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2003-11-06 - 9:51 a.m.

I am reading through Tom Johnson�s The Voice of New Music in date sequence. It is a New York diary in the early 70s, maybe at the height of Cage�s influence. He went to a concert given by Rhys Chatham some time in early 1973 which uses two gongs. Johnson saw this as a worthwhile example of Cage�s dictum that sounds should be allowed to be themselves and possibly as a harbinger of how music will develop. When he came to edit the e-book together, he notes ruefully that the future did not follow this path. Rhys Chatham, for example, heard the Ramones a couple of years later and that shaped his direction for some years afterwards.

In the previous piece Johnson reports on a performance of the evolving pieces which became Reich�s Six Pianos and Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organs. These were the first Reich pieces that I got to here as it happens and I found them extraordinarily exciting. It was some years later that I discovered that they stand at a turning point in Reich�s evolution as a composer.

I came across a record of a series of I Ching consultations carried out about 20 years ago � in the I Ching Workbook which was in the set of volumes I took from Regan�s library. This gave me quite an eerie feeling. I checked through the hexagrams and a couple seemed to repeat and so I have tried to a calculate whether they are more common than �chance� would suggest. The answer that I came up with was that their incidence is significant at just over 98% - in otherwords the �chance� of getting those two pairs is about one in 50. This is an interesting margin � somewhere between the pretty improbable and the so what.

This episode provoked me into looking further into the history of the I Ching. There are some who have looked in detail at Cage�s use of it and decided that he just employed it as a �chance engine�. Leibniz was the first person in the West to hear of it � from a friend of his who was working as a missionary in China. Leibniz was working on binary representation at the time. He was struck for example by the binary code for the number 7 � which is III. He seems to have had a metaphysical theory of binary � that it was about the relationship between God and Nothingness. Then he found out that the Chinese used a binary code for rather similar purposes. I am not sure whether its possible to discover easily how much further he took the parallels between Taoism and his philosophy without reading some original texts � I can sense that there might be deeper parallels.

There�s the related question of what the West made of the book between Leibniz and Cage � who was given it by Christian Wolff because his dad�s publishing company had just brought out an edition of the work. I think this must have been the English translation of the Willhelm translation (into German) which included an article by Jung. I think the first English translation from the Chinese was by Legge in the 1880s.

Jung was receptive to the idea that the I Ching used more than �just� chance � he was working up his synchronicity ideas. Leibniz was already looking for symbolic representation of metaphysical ideas in binary code. To me this makes it unlikely that Cage was just looking for a �simple� version of chance but I can�t argue this out in detail yet.

The recording of Music of Changes that I have is by David Tudor and in 1973 Johnson went to a performance of David Tudor�s work �Rainforest�. Tudor had been a close collaborator of Cage�s. Rainforest was a peformance by Merce Cunningham for which Andy Warhol designed helium filled pillows. The music for Rainforest used electronic and synthesized sounds which were played into a variety of objects which resonated in different ways. This entry caught my attention becauseBill Viola, the video artist whose work is on show at the National Gallery just now, was heavily involved with the Rainforest project at this point when I get the impression he picked up some of Tudor�s vision.

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