This week’s theme is…A Musical High! Countless music lovers experience a “natural high” from listening to their favorite things. Music’s ability to change the chemistry of our moods is renowned. But musicians and other artists have long been associated with less natural highs, and the link between intoxication and creativity is strong, if somewhat ambiguous. This week we explore music related to the theme of intoxication, or created by musicians who regularly induced that state upon themselves. Disclaimer: The subject of intoxication as it relates to artistry is complex and ethically fraught; none of the writing on Smart and Soulful is meant to condone intoxication by any substance, legal or otherwise, in the pursuit of creative productivity. Enjoy your music responsibly!
A Musical High, Day 2 – Water Walk by John Cage
Steve Jobs once quipped, snarkily, that Bill Gates would be a “broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.” Steve Jobs was never one to pull his verbal punches, but…can we cautiously agree? Is there something about mind-altering drugs so powerful that can open up limited, entrenched thinking and broaden one’s sense of the possibilities the universe offers? I think there’s probably some truth to that. The challenge is, of course, not to make too big a habit of it, and also to find some kind of productive outlet for said thinking that moves the world forward just a bit. I think we can less cautiously agree that Steve Jobs did that. He guided his company through an unbelievable number of technological innovations, from the Macintosh platform to the iPod to the iPhone to the iPad, all of which were quickly copied by competitors as soon as they were legally able. And he did it with an astonishing sense of style and panache. It’s not just that Apple products tend to be more functional and user-friendly than other products, but they are also aesthetically well-engineered in every imaginable way. Jobs has been known to criticize Gates’ lack of aesthetic sense also.
Did the acid trips of his past help Steve Jobs drive Apple to accomplish the things that it has? He seemed to think so, having called them some of his most important experiences. I’ve read that Jobs attributed much of the sensibility that helped him guide Apple to success to the boundary-melting subjective impressions of his trips, so perhaps without it we would not carry touch screen phones in our pockets and tap out so many brief e-mails on our iPads. Nothing ventured…
The history of music is sparse with examples of creative giants who had the opportunity to experiment with the mind-shifting capabilities of major psychedelics. Except for the rock musicians of the twentieth century, there are not any major Western musicians who would have had the opportunity to partake in LSD or psilocybin mushrooms. Well, except for one. And that he had the opportunity is certain. Whether he took the opportunity is less so. But I think most who know anything about him have their suspicions.
John Cage was one of those polymath types. He had his vocation and his avocation, like Messiaen with his birds, Saint-Saens and his astronomy (see this post for more on that), and Mendelssohn with his drawings. John Cage was a passionate mycologist, that is, an enthusiast of mushrooms. Throughout his life he hunted them, picked them, collected them, studied them, ate them, cooked them, and shared them with his fellow mushroom enthusiasts. He even revitalized the defunct New York Mycological Society, whose web page pays him homage in several places:
Given the scope of Cage’s interest and experience with mushrooms, which included a great deal of him hunting them in the wild, and eating various varieties even if he was not sure of being poisoned, I would think it is safe to say he may have ingested at least one or two of the “magical” variety. At least one…or two. And I think his life’s work corroborates this, exhibiting as it does parallels with Steve Jobs’ way of thinking about the world. Jobs saw Bill Gates as narrow, pedantic, and uninspired while he turned computers into an art, which required some highly unconventional thinking. John Cage could have been discouraged out of making music at certain points in his life had he succumbed to his weaknesses and not exhibited the flexibility of thinking that Steve Jobs valued so much. But instead of quitting, Cage pivoted, and succeeded in inaugurating a revolution in musical thought smack dab in the middle of the twentieth century, a revolution whose effects are undisputedly felt to this day.
During the 1930s John Cage sought to study with one of the best composers in the world, who had emigrated to the United States from his native Germany, Arnold Schoenberg. He must have been an unbelievably exacting teacher, a purveyor of peerless musical craft. Cage could not afford his tuition rates, but the master made him an offer: if he promised to make music his life, he would accept him as a student for free. It’s almost like signing your name in blood if you think about it. I get the sense that Arnold Schoenberg was not the kind of fellow to take promises lightly. Cage studied with Schoenberg for two years and, while the young padawan was deeply taken with his teacher, Schoenberg was unimpressed with Cage’s craftsmanship, continually pointing out his weak sense of harmony, which he regarded as a major liability. And Cage just couldn’t get past that. Sensing in impasse, he left Schoenberg, and may have given up music completely at that point, but for his promise. So, he needed a new approach.
And it’s what he started to come up with next that makes me wonder about the chemicals that may have altered his brain chemistry from time to time. Since he could be weak in working rigorously with musical sounds, he changed the very nature of the musical sounds themselves. John Cage asked the question “what is music?” and arrived at different answers that anyone ever had before. The odd thing is that his answers often have a strange sort of integrity and internal logic which actually make his wide-ranging experiments feel quite musical, but in ways that most listeners probably don’t expect. Cage started to find music in places that most musicians had not thought to look. Here’s one of his pieces, called Water Walk:
Did you hear the music that arose from all the elements of that performance? If you’re not used to listening to things like this the answer is probably “no”, but many listeners do hear a very musical shape and texture to much of what comes together there. If you want to hear Cage himself perform Water Walk, you should watch this, an interesting artifact of post war American culture. It is John Cage’s appearance on the game show “I’ve Got A Secret” in 1960, and brazenly showcases the very understandable reaction of ordinary audiences upon first being exposed to Cage’s musical approach, which was by this point quite developed:
I give the host, Garry Moore, quite a bit of credit in his handling of the segment. He is genuinely interested in Cage’s philosophy and asks fair and probing questions to help him articulate it.
Cage’s approach started a revolution which deeply affects a great deal of music written in university composition programs today. Certainly, he is a controversial figure. The perennial debate is, of course, whether his lack of traditional competence was an asset, motivating him to change the way music is conceived of in revolutionary ways, or a liability, exposing him as a hack who was able to capitalize on his knack for publicity. But he has had staying power in musical intellectual circles, and even Schoenberg himself acknowledged the genius in his flexible and resourceful re-imagining of the very nature of music, identifying Cage as the only of his American students to be at all interesting to him.
As with Steve Jobs, we can ask the very relevant question of whether Cage’s speculated pharmacological exploration helped to lay the groundwork for his conceptual pivot. The answer seems obvious to me, but if true, it is hard to imagine a secret more closely guarded in the service of a clean reputation. Cage fits into the overall puzzle of American twentieth century musicians who made it their craft to essentially re-imagine the boundaries of music’s definition. Terry Riley, another such pioneer, made little secret of his penchant toward using THC and LSD to catalyze his muse of ideas. Cage’s ideas are, one might argue, even more conceptually extreme, so it would not be at all surprising to me, and many others I suspect, if his muse responded to a similar catalyst.
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