Uncaged: John Cage and Conceptual Approaches to Participatory Music-making

Abstract

This paper will explore conceptual approaches to participatory music-making, with a focus on the work of John Cage. Cage relied primarily on a performer-audience model of music-making; which seems paradoxical, as a non-hierarchical participatory model seems more in line with his philosophy. While his compositional methods appeared to indicate a desire for self-effacement and collaboration, the resultant works were often quite far from models of non-hierarchical co-creation. However, Cage was a composer who concerned himself primarily with illuminating concepts and demonstrating processes, rather than producing beautiful ‘objects’ and musical commodities. Embracing a community-based experimental model of participation involves departing from traditional Western art music paradigms that regard ‘sound’ primarily as a consumable ‘product’ and the individual composer as all-knowing, all-powerful and central to any experience of music. This movement from selfaggrandisement to self-effacement; from hierarchy to acceptance of difference; from occupation of territory to nomadic adventure; from cliches and ‘norms’ to the ‘novel’ and ‘unprecedented’, challenges the stature of the ‘professional’, within the tripartite musical system of composer, performer and listener. Rather than the solitary composer focusing on the creation of a ‘fixed’ text containing written instructions for its sonic actualisation, musical composition can be centred around the designing of events that encourage social cooperation. These events would be, ideally, non-hierarchical and participant-self-determining but most importantly, always in motion and a state of flux.