Although the music and philosophy of John Cage (1912-92) exert extraordinary influence on both the art world and popular culture, few scholars have examined the composer’s views on musical performance and its potential for the cultivation of a more just and non-hierarchical society. Cage’s experiments with chance operations and open-ended indeterminate scores present significant challenges to conventional methods of performance analysis and evaluation. His compositional process represents a shift from the creation of musical objects (stable texts with which performances achieve greater or lesser degrees of fidelity) to the creation of musical events (open-ended activities that propose no authoritative relationship to the performances generated), and thus requires new interpretive and evaluative approaches. These new approaches offer exemplars of a mode of ethical judgment that forgoes the prescriptions provided by models, rules, moral injunctions, and habit. In their place, Cage calls for an evaluative practice attuned to the specificities of each open-ended process and the material situations in which they are enacted – a practice that has profound practical, philosophical, and political implications not only for the performance of music, but for life in a complex and constantly changing world.
This project addresses these performance issues and their far-reaching ramifications by staging a rapprochement between Cage and contemporary thinkers pursuing similar lines of inquiry. Chief amongst these is Gilles Deleuze (1925-95), a philosopher with whom Cage shares an insistence on the primacy of difference over stability, the privileging of process over product, and resistance to restrictive applications of power at the individual level (through habit and enculturation) and at the level of the collective (through rule-bound authority). By viewing Cage’s music and writing through the prism of his likeminded contemporaries, this study aims to demonstrate the resonance between his unique perspective on the ontological status of the musical work, on the ethical demands assumed by performers, and on his broader aspirations for a sustainable, leaderless future. As the world grows more Cagean in its complexity, this study should provide theoretical and practical support to Cage scholars, performers, and to all interested in the intersection between art and politics at the dawn of the twenty-first century.