Secret History of Rock. The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard (4 page)

Scott, meanwhile, succeeded his brother as CBS bandleader and composed music for Broadway and commercials. All the while, his sense of humor continued to shine. In 1949, Scott’s orchestra performed
Silent Music
, a music-less, pantomimed swing tune, a full three years before
John Cage
offered his own silent work, 4’33”. This wasn’t the first – nor would it be the last – time Raymond Scott was ahead of those considered ahead of their time.

By the 1950s, as his music fell out of fashion, Scott focused more on electronics, an interest since his engineering days. He invented instruments such as the Electronium, which he described as “an instantaneous composition-performance machine,” as well as an early synthesizer. Over the next two decades he would play a role in the development of both the sampler and sequencer, the basic tools of nearly all modern dance music. Scott’s recording was sporadic, but typically ahead of its time. His 1963 synthesizer work,
Soothing Sounds for Baby
, featured keyboard patterns that predated similar work by minimalists such as
Philip Glass
and Terry Riley by decades (see also the 1996 album, Music for Babies, by U2 collaborator Howie B.).

DJ Spooky:

Soothing Sounds for Babies
is fucking brilliant. It’s repetitive, with a beat pulse. I look to him as one of the originators of a techno aesthetic, in the way that techno comes out of the detritus of the industrial revolution.

Scott continued composing and inventing until a stroke left him debilitated in 1987. By then, the influence of his avant-garde cartoon music could be heard in the quirky new wave of groups like Oingo Boingo (whose Danny Elfman has composed very Scott-like material for The Simpsons) and They Might Be Giants. Recent tributes from both the jazz (Don Byron’s Bug Music) and classical (Kronos Quartet’s rendition of
Dinner Music
) worlds indicates that today’s musicians are finally walking across the bridges Scott built.

DISCOGRAPHY

Powerhouse: The Raymond Scott Project, Vol. 1
(Stash, 1991)
.

Reckless Nights and Turkish Twilights: The Music of Raymond Scott
(Columbia, 1992)
.

JOHN CAGE

David Grubbs, solo / Gastr del Sol:

John Cage’s influence has been so widespread for nearly anybody working in a certain type of music, it becomes part of what it means to make music in the 1990s or beyond. His influence comes from a few gestures: The idea that any sound is permitted. Something as simple as that, put to such terrific use in his works, just becomes a general fact of working with sounds.

To many familiar with concert music, John Cage is no secret at all. In fact, he’s arguably the dominant personality in 20
^th
-century experimental music. Studied in universities and performed by classical musicians all over the world, his work has shaped the course of modern music. Although Cage had no direct dealings in the world of rock music, his influence was so great that his presence – and that of his many disciples – is pervasive. So closely is Cage identified with the avant-garde as a whole, his name – as it shows up in R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” or in Stereolab’s “John Cage Bubblegum” – has come to signify an entire musical movement.

Like his hero,
Erik Satie
, Cage was colorful and good-humored, and often branded a charlatan by the classical orthodoxy. As perhaps he would have admitted, his work often seems more like a stunt than an actual composition; the ideas always stood out more than the music. Conceptually, though, Cage represents a complete break with the Western classical tradition, a total liberation of sound. His fundamental philosophy that “any sound is musical” would forever change the way we hear music.

Though nearly all Cage’s work reinforces an “anything goes” ethic, his explorations took a number of distinct paths. As a young man in the early 1930s, he studied with two major composers, Arnold Schönberg and Henry Cowell. Schönberg, who sparked a revolution in classical composition with his use of 12-tone music (using all available notes rather than only those in a particular key), influenced Cage’s earliest work. Cowell, however, would have a more lasting influence. Cowell was among the first to bring rhythm – which had long played a large role in Eastern music – to higher prominence in the West. Asian musical forms and Buddhist philosophies would play a central role in Cage’s work. As much as any American artist, Cage presaged the flirtation of future generations – beatniks, hippies, and rock musicians – with Eastern culture.

Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth:

He was omnipresent as an influence on everybody in the arts, more as a theorist and teacher – his Eastern, Buddhist concepts – than for his actual pieces. Later I did go directly to his books and works, though. His inspiration is ready sublime in a way, you can’t minimize his influence, even on people who don’t know it.

In 1937, Cage brought rhythm to the forefront by founding one of the country’s first all-percussion ensembles. The physicality and tonal complexity of percussion attracted him; he believed that drumming was closer to natural human actions (hitting, tapping), and therefore a more direct musical expression, than other kinds of playing. He also recognized that percussion comes closer to the unintended sounds we hear in the world around us, otherwise known as noise. The eventual acceptance of noise elements into art music would have a significant impact on both modern jazz and rock.

Many of Cage’s earliest works utilize percussion, most notably his
First Construction
(1939), which may be the first “industrial” song in its use of exclusively metal instruments (gongs, bells, metal sheets). From the beginning, Cage’s rhythmic percussion works were closely tied to dance; in the ‘40s he began a lifelong collaboration with influential modern dance choreographer Merce Cunningham.

In search of a more economical way to present the varied sounds of a percussion ensemble, Cage began experimenting with the manipulation of piano strings. By attaching various small objects – bolts, nails, rubber bands – that distorted the notes and made them more percussive, Cage invented the “prepared piano,” an instrument with a variety of exotic timbres. Cage’s major prepared piano work, the trancelike
Sonatas
and
Interludes
, is perhaps his most beautiful and well-known piece. But the true significance of the prepared piano was, again, philosophical. The idea that not only was any sound permissible, but so was any instrument – or any use of an instrument – would inspire countless musicians, from Frank Zappa to Sonic Youth, to alter their instruments as well.

Mark De Gli Antoni, Soul Coughing:

The psychological influence of “every sound around you is potentially a musical sound” was exactly the kind of thinking I needed for getting into the sampler. Take a song like [Soul Coughing’s] “Is Chicago?”: There was a building with great door squeaks, so I recorded them. And the question was: How do I take what I think are really musical sounds and fit them in a piece of music so they become not just random noise, but a real melodic, important element?

By the 1950s, Cage had embarked on a new exploration that further employed Eastern and Buddhist ideas: aleatory, or chance, music. Instead of composing, Cage set up situations where chance determined the sounds created. The score of one well-known orchestral piece,
Atlas Eclipticalis
, is created by transposing astrological charts onto a musical staff.

One of Cage’s greatest creations – and certainly his most notorious “composition” – combines elements of chance with nontraditional musical sounds. Cage’s
4’33”
calls for a performer to sit at his instrument for 4 minutes and 33 seconds without playing. The silence enables the audience to focus on the “chance music” around them: the hum of the lights, the car horns on the street, the squeaking of chairs. The piece also illustrates as concisely as possible Cage’s contention that, more than sound or structure, the only true determining element in music is time.

While Cage’s chance operations have had little impact on popular music, the environment in which they were performed has. By the early ‘50s, Cage began to organize “intermedia events,” where he held some of his more outrageous chance operations.
Theatre Piece
, for example, included a nude cellist smoking a cigar, balloons that were released and popped, and a man slung upside down with a watermelon. Events like these became the inspiration for the Fluxus art movement of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, which included experimental composers
LaMonte Young
and Yoko Ono, and artist Al Hansen (a student of Cage, who is also the grandfather of pop star Beck). Cage’s intermedia events were also precursors to “happenings” such as the Velvet Underground’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and later, ‘80s performance art.

Joe Henry:

John Cage taught everybody a new way to look at art. And he was a big influence on John Lennon and David Bowie, people like that. He’s still this tremendous figure. I wrote on my shaving mirror, in my wife’s mascara, a quote from Cage: “Everything we come across is to the point.” Cage talked constantly about getting your vanity out of the way. His idea of looking outward, I’ve tried so hard to work that way. For me, writing songs has less to do with self-expression than discovery. And I know a lot of my sensibility is informed by Cage.

A last element of Cage’s exploration with new sounds is his electronic and tape music. As early as 1939, his
Imaginary Landscape No. 1
used two turntables (today’s basic DJ tools). Later, with
Cartridge Music
, Cage amplified various materials (wire, pipe cleaners, feathers) by attaching them to a phonograph cartridge and running them across a variety of surfaces. The piece, recognized as the first electronic work designed for live performance, illustrated the potential for generating sound from even the most ordinary objects.

DJ Spooky:

Pieces like
Imaginary Landscape
are supremely transitional moments in music. The piece uses radio signals, and if you think about it, radio acts as a network of frequencies just as instruments access a range of frequencies or tones. Playing with both of those he created this weird social piece. He was really advanced conceptually. For me, sampling acts as a theater of memory, and memory is its own network of frequencies – certain things trigger different memories. By putting them together in different bits and pieces you can build new memories, or imaginary memories. Which is like
Imaginary Landscape
, where the psychology of human memory becomes its own landscape. That’s what music is at its core.

Though Cage was not the first to create
musique concrète
(or tape music, which like sampling, uses prerecorded sounds), pieces such as his
Imaginary Landscape No. 5
and
Fontana Mix
are innovative in their use of collage, which would play a large role in later pieces such as
Roaratorio
(1979) and his five
Europeras
(1988-1991). By the time he died, in 1992 at age 80, Cage’s position as the preeminent representative of 20
^th
-century musical experimentation was secure.

WORKS

Imaginary Landscape No. 1, for Two Turntables, Frequency Recordings, Piano and Cymbal
(1939)
.

Three Constructions, for Percussion
(1939-41)
.

Bacchanale, for Prepared Piano
(1940)
.

Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano
(1946-48)
.

Imaginary Landscape No. 4, for 12 Radios
(1951)
.

Music of Changes
(1951)
.

4’33”, for Any Instruments
(1951)
.

Williams Mix, for Tapes
(1952).

Fontana Mix, for Tapes
(1958).

Indeterminancy
(1958).

Cartridge Music, for Amplified “Small Sounds”
(1960).

Music for Amplified Toy Pianos
(1960).

Atlas Eclipticalis
(1961).

HPSCHD, for Amplified Harpsichord and 51 Tapes
(1967-68).

Roaratorio, an Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake
(1979).

Europeras 1-5
(1988-91).

TRIBUTE: Various Artists,
A Chance Operation: The John Cage Tribute
(Koch, 1993)
; an interesting collection – featuring Frank Zappa, Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson, and other avant-garde figures – broken up into small fragments that, when played on a CD player’s “random” mode, itself becomes a chance operation.

TRIBUTE: Various Artists,
Caged / Uncaged
(Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1993)
; produced by
John Cale
, the collection features Cage works interpreted by David Byrne, Lou Reed, Joey Ramone, Blondie, and Jello Biafra of the
Dead Kennedys
.