著者

澁谷 政子

出版者

東京芸術大学

雑誌

東京藝術大学音楽学部紀要 (ISSN:09148787)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.20, pp.A53-A70, 1994

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It has already been recognized that Jonn Cage radically expanded the boundaries of music and had great influence upon contemporatry music. He was an extraordinary inventor, but he was not completely free of relations with the Western traditional world. This paper aims to reveal him as a man who still possessed intention, rationality and ego. By presenting a clue to the interpretations, it should be helpful to the listener of Cage's music. The first section deals with what Cage has adhered to: a fight against the traditional norms, his respect for Schoenberg's twelvetone method, his belief in the importance of electronic instruments for new music, and his faith that the advance of science will bring utopia to the global village. These adherences of Cage show that from the beginning he was never a marvelous naive man free of the actual world. The problems which he held are common to both other composers and modern people. The second section discusses the intention and the method of Cage's music. He had not a lack of intention, but rather a strong intention of unexpressing his own intention. According to this intention, Cage invented different original systems for composing music. They are, including the rhythm structure and the chance operations, very rational and effective means of realizing his purpose, that is to say, to protect the process of composing from being influenced by the composer's taste or thought. Such rationality of his method is found in the twelve-tone method and total-serialism, as well. In the third section, the particularity of Cage's solution to the universal problem about ego is brought to light. When he faced rationality in ego, he gave an answer and put it into practice as a musician: he attempted to renounce his ego, in other words, to change the nature of ego. This renouncement would be impossible in reality. In the field of the imagination, however, all is conceivable. Since he was a musician, he could imagine such a situation and try to make it come true in his music, and moreover in his life. Finally, one interpretation of Cage's music is presented. No one can live without his ego in the real world, but Cage found that in the world of sound one might remain without ego, and continued seeking in that direction. Therefore, John Cage's music can transfer the listener to a world in which one feels free of ego.