Another Love Note (No. 2)

ANOTHER (LOVE) NOTE THAT I WILL NEVER SEND TO SOMEONE I DON’T KNOW

To: John Cage
From: Rachel Harkai
Re: Silence

Dear John,

Much like my love for Jonny Greenwood, my love for you began mid-way through my high school career. I was fifteen, a summer percussion student at Interlochen Center for the Arts, when I heard your Cheap Imitation for the first time. Strange, beautiful, and circular, your music seemed at once immediate and mysterious. How, I wondered, could the Imitations sound so simple, when the intention behind the notes seemed so opaque?

In Interlochen’s crowded basement music library, I listened to old vinyl recordings of your works - especially your percussion pieces - trying to understand the inspiration behind these songs whose sounds were so foreign to my classically-trained ear. And even though I always suspected your genius, I suspected it with a great deal of suspicion. This was, I think, because I was unable to understand your logic, the trajectory you had planned for the future of experimental music, your incorporation of chance. And admittedly, I still remain somewhat suspicious of your work - though today, years later, my willingness to more readily accept the unpredictable, the inexplicable, and the random, has transformed this suspicion into its own strange sort of love. I now love your music because it continues, with every listen, to truly surprise me.

But I am writing this letter to your long-dead soul today, not about your music, but about your writings. In college I had the strange fortune of taking an essay-writing class with a writer who I imagine will one day be very famous, her work likely appearing in assorted anthologies of twenty-first century literary history. She spent a good deal of the course trying to illustrate the value that chance operations - a creative practice employed early on by your friend Duchamp, and later adopted heavily by yourself - might have to the writer. Though many of this professor’s students may have suspected her genius, I think many also believed that this woman was insane. Only now, over a year later, am I beginning to gather even the slightest understanding of what she was saying.

I picked up a copy of Silence - your first collection of writings - from the library last week. They read like the sound of your music - beautiful, circular, simultaneously dense and airy. Though many of your lectures and essays are forty, fifty, even sixty years old, they feel somehow refreshing to me, I think because of the authority with which they ask questions, unafraid of receiving no answer. These writings challenge preconceived notions of form and structure, asking the reader to experiment with the effects of timing, of repetition, and with the ways that we might literarily notate sound.

Your work, I would say, should in many ways be a primer to the young writer (and particularly the young poet), illustrating how form can effectively enhance content. How else, after all, should we talk about experimental music, if not through experimental presentation? Though I may never be smart enough to fully grasp the concepts behind your approaches, I say without hesitation that the challenge to understand them will, for me, be ever-inspiring.

Fondly,
Rachel

____________________________________________________________

In other news, Garfield Minus Garfield is the best thing I’ve seen in a while. Check it out.