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All of this paints a very gloomy picture, for those of us who admire the free-spirited idealism of the avant-garde. Today, the avant-garde is often pronounced dead and even those who were its most active proponents have rejected its basic assumptions. Consider, for example, the following statement by Jackson Mac Low, a poet who attended Cage's classes at the New School in the 1950s. Open to all poetries, I am shipwrecked amid such terms as "avant-garde" and "experimental"--words largely abandoned by many who share my universe of discourse. . . . The idea of a vanguard party--the political avant-garde--has been thoroughly discredited, and like militarism it has no place in discussions of the arts. "Avant-garde," like "vanguard," carries within it the self-congratulatory presumption that one's group is "ahead of" and more knowing than everyone else in one's field, more far seeing and worthy of leading, and justified in putting down all who do not share the group's preconceptions.[51] But while we no longer value progress and innovation in the arts as highly as in the past, the political and social transformation of society advocated by avant-gardism still remains a goal that is now sought using different means. And it is here that we return to John Cage's contribution to the development of avant-garde aesthetics in the twentieth-century. During the 1950s, works such as Cage's Music of Changes (1951) and his Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1958) drew upon the premise that art equals life by "imitating nature in her manner of operation." This approach is certainly congruent with the historical avant-garde's aesthetic claims. But Cage's ultramodernist compositional methods and the resultant abstract depersonalized mode of musical expression seem to differentiate his work from that of his iconoclastic predecessors. The passivity and apparent absence of political engagement characteristic of Cage's music from this period differs markedly from works by the historical avant-garde. Although Cage must have surely supported many of the goals of the 1960s protest movement, he did not support its methods. In a conversation with Morton Feldman about the Vietnam War he explained: You know, my tendency is to think of these activities--of protest, and of parades, and objections, and all these things--as being like critical actions rather than composing actions. I know, in my case and certainly in your case, that nothing that the critic said stopped me from composing. Now it seems to me that the war is not going to be stopped by critical action, or, if it is stopped that it will be suceeded by another war, et cetera. I think something like a composing action needs to be made rather than like a critical action, in order to bring about a world where these things to which we clearly and rightfully object will not take place.[52] These ideas lead us to Cage's approach toward the political and social function of art and ultimately to his transformation of avant-garde aesthetics. Towards the end of the 1960s Cage paid increasing attention to relationships between art and political and social structures. Art and life remained inseparable for Cage, but a work of art also constituted a model of how an ideal world might be constructed. This idea is stated in Cage's essay "The Future of Music" (1974): Less anarchic kinds of music give examples of less anarchic states of society. The masterpieces of Western music exemplify monarchies and dictatorships. Composer and conductor: king and prime minister. By making musical situations which are analogies to desirable social circumstances which we do no yet have, we make music suggestive and relevant to the serious questions which face Mankind.[54] The political intent of a work conceived in this way lies in its offering us alternative epistemologies with the hope that these might lead to a radical reshaping of our political and social structures.[55] This approach constitutes what the Marxist literary critic Raymond Williams has termed alternative culture, which he contrasts with oppositional culture--a tactic that also strives for social change, but through a much more overt and confrontational political message.[56] Seen in this light, even Cage's most abstract ultra-modernist compositions from the early 1950s are steps toward his formulation of musical works as idealized social structures; for by "letting sounds be themselves" in works such as the Music of Changes he created a musical anarchy which would later offer us models for alternative forms of social and political organization. Cage's early interest in the future of music increasingly became a concern for the state of the world, a preoccupation that persisted throughout his artistic career. A call for the political and social transformation of society was echoed in every one of his works from those which had a more overt (and oppositional) political message such as "Lecture on the Weather" or his mesostic poem entitled "Anarchy" to works in which Cage's political voice was subliminal. This latter mode of socio-political discourse is perhaps most dynamically demonstrated by Cage's late music such as 13 (1992, for a chamber ensemble of 13 instruments) where his principle of "anarchic harmony" models an idealized social structure through harmonic configurations that are surprisingly conventional but remain free from a central and dominating tone. His invention of the "Musicircus"--a genre of performance based on the superimposition of a variety of musical events[57]--is yet another example of Cage's utopian anarchism with its balance between the integrity of the parts and the unity of the experiential whole.
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Cage was inspired by James Joyce's Finnegan's
Wake and particularly "Here comes everybody"--a
phrase which reappears throughout the novel. His aesthetic pluralism
allowed for an infinite range of musical materials and Cage saw
in Joyce's text an analogous cultural pluralism that supplied
a foundation for his social philosophy. This was musically portrayed
in HMCIEX (an anagram derived from "HCE mix"),
a work based on folk songs from 151 countries and Roaratorio,
a composition that combines a recording of Cage reading his mesostic
poem "Writing a Second Time through Finnegan's Wake"
with music consisting of sounds from around the world.