A Few Thoughts about The Cage

Historically, the relationship between the visual appearance of a musical score and its musical content has often been complicated in the west, sliding on a spectrum between practical separation and artistic unison. This range of representation can exist anywhere between the strict austerity of the works of J.S Bach and the extremely expressive works of a modern composer like George Crumb. Even with that kind of historical variety, in most modern music notation, much of which was inherited from the 19^th century, the actual physical appearance of a score has very little to do with, say, the meaning of the music or the ideas meant to be communicated. For these scores, a high value is placed upon practical knowhow, for explicit precision in notation that a highly trained performer would be able to understand and replicate. In and of itself, this is not a bad practice, but it is certainly not the only way or even the norm of the Western Classical tradition of music. Long before some of the most extreme modernist experiments of the twentieth century in graphical notation, the vocal music style known as Ars Subtilior, which originated in southern France towards the ends of the fourteenth century and featured dense scores which intentionally attempted to match the text and meaning of the pieces. For instance, in some love songs, the actual shape of the notation would resemble that of a stylized heart. The physical appearance of the score was not just designed for practical transmission of technical features but was another avenue for expressing the ideas of the music. Granted, The Cage is aligned more with the experimental tradition of western classical music found in the 20^th century than with medieval choral music, specifically being inspired by the works of American composers George Crumb and John Cage (the title of this work being an explicit reference to Cage). I decided to name the work after Cage as the artistic and philosophical objectives of the piece were reminiscent of Cage’s work in musical indeterminacy. In many of Cage’s works, musical indeterminacy was a compositional framework within which Cage would introduce aspects of chance or randomness into his compositions, often either in the prescribed notes on the page of sheet music or in the performance instructions of the piece. A good example of this is found in Cage’s piano composition Music of Changes, where the choices of rhythm, pitch, timbre, and volume of the piece were chosen by using the traditional Chinese divination book the I Ching. While Cage’s ideas helped form the philosophical assumptions behind this piece, the graphical scores of George Crumb helped to illustrate to me the extent to which traditional Western music notation could be stretched. For example, in book one of Crumb’s set of piano music entitled Makrokosmos, the eighth piece, “The Magic Circle of Infinity”, as the title suggests, appears as a circle which is really a long bar of music bent to become a circle that feeds back into itself. While there may not be explicit musical references to the works of these composers in my piece, the spirit of The Cage comes directly from these composers and the wider 20^th century American experimental music tradition.

Just as much as this work proceeds from my background as a music major, it also is part of my identity as an interdisciplinary artist. Not only am I a composer, but I am also a mathematician and writer, and each of those arts feeds into the others. This score is quite exemplary of that. During January of 2023, I took a class on visual narrative for my English minor, and the class featured a heavy focus on comics and their history/development. The more I read theoretical works on the way comics and visual narratives work, the more I became interested in somehow using what I had learned about comics in my own ongoing work as a composer. Most essentially, when I was reading Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, I was struck by his assertion that space equates to time in visual narratives. After learning about this, I wrote a lengthy blog post for my class on the subject, trying to ascertain if such a claim could pertain to musical scores as well. Time on both a practical and conceptual level is so important to musical experience and performance that I could not help but be intrigued by this idea. 

As much as I found McCloud’s ideas interesting and was inclined to agree with him, I could not help but take issue with his claim that the score itself is not music. On face value, it seems like a fair assumption. One is a visual medium and the other is a sonic one. And yet, it is too simplistic of a division. In music, there is this concept of audiation, meaning when one reads a score, they are internally hearing the music in their mind — pitches, rhythms, and all. McCloud uses the idea of the musical score as a means of discussing his concept of the icon, which he defines as “any image used to represent a person, place, thing or idea”. McCloud uses this definition to distinguish the score and the music in terms of an idea that is to be represented and the thing that is doing the representing. It is this separation of representation from idea that I took issue with and largely am attempting to interrogate in The Cage. Contrast this kind of distinction with the way literary analysis deals with the language of a text. I don’t recall anyone ever saying that the words in a novel or poem are not literature while the ideas they express are. Music notation, in terms of instruction and predefined meaning, functions similarly to the words of a text. If words read internally are just as much literature as words read aloud, then I believe sounds heard in one’s head are just as much music as sounds that are heard aloud.

Besides approaching the music score with McCloud’s idea that space equates to time in comics, another key rhetorical aspect of The Cage came from reading Charles Hatfield’s “An Art of Tensions” in class. In this essay, Hatfield’s chief claim is that “Comic art is composed of several kinds of tension, in which various ways of reading–various interpretive options and potentialities–must be played against each other.” Hatfield’s framing of reading comics in terms of tensions greatly interested me, especially in terms of thinking about these tensions as options or choices in a possible reading which could bring about an indeterminate result in meaning. The more I thought about Hatfield’s claims, the clearer the image of The Cage as a piece came to me. The ideas about tension in reading comics Hatfield describes combined with the parts of McCloud’s writing I did and did not agree with would then form the technical backbone by which The Cage would be created.

In the case of The Cage, there are two types of tensions Hatfield describes that I deliberately focused on bringing into the piece, namely what Hatfield calls single image versus image in series and sequence versus surface. The first category describes the tension between reading comics by focusing on the individual panels of the comic versus seeing how the collection of panels interact form a narrative. The second category describes the tension between seeing the collection of panels as a story that a reader is immersed in versus seeing the collection of panels as a piece of graphic design. However, before I could begin to bring these rhetorical strategies pertaining to comics to music notation, I had to reevaluate what the basic building blocks of music were. What I mean is while I saw the bar or measure of music in notation as the closest analog to a comics panel, since a measure is similarly a container of information and events (although in this case being sonic rather than visual), the structural importance of the measure is quite different to the comics panel. As a composer of music, I was taught that musical phenomena such as melody, rhythm, harmony, etc. came first and notational features such as a measure would be chosen based on their functionality, in how they helped make reading and playing the music easier. Contrast this with the way comic panels are an essential part of the storytelling of comics, where there is a great deal of artistic choice in the arrangement, size, or layout of the panels of a page. While writing this piece, I had to reconsider a basic part of my musical training.

To fully explore Hatfield and McCloud’s ideas, I had to treat measures of music like panels of a comic. This is what allowed me to focus on some of the categories of tension Hatfield describes. For instance, to explore image versus image in series, I tried to balance the amount of variation between each panel or measure of music. On the one hand, there are only 4 distinct sound events ever called for in the piece occurring in the measures, almost acting like recurring characters in a story that ground the piece and create a sense of continuity. On the other hand, there is very little exact repetition between individual panels. The combination of appearance, note order, and angle of the panels helps to individualize them, disrupting the sense of continuity with the repetition of the four notes. To explore sequence versus surface, I intentionally designed both the rules for performing/reading the piece and the graphic design to apply this tension to a musical setting. While the piece has been designed to encourage experimentation and facilitate options, the performer/reader has some specific goals and rules to abide by which help create the sense of a sequence in the piece, namely the defining of a beginning at the upper left corner, the defining of an ending at the lower right corner, the rule that the performer/reader must move along adjacent measures, and the rule stating that measures of music can (with some exceptions) only be repeated three times. The performer/reader then can never be stagnant for too long and must eventually move sequentially through the work. However, the cavernous graphic design of the piece encourages the reader to be aware of the possible “roads” to be taken within the work, as some of the roads will lead to dead ends for the performer/reader where they will not reach the end of The Cage. By choosing the focus on these visual tensions, the musical features of the piece have become intertwined with the visual, where indeterminacy is shared across both parts of the work. This then makes it necessary for the reader/performer to consider how the visual and sonic parts are related and how they are in tension with each other. 

When it finally came to creating the piece, a major roadblock appeared before me in the form of the lack of software dedicated to this kind of experimental music notation. While there exists software dedicated to creating traditional sheet music (such as Sibelius and Finale), most of these programs did not have the options to experiment with notation in the way I envisioned. I was then forced to invent my own way of creating this piece under the conditions of not having much time and not having much money I could spend on new software that I would then have to learn. Out of these constraints I pushed myself to find a way to make the piece using software I already had experience with, namely the sheet music software Musescore, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft paint. At first, I was not sure the software I had would be enough to really explore all the possibilities I had in mind with this work, especially when using Microsoft Word with how limited its scope of usage is. However, as I spent more time working with and thinking about all the ways these individual pieces of software could interact, I eventually found a workflow which made the creation of this work possible. Specifically, that workflow looked like writing out bits of music on traditional notation in the Musescore, screenshotting that work, bringing those screenshots over to Microsoft Word where I could modify their visual properties or write the text for the piece, and then bringing those modified screenshots and text over to Microsoft Paint where I would be able to freely arrange the text and screenshots. Of course, this workflow also had noticeable drawbacks to it, as using Microsoft Word to modify the music notation screenshots would often lower their resolutions, making the work harder to read and understand. Considering my interest in the work of exploring musical indeterminacy however, this drawback from using Microsoft Word in this way was something that interested me. The added friction from the limitations of Microsoft Word helped to bring out more aspects of indeterminacy in the work.

With all this mind, the score I created is a visual and sonic exploration of the possibilities of sound, time, and their relation to space, largely designed to be something one hears inside their own head, reading along the “panels” of music. While some traditional music symbols persist in the score, the creation of time in the work is largely left to space. With only a few bits of instruction, much of the interpretation of the work is left up to the performer, which is intended to be just about anyone, even those with no musical training. I wanted to create a piece that would include as many different possible performers as possible, allowing them to utilize their own intuition and sense of space to understand the work. Many conservatively-minded musicians might take issue with this whole score, reasoning that if there is no audible sound, how could this possibly be music? Where is the physical, real thing? This kind of thinking prioritizes one kind of musical experience, excluding others who might not be able to match that experience for a number of reasons. This is a work which is trying to show that there is more than one way to experience music and the musical. In the end, I believe that music can be experienced in a totally fulfilling manner, even when it cannot be heard.