere and produced artistic revolution.
As I looked at art more and more, I discovered that that wasn't really a true picture. What really happened was that there was sometimes very fertile scenes involving lots and lots of people - some of them artists, some of them collectors, some of them curators, thinkers, theorists, people who were fashionable and knew what the hip things were - all sorts of people who created a kind of ecology of talent. And out of that ecology arose some wonderful work. The period that I was particularly interested in, 'round about the Russian revolution, shows this extremely well. So I thought that originally those few individuals who'd survived in history - in the sort-of "Great Man" theory of history - they were called "geniuses". But what I thought was interesting was the fact that they all came out of a scene that was very fertile and very intelligent. So I came up with this word "scenius" - and scenius is the intelligence of a whole... operation or group of people. And I think that's a more useful way to think about culture, actually. I think that - let's forget the idea of "genius" for a little while, let's think about the whole ecology of ideas that give rise to good new thoughts and good new work.
In approaching Cage’s The Future of Music: Credo with this perspective in mind, we can gain a better appreciation of the wider cultural and creative context that Cage was embedded in in the 1930s and 40s, and how through his intensive research in the period he was a product of that culture - and was a theoretical collagist, a synthesizer of ideas.
One thing I want to mention in this short post is the date of The Future of Music: Credo. Leta E. Miller has convincingly provided evidence that Cage could not have delivered the lecture - that the later 1958/1961 published text is based on - in 1937 (in fact, the lecture took place in Seattle on 18th February 1940). David Nicholls has explained that this makes far more sense in relation to the texts that he drew from as sources for his ideas. Richard H. Brown suggests that in fact The Future of Music: Credo was probably pieced together before first publication in the late 1950s.
But there is one glaring piece of evidence that I don’t believe has been mentioned previously that demonstrates that sections of the lecture could not have been written before August 1940 at the earliest. Cage writes
Most inventors of electrical musical instruments have attempted to imitate eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instruments, just as early automobile designers copied the carriage. The Novachord [released in February 1939] and the Solovox [released in August 1940] are examples of this desire to imitate the past rather than construct the future.
Cage may well have had a point about this, but he couldn’t have written it while he was in Seattle, and it could not have been part of the lecture he delivered on 18th February 1940 shortly before leaving the city.
The Hammond Solovox was introduced to the US public in early August 1940 - 6 months after Cage delivered the lecture to a Seattle audience. Richard H. Brown has noted that the version of The Future of Music: Credo first published in 1958, then in the 1961 collection Silence: Lectures and Writings, must contain material from a number of articles and research writings from the late 1930s through to the 1940s. In fact, the text concerning the Novachord and Solovox can be found in a Guggenheim Grant application from late 1940, and must have been ‘cut and pasted’ into a collated version of The Future of Music: Credo at a later date.
In the next few posts I’ll be looking at this and other matters concerning the Cage lecture in more detail, as well as looking back at the sources Cage drew from.