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i
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

ii
The Oxford Music/Media Series

Daniel Goldmark, Series Editor
Tuning In: American Narrative Television Music Mismatched Women: The Siren’s Song Through the
Ron Rodman Machine
Special Sound: The Creation and Legacy of the BBC Jennifer Fleeger
Radiophonic Workshop Robert Altman’s Soundtracks: Film, Music
Louis Niebur and Sound from M*A*S*H to A Prairie Home
Seeing Through Music: Gender and Modernism in Companion
Classic Hollywood Film Scores Gayle Sherwood Magee
Peter Franklin Back to the Fifties: Nostalgia, Hollywood Film, and
An Eye for Music: Popular Music and the Popular Music of the Seventies and Eighties
Audiovisual Surreal Michael D. Dwyer
John Richardson The Early Film Music of Dmitry Shostakovich
Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Joan Titus
Virtual Performance Making Music in Selznick’s Hollywood
Kiri Miller Nathan Platte
Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Hearing Haneke: The Sound Tracks of a
Art-Music Radical Auteur
Holly Rogers Elsie Walker
Composing for the Red Screen: Prokofiev and Unlimited Replays: Video Games and
Soviet Film Classical Music
Kevin Bartig William Gibbons
Saying It With Songs: Popular Music and the Hollywood Harmony: Musical Wonder and the
Coming of Sound to Hollywood Cinema Sound of Cinema
Katherine Spring Frank Lehman
We’ll Meet Again: Musical Design in the Films of French Musical Culture and the Coming of
Stanley Kubrick Sound Cinema
Kate McQuiston Hannah Lewis
Occult Aesthetics: Synchronization in Sound Film Theories of the Soundtrack
K.J. Donnelly James Buhler
Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Through the Looking Glass: John Cage and
Imagination Avant-Garde Film
William Cheng Richard H. Brown
Sounding American: Hollywood, Opera, and Jazz
Jennifer Fleeger
iii
THROUGH THE
LOOKING GLASS
John Cage and Avant-Garde Film
Richard H. Brown
1
iv
1
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You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Brown, Richard H., 1982–author.
Title: Through the looking glass : John Cage and avant-garde film /Richard H. Brown.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2019. |
Series: The Oxford music/media series | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018015150 (print) | LCCN 2018021953 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190628093 (updf ) |
ISBN 9780190628109 (epub) | ISBN 9780190628116 (Oxford Scholarship Online) |
ISBN 9780190628079 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190628086 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Cage, John—Criticism and interpretation. | Music—20th century—History
and criticism. | Experimental films—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC ML410.C24 (ebook) | LCC ML410.C24 B76 2018 (print) | DDC 780.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018015150
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Paperback printed by WebCom, Inc., Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
This volume is published with the generous support of the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American
Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation
v
What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the
best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking
always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your
fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.
— H e n r y D a v i d Thoreau, “Sounds,” from Walden; or, Life in the Woods, 1854
vi
vi
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Audiovisu(ality)(ology) 1
1. The Spirit Inside Each Object: Oskar Fischinger, Sound
Phonography, and the “Inner Eye” 15
2. “Dreams That Money Can Buy”: Trance, Myth, and Expression,
1941–1948 49
3. Losing the Ground: Chance, Transparency, and Cinematic
Space, 1948–1958 91
4. “Cinema Delimina”: Post-Cagean Aesthetics, Medium
Specificity, and Expanded Cinema 139
Conclusion: “Through the Looking Glass”: Poetics and Chance
in John Cage’s One11 173
Notes 181
References 217
Index 233
vi
ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
That is finished now. It was a pleasure. And now this is a pleasure.

—J o h n C a g e
This study would not have come about were it not for the generous support and
encouragement from scholars, artists, and family. First and foremost, I would like
to thank Joanna Demers for running with the topic from day one and pushing
me along at every step of the way with brilliant editorial critiques and kind words
of encouragement; David James, for sparking my interest in experimental film,
thus fueling the trajectory of this topic; and Bryan Simms, for his guidance in the
process of writing and researching about 20th-century music. In addition, I owe a
great debt to Robert Moore’s keen analytic insight and for his unwavering advo-
cacy for all things Zen, as well as George Wilson for his guidance with the history
of film philosophy, and finally Brian Head for taking time out from our many
private guitar lessons over the years to discuss the esoteric world of John Cage,
cathode-ray tubes, and anything else that hid the obvious fact that I had spent the
week researching and not rehearsing.
This study would not have taken its current shape without the guidance of
many archivists, most notably the encouragement and zeal of Laura Kuhn at the
John Cage Trust, Cindy Keefer and Barbara Fischinger at the Center for Visual
Music, and Augusto Morselli at the Richard Lippold Foundation. Many other
archivists have aided this research along the way, including Nancy Perloff at the
Getty Research Institute, Jonathan Hiam and Bob Kosovsky at the New York
Public Library, Music Division, D. J. Hoek and Jennifer Ward at Northwestern
University Music Library, Jennifer Hadley at the Wesleyan University Special
Collections Library, David Vaughan at the Merce Cunningham Dance Company
Archives, Robert Haller and Andrew Lampert at Anthology Film Archives,
Marisa Bourgoin at the Archives of American Art, Bill O’Hanlon at the Stanford
University Special Collections, Charles Silver at the Museum of Modern Art
Film Study Center, and Tom Norris at the Norton Simon Museum.
In addition, this research has benefited from the many detailed comments and
critiques of scholars within the world of Cage Studies, and I would like to extend
a special note of thanks to all who were willing to guide my thoughts through
the process of writing and revising: Gordon Mumma, Kenneth Silverman,
James Pritchett, David Bernstein, David Nicholls, David Patterson, Christopher
x
x • Acknowledgments
Shultis, Leta Miller, Suzanne Robinson, John Holzapfel, Mark Swed, Mina Yang,
Benjamin Piekut, Olivia Mattis, Joseph Hyde, Josh Kun, Brian Kane, Tim Page,
Douglas Kahn, Paul Cox, James Tobias, Emile Wennekes, Tobias Plebuch, and
Margaret Leng Tan.
As John Cage once said, “an error is simply a failure to adjust immediately
from a preconception to an actuality,” and thus, all errors that remain in this
study, whether a potentiality or an actuality, are wholly my own. To my many
roommates and friends in the Los Angeles entertainment industry that puzzled
over my strange, foreign, and oftentimes hermetic academic life, while still gen-
erously providing some firsthand observations on the realities of filmmaking
that a scholar could never anticipate; to my cousins Maria Dyer and Christine
Troshynski for providing free couch space in Chicago and New York for my
many extended archival visits, and finally, a special note of gratitude to my sister
Vanessa, who ran alongside me in our race to the finish line for our doctorates
(she won by a year . . .), and to my mother, Bonnie.
1
INTRODUCTION
Audiovisu(ality)(ology)
It’s not a physical landscape. It’s a term reserved for the new technologies. It’s
a landscape in the future. It’s as though you used technology to take you off the
ground and go like Alice through the looking glass.
— J o h n C a g e , 1 9 8 9
Cage has laid down the greatest aesthetic net of this century. Only those
who honestly encounter it and manage to survive it will be the artists of our
contemporary present.
— St a n B r a k h a g e , 1 9 6 2
On one quiet evening in 1960, viewers who tuned in to the pop-

ular game show “I’ve Got a Secret” laughed at music in a new way.
The premise of the show was simple: A blind celebrity panel aimed
to guess the contestant’s quirky secret through a cross-examination
that typically culminated in a calculated imbroglio. The February 22
show began with Zsa Zsa Gabor, who revealed that she was donning
a dress made out of a potato sack, followed by John Cage, whose se-
cret was to perform a composition consisting of an electric mixer,
mechanical fish, five radios, tape recorder, and various other sound-
producing devices. Eclectic musical performances on the show were
not uncommon, such as a rendition of orchestral literature on soda
pop bottles by members of the New Orleans Philharmonic, or duet
for violin and chimpanzee by Canadian singer Gisèle MacKenzie. The
host, Gary Moore, endeavored to legitimize Cage’s performance as “se-
rious music” by quoting several major newspaper reviews, and eventu-
ally abandoned the panel to allow time for the performance of Water
Walk (1959), which, as Cage explained with a deadpan stare, earned
its title, “because it contains water, and I walk during its performance.”
Moore ended the introduction with a caveat: “He takes it seriously,
I think it’s interesting; if you are amused you may laugh, if you like it
you may buy the recording.”
Water Walk featured a typically atypical Cage, layered between
levels of mediation (although the radios remained silent because of
a union dispute) and beaming with optimism under the veil of his
2
2 • T h r o u g h th e L o o k i n g  G l a s s
famous sunny disposition. After his introduction he noted to Moore that he

would “prefer laughter over tears” in response to his variation of a typical perfor-
mance. Within contemporary music circles today, Water Walk holds a place of
reverence that rarely provokes laughter or tears, and it recently found a new life
on the Internet. As of this writing, it’s the most-viewed John Cage video on the
popular user-generated content website, YouTube. The clip exists within its own
phantasmagoric shadow, reflecting a tumultuous time in American history, when
in the same year John F. Kennedy outperformed his perspiring opponent Richard
Nixon in the first televised presidential debate, and when Cage finalized perhaps
the most influential publication by a composer in the 20th century, Silence. Each
time I revisit the clip, I’m struck by the medium itself: the flickering frame and
muted grays give it an artifice that simultaneously reaffirms its concrete identity
as historical evidence while gleaming with an artificiality as haunting as a televi-
sion left to sputter forth late into the night long after its viewer has fallen asleep
(Figure I.1).
Broadcasting from CBS Studio 59 on West 47th Street in New York City,
Cage’s “I’ve Got a Secret” performance occurred at a time when media boundaries
became subject to the same ontological scrutiny as traditional forms of ar-
tistic expression, reflecting a tension within late capitalist consumption habits
best echoed in Raymond Williams’s classic study on mediation and identity,
Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974). Avant-garde filmmakers and
the industry surrounding their endeavors were adept at articulating seismic shifts
in the media landscape, chiefly those working within the fringes of a new media
economy. Just down the street from Studio 59 in lower Manhattan, Lithuanian
artist Jonas Mekas was setting the foundation for the Film-Makers’ Cooperative
while simultaneously editing the influential avant- garde film journal, Film
Culture. Meanwhile, impresario Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16 series was at its height,
showcasing avant-garde and experimental films to a captive audience of curious
young New Yorkers. These minor cinemas were more than just an opposition
to the hegemony of industrial forms of narrative cinema. Their ethical stance
of what David James describes as “becoming-minoritan” reflected a living, or-
ganic network that spread throughout the variegated artistic enclaves of major
American cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, channeling
out to the “I-80 avant-garde” of midwestern town-and-gown outposts such as
Ann Arbor, Michigan.
By 1960, the 48-year-old John Cage was primed to stand as a type of metaphor
for this transition period, and his “I’ve Got a Secret” appearance inaugurated his
near-mythological position as a sort of father figure to the movement. Beaming
forth on the television screen, Cage presented a host of ideological contradictions
that inspired reverence, opposition, and, above all, an outpouring of theory and
discourse on the ontology of the musical artwork in an interconnected audiovisual
3
Introduction • 3
Figure I.1 John Cage performs Water Walk (1959) on “I’ve Got A Secret,” February
23, 1960.
environment.1 Like the cathode ray beaming through shimmering glass, avant-
garde cinema challenged artists to climb the mantel and peer into the mirror re-
flectivity of this new media landscape of the future, and Cage’s “aesthetic net”
caught many well-known filmmakers. Pointing to that nexus, this book begins
with a simple goal: to survey John Cage’s interactions and collaborations with
avant-garde and experimental filmmakers, and in turn seek out the implications
of the audiovisual experience for the overall aesthetic surrounding Cage’s career.
I choose key moments in Cage’s career during which cinema either informed or
transformed his position on the nature of sound, music, expression, and the on-
tology of the musical artwork. This is not an exhaustive history of Cage’s influence
4
on filmmakers’ approaches to filmmaking, nor is it a complete history of Cage’s

work with filmmakers. The examples I highlight coincide with moments of rup-
ture within Cage’s own consideration of the musical artwork, and I argue that
these instances have a significant and heretofore unacknowledged role in Cage’s
notion of the audiovisual experience and the medium-specific ontology of a work
of art. In turn, I argue for a reframing of Cage’s artistic program around media
and perception.
The emerging field of audiovisual studies informs many aspects of this survey.
Recent research has attempted to map this terrain of inquiry, and this study
clarifies Cage’s role in establishing just what it means to speak of audiovisual aes-
thetics.2 One distinction I consider important for the purposes here is that be-
tween an audiovisual event, in which both sound and image are paramount to
the experience of an artwork, and audiovisuality, in which a concept or artwork
elucidates or expands upon the phenomenological present, thus opening up one’s
eyes to the very notion of existence. Defenders of Cage’s artistic program contend
his goal was simply that: to create a situation that, as Richard Fleming describes,
“stirs what surrounds us, is already before us, that in the midst of which we find
ourselves.”3 I wholeheartedly agree. I can recall many times when I left a concert
of Cage’s music and felt such an awareness, and if anything, this study supports
the foundation of Cage’s paradoxical intention of nonintention. Coming to terms
with such a situation is one of the most rewarding aspects of exploring Cage’s
music, life and art, and a more enlightened soul would be content at leaving it at
that. However, having climbed the mantel, I find myself subject to the same in-
corrigible fate as Cage, and thus I will now proceed, as Cage once explained to his
mentor Arnold Schoenberg, to beat my head against the wall and, in the process,
poke my finger through the mirror.
To this I turn to audiovisuology. Combining qualitative, historical, system-
atic, and theoretical approaches, audiovisuology pivots from metaphorical uses of
language to describe music toward the aesthetic experience of both listening and
seeing. This shift from the notion of music in absolute terms is more in line with
audiovisuality and the foundations of intermedia aesthetics, in which no single
medium is held above another.4 I find this methodology helpful for approaching a
topic that combines elements of historical musicological approaches to style anal-
ysis, avant-garde film studies in identity politics, medium, and defamiliarization,
contemporary art theory on ontology and objecthood, and traditional film music
scholarship on the relationship among sound, music, and image. Methodological
tussles between competing ideological and departmental boundaries reflect the
dramatic pressure placed on humanities academics to provide conceptual bridges
between their work in the service of a 21st-century-contingent labor market. Yet
this new academic economy is more diverse and interconnected than anything
beyond, or perhaps perfectly in line with, Cage’s most prescient dreams, and it is
5
Introduction • 5
to this challenge that I consider Cage Studies paramount, as any line of inquiry
into his career is inherently interdisciplinary.
I am not concerned with the arguments for or against Cage’s destabilization of
a culturally specific form of musical discourse; I focus rather on the implications
of the audiovisual experience and its concomitant role in 20th-and 21st-century
modes of listening. Following the narrative of audiovisuology studies, I argue that
the cinematographic experience, from its earliest incarnations in sound film and
visual music animation to interactive media in the 1960s, gradually engendered
a greater framework for understanding sound and listening than the relation-
ship between notation and the sonic event. I use the term “cinematographic”
here in the greater sense: the entire audiovisual filmic experience as well as the
theoretical and philosophical investigation into the nature of the cinematic ex-
perience as it relates to reality and philosophy. Avant-garde, experimental, and ex-
panded cinema practices provide both a theoretical and a practical framework for
outlining such an audiovisual aesthetics. Writing the history of this movement
in the United States was and continues to be a form of political ideology, where
the minor–majority ethical stance of classic histories such as P. Adams Sitney’s
Visionary Film, David James’s Allegories of Cinema, and more recent volumes
such as Paul Arthur’s A Line of Sight, literally and figuratively beam forth with
a poetic optimism. Classic volumes by A. L. Rees and numerous source reading
documents from journals such as Film Culture established a historical narra-
tive of American avant-garde film. Such narratives typically begin with trance
filmmakers such as Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage, followed by Underground,
Structural, and Expanded cinema practices in the 1960s, and this book adheres to
accepted boundaries in its scope, noting moments during which Cage’s evolving
positions coincided with practitioners and participants in new media culture.5
To place Cage at the center of this transformation in audiovisual culture
would steer this study toward a familiar hagiography that has long beleaguered
Cage Studies. Cage Studies, whether with a capital “S” or in quotes, in many ways
mirrors the reception history of Cage’s life and music. The first wave, beginning
with James Pritchett’s The Music of John Cage (1993), inaugurated an intellec-
tual trend that sought to legitimize Cage’s music through traditional musicolog-
ical methodology. Pritchett’s effort at proving that Cage was first and foremost
a composer by presenting a style history through musical analysis remained a
calling card for those hoping to cement his place within the discourse and his-
tory books of 20th-century Western European Art Music. And yet, such posi-
tivistic approaches were already waning in the face of critical musicology, which
sought to destabilize the patriarchal Eurocentric tone of the discipline, and the
second wave of scholarship beginning in the early 2000s quickly expanded to
critique Cage’s artistic platform. Most recently, theoretical discussions stemming
from art history, primarily through the work of Branden Joseph, Julia Robinson,
6
and others, have situated Cage’s aesthetic within the postwar American Neo-
Avant-Garde of visual artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
Joseph’s work in particular argues that artists within Cage’s circle moved be-
yond the European strategies of shock and negation that distanced art from the
shackles of capitalism, as famously articulated by Peter Bürger’s classic Theory
of the Avant-Garde. The postwar Neo turn instead affirmed difference through
a strategy of passivity that acknowledged the totalizing force of late capitalism,
and Joseph connects Cage’s critique of representation according to philoso-
pher Gilles Deleuze’s notion of immanence. Perhaps the most refreshing recent
theoretical model within musicology is that of Benjamin Piekut, who adopts
anthropologist Bruno Latour’s “Actor-Network-Theory” to characterize the
competing and interconnected ideological discourses of 1960s experimentalism
in New York. Many since have penned nuanced insight into many of the con-
tradictory elements of Cage’s stances on race, politics, and identity, elements
that I agree are in need of greater scrutiny if Cage Studies is to progress as a
discipline.6 In the midst of these ideological tussles, I find myself somewhat of a
centrist. I respect the advice and guidance that many of the first-generation Cage
scholars gave to this project, and I strove to find a balance between historical
documentation of Cage’s work with filmmakers and the myriad of theoretical
angles available to explain it.
Cage’s uncanny ability to present circuitous ideological stances on listening
and sound during his career sparked a range of interpretations that moved far
beyond the scientific speculations he espoused in his writings. His calculated use
of a variety of South Asian and Eastern heuristics to demonstrate his concep-
tion of listening further problematized any straightforward reading of his artistic
program. Cage’s colorful and creative prose veiled rather traditional observations
among expression and the musical object, musical time, and the scientific struc-
ture of soundwaves.7 To say that Cage even advocated a specific aesthetic in the
traditional sense would be an overstatement. He at times advocated a radical bohe-
mianism that sought to usurp the power structures of corporate and political
economies of music and at others retreated into a transcendental metaphysics.
However, his fundamental notion of sound empirically categorized according
to scientific observations regarding soundwave structure, duration, and audition
remained consistent throughout his career. Relying on such a strict epistemology
allowed Cage to withdraw any links between subjectivity and experience, despite
the fact that his many observations on the relationship between audition and
recording point directly to such a link. This is often read as a pacifism reflec-
tive of the homosexual subculture of artists and intellectuals living through the
McCarthy era in the United States, as many have posited following the lead of
Moira Roth’s classic essay, “The Aesthetics of Indifference,” or alternately as a re-
treat into the purely metaphysical relationship between idea and object.8
7
Introduction • 7
Following the work of David Paul on the reception history of Charles Ives,
I situate Cage’s interaction and collaborations with filmmakers within a changing
landscape of American intellectual history, expanding beyond Cold War politics
to include West Coast Bohemianism, Modern Gnosticism, and the American
Technological Sublime.9 These shifts coincide not only with those of Cage’s
ideology, they mirror the philosophical investigations of form and medium
in cinema as a type of political critique. Cage’s compositions often contained
critiques of technological change in the 20th century, and his empirical catego-
rization of sound came about through a number of interactions with scientists
and engineers, the most notable being his father, John Cage Sr. Unbeknownst
to many, Cage Sr.’s research focused on infrared-vision and sonar technologies,
cathode-ray tubes for television, and, later in life, particle propulsion systems for
interstellar travel. Cage Jr. demonstrated a surprising understanding of the spe-
cific mathematics and scientific application of his father’s research, and I pay spe-
cial attention to Cage’s Imaginary Landscape compositions as nodal points for
each of his intellectual and compositional breakthroughs. These works coincide
quite closely with key junctures in Cage’s ever-changing and eclectic blend of sci-
entific and spiritual metaphors to describe his ontology of music and modes of
listening.
Moving beyond Cage Studies, I turn to a wide variety of fields under the
general banner of audiovisuology. The most helpful thread of discourse traces
sound artist and theorist Michel Chion’s critique of the traditional separation
of the soundtrack as a distinct entity within the experience of the sound film.
Chion’s “audiovisual contract” remains a foundation for those studying sound in
film, and his categorization of listening modes into casual, semantic, and reduced
are useful starting points. For the third category, Chion builds on the notion of
the acousmatic, a term coined by Cage colleague, sound engineer, and theorist
Pierre Schaeffer, whereby one focuses on the primary attributes of sound devoid
of their visual context or origin. This model of what Schaeffer titled “reduced
listening” has many parallels to Cage’s own efforts at “letting sounds be sounds,”
although Cage himself expressed reservations with Schaeffer’s specific formula-
tion.10 However, the reduced-listening model does bring to light a key theoretical
and cognitive element of audiovisuality that Cage often noted: Although we can
choose to look away, divert, or even close our eyes, even in deafness we never truly
close off our bodies to the vibratory sensations of sound. Cage’s experience in an
anechoic chamber, where soundwaves are reduced to nearly inaudible levels, led
not only to his signature phrase, “there is no such thing as silence,” it also upset
the traditional hierarchy of media.11
Following Cage, sound art theorists argue that modern Western civilization
gives primacy to the visible as the measure for the general ontology of experience,
while relegating the audible to hearsay, a form of communication and evidence
8
prone to subjectivity and falsity. Scientific measurement relies on the concrete-

ness of visual examples, and although theories of the mathematical ratios between
musical overtones provide a general consideration of musical form and structure,
their varied applications in tuning systems throughout history and the inherent
subjectivity of individual methods of the structuring of the octave make this
system an unreliable method of measurement or scientific proof. Cage’s effort
at reversing this media hierarchy gave the term “music” primacy in his model of
audiovisuality. Through his desire to legitimize his artistic platform within the
narrative of Western tonality, from Monteverdi to Schoenberg, Cage held onto
the term “music” too strongly; perhaps a better term would simply be “audition”
or the experience of audition. In any case, Cage’s formulation provides a fitting
starting point for exploring a methodology for audiovisual studies, moving to-
ward the “ology” necessary for any research agenda wishing to elucidate mean-
ingful conclusions beyond the traditional models of counterpoint and parallelism
familiar to those studying narrative film music.
The standard theoretical discussions of sound in film argue that sound
temporalizes the cinematic experience, grounding it in a reality in sync with
the temporal audiovisual experience, and thus point to the necessity of sound
in the cinematographic experience. Sound spatializes the two-dimensionality
of cinema by projecting the emotive, narrative, and cinematographic content
into space, providing a moment of empathy and identification with the artifi-
cial celluloid imagery on the screen. Sound projects vibrations into the cinematic
space that reverberates within the cavity of the audience member, allowing for a
nuanced and emotive connection to the distant and fantastical imagery in front
of them. This points to the deficiencies of any single medium to fully generate a
sense of reality independently and to the importance of considering the cinemat-
ographic experience as a whole when discussing general ontologies of cinema.12
Traditional media pairings sought to find ways in which sound and music aug-
ment or shape narrative or visual elements of the cinematographic experience,
and as Cage expressed in his own writings, this media hierarchy was anathema to
his model of audition as the primary attribute. This theoretical pressure point re-
mains an arena of contention within audiovisuology, and I find Nicholas Cook’s
rather cumbersome yet enlightening classic study, Analysing Musical Multimedia,
a helpful starting point for establishing a methodology that upsets the familiar
ways one characterizes simultaneously seeing and hearing an audiovisual event.
Cook’s laudable effort at challenging the model of visual primacy in analyzing
multimedia is predicated on the notion that meaning is an emergent attribute
that occurs within what he describes as synchronic “Instances of Multimedia”
(IMM) brought about through the logic of metaphor. Within any such IMM,
Cook applies two tests. The first asks whether any similarity is consistent
or coherent, and consistence leads to a second category of various levels of
9
Introduction • 9
conformance: dyadic, when one medium corresponds directly to the other; uni-
tary, when one medium predominates and the other conforms; and triadic, when,
following Roland Barthes, the two mediums are linked indirectly through a “third
meaning” with consistency.13 Cook argues that most IMMs fail the conformance
test (an assertion that has broad implications for the notion of “visual music”
discussed in Chapter 1) and his second test, that of difference, is the most helpful
for my purposes. With this test one looks for either contrariety, in which the
media pairing undergoes undifferentiated difference, or contradiction, in which
the pairing is in competition or contest for meaning. Following the observations
of James Buhler, however, it seems clear that Cook fell prey to a similar problem
Cage encountered when drafting his early theoretical essays on the relationship
between music and dance. Here Cage grappled with the assumption that music
itself is only form, not content, and music is prone to enter into a meaningful
relationship that gives primacy to the other, leaving it with the default status of a
secondary attribute.14
This common empirical philosophical observation, that music is the “grin
without the Cheshire cat,” points to a methodological tussle that musicologists
have battled for nearly a century, namely the effort at establishing methods of
legitimizing 19th-century notions of musical autonomy through style analysis
and music theory. Ironically, as Buhler also notes, film studies fell prey to the
same fate, but in reverse. Classic academic studies relied on psychoanalytical and
semiotic models of structural interpretation and “close-reading” analyses of test
case films to demonstrate highly specific theories of film. However, in the 1990s
the so-called Wisconsin School adopted a neoformalist cognitive approach to
demonstrate concrete visual relationships of continuity editing. Scholars such as
David Bordwell and Noël Carroll have surprisingly turned to musical–theoretical
models of harmony and counterpoint to give meaning to their close readings of
editing and framing of the visual field. Around the same time, musicological
scholarship was just beginning to turn away from its positivistic past, and Cook’s
final assertion in Analysing Musical Multimedia, that one must “dispense with
the ethics of autonomy, and with the Romantic conception of authorship which
underwrites it,” reflects a radical approach to multimedia analysis. Such an ap-
proach is in no small way influenced by Cage’s disruptive ontology as it strives to,
as Cook pleads, “analyse the way in which contest deconstructs media identities,
fracturing the familiar hierarchies of music and the other arts into disjointed or
associative chains.”15
Cage’s struggles with 19th-century notions of autonomy, musical form, and
the general ontology of music emerged during a period of sweeping changes
in media and technology, and the title of this book and opening quote of this
Introduction provide a fitting metaphor for the underlying issue of media
and perception in Cage’s various ontologies of music. To this I turn to one
10
last helpful theorization, the notion of the cinesonic and the materiality of
sound. Borrowing from Philip Brophy’s poignant neologism, Andy Birtwistle
argues for a return to the materiality of sound as a temporal event in which,
following the tenets of an audiovisuology, a cinesonic approach to the audi-
ovisual reaffirms the material. Invoking the foundational semiotic approaches
to film studies, Birtwistle notes that Saussurian linguistics ignores concrete
speech acts, or parole, in favor of synchronic, static states of language [états de
langue] that identify speech acts differentiated in negative terms from others.
By relegating sounds to a secondary status, linguistics brackets what Birtwistle
describes as the “concrete particularity” of sound. Drawing on Schaeffer’s
acousmatic model of listening, he argues for an undifferentiated sense of per-
ception that allows for a fluid and dynamic approach to audiovisual events.16
Although Birtwistle’s goals are geared toward discovering and negotiating
relationships between sound and image, his conceptual critique reflects the in-
fluence of Cage’s own model of undifferentiated perception within audiovisual
studies in particular and sound studies in general. This collision point between
studying sonic events on their own versus their audiovisual context is precisely
the terrain I tread throughout this study. One has to look at only a few re-
cent volumes in sound studies by Seth Kim-Cohen, Frances Dyson, Salomé
Vougelin, and Brandon LaBelle to note the centrality of Cage in the study of
sound. Few, however, negotiate the nexus of the audiovisual, and few consider
the differentiation I make between audiovisuality from a Cagean perspective,
where the sonic event opens up a perceptual awareness, and the study of the
audiovisual, which negotiates realms of fluid, emergent meaning within any
multimedia event.17
Organization and Scope

This book is organized around two principles and their convergence: sound on
film, sound in film, and intermedia. Each of these concepts corresponds to what
I consider the three key conceptual shifts in Cage’s artistic platform. I begin with
his move away from the tutelage of Arnold Schoenberg after a brief apprenticeship
with German abstract animator Oskar Fischinger in the 1930s. This encounter
led to his first explorations of the total sonic landscape in his early percussion
pieces and was followed by his exploration of the poetics of dance, theories of
mythopoetics, and interaction with Maya Deren and Hans Richter in the 1940s.
Second, I turn to his move toward chance and indeterminacy in the early 1950s,
which coincided with his concern for transparency in relationship to cinematic
space. Last, I converge in the 1960s, when Cage moved toward a sound-system
model of unencoded transduction of sound through electronics, dance, and film
in his “Variations” series. In the interim I review a number of Cage’s theoretical
1
Introduction • 11
writings under the lens of media and perception, noting a largely unacknowl-
edged thread of continuity in his writings that looks to the concrete particularity
of sound, and its relationship to audiovisual events and, ultimately, to a model of
audiovisuality that points to the undifferentiated act of perception itself.
I begin first with the question of sound on film, that is, the optical imprint of
sound in the recording mechanism of the sound film in Chapter 1, which examines
early theories of audiovisuology within the realm of visual music studies. The
conceptual critique of visual music vastly expanded in the 2010s as composers
and sound artists have explored the predecessors of digital signal processing and
audiovisual software, looking back to the earliest technologies that unveiled the
nature of sound through the diachronic representation of soundwave structure
on the optical soundtrack. The history of visual music is a scattered and contested
ground in this theoretical debate, and I begin by clarifying the historical and
chronological details of one of the most cited interactions in the history of visual
music studies between John Cage and German animator Oskar Fischinger in the
1930s and 1940s. In interviews Cage repeated a phrase he attributed to Fischinger
describing the “spirit inside each object” as the breakthrough for his own move
beyond tonally structured composition toward a “Music of the Future” that
would encompass all sounds. Further examination of this connection reveals an
important technological foundation to Cage’s call for the expansion of musical
resources. Fischinger’s theories and experiments in film phonography (the ma-
nipulation of the optical portion of sound film to synthesize sounds) mirrored
contemporaneous refinements in recording and synthesis technology of electron-
beam tubes for film and television.
New documentation on Cage’s early career in Los Angeles, including research
Cage conducted for his father John Cage Sr.’s patents, explains his interest in
these technologies. Concurrent with his studies with Schoenberg, Cage fostered
an impressive knowledge of the technological foundations of television and radio
entertainment industries centered in Los Angeles. Adopting the term “organized
sound” from Edgard Varèse, Cage compared many of his organizational princi-
ples for percussion music to film-editing techniques. As Cage proclaimed in his
1940 essay “The Future of Music: Credo,” advancements in technology not only
allowed for an expansion of musical resources and compositional techniques, they
also demanded that music itself be redefined. Film phonography and, later, mag-
netic tape provided the conceptual foundation for many of Cage’s aesthetic views,
including the inclusion of all sounds, the necessity for temporal structuring, and
the elimination of boundaries between the composer and the consumer. These
two origin moments in the Cage narrative point to the primacy of the audiovisual
in Cage’s ontology of the musical artwork, and cinema as a medium embodied
this concept both through the physical observation of soundwave structure and
through the audiovisual experience of temporally animated sound and image.
12
I spend time at the end of Chapter 1 addressing Cage’s original formulation of

his “The Future of Music: Credo,” essay, noting that it likely was a historical after-
thought assembled in 1960 for his publication of Silence. This assertion has many
implications for our conceptual understanding of the term “organized sound” as
well as the traditional Cage/Varèse dichotomy on the nature of the term espoused
by the journal Organized Sound.
Temporality was paramount for Cage’s ontology of music, and dura-
tion remained central to Cage’s notion of musical form throughout his career.
Chapter 2 examines the transformation of Cage’s temporal–mathematical com-
positional strategies in light of the audiovisual experience of the accompanied
dance and its relationship to early theories of cinematographic reality in American
avant-garde cinema. I note here a shift toward the European strategies of irony
and difference in Cage’s rhetoric and compositions, particularly in the tone of
his “Landscape” pieces from the period. I begin with Cage’s interaction with
Hungarian polyartist László Moholy-Nagy at the newly established School of
Design in Chicago. Like Fischinger, Moholy-Nagy advocated a tactile, interactive
approach to the audiovisual experience, and his theories on the figure–ground
relationship among photography, film, and kinetic sculpture were predicated on
the notion of a “space-time accentuated visual art” that projected cinematic light
into three-dimensional space in an effort to replicate the auditory experience of
delineating spatial proximity and distance. During his tenure in Chicago, Cage
developed a theory of sound effect in his “Landscape” series of compositions that
played on the mimetic reflections of visuality in radio, epitomized by his com-
mission for the Columbia Workshop production of The City Wears a Slouch Hat
(1942). I examine this production in light of the issue of temporality in radio
narrative, in which the lack of visual stimuli detemporalizes the narrative flow
of Kenneth Patchen’s surrealist noir script. This interplay within temporalized
and detemporalized narrative spaces became a central focus for filmmaker
Maya Deren.
Maya Deren’s pioneering silent films from the 1940s detemporalized the cin-
ematic experience by removing the sonic bond of an audio track and replaced
this reality with an aesthetic of cinematic space based on theories of poetry and
dance. As I argue, this approach was part of a larger dialogue among artists and
intellectuals within the artistic enclave of Greenwich Village in New York. Cage
was enmeshed with this community starting in 1942, and his interaction with
Deren was largely facilitated through comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell.
I outline a debate on the concept of “Significant Form” in the journal Dance
Observer from 1944 to 1945, which culminated in Cage’s first theoretical essay on
form as it relates to bodily articulation of space, “Grace and Clarity,” (1944) and
its implications for Deren’s influential 1944 film At Land, in which Cage played
a supporting actor role. Finally, this chapter culminates with an examination of
13
Introduction • 13
German filmmaker Hans Richter’s feature-length avant-garde film, Dreams That

Money Can Buy (1947). Cage’s music for a section of the film, conceived and
shot by Marcel Duchamp, presents a configuration of the audiovisual experience
that projects timbral alterations in the prepared piano set against Duchamp’s
rotoreliefs.
Chapter 3 centers on the relationships between acoustic projection and cine-
matic space, starting with Cage’s turn to chance and indeterminacy in the 1950s.
I start with Cage’s rhetoric on the medium of magnetic tape as the second trans-
formation of sound materiality, which moved away from the indexical print of
sound phonography toward a virtual coding of information indeterminate to the
naked eye yet determinate in duration. Building on art historian Julia Robinson’s
notion of “symbolic investiture,” I survey the divided interpretations of Cage’s
platform among musicologists that decode his music according to style anal-
ysis that established a compositional logic for his move to indeterminacy and
the larger debate among art historians on the split between Neo-Avant-Garde
and Abstract Expressionist aesthetics. I argue that Cage’s interaction with
film and filmmakers provides a meeting ground for these debates within cine-
matic space in two films: Cage’s score for the Herbert Matter documentary on
sculptor Alexander Calder in 1950, and colleague Morton Feldman’s score for
the Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg documentary on Abstract Expressionist
painter Jackson Pollock the following year. Both artists saw these commissions as
opportunities to formalize connections between their compositional approaches
to sound and the visual approach to space, kinetic movement, and ground re-
vealed in the time-based poetics of the moving image.
In the final section of Chapter 3, I examine a film collaboration I discovered
with the sculptor Richard Lippold that documented his monumental wire sculp-
ture, The Sun, (1956) where Cage and Lippold applied chance procedures to the
editing process. Following the principles of Russian Constructivist theories of ki-
netic light and rhythm, Lippold’s approach to his self-described “open sculptures”
focused on themes of transparency and space rather than on mass and dimension
by seamlessly integrating intricate constructions of bundled polished wire and
tubing into the surrounding architecture. Cage’s and Lippold’s mutual concern
for geometric abstraction, elaborate mathematical structures, and an open-ended
spiritual discourse on the nature of the work of art sparked an important dialogue
leading to the period of Cage’s most dramatic artistic gestures in the early 1950s.
Lippold’s freestanding sculptures delicately articulated three-dimensional space,
and the kinetic energy of their complex lattice arrangements mirrored Cage’s
compositions for the prepared piano. Cage’s dislocation of the harmonic–nodal
structure of the piano in turn projected acoustic simulacra with the same metallic
shimmer of Lippold’s wire formations. Lippold’s commission came about as a re-
sult of his split with the so-called Irascible 18 collective of New York artists, and
14
the history of its commission and reception reflect both an ideological divide on
the materiality of sculpture and larger postwar McCarthy-era politics of passivity
and resistance.
Chapter 4 converges on the sound-in-film/sound-on-film dichotomy, when
Cage revised his aesthetic stance on multimedia sound-system assemblages in the
1960s. Framed around a conference panel in 1967 at the University of Cincinnati,
Cinema Now, in which Cage discussed the current state of Underground Cinema
in the United States, Chapter 4 outlines Cage’s interaction with the “two Stans,”
Stan Brakhage and Stan VanDerBeek, culminating in a detailed critique of
Cage’s 1965 immersive interactive multimedia work, Variations V. I first begin
with a detailed reading of the fundamental tenets of Cage’s negative aesthetic
set forth in his seminal publication Silence (1961), exploring its implications for
multimedia and intermedia theories in the 1960s. Two competing poles of in-
terpretation of Cage’s theories surrounding chance and indeterminacy emerged
from the first post-Cage generation. The first sought out a reduction of the art-
work to its base materials in an act of contraction, whereas the second reached
for the opposite, a total expansion of individual medium-specific artworks in a
monumental Gesamtkunstwerk, epitomized by Stan VanDerBeek’s theories of ex-
panded cinema and intermedia.
Although Cage’s interaction with filmmakers continued into the following
decades, most notably with artists such as Peter Greenaway, Elliot Caplan, and
Emile De Antonio, I choose to conclude in the 1960s, as this moment demarcates
the boundary between Cage’s “heroic” period of influence and the emergence of
the first of many post-Cagean generations that either worked in conjunction with
or in direct opposition to Cage’s ideas and compositional techniques. A study
of these additional documentaries on Cage and their effect on the cultural as-
similation of Cagean notions of indeterminacy fall outside the parameters of the
specific concerns of this study, namely the audiovisual relationships that the cine-
matographic experience might engender within the context of Cage’s artistic plat-
form. 1969 also marked a significant moment of retreat from Cage’s Wagnerian
multimedia extravaganzas and a move toward a late period of composition that
explored themes of American transcendentalism. Although concise in terms of
examples, this study aims to position each of Cage’s interactions with avant-garde
filmmakers within the larger narrative of audiovisual studies in an effort to reor-
ient our perspective of Cage away from the pure ontological model of listening,
as it is only through the lens of audiovisuology that we can effectively characterize
a Cagean notion of audiovisuality by looking both outward and within.
15
1 THE SPIRIT INSIDE EACH OBJECT
OSKAR FISCHINGER, SOUND PHONOGRAPHY,

AND THE “INNER EYE”
One day I was introduced to Oscar [sic] Fischinger who made abstract films quite
precisely articulated on pieces of traditional music . . . When I was introduced to
him, he began to talk with me about the spirit which is inside each of the objects of
this world. So, he told me, all we need to do to liberate that spirit is to brush past
the object, and to draw forth its sound. That’s the idea which led me to percussion.
—J o h n C a g e , interview with Daniel Charles, 1968
In the summer of 1937 the young John Cage arrived at Oskar

Fischinger’s temporary animation studio in Hollywood to volunteer
as the filmmaker’s assistant. Cage’s brief apprenticeship—by all ac-
counts lasting no more than a few days—later became a recurring sub-
ject in the composer’s personal history, retold extensively in interviews
and articles.1 By the time Cage started narrating his autobiography a
decade later, his aesthetic concerns extended far beyond percussion,
and, much like his 1940 essay “The Future of Music: Credo,” the
Fischinger anecdote provided a fitting originary event. This shift in
narrative pulled his artistic program out from the modernist lineage
of Arnold Schoenberg, rewriting it instead along a spiritualized no-
tion of perception stemming from the scientific authority of sound
phonography in the early history of visual music practice.
This small anecdote of a passing encounter quickly spread in musi-
cological texts and histories of visual music and has since represented
many of the changes in theoretical discourse on music and autonomy
in recent decades. Museum exhibitions and special journal editions
on the foundations of visual music practice in the 2010s have, much
like Cage Studies, struggled to reconcile the theoretical with the his-
torical, and the Cage/Fischinger anecdote has become a focal point
of discourse that alternately looks toward the scientific rationali-
zation of sound–image relationships and the artisanal synchroni-
zation of synaesthetic relationships brought about by Fischinger’s
working methods of animation (despite the fact that synaesthetic
correspondences were never Fischinger’s goal). This stemmed from
16
a simple yet profound observation: On the audio portion of sound film a clear
visual representation of soundwave structure appears, and the visual nature of this
phenomenon inspired numerous theories similar to Fischinger’s on the indexical
relationship between sound and image and its implications for a composite visual
music.2 Michael Broyles’s investigation of the so-called (and recently trademarked
term) American Mavericks goes so far as to claim that this event sparked the even-
tual multimedia turn in contemporary music practice following Cage’s “aural–
visual symbiosis” model of theater in the 1950s. Although musicologists put Cage
squarely at the center of the ultramodernist critique of musical autonomy, the
theoretical nature of what such a multimedia practice could be remains elusive,
much like the nature of visual music practice and its origin stories.3
Fischinger too has remained both an ahistorical and futural catalyst in what
James Tobias describes as a history of visual music that is “indiscriminately
present, a familiar achievement of modernist aesthetics that is as yet techno-
logically unfulfilled, a still-to-be concretized new medium awaiting its avatar.”
Practitioners from a wide range of hybrid media arts have turned to his films and
his encounter with Cage as a foundational moment in contemporary multimedia
aesthetics.4 Tobias calls Fischinger’s work an “everyday hermeneutic” among the
many theoretical calls for the musicalization of cinema through the stylization
of time, and his tightly synchronized colorful animations, organized through
complex methods of timing the optical imprint on the sound portion of cellu-
loid film with image, inspired numerous theories on the foundations and aims
of visual music practice for audiovisual studies. The same issues surround Cage’s
reception beginning in the 1950s, and the Fischinger origin story noticeably
parallels Cage’s remarks to Schoenberg regarding harmony during his tutelage
from 1935 to 1937, when, after a meeting discussing his deficiencies in counter-
point, Cage allegedly contended that he would devote his career to “beating his
head against the wall.”5 Cage’s first mention of Fischinger occurred during his
rediscovered Vassar College address in 1948, where he first proposed a “silent
piece” alongside a work for 12 radios (later to become Imaginary Landscape No.
4, discussed in Chapter 3), and it marks a turning point in Cage’s historiciza-
tion of his stance on the ontology of music through his own version of everyday
hermeneutics via Fischinger, a strategy that shifted to the rhetoric of the East
shortly thereafter. Parsing Cage’s words and connecting them to practice remains
a central challenge to Cage studies, and recent scholarship on Cage’s early career
has made great strides in clarifying dates, contacts, and source materials in an ef-
fort to contextualize his work within the blossoming and diverse artistic culture
of Los Angeles and the West Coast in general, while still adhering to the tradi-
tional musicological methodology of style analysis and critique. Although eu-
reka moments make for excellent memoirs—and Cage’s biography is full of such
examples—determining any direct lineage or influence for Cage’s intellectual or
17
The Spirit Inside Each Object • 17
compositional breakthroughs is difficult, given Cage’s proclivity for crafting a

colorful personal narrative that both simplified and obscured the complex web of
influences that shaped his career.6
For musicology, visual music practice highlights methodological concerns re-
garding musical autonomy and style analysis, as it bridges the extramusical with
scientific observations regarding soundwave structure. Visual music provides
both a metaphor and a method to characterize convergent media practice as
an outgrowth of modernist observations on synaesthetic relationships and uni-
versal meaning. Recent interdisciplinary literature on musical performativity and
the audiovisual experience, such as Nicholas Cook’s Beyond the Score: Music as
Performance (2013), or the visual culture of classical music performance explored
in Simon Shaw-Miller’s Eye hEar: The Visual in Music (2013), has invited the
expansion of discourse on the audiovisual within musicology as it relates to style
histories. Cage’s intuitive understanding of this connection is reflected in his own
rhetoric regarding the nature of sound in scientific terms. The temptation to con-
flate Cage’s interaction with Fischinger as part of a larger social and technological
history of convergent media is compelling. However, the surviving documenta-
tion outlines a neighboring and perhaps more lucrative avenue of comparative
stylistic analysis in a heretofore unacknowledged aspect of his early career: re-
search he undertook during the same time for his engineer and inventor father,
John Cage, Sr., on a series of patents in television and infrared-vision technology.
What follows is an investigation of this relationship in the context of visual
music practice as it extends to artists Cage was directly in contact with during
his formative years.7 Although many have noted the general connection be-
tween Cage and his father through the dubious yet often-repeated anecdote from
Schoenberg that Cage was an “inventor of genius,” the actual technical research
Cage undertook for his father had a profound effect on his characterization of
the listening experience as an electromagnetic transference of unencoded infor-
mation, a notion that remained central to his aesthetic of silence in the coming
decades.8 Fischinger’s artisanal approach to visual music animation sparked
Cage’s interest in conceiving sound as a tactile materiality, and his turn to percus-
sion and subsequent innovations in mathematical temporal structures were built
on a foundational understanding of the scientific structure of sound through vis-
ualization. Moving beyond stylistic concerns within his compositional practice,
the Fischinger anecdote and subsequent history of Cage’s early interest in visual
music marks a rupture in his aesthetic of the purely musical, marking the first of
several steps in which Cage expanded the notion of music toward a theatrical
multimedia model, while still maintaining a philosophical stance that placed au-
dition and the materiality of sound at the top of his media hierarchy.
Cage’s connection with Fischinger furthermore highlights the relationship be-
tween West Coast composers and the burgeoning entertainment and electronics
18
industries in California. Throughout this period, roughly spanning from the in-
troduction of sound film technology in the late 1920s and the consolidation of
radio and film industries to the outset of the American engagement in World
War II in the early 1940s, Los Angeles offered economic opportunities and refuge
from the strife of world events. The sudden influx of artists and intellectuals from
war-torn Europe fostered an unprecedented dialogue on the potential of film
and radio; implicit in this dialogue was the belief that rapid advances in audio
and visual technology would enable radical new approaches to the work of art.
Immigrating to Los Angeles in 1936, Fischinger brought with him the theoretical
and technical knowledge of visual music practice and laid the groundwork for
aesthetic discussions on the relationship between sound and image on screen.
The history of visual music practice arguably extends to Louis Bertrand Castel’s
18th-century color organs and occult epistemologies of the electromagnetic spec-
trum dating to Joseph Fourier. However, with the introduction of film and, even-
tually, synchronized sound, artists readily embraced the medium as the foundation
for a new audiovisual practice. Cage first encountered precedents for such a prac-
tice during his travels to Europe in 1930 and 1931, particularly through transition,
a literary journal devoted to US artists living in Europe. Cage repeatedly cited
this cultural guidebook for Americans abroad as an important source of informa-
tion and ideas.9 Several articles, echoing the manifestos of early filmmakers and
theorists such as Sergei Eisenstein, Germaine Dulac, and Dziga Vertov, extolled
the revolutionary potential of the new art form of the sound film.10 Calls within
transition for experimental approaches to sound film opposed industry norms
and encouraged an engagement with the materiality of the medium itself, and
throughout the 1920s, Oskar Fischinger and other artists responded. A school of
abstract film formed around several venues in Berlin and included artists such as
Viking Eggeling, Walther Ruttman, and Hans Richter (who would later collab-
orate with Cage in his first feature-length avant-garde film, Dreams That Money
Can Buy [1947]). Works from Fischinger and others prompted theoretical and
technical debates on the implications of new developments in cinematic tech-
nology. Starting in 1927, artists, scientists, and devotees convened in Hamburg
for a series of “Kongress für Farbe-Ton-Forschung” [“Color Music Congresses”],
organized by Dr. Georg Anschütz, featuring scholarly presentations on synaes-
thesia, color music, and the color organ.
Fischinger occasionally sought to correlate his geometric abstractions to spe-
cific musical sounds, and it can be argued that his realization that these visual
“ornaments” bore a substantial resemblance to the patterns generated by sounds
on the optical soundtrack led to his notion of a “spirit” within each object. By
drawing images and photographing them onto the optical soundtrack, Fischinger
experimented with a variety of sound shapes and their corresponding sounds. His
early Ornament Ton [Ornament Sound] experiments received international press,
19
and he noted the implications of this new technique in a widely publicized article,
“Klingende Ornamente” [“Sounding Ornaments”]. “Now,” he proclaimed, “con-
trol of every fine gradation and nuance is granted to the music-painting artist,
who bases everything on the primary fundamental of music, namely the wave-
vibration or oscillation in and of itself. In the process surface new perceptions
that until now were overlooked and remain neglected.”11 Fischinger converted
his studio to explore this new technique, and photos of mock examples of geo-
metric shapes were widely publicized across Germany12 (Figure 1.1). The actual
geometric shapes used in the experiments produced a variety of sounds, some
so disturbing that the technicians feared that it might damage their equipment
(Figure 1.2).
Fischinger’s experiments, alongside others such as those of Rudolph
Pfenninger in Munich and Arseni M. Araamov in Leningrad, were a culmination
of scientific discoveries in acoustics dating to Ernst Floren Chladni’s 18th-century
experiments with “ur-images.” This expansion from the analogic capabilities of the
phonographic record to the generative in optical synthesis marks a turning point
for both avant-garde film and electronic music practice. As Cage would later the-
orize, the implications for such a practice were paramount for his expansionist
model of music in the following years.13 There is no documentation indicating
that Cage was aware of these experiments during his European travels, aside from
Figure 1.1 Fischinger in Berlin studio with mock publicity, Ornament Sound scrolls,
ca. 1932. © Center for Visual Music.
20
Figure 1.2 Examples of “ornaments” from Fischinger’s ca. 1932 Ornament Sound
experiments. © Center for Visual Music.
his attendance at the Neue Musik Berlin festival in 1930, which showcased some
of the earliest experiments in overdubbing techniques with phonograph records
by Paul Hindemith (a close friend of Fischinger) and Ernst Toch.14 However,
when Cage returned to Los Angeles in 1931 to begin his musical training, the
European avant-garde soon followed. In the increasingly tumultuous Nazi era,
experimental artists flocked to the United States, particularly to the blossoming
exile population surrounding the Hollywood industry in Los Angeles and the
West Coast in general.
The network of artists who shaped Cage’s early musical training in the 1930s
was as diverse and eclectic as Los Angeles itself. Members of the exile popula-
tion such as art dealer Galka Scheyer, bohemian artists Pauline Schindler and
Henry Cowell, and Schoenberg pupil Adolph Weiss each played a key role in
fostering Cage’s artistic curiosity. Each step in Cage’s early chronology was
21
marked by colorful anecdotes that seemed to fall naturally in step: After a brief
period of study with pianist Richard Buhlig in Los Angeles, Cage hitchhiked to
San Francisco in 1934 to present an early composition at Cowell’s New Music
Workshop, and, at Cowell’s suggestion, traveled to New York that spring to study
with bassoonist Adolph Weiss. Returning to Los Angeles at the end of the year,
Cage organized a series of concerts in Los Angeles, began his formal studies
with Arnold Schoenberg in March of 1935, eloped with Xenia Kashevaroff, and
worked full time for his father as a research assistant.15 Although the former
anecdotes have become commonplace in the Cage narrative, the last has received
little if any acknowledgment.
Cage Sr.’s earliest achievements focused on submarine ventilation and pro-
pulsion technology, and he later contracted his engineering skills to several
corporations, including the automobile industry. In the early 1930s Cage Sr.
shifted his efforts, and his focus for the next 20 years became the perfection of
the cathode-ray tube, whose development was essential for the practical realiza-
tion of television.16 The cathode-ray tube aided scientific investigations of electro-
magnetic waves beyond the visible spectrum, and Cage Sr. realized the potential
of combining the peering lens of a cathode-ray tube with another military tech-
nology: infrared vision. The prospect of mechanically assisted visualization of
material beyond human perception was a preoccupation of Cage Sr. for some
time, beginning with his interest in underwater submarine detection after the
failure of his earlier projects with gasoline-powered submarine engines that, as
Cage Jr. liked to often recall, were rejected by the military because the exhaust
bubbles gave away the position of the vessel. In 1935 Cage Sr. filed for articles of
incorporation with the partnership of Los Angeles lawyer Herbert Sturdy under
the appropriately punned name “Sturdy-Cage Projects, Inc.” to develop a new
machine. Working in the garage of the family home in Los Angeles, Cage Sr.
began patent preparations for his “Invisible-Ray Vision Machine.”17
Cage Jr. was hired by his father in March of 1935 and worked tirelessly to con-
struct the infrared device during his early counterpoint studies with Schoenberg.
With 40 different claims, this patent was clearly the centerpiece of Cage Sr.’s work,
with the goal of jumpstarting Sturdy-Cage Projects. Cage Jr. wrote to Weiss, who
had developed a close friendship with Cage Sr., noting, “My father has hopes of
becoming wealthy . . . you would have only to whisper a wish and it would be
amplified materially.”18 Documents Cage Jr. retained from this research reveal his
extensive knowledge of electrical engineering and his deftness for scientific in-
quiry. As he learned, for an image to appear on a television screen, the electron
beams emitted from the cathode-ray tube are directed through magnetic fields at
the end of the cathode. To control the “sweep” of the beam, oscillators directed
the electric current across the screen in rapid successive passes on the horizontal
and vertical planes to form the image.19 Cage Sr.’s device followed this principle,
2
directing the cathode-ray-tube beam onto a photoreactive plate that highlighted

wavelengths beyond the visible spectrum. He assigned his son to construct one
version of the machine that deflected a beam of light on mirrors that vibrated
on two axes at right angles to one another to perform the sweep. As Cage Sr.
described in the patent application, the mirrors were controlled by conventional
oscillation generators, and it was his son’s task to build two such devices at a total
cost of $225.20 Coincidentally, in Palo Alto, California, a young engineer by the
name of William Hewlett was finishing his master’s thesis at Stanford on a similar
apparatus. Teaming up with David Packard, a colleague of Cage Sr. at General
Electric, the Hewlett-Packard pair began manufacturing an elegantly simple ver-
sion of just such an oscillator for commercial testing purposes. Their Model 2A
audio oscillator retailed for just $54.40.21
Cage Jr. kept several working notes from the project, and in one document
he sketched out a number of soundwave structures, including a sine wave with
plotted points of frequency, and a combination signal of sine and triangle waves
that the frequency oscillator would have generated. The notes outline the me-
chanics of the scanning apparatus, but Cage noticed something else. In the
margins he wrote: “Sawtooth oscillators, reflector plates in tubes” and finally,
“electric musical instruments,” an idea he would return to four years later with his
first electroacoustic composition, Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939). Additional
sketches bear a striking similarity to a Fourier analysis of a sine wave, and Cage’s
memory of the rotating mechanism within the cathode-ray tube clearly stuck
with him many years later. Discussing Rauschenberg’s screenprints from the late
1950s, he recalled the parallel effect obtained by Cage Sr.’s “device made of glass
which has inside it a delicately balanced mechanism which revolves in response
to infrared rays,” and later in the same essay made explicit reference to Fourier
analysis.22
Cage Jr. seemed to float in and out of the work with a quixotic air of curiosity.
In one note to Pauline Schindler, he playfully danced around the fundamental
concept of the “Invisible Ray Vision” machine with a sensual exuberance:
I am luminous. There is a marvelous extension around me like the things

continents have around them in atlas maps. I am on the topmost peaks
of sensitivity. I am convex and then I’m concave. I include and exclude.
I simmer. I purr. I shall be fired from my job. My father’s like a character
out of Moliere. Stubborn, one faced like imitation-college short story.
He’s become an idea, a dissension, a unit molecule taking up position. But
I am on top.23
Blending technological and scientific discourse with a playful spiritual bent,

this note hints at Cage’s blossoming interest in an alternative artistic career.
23
Instead of following his father’s footsteps into a lucrative industrial application

of the research, Cage turned to a primitive, perhaps regressive, technological ap-
proach to the “spirit inside objects” through the simple kinetic–mechanical act of
percussion. As a mechanical act, the percussive strike of an object is the simplest
application of a technology in the reproduction of sound. As a visceral, sensual
act, percussion brought forth an intimate connection with the compositional
materials that Cage could not find in serialism. This move away from tonal music
and toward percussion marked a shift in his approach to the materials of musical
composition, aggressively providing not an alternative, but a solution to the def-
inition of music as encompassing the entire spectrum of sound. Cage’s under-
standing of the concept was based primarily on the technological advances in
recording technology of both the visual and the auditory spectra and their com-
monality in oscillating electric current. Although Cage likely did not realize it at
the time, the fundamental concept behind the mirror apparatus he was assigned
to construct was quite similar to the technology behind film phonography,
priming him for his interaction with Fischinger the following year.
Although the technical implications of this theory may have been beyond
the younger Cage, an intuitive artistic connection between Cage Sr.’s scientific
interests and contemporary theories of visual perception would have been ap-
parent with the introduction of the artworks of another major figure of the
European historical avant-garde: Marcel Duchamp. In the 1930s Cage was
exposed to a number of Duchamp’s earlier works of analytic cubism, such as
Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912) on display at the private collection of
Louis and Walter Arensberg in Los Angeles, where Cage often visited.24 In the
case of Nude Descending a Staircase (No.2), the perceptual act of viewing a work
of analytic cubism paralleled scientific observations on the successive viewing
of movement over time, as well as the penetrating aspect of x-ray photography
in then-current scientific observations. Providing a composite sense of viewing,
this work demanded a sense of perspective that encapsulated durational inten-
sity in a single viewing plane, much in the same way that television and film
brought together successive imagery into a composite frame. Furthermore, the
clear reference to a “stripped” nude model gave a skeletal reference to the pene-
trating vision that x-ray photography had on the anatomical human figure, and
as scholars have revisited the diffuse output of Duchamp’s early career, many
have noted such technological commentary within his work.25 Moreover, the
sequential motion of Duchamp’s nude bears a distinct parallel to French pho-
tographer Etienne-Jules Marey’s “chronophotographie géometrique.” In Marey’s
work, the sequential movement of a human figure is traced through an early
form of time-lapse photography that captured the human movement in a single
frame by tracing lines reflected by the flash photography on dots placed at joints
throughout the human figure.26
24
The American origins of time photography were deeply rooted in the

drive toward standardization of nature, demonstrated in the parallel work of
Eadweard Muybridge’s exposure shots of human and animal figures in mo-
tion. Muybridge’s early experiments in motion photography were conducted
in nearby Palo Alto, where clock time and scientific observation of human
motion emerged out of the American drive for standardization, particularly
in communication and transportation technologies. Railroads necessitated
the lockstep of American industry, and it was the profits of that very industry,
through railroad tycoon Leland Stanford’s genteel wager of equestrian physics,
that Muybridge was given the first opportunity to transplant the lockstep of
industry into the realm of the visual.27 As fate would have it, just 50 years later,
a new race for between the emerging Silicon Valley industry of commercial
electronics and the burgeoning entertainment industry of Los Angeles would
further push this drive to the patent office all the way to the international con-
flict of World War II.
Visualizing Music: Oskar Fischinger

and Cage’s “Quartet”
While John and Xenia Cage settled as newlyweds in Los Angeles in 1935, Oskar
Fischinger’s situation in Berlin had reached the breaking point. Even though his
popularity garnered him official censor permits for his films, he was forced to
resort to a series of complex tactics that redefined his films as outside the pur-
view of “abstract” art. Around the same time an agent for Metro-Goldwyn-
Mayer (MGM) brought several of his films to Hollywood for a test screening at
the Filmarte Theater, where they were greeted with riotous approval by a large
audience. Paramount quickly offered a lucrative contract for a short piece to
be included in their feature The Big Broadcast 1937, and Fischinger arrived in
Los Angeles in February 1936. Fischinger immediately encountered the usual
frustrations of émigré artists attempting to assimilate into the industrial model
of film production. Paramount’s refusal to spend money on color film stock for
Fischinger’s portion of the project heightened these tensions, and he left the proj-
ect by the middle of the year. He managed to get by with the help of his many
friends in the émigré population, including Galka Scheyer. In December 1936
Fischinger received a contract from MGM, and he rented a studio space for the
animation production that included some scaffolding. Galka Scheyer introduced
Cage to Fischinger sometime before March of the following year, and Cage and
Fischinger likely discussed percussion music prior to his apprenticeship, because
he sent Fischinger a complimentary ticket to a lecture on percussion music at
the home of bookbinder and musician Hazel Dreis in March 1937, noting on
25
the ticket a promised performance of several compositions on new percussion

instruments by the “John Cage Group.”28
In early 1937 Fischinger began work on his MGM short titled An Optical
Poem, and in hope of a possible future commission, or perhaps out of his own in-
terest in sound phonography, Cage apprenticed briefly for the project (Figure 1.3).
An Optical Poem was shot using the tedious process of stop-motion animation,
whereby dozens of individual paper cutouts of geometric shapes were arranged
on the shooting stage and then repositioned after each frame of film was exposed.
To outline the animation, Fischinger sketched a graphic–temporal notation of
the movement of individual figures across the screen (Figure 1.4). He used a
large scroll of graph paper, on which the horizontal plane represented the in-
dividual frames. The graph paper was subdivided into individual lines where
Fischinger sketched the general movement of the figures over time. The curved
lines and straight lines in the example specify a few of the many movements
across the screen of the paper cutouts.
With these details one can get a sense of the animation process Cage witnessed.
Fischinger knew the exact attack points in which each image would appear. In
later sections a myriad of figures move across the screen, each corresponding with
Figure 1.3 Fischinger in studio working on An Optical Poem. Hollywood, California,

1937. © Center for Visual Music.
26
Figure 1.4 Oskar Fischinger, graphic notation sketch for An Optical Poem. © Center for Visual Music.
27
different attack points, and the coordination of each of the figures within the set
was a complex endeavor. As Cage recalled later in life, during his apprenticeship
Fischinger looked on, cigar in hand, in the corner of the studio while Cage care-
fully moved the large paper cutouts of colored geometric shapes a few fractions of
an inch with a large feather attached to a stick for each successive frame shot. At
one point Fischinger fell asleep, dropping ashes from his cigar into a pile of papers
and rags and starting a small fire. Frightened, Cage rushed to splash water on the
flames, dousing Fischinger and the equipment in the process.29 Years later, Cage
wrote a mesostic in memory of the encounter:
when yOu
Said
eaCh
inAnimate object
has a SpiRit
that can take the Form of sound

by beIng
Set into vibration
i beCame a musician
it was as tHough
you had set me on fIre
i raN
without thinkinG
and thrEw myself
into the wateR30
According to all surviving documentation, Cage’s work lasted no more than

a few days, and likely ended after the fire incident. Moreover, as Fischinger’s wife
Elfriede later noted, the event seems highly unlikely to have occurred as Cage
recalled because of the highly flammable nature of the nitrate film used during the
animation process.31 Despite the brevity of Cage’s apprenticeship and his hazy rec-
ollection, the influence of Fischinger’s animation method can be seen in the man-
uscript for Cage’s first percussion work, Quartet, which displays many similarities
to Fischinger’s graphic sketches. Although Cage dated the work to 1935—before
his first encounter with Fischinger—there is reason to think the date incorrect and
that it likely dates from after his apprenticeship.32 Cage’s only other percussion
piece from his Los Angeles years, Trio (1936), used conventional notation and was
written for specific instruments, whereas his Quartet does not specify instrumen-
tation and is written in a unique graphic notation. Each movement of the manu-
script is written in a progressively strict type of proportional notation, beginning
28
with the first movement in loosely drawn lines, followed by the second movement,
which attempts to align measures among systems, followed by the third move-
ment, “Axial Asymmetry,” with a strict uniformity of 60 bars per system, and
culminating with the final movement, written on graph paper (Figure 1.5).
Cage’s blocking of individual instruments bears a distinct similarity to the
animation “staging” in Fischinger’s graphs, and it is here that the notion of a
“spirit inside each object” has clear scientific and practical artistic implications.
Cage had discovered the scientific nature of soundwave structure through
film phonography and scientific research for his father, giving him a sense of
the indexical relationship between sound and object. In Fischinger’s studio he
witnessed a miraculous blending of scientific precision with brilliant artistry in
the synchronization of sound and image over time. Thus, in just one short en-
counter, Cage for the first time noticed the connection among sound, object,
and duration. Although this scientific explanation is helpful in terms of a con-
crete particularity of sound in Cage’s larger ontology of music, it is helpful at
this juncture to return to the opening epigraph and reexamine the “spirit inside
each object.” Fischinger’s original observation came from an anecdote in which
he heard his wife, Elfriede, drop a key in an adjacent room, upon which he im-
mediately recognized the sound as coming from that key and no other object,
pointing to the fact, as one would infer, that each object has an indexical imprint
in scientific terms as a specific set of soundwaves unique to its physical charac-
teristics. However, as the quote continues, Fischinger conveyed something else
to Cage: that he must “brush past” the object as an act of indexical liberation,
drawing forth an aesthetic distinction that, as Tobias elsewhere notes, was a con-
sistent theme throughout Fischinger’s career. The colorful and variegated shapes
that animate the screen are at times in conformance with the scientific soundwave
patterns inscribed on the audio portion of the film, but their materiality is both
concrete and reflexive. Tobias argues that Fischinger’s visual music was an aes-
thetic practice of a philosophy of music less concerned with representational
theory and film’s indexicality, in which “the temporalized ornament correlated
poetic insight and aesthetic observation with a sensory force experienced as a par-
ticular, creative truth of being-in-mass mediation.”33 Such an observation moves
close to the romantic notion of musical absolutism and the poetic insight gained
from collective universal experience, through which the universal intelligibility of
sound phonography led simply to a modernist rationalization of traditional 19th-
century aesthetics of musical autonomy. However, Cage, following Fischinger,
invoked something greater about the spiritual within sound’s materiality: a phi-
losophy of immanence. As Fischinger noted in an undated manuscript,
There are many things in nature before which our mind remains in
wonder, without the mind’s eye mastering or a sophisticated cortex
29
Figure 1.5 John Cage, manuscript for Quartet, Movement IV, graphic notation details, ca. 1937. John Cage Music Manuscript Collection, New York
Public Library, Music Division, JPB 95-3, Folder 175. Used by permission of the John Cage Trust.
30
penetrating this mysterious, evocative weaving to descend into the dark-

ness of the unexplored and clarify still unseen relationships. Here even the
physicist must halt, and here lie, too, the boundaries of his world. Only
poets gifted with higher imagination may perhaps intuitively see into
deeper darkness, to penetrate it and glimpse relationships that cannot be
proven immediately.34
Following his work on infrared vision and subsequent poetic remarks to

Schindler, Cage intuitively grasped what Holly Rogers likens to a state of “tem-
poral liminality.” Speaking in the context of video art aesthetics, Rogers culls
from the anthropological work of Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner, who
describe a rite-of-passage ritual of separation in which the individual enters into
a liminal period, hovering within a dynamic, diachronic, indeterminate tran-
sitional phase before individualization is achieved.35 Cage would later char-
acterize a similar state reflective of the philosophy of Henri Bergson, but in
essence this liminal transition on the immanent plane was the core of Cage’s
liberatory turn: a move away from intellectual abstraction and absolutism to-
ward a new universality, a turn that he ultimately reoriented as a new everyday
hermeneutic that abstracted musical form under the veil of Eastern philosophy
and transcendental thought. In the interim, his interest in scientific metaphors
for temporality and mediation through electromagnetic current remained cen-
tral to his evolving aesthetic, particularly with his experiences in Seattle in the
coming years.
Transcendent Radio: Imaginary Landscapes

and the “Inner Eye”
Following his brief apprenticeship, Cage had no further contact with Fischinger
until the fall of 1940, yet in the intervening years his interest in electroacoustic
composition began to blossom. Cage Sr. continued with his research on electron-
beam tubes with patents in 1938 and 1939, research Cage Jr. assisted on until his
departure for Seattle in 1938.36 During his brief tenure at the Cornish School
in Seattle from the fall of 1938 to the spring of 1940, Cage entered into his first
period of compositional maturity. He completed several percussion and elec-
troacoustic works, “invented” the prepared piano (a piano whose sound has
been changed by the placement of objects, or “preparations” on or between the
strings), and fostered several key artistic relationships with visual artists based in
the Northeast. As his first venture away from his family and the social confines of
Los Angeles, Cage found refuge in the small artistic community of the Cornish
School. Like his later experiences at Black Mountain College and Stony Point,
31
New York, Cage’s close, daily interaction with like-minded liberal artists and
intellectuals engendered an environment of both artistic and social freedom
paralleled only by his time in Europe and early years in Los Angeles.
In Seattle, Cage encountered two visual artists who would provide an impor-
tant transition from the spiritual theories of Fischinger: Mark Tobey and Morris
Graves. Wisconsin native Mark Tobey introduced Cage to many tenets of Zen
Buddhism and Bahá’í faith, a connection that Cage repeatedly referred to as a key
juncture in the development of his early aesthetic. Whereas scholars note many of
these connections in the context of Cage’s later turn toward Eastern philosophy,
Tobey’s technological discourse on the transformation of modern mediated per-
ception has gone unnoticed.37 Tobey’s artistic sense of immediacy and phenome-
nological awareness led to Cage’s often-repeated story of the encounter with the
artist one evening in Seattle:
Though I loved the work of Morris Graves, and still do, it was Tobey who
had a great effect on my way of seeing, which is to say, my involvement
with painting, or my involvement with life even. I remember in partic-
ular a walk with Mark Tobey from the area of Seattle around the Cornish
school downhill and through the town toward a Japanese Restaurant—a
walk that would not normally take more than forty-five minutes, but on
this occasion it must have taken several hours, because he was constantly
stopping and pointing out things to see, opening my eyes in other words.
Which, if I understand it at all, has been a function of twentieth-century
art—to open our eyes.38
In Mark Tobey Cage found, as in Marcel Duchamp’s earlier work, a blend of

geometric abstraction and temporal gesture that effectively portrayed a sense
of duration on the canvas plane. Tobey, an amateur musician and composer,
was personally concerned with the visual representation of music, outlined in
his correspondence with German American painter Lyonel Feininger.39 For
example, in 1939 the Works Progress Administration commissioned Tobey for
a mural painting that was never installed. The work he produced, his largest
canvas to date, titled Science, brought together a number of prescient techno-
logical motifs. Balancing historical scientific observations on celestial bodies
and anatomy with modern communications, Tobey’s canvas blends spiritual
and technological imagery in a personal expression of his Bahá’í faith. The
centerpiece of the canvas, a star in the palm of a hand, connects to other an-
atomical elements of the body via a network of lattices that resembles power
lines and radio towers. These beacons of communication link the human
psyche to the natural surroundings of electromagnetic energy emanating from
the palm, the fingernail, and the heart. The symbols for Mars and Venus float
32
along the periphery with animal motifs found in other contemporary works.
In this and many other paintings by Tobey, a connection among the invis-
ible spaces of surroundings is captured in abstractions of human perception,
linking unconsciousness with the experience of reality.
In contrast to Tobey’s passive receptivity, Morris Graves’s confrontational in-
teraction with Cage resulted in a more tumultuous relationship between the two
artists. Graves’s activist Dada antics within the Cornish School garnered him a
reputation as the community agitator, such as his first interaction with Cage at
a concert featuring his recent percussion works in 1939. Arriving with a bag of
peanuts and a box of weighted doll eyes, Graves prepared to heckle Cage. Cracking
peanuts and using a pair of doll eyes as pretend-lorgnettes, Graves reached a furor
at the end of the third movement of Cage’s Quartet, when he threw back his head
and screamed “Jesus in the Everywhere!”40 After the event the two became close,
eventually sharing a townhouse near the Cornish School. Cage would later recall
this encounter in his essay on Graves in the publication Empty Words (1973).
Arranged in his unique spatial typescript, Cage’s homage highlights the inter-
active element of Graves’s painting style and the shock of their first meeting.41
Reminiscences and anecdotes are interspersed with nonsyntactical dance-chants
arranged to follow metrical patterns of motivic groups from the fourth move-
ment of his Quartet, a reference to one of the many “percussive” instrumentations
that Cage proposed for the performance of the work. One section in particular
juxtaposes a key technological element of Graves’s work with the memory of the
encounter:
CHAI yaCHAI
TANyaCHAITANyaCHAITANyaTANyaCHAITANyaTAN
yayaCHAITANyaCHAIyaCHAITANyaCHAICHAITAN
yaCHAIyaCHAITANyaCHAIyaCHAITANyaCHAICHAI
Finally, the master himself
sends various things to the house, such
as a carpet, a hubble-bubble for smoking, and the like.
Friedman-Kein saw thirty Instruments for New
Navigation, elements for forty more. Told Duncan
Phillips how marvelous they were. NASA
invited Graves to Goddard Space Flight Center and Cape
Kennedy to discuss aesthetics of orbital travel. Came
to the concert with friends, a large bag of peanuts, and
lorgnette with doll’s eyes suspended in it. “If
he does anything upsetting, take him out.”
After the slow movement, he said:
Jesus in the Everywhere. That was taken as the signal.42
3
The works in reference were a series of Graves’s sculptures titled Instrument for
a New Navigation from the early 1960s, made in response to the rapid advances
during the period in space travel. The navigation tools caught the interest of
NASA, which arranged for Graves’s participation in a project to include artworks
on early deep-space exploratory missions. Graves’s fascination with the seemingly
endless void of the cosmos paralleled his lifelong concern with the visual motive
of the “inner eye.” These “instruments” often included a biomechanical orifice
capable of peering into the cosmos, reflecting his ambiguous relationship with
technological advancements. His earliest use of this symbol was in the 1934 work,
Untitled Night Scene, in which a surrealistic amalgam of items surrounds the cen-
tral object: a cross between a streetlight and a clock from which the dials are
removed and replaced with a transparent space with a floating cathode-ray tube
in the center. As Graves later recounted, he reflected the relationship between
inner and outer modes of space in this series:
The observer must be mindful of the simple fact that there are three
‘spaces’: phenomenal space (the world of nature, of phenomena), the
space ‘outside’ of us; mental space, the space in which dreams occur,
and the images of the imagination take shape; the space of conscious-
ness . . . [within which the origins, operations and experiences of con-
sciousness are revealed].43
Reading Cage’s compositional development during his Seattle years within

this discourse reveals a concern with the ramifications of spatial and temporal
perceptions and the mediating role of technology in the perceptions of inner and
outer existence. Cage’s three major innovations during the period included the
development of a temporal–lattice structuring of his percussion works, the in-
tervention in the sounding apparatus of the piano with “preparations” that al-
tered the perceived normalcy of piano sounds, and the inclusion of electronic and
broadcast technology in his early electroacoustic works.
For Cage, physical movement and rhythm were deeply intertwined. His
early work with eurhythmics at the Cornish School led to a number of creative
methods for visualizing music as physical movement. Writing the musical rhythms
of a work in chalk on the floor, Cage would instruct students to walk the size of
beats and then to subdivide these rhythms according to precise delineations of
space.44 Simultaneously, he developed his well-known compositional approach
that stressed part–whole relationships in strict ratios. With an engineering per-
spective for mathematical proportioning, his works employed what he described
as “micro-macrocosmic” form. Within this structure, phrase groupings were ar-
ranged in proportion to larger sections in a repeating sequence of ratios on both
levels. For example, in First Construction in Metal (1939), the overall schema
34
consists of five sections in the sequence 4-3-2-3-4. Within each section, the struc-
ture repeats within nested smaller units.45 The first section of four contains four
subsections that repeat the same pattern of 4-3-2-3-4, whereas the second sec-
tion of three contains three subsections built on the same structure, and so on
to the end of the piece. Within these units, Cage was free to choose from a lim-
ited amount of smaller motives, and his choices were determined through a ro-
tational axis in which each successive choice must follow a neighboring point on
the circle.46
The origins of micro-macrocosmic form emerged from two concerns: the
necessity of coordinating dance steps with music in choreographed works, and
the structuring of open-ended modules of phrase structure. These “frames,” as
Cage would later identify them, provided an open-ended temporal space for the
sounding bodies. Stemming from initial concerns found in his Quartet, which
did not specify instrumentation for performance, his works began to move away
from traditional notation. Even in his early prepared piano scores, the relation-
ship between notation and aural result was immediately stratified by the mechan-
ical interjection of items on the strings. As he developed these techniques, Cage
began to create complicated harmonic relationships by placing preparations on
specific nodal points along the string body that created a secondary melodic aural
result that contradicted the written notation.47 The notation for these works
was in essence a form of tablature, dissolving the relationship between notation
and sound, and instead focusing on the relationship between mechanical ac-
tion and sounds. At the same time as his first interventions in the piano, Cage’s
first electroacoustic compositions began to take on themes of dislocation and
defamiliarization through the reuse of modern technology.
Although one of Cage’s primary interests in first moving to Seattle was the
expansive inventory of percussion instruments at the Cornish School, he soon
found another outlet for experimentation: the newly built radio broadcast studio
housed on campus. Often described as a discovery rather than an invention, radio
provided a technology that could “tune in” to the celestial realm, transporting
listeners through the experience of auditory perception into the abstractness of
music. However, rather than merely instilling a sense of optimism in the new me-
dium, the disembodiment of sound furthered the amnesic sense of perception,
defamiliarizing listeners from the traditional context for sounds in the aural envi-
ronment and foregrounding questions of individuality and reality, a theme Cage
would explore in his first electroacoustic composition, Imaginary Landscape No.
1 (1939).
Composed to accompany the dance by choreographer Bonnie Bird, Imaginary
Landscape No. 1 features two sets of test tone recordings that could modulate fre-
quency through the use of a foot-operated clutch mechanism that altered the
speed of the records. Along with the records, Cage employed a Chinese cymbal
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and there, blew across us from moment to moment, uncannily
unsubstantial as we went through them, in mere fog. Then finally we
looked down upon it all, the eye ranging far and wide over a
magnificent confusion of multitudinous rounded knolls, of fantastic
perilously toppling lofty crags from which streamed wisps of
gossamer vapor, of grotesque mountains and tremendous chasms,
such as the wildest scenery of earth can never show.
Familiar as it was to me, I could not help admiring anew the
immense sublimity of that spectacle which drifts so brilliantly under
the blue arch of heaven when the shadowed earth below teems with
rain, that spectacle which the eye of earth-bound man never sees.
To the extreme limit of vision it stretched, apparently solid, a fairy
country gleaming snow-white under the vertical sun, across which
our shadow, growing smaller at each instant, flitted like the shadow
of a great bird.
I felt Sylvia’s hand squeeze me in her delight. My exasperated
annoyance with Toby died down, all but vanished. Perhaps he wasn’t
such a fool, after all. It was worth while to show her this. That was
what he had climbed so steeply for. Now he would flatten out, circle
once or twice to imprint this fairy scene upon her memory, and then
descend. But he did not. He did not even glance round to us. He
held the nose of the machine up, climbed still, higher and higher, in
those sheer and dizzy spirals.
This was getting beyond a joke. I glanced at my watch, computed
the minutes since we had risen from that gray-green sea now out of
sight beneath the horizon-filling floor of cloud. We must be already
over five thousand feet up. That was surely quite enough. He might
lose his direction, cut off from the earth by that great cloud-layer,
miss the sea for our return. A forced landing upon hard ground with
those water-floats of ours would be a pretty ugly crash. I craned
forward, looked over his shoulder at the dial of the barograph. We
were seven thousand! What on earth—
I shouted at him, but of course he did not hear it in the deafening
roar of the engine. I caught hold of his shoulder, shook him hard. I
had to shake a second time before his face came round to me. It
startled me with its strange set fixity of expression, the wild eyes that
glared at me. I gesticulated, pointed downward. He opened his lips in
a vicious ugly snarl, shouted something of which only the ugly rebuff
of my interference was intelligible, turned again to his controls, lifted
the machine again from its momentary sag.
I sank back into my seat, quivering. Sylvia glanced at me
inquiringly. I shrugged my shoulders. She had not, I hoped, seen that
ugly snarl upon his face. The cloud-floor was now far below us, its
crags and chasms flattened to mere corrugations on its gleaming
surface. The seaplane rose, circling round and round untiringly,
corkscrewing ever up and up into the infinite blue above us.
I was now thoroughly alarmed. What was he playing at? I worried
over the memory of his furious face when I had made my gestured
expostulation. Surely he could have no serious purpose of any kind
in thus climbing so steeply far above any reasonable altitude. There
was no serious purpose imaginable. Unless—no, I refused to
entertain the sudden sickening doubt of his sanity. He was playing a
joke on us, on me. Guessing that I had lost my nerve, and angry with
me for spoiling a tête-à-tête flight with Sylvia, he was maliciously
giving me a twisting. Presently he would get tired of the joke, flatten
out.
But he did not get tired of it. Up and up we went, in turn after turn—
rather wider circles now, for the air was getting rare and thin, and
sometimes we sideslipped uncomfortably, and the engine flagged,
threatening to misfire, until he readjusted the mixture—but still
climbing. Far, far below us the cloud-floor was deceptive of our real
height in its fallacious similitude to an immense horizon of snow-
covered earth.
I glanced at my watch, calculated again our height from the
minutes. We must surely now be over twelve thousand feet! I shrank
nervously from the mere thought of again moving to look over his
shoulder at the barograph. An appalling feeling of vertigo held me in
its clutch. That last glance over the side had done it, reawakening all
the panic terror which had swept over me that day when—at such a
height as this—I had seen that Hun plunge to destruction and had
suddenly realized, as though I had but just awakened from a dream,
my own high-poised perilous instability. I sat there clutched and
trembling, could not have moved to save my life. I would have given
anything to have closed my eyes, forgotten where I was, but the
horrible fascination of this upward progress held them open as
though mesmerized. I tried to compute the stages of our ascent from
our circling sweeps. Thirteen thousand—thirteen thousand five
hundred—fourteen thousand—fourteen thousand five hundred—
fifteen thousand—I gave it up. It was icily cold. My head was dizzy,
my ears sizzling with altered blood-pressure. My lungs heaved in this
rarefied atmosphere. I glanced at Sylvia. She looked ill; her lips were
blue; she was gasping as though about to faint.
She looked at me imploringly, made a gesture with her hand
toward Toby’s inexorable back. I shrugged my shoulders in sign that
I had already protested in vain. But nevertheless I obeyed. Once
more I leaned forward and clutched at his shoulder. Once more, after
I had shaken him furiously, he turned upon me with that savage
snarl, shouted something unintelligible, and switched round again to
his controls.
Sylvia and I looked at each other. This time she had seen. In her
eyes I read also that doubt of his sanity which was torturing me. She
motioned me toward the cockpit, pantomimed my taking over control.
It was impossible. I gestured it to her. Even if my nerves had been
competent to the task, it was certain that Toby would not voluntarily
relinquish his place. To have attempted to take it from him—if he
were indeed mad—would have resulted in a savage struggle where
the equilibrium of the machine would inevitably have been lost—in
about two seconds we should all of us be hurtling down to certain
death. The only thing to do was to sit tight—and hope that he would
suddenly have enough of this prank, and bring us earthward again.
But even if he had suddenly vanished from his place, to clamber
over into the cockpit and take charge was more than I could have
done at that moment. There was a time when I might have done it.
But now I was shaking like a leaf. I could not have pushed a
perambulator, let alone pilot an airplane.
And still we climbed, roaring up and up. The yellow canvas of the
lower plane, gleaming in the sunshine, seemed curiously motionless
against the unchanging blue that was all around us. The earth, the
very clouds below us, seemed totally lost. I could not bring myself to
venture a glance down to them. We seemed out of contact with
everything that was normal life, suspended in the infinite void. And
yet the engine roared, and I knew that we still climbed.
We must have been somewhere about twenty thousand feet. My

head seemed as though it would burst. I was breathing with difficulty.
A little higher, and we should need oxygen. Toby’s face was of
course hidden from me, but he sat steadily at his controls, apparently
in no embarrassment. Probably he had recently been practicing
flying to great heights—it would be his queer idea of amusing himself
—and was more habituated to changes of atmospheric pressure. I
looked at Sylvia. She was plainly much distressed—and more than
distressed, frightened. I cannot describe the anguish which gripped
me as I contemplated her. Whatever I had tried to pretend to myself
down there on that distant earth in those six dreary months since my
pride had been wounded, I knew now, with an atrocious vividness of
realization, that I loved her. And I could do nothing—nothing—to
save her, if that lunatic in front did not come to his senses! The
imploring look she fixed upon me was exquisite torture. Speech was
impossible in that deafening roar of the engine, but she made me
understand—the bitter irony of it!—that it was in me she trusted. I
took her hand, pressed it to my lips. If we were to die, she should at
least know what I felt for her. And then—oh, miracle!—I felt my hand
pulled toward her, taken to her lips. She met my eyes with a wan
smile of unmistakable meaning.
And then, just as I was all dizzy with the shock of it, the roar of the
engine ceased. There was a sudden silence that was awesome in its
completeness. Our nose came down to slightly below the horizontal.
Thank heaven, he was tired of the joke, was flattening out, was
going to descend! We began, in fact, to circle in a wide, very slightly
depressed, slanting curve. Toby twisted round from his seat, one
hand still upon the controls. There was a grim little smile on his face
as his eyes, curiously glittering, met mine.
“You get out!” he said curtly. His voice sounded strangely toneless,
far off, in that rarefied upper atmosphere.
For a moment I had a spasm of alarm, but I could not believe he
was serious. It was too fantastic, at twenty thousand feet in the air.
“Don’t be a silly ass, Toby! Take us down. The joke has gone far
enough.” My own voice was thin in my ears.
He ignored my protest.
“This is where you get out!” he repeated stubbornly.
Was the man really mad? I thought it best to humor him, managed
to force a little laugh.
“Thanks very much, but I’d rather go back with you,” I said.
“We’re not going back,” he replied with grim simplicity. “But you are
—here and now.”
This was madness right enough! Our only chance was to get him
into conversation, turn the current of his thoughts somehow, coax
him back to earth.
“Not going back?” I grinned at him as if he were being really funny.
“Where are you going, then?”
“We’re going on—Sylvia and I.”
He smiled at her fondly, nodded as though sure of her assent. She

uttered a little cry of alarm, clutched at me. All the time, while we
were speaking, he was steering the airplane automatically with one
hand, bringing her round and round in wide, flat circles where we lost
the minimum of height.
“On?” I said in innocent inquiry, while my brain worked
desperately. Curiously enough, in that moment of crisis, I found my
head as clear, my nerves as steady, as they had ever been in my
life. All my dizzy turmoil had vanished. I forgot that I had ever had a
panic in the air. I was merely trying to think of some scheme by
which I might be able to replace him at those controls. “On—where?”
He jerked his hand upward.
“Up there! On and on, until we come to—” He stopped himself
suddenly, his face diabolically suspicious. “You think I’m going to tell
you, don’t you? You think you’ll be able to follow us? But you wont!
You get out—here and now—d’you understand?”
I tried to be cunning.
“But Toby!” I objected. “I think I know the way—better than you do,
perhaps. Change places and let me take the machine.”
It was a false move.
“What?” he cried. “You think you know the way, do you? You think
you know the way beyond the stars?” He burst suddenly into a
hideous laugh, thin and cackling in the awesome silence of that
upper air. “Then you’ll never get there! I’ll see to that! Get out!” He
gestured over the side, into the blue abyss above which we circled.
“Quick!”
I glanced at Sylvia. She was sitting numbed with horror, incapable of

speech. As I looked, she jerked forward in a gesture of wild protest
abruptly checked by the straps which held her in her seat. The
airplane rocked in its now tender equilibrium just as something went
crack! past my head. My eyes were back on Toby in the fraction of
an instant. Still twisted in his seat, he was leveling that automatic
pistol at me. I could see by his eyes that he was in the very act of
pressing the trigger for the second time.
Four years’ war-service in the air make a man pretty quick. In a
flash I had ducked, flung myself upon him over the slight partition
between us, wrenched at his wrist. Risky as it was, it was certain
death to all of us if this homicidal maniac was not dealt with. His
awkward half-turned position put him at a disadvantage, but he
fought grimly, with all a maniac’s strength, trying to point the muzzle
of that pistol at my body. Automatically, of course, he rose to face
me, relinquished the controls to use both hands. I felt the machine
lurch and plunge dizzily nose downward. I had one lightning-quick
thought—thank God, Sylvia was strapped!—and then I tumbled over
the partition headfirst into the cockpit.
It was not thought but instinct with which I clutched the steering-
stick,—one had not much time for thought when fighting the nimble
Fokker,—got into some sort of position on the seat. We were
vertically nose down, spinning horribly—but not once but many times
in the war I had shammed dead, gone rushing earthward in a
realistic twirling spin and then abruptly flattened out of it upside down
and come up like a rocket over the pursuing Hun. This was simpler. I
had only to pull her out of it—and only when I pulled her out of it,
circled her round once for a long steady glide, did I realize that I was
alone in that cockpit. There was no Toby!
I glanced back to Sylvia. She sagged in her seat against the straps
—fainted. Just as well, I thought grimly. I touched the engine to a
momentary activity to test it, shut it off again for a long circling
descent toward the cloud-floor far below. An exultation leaped in me,
the exultation of old days of peril in the air. I thought of Toby, with
whom I had shared so many, with a sudden warming of the heart.
Poor old Toby! He had died as after all he perhaps would have
wished to die, high up in the infinite blue—dead of shock long before
he reached the earth. I thrilled with the old-time sense of mastery
over a fine machine, delicately sensitive to the controls, as that
massed and pinnacled cloud landscape grew large again beneath
me. My one anxiety was whether it hid sea or land. Then, just as we
drew near, I saw a deep black gulf riven in its snowy mass—saw
down through that gulf a tiny model steamship trailing a long white
wake....
The wedding? That was last year.
Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the March 1924 issue

of The Blue Book Magazine.
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Through The Looking Glass: John Cage

and Avant-Garde Film Richard H. Brown

Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness: Through

Technocrats of the Imagination: Art, Technology, and

The Spirit of Individualism. Shanghai Avant-Garde Art

An Avant-garde Theological Generation: The Nouvelle

Heritage Conservation in the United States: Enhancing

Looking through the Speculum: Examining the Women's

The Glass Hotel Emily St. John Mandel [Mandel

Medieval Monarchy in Action Boyd H. Hill Jr

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

The Oxford Music/Media Series

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

That is finished now. It was a pleasure. And now this is a pleasure.

On one quiet evening in 1960, viewers who tuned in to the pop-

famous sunny disposition. After his introduction he noted to Moore that he

on filmmakers’ approaches to filmmaking, nor is it a complete history of Cage’s

prone to subjectivity and falsity. Scientific measurement relies on the concrete-

Organization and Scope

I spend time at the end of Chapter 1 addressing Cage’s original formulation of

German filmmaker Hans Richter’s feature-​length avant-​garde film, Dreams That

1 THE SPIRIT INSIDE EACH OBJECT

OSKAR FISCHINGER, SOUND PHONOGRAPHY,

In the summer of 1937 the young John Cage arrived at Oskar

The Spirit Inside Each Object • 17

compositional breakthroughs is difficult, given Cage’s proclivity for crafting a

The Spirit Inside Each Object • 19

The Spirit Inside Each Object • 21

directing the cathode-​ray-​tube beam onto a photoreactive plate that highlighted

I am luminous. There is a marvelous extension around me like the things

Blending technological and scientific discourse with a playful spiritual bent,

The Spirit Inside Each Object • 23

Instead of following his father’s footsteps into a lucrative industrial application

The American origins of time photography were deeply rooted in the

Visualizing Music: Oskar Fischinger

The Spirit Inside Each Object • 25

the ticket a promised performance of several compositions on new percussion

Figure 1.3 Fischinger in studio working on An Optical Poem. Hollywood, California,

The Spirit Inside Each Object • 27

that can take the Form of sound

According to all surviving documentation, Cage’s work lasted no more than

penetrating this mysterious, evocative weaving to descend into the dark-

Following his work on infrared vision and subsequent poetic remarks to

Transcendent Radio: Imaginary Landscapes

The Spirit Inside Each Object • 31

In Mark Tobey Cage found, as in Marcel Duchamp’s earlier work, a blend of

The Spirit Inside Each Object • 33

Reading Cage’s compositional development during his Seattle years within

We must have been somewhere about twenty thousand feet. My

He smiled at her fondly, nodded as though sure of her assent. She

I glanced at Sylvia. She was sitting numbed with horror, incapable of

Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the March 1924 issue

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

START: FULL LICENSE

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

German filmmaker Hans Richter’s feature-length avant-garde film, Dreams That

directing the cathode-ray-tube beam onto a photoreactive plate that highlighted