A composer’s chance-based method for reworking Joyce’s final novel
What the Work Is
Writing through Finnegans Wake is a literary work by the American composer John Cage. It belongs to a group of texts Cage produced by applying his chance-based compositional methods to existing writing, and it takes as its raw material James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake. The title names both the book and the procedure behind it: Cage “wrote through” Joyce’s text rather than writing about it, generating a new text from the original by means of a rule-based, chance-driven operation.
What the Book Is About
The work is not a commentary, interpretation, or summary of Finnegans Wake. It is a reworking of Joyce’s language itself. Cage subjected the text of the novel to a systematic procedure, so that the resulting book presents language drawn from Finnegans Wake but reorganized according to a method rather than according to Joyce’s own design. The aim is consistent with Cage’s broader artistic project: to remove the composer’s or writer’s personal will and taste from the act of making, and to let a procedure — in this case one governed by chance — determine the outcome. In this sense the book treats Joyce’s novel as a body of material to be operated upon, much as Cage treated sounds, and it extends his compositional thinking from music into the medium of written language.
Key Ideas and Themes
The central idea behind Writing through Finnegans Wake is the application of chance operations to literature. Cage had, from 1951 onward, used the I Ching, an ancient Chinese text used for divination, as a tool for making compositional decisions, allowing chance to determine which sounds would occur and in what order. He described this approach as “imitating nature in its manner of operation,” and he came to value works in which sounds were freed from the composer’s intentions and will. Writing through Finnegans Wake carries that same principle into writing: rather than composing sentences by authorial choice, Cage let a chance procedure select and arrange material from Joyce’s text.
A second theme is the treatment of an existing literary masterpiece as raw material. By writing “through” Finnegans Wake rather than responding to it discursively, Cage places his own work in a dependent, procedural relationship to Joyce’s. The method does not add commentary or explanation; it transforms the source text into a new text whose shape is determined by the operation performed on it. This reflects Cage’s long-standing interest in process over personal expression — the idea that a work can be generated by a rule, with the maker stepping back from decisions of taste and meaning.
The choice of Finnegans Wake is itself significant to the work’s character. Joyce’s novel is famously built out of dense wordplay, multiple languages, and layered puns, so that its language already resists ordinary reading and fixed meaning. Cage’s chance-based rewriting operates on a text that is already unconventional in its use of language, and the resulting work shares in that resistance to straightforward sense. The book thus sits at the meeting point of two experimental sensibilities: Joyce’s linguistic inventiveness and Cage’s procedural, chance-governed approach to making art.
Significance and Influence
Writing through Finnegans Wake belongs to Cage’s wider body of writing, which includes his lectures and essays collected in Silence, his first and most widely read book. Within that body of work, the “writing through” texts represent his effort to carry the logic of his musical methods — indeterminacy and chance — into the medium of language. The work is of interest as an example of how Cage’s central compositional principle could be transferred from sound to text, and as a meeting of two major experimental figures of the twentieth century: the composer who made chance a method, and the novelist whose final book pushed language to its limits.
John Milton Cage Jr. was born on September 5, 1912, at Good Samaritan Hospital in downtown Los Angeles. His father, John Milton Cage Sr. (1886–1964), was an inventor, and his mother, Lucretia (“Crete”) Harvey (1881–1968), worked intermittently as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times. In a 1976 interview, Cage mentioned that George Washington was assisted by an ancestor named John Cage in the task of surveying the Colony of Virginia. Cage described his mother as a woman with “a sense of society” who was “never happy,” while his father is perhaps best characterized by his inventions, which were sometimes idealistic, such as a diesel-fueled submarine that gave off exhaust bubbles. The senior Cage was uninterested in an undetectable submarine. Other inventions were revolutionary and against the scientific norms, such as the “electrostatic field theory” of the universe. John Cage Sr. taught his son that “if someone says ‘can’t’ that shows you what to do.” In 1944–45, Cage wrote two small character pieces dedicated to his parents: Crete and Dad. The latter is a short lively piece that ends abruptly, while Crete is a slightly longer, mostly melodic contrapuntal work.
When Cage was 18 months old, he ate two or three strychnine tablets. “At first the baby’s life was despaired of,” an article stated, but “a stomach pump was administered with success.”
Cage’s first experiences with music were from private piano teachers in the Greater Los Angeles area and several relatives, particularly his aunt Phoebe Harvey James who introduced him to the piano music of the 19th century. He first received piano lessons at school in fourth grade and enjoyed music, but expressed more interest in sight-reading than technique without yet thinking of composition. During high school, one of his music teachers was Fannie Charles Dillon. By 1928, though, Cage was convinced that he wanted to be a writer. He graduated that year from Los Angeles High School as a valedictorian, having also in the spring given a prize-winning speech at the Hollywood Bowl proposing a day of quiet for all Americans; by being “hushed and silent,” he said, “we should have the opportunity to hear what other people think.”
Cage enrolled at Pomona College in Claremont, California, as a theology major in 1928. At Pomona, he encountered the work of the artist Marcel Duchamp via Professor José Pijoan, of the writer James Joyce via Don Sample, of the philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy, and of the composer Henry Cowell. In 1930, he dropped out of Pomona, having come to believe that “college was of no use to a writer” after an incident described in his 1991 autobiographical statement:
I was shocked at college to see one hundred of my classmates in the library all reading copies of the same book. Instead of doing as they did, I went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution was not being run correctly. I left.
Cage persuaded his parents that a trip to Europe would be more beneficial to a future writer than college studies. He subsequently hitchhiked to Galveston, Texas, and sailed from there to Le Havre, France, from where he took a train to Paris. Cage stayed in Europe for 18 months, trying his hand at various forms of art. First, he studied Gothic and Greek architecture, but decided he was not interested enough in architecture to dedicate his life to it. He then took up painting, poetry and music. It was in Europe that, encouraged by his teacher Lazare Lévy, he first heard the music of contemporary composers (such as Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith) and finally got to know the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, which he had not experienced before.
After several months in Paris, Cage’s enthusiasm for America was revived after he read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. He wanted to return immediately, but his parents, with whom he regularly exchanged letters during the entire trip, persuaded him to stay in Europe for a little longer and explore the continent. Cage started traveling, visiting various places in France, Germany, and Spain, as well as Capri in Italy and, most importantly, Mallorca, Spain, where he started composing. His first compositions were created using dense mathematical formulas, but Cage was displeased with the results and left the finished pieces behind when he left. Cage’s association with theater also started in Europe: during a walk in Seville he witnessed, in his own words, “the multiplicity of simultaneous visual and audible events all going together in one’s experience and producing enjoyment.”
Apprenticeship and Studies with Schoenberg
Cage returned to the United States in 1931. He went to Santa Monica, California, where he made a living partly by giving small, private lectures on contemporary art. He got to know various important figures of the Southern California art world, including arts patron Galka Scheyer and his later composition teacher Richard Buhlig. By 1933, Cage had decided to concentrate on music rather than painting. “The people who heard my music had better things to say about it than the people who looked at my paintings had to say about my paintings,” Cage later explained. In 1933, he sent some of his compositions to Henry Cowell; the reply was a “rather vague letter,” in which Cowell suggested that Cage study with Arnold Schoenberg—Cage’s musical ideas at the time included composition based on a 25-tone row, somewhat similar to Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique. Cowell also advised that, before approaching Schoenberg, Cage should take some preliminary lessons, and recommended Adolph Weiss, a former Schoenberg pupil. Weiss had been asked by Schoenberg to be his assistant and to train students who might not be ready for Schoenberg’s teaching.
Following Cowell’s advice, Cage traveled to New York City in 1933 and started studying with Weiss as well as taking lessons from Cowell himself at The New School. He supported himself financially by taking up a job washing walls at a YWCA (Young Women’s Christian Association) in Brooklyn. Cage’s routine during that period was apparently very tiring, with just four hours of sleep on most nights, and four hours of composition every day starting at 4 am. Several months later, still in 1933, Cage became sufficiently good at composition to approach Schoenberg. He could not afford Schoenberg’s price, and when he mentioned it, the older composer asked whether Cage would devote his life to music. After Cage replied that he would, Schoenberg offered to tutor him free of charge.
Cage studied with Schoenberg in California first at the University of Southern California and then at the University of California, Los Angeles, as well as privately. The older composer became one of the biggest influences on Cage, who “literally worshipped him,” particularly as an example of how to live one’s life being a composer. The vow Cage gave, to dedicate his life to music, was apparently still important some 40 years later, when Cage “had no need for it [i.e. writing music],” he continued composing partly because of the promise he gave. Schoenberg’s methods and their influence on Cage are well documented by Cage himself in various lectures and writings. Particularly well-known is the conversation mentioned in the 1958 lecture Indeterminacy:
After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, “In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.” I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, “In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.”
Cage studied with Schoenberg for two years, but although he admired his teacher, he decided to leave after Schoenberg told his students that he was trying to make it impossible for them to write music. Much later, Cage recounted the incident: “… When he said that, I revolted, not against him, but against what he had said. I determined then and there, more than ever before, to write music.” Although Schoenberg was not impressed with Cage’s compositional abilities during these two years, in a later interview, where he initially said that none of his American pupils were interesting, he further stated in reference to Cage: “There was one … of course he’s not a composer, but he’s an inventor—of genius.” Cage would later adopt the “inventor” moniker and deny that he was a composer.
At some point in 1934–35, Cage met artist Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff while working at his mother’s arts and crafts shop. She was the Alaskan-born daughter of a Russian priest; her work encompassed fine bookbinding, sculpture and collage. Although Cage was involved in relationships with Don Sample and with architect Rudolph Schindler’s wife Pauline, he fell in love with Xenia immediately. Cage and Kashevaroff were married in Yuma, Arizona, on June 7, 1935.
Modern Dance, Eastern Influences, and the Discovery of Chance
The newly-married couple first lived with Cage’s parents in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, and then moved to Hollywood. During 1936–38, Cage changed jobs multiple times, including to one that started his lifelong association with modern dance: dance accompanist at the University of California, Los Angeles. He produced music for choreographies and at one point taught a course on “Musical Accompaniments for Rhythmic Expression” at UCLA with his aunt Phoebe. It was during that time that Cage first started experimenting with unorthodox instruments, such as household items, metal sheets, and so on. This was inspired by Oskar Fischinger, who told Cage that “everything in the world has a spirit that can be released through its sound.” Although Cage did not share the idea of spirits, these words inspired him to begin exploring the sounds produced by hitting various non-musical objects.
In 1938, on Cowell’s recommendation, Cage drove to San Francisco to find employment and to seek out fellow Cowell student and composer Lou Harrison. According to Cowell, the two composers had a shared interest in percussion and dance and would likely hit it off. Indeed, upon meeting the two immediately established a strong bond and began a working relationship that continued for several years. Harrison soon helped Cage to secure a faculty position at Mills College, teaching the same program as at UCLA and collaborating with choreographer Marian van Tuyl. Several famous dance groups were present, and Cage’s interest in modern dance grew further. After several months, he left and moved to Seattle, Washington, where he found work as composer and accompanist for choreographer Bonnie Bird at the Cornish College of the Arts. The Cornish School years proved to be a particularly important period in Cage’s life. Aside from teaching and working as accompanist, Cage organized a percussion ensemble that toured the West Coast and brought the composer his first fame. His reputation was enhanced further with the invention of the prepared piano—a piano which has had its sound altered by objects placed on, beneath, or between the strings—in 1940. This concept was originally intended for a performance staged in a room too small to include a full percussion ensemble. It was also at the Cornish School that Cage met several people who became lifelong friends, such as painter Mark Tobey and dancer Merce Cunningham. The latter was to become Cage’s lifelong romantic partner and artistic collaborator.
Cage left Seattle in the summer of 1941 after the painter László Moholy-Nagy invited him to teach at the Chicago School of Design (what later became the IIT Institute of Design). The composer accepted partly because he hoped to find opportunities to organize a center for experimental music that were not available in Seattle. These opportunities did not materialize. Cage taught at the Chicago School of Design and worked as accompanist and composer at the University of Chicago. At one point, his reputation as percussion composer landed him a commission from the Columbia Broadcasting System to compose a soundtrack for a radio play by Kenneth Patchen. The result, The City Wears a Slouch Hat, was received well, and Cage deduced that more important commissions would follow. Hoping to find these, he left Chicago for New York City in the spring of 1942.
In New York, the Cages first stayed with painter Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim. Through them, Cage met important artists such as Piet Mondrian, André Breton, Jackson Pollock, Marcel Duchamp, and many others. Guggenheim was very supportive: the Cages could stay with her and Ernst for any length of time, and she offered to organize a concert of Cage’s music at the opening of her gallery, which included paying for transportation of Cage’s percussion instruments from Chicago. After she learned that Cage had secured a concert at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Guggenheim withdrew all support, and, even after the ultimately successful MoMA concert, Cage was left homeless, unemployed, and penniless. The commissions he hoped for did not happen. He and Xenia spent the summer of 1942 with dancer Jean Erdman and her husband Joseph Campbell. Without the percussion instruments, Cage again turned to prepared piano, producing a substantial body of works for performances by various choreographers, including Merce Cunningham, who had moved to New York City several years earlier. Cage and Cunningham eventually became romantically involved, and Cage’s marriage, already breaking up during the early 1940s, ended in divorce in 1945. Cunningham remained Cage’s partner for the rest of his life. Cage also countered the lack of percussion instruments by writing, on one occasion, for voice and closed piano: the resulting piece, The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1942), quickly became popular and was performed by the celebrated duo of Cathy Berberian and Luciano Berio. In 1944, he appeared in Maya Deren’s At Land, a 15-minute silent experimental film.
Like his personal life, Cage’s artistic life went through a crisis in the mid-1940s. The composer was experiencing a growing disillusionment with the idea of music as means of communication: the public rarely accepted his work, and Cage himself, too, had trouble understanding the music of his colleagues. In early 1946, Cage agreed to tutor Gita Sarabhai, an Indian musician who came to the US to study Western music. In return, he asked her to teach him about Indian music and philosophy. Cage also attended, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, D. T. Suzuki’s lectures on Zen Buddhism, and read further the works of Coomaraswamy. The first fruits of these studies were works inspired by Indian concepts: Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, String Quartet in Four Parts, and others. Cage accepted the goal of music as explained to him by Sarabhai: “to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences.”
Early in 1946, his former teacher Richard Buhlig arranged for Cage to meet Berlin-born pianist Grete Sultan, who had escaped from Nazi persecution to New York in 1941. They became close, lifelong friends, and Cage later dedicated part of his Music for Piano and his monumental piano cycle Etudes Australes to her. In 1949, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
After a 1949 performance at Carnegie Hall, New York, Cage received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, which enabled him to make a trip to Europe, where he met composers such as Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez. More important was Cage’s chance encounter with Morton Feldman in New York City in early 1950. Both composers attended a New York Philharmonic concert, where the orchestra performed Anton Webern’s Symphony, followed by a piece by Sergei Rachmaninoff. Cage felt so overwhelmed by Webern’s piece that he left before the Rachmaninoff; and in the lobby, he met Feldman, who was leaving for the same reason. The two composers quickly became friends; some time later Cage, Feldman, Earle Brown, pianist David Tudor, and Cage’s pupil Christian Wolff came to be referred to as “the New York school.”
In early 1951, Wolff presented Cage with a copy of the I Ching—a Chinese classic text which describes a symbol system used to identify order in chance events. This version of the I Ching was the first complete English translation and had been published by Wolff’s father, Kurt Wolff of Pantheon Books, in 1950. The I Ching is commonly used for divination, but for Cage it became a tool to compose using chance. To compose a piece of music, Cage would come up with questions to ask the I Ching; the book would then be used in much the same way as it is used for divination. For Cage, this meant “imitating nature in its manner of operation.” His lifelong interest in sound itself culminated in an approach that, in his view, yielded works in which sounds were free from the composer’s will:
When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic—here on Sixth Avenue, for instance—I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound … I don’t need sound to talk to me.
Although Cage had used chance on a few earlier occasions, most notably in the third movement of Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1950–51), the I Ching opened new possibilities in this field for him. The first results of the new approach were Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for twelve radios and Music of Changes for piano. The latter work was written for Tudor, whom Cage had met through Feldman—another friendship that lasted until Cage’s death. Tudor premiered most of Cage’s works until the early 1960s, when he stopped performing on the piano and concentrated on composing. The I Ching became Cage’s standard tool for composition; he used it in practically every work composed after 1951, and eventually settled on a computer algorithm that calculated numbers in a manner similar to throwing coins for the I Ching.
Despite the fame Sonatas and Interludes earned him, and the connections he cultivated with American and European composers and musicians, Cage was quite poor. Although he still had an apartment at 326 Monroe Street (which he had occupied since around 1946), his financial situation in 1951 worsened so much that while working on Music of Changes, he prepared a set of instructions for Tudor as to how to complete the piece in the event of his death. Nevertheless, Cage managed to survive and maintained an active artistic life with lectures and performances.
In 1952–1953, he completed another mammoth project—Williams Mix for eight magnetic tapes, which Brown, Feldman, Tudor, and Bebe and Louis Barron helped to put together. Also in 1952, Cage composed the piece that became his best-known and most controversial creation: 4′33″. The score instructs the performer not to play the instrument during the entire duration of the piece—four minutes, thirty-three seconds—and is meant to be perceived as consisting of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed. Cage had conceived of “a silent piece” years earlier, but was reluctant to write it down; indeed, the premiere (given by Tudor on August 29, 1952, at Woodstock, New York) caused an uproar in the audience. The reaction to 4′33″ was just a part of the larger picture: on the whole, it was the adoption of chance procedures that had disastrous consequences for Cage’s reputation. The press, which used to react favorably to his earlier percussion and prepared piano music, ignored his new works, and many valuable friendships and connections were lost. Boulez, who used to promote Cage’s work in Europe, was opposed to Cage’s particular approach to the use of chance, and so were other composers who came to prominence during the 1950s, such as Karlheinz Stockhausen.
During this time, Cage was also teaching at the avant-garde Black Mountain College just outside Asheville, North Carolina. Cage taught at the college in the summers of 1948 and 1952 and was in residence the summer of 1953. While at Black Mountain College in 1952, he organized what has been called the first “happening” in the United States, later titled Theatre Piece No. 1, a multi-layered, multi-media performance event staged the same day as Cage conceived it that “would greatly influence 1950s and 60s artistic practices.” In addition to Cage, the participants included Cunningham and Tudor.
From 1953 onward, Cage was busy composing music for modern dance, particularly Cunningham’s dances (Cage’s partner adopted chance too, out of fascination for the movement of the human body), as well as developing new methods of using chance, in a series of works he referred to as The Ten Thousand Things. In the summer of 1954 he moved out of New York and settled in Gate Hill Cooperative, a community in Stony Point, New York, where his neighbors included David Tudor, M. C. Richards, Karen Karnes, Stan VanDerBeek, and Sari Dienes. The composer’s financial situation gradually improved: in late 1954 he and Tudor were able to embark on a European tour. From 1956 to 1961 Cage taught classes in experimental composition at The New School, and from 1956 to 1958 he also worked as an art director and designer of typography. Among the works completed during the last years of the decade were Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–58), a seminal work in the history of graphic notation, and Variations I (1958).
Later Career and Silence
Cage was affiliated with Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and collaborated with members of its music department from the 1950s until his death in 1992. At the university, the philosopher, poet, and professor of classics Norman O. Brown befriended Cage, an association that proved fruitful to both. In 1960 the composer was appointed a fellow on the faculty of the Center for Advanced Studies (now the Center for Humanities) in the Liberal Arts and Sciences at Wesleyan, where he started teaching classes in experimental music. In October 1961, Wesleyan University Press published Silence, a collection of Cage’s lectures and writings on a wide variety of subjects, including the famous Lecture on Nothing that was composed using a complex time length scheme like some of his music. Silence was Cage’s first book of six, but it remains his most widely read and influential. In the early 1960s, Cage began his lifelong association with the music publishing company Edition Peters. Walter Hinrichsen, the president of the corporation, offered Cage an exclusive contract and instigated the publication of a catalog of Cage’s works, which appeared in 1962.
Edition Peters soon published a large number of scores by Cage, and this, together with the publication of Silence, led to much greater prominence for the composer than ever before. In 1965, Betty Freeman set up an annual grant for living expenses for Cage which continued until his death. By the mid-1960s, Cage was receiving so many commissions and requests for appearances that he was unable to fulfill them. This was accompanied by a busy touring schedule; consequently, his compositional output from that decade was scant. After the orchestral Atlas Eclipticalis (1961–62), a fully notated work based on star charts, Cage gradually shifted to, in his own words, “music (not composition).” The score of 0′00″, completed in 1962, originally comprised a single sentence: “In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action”, and in the first performance the disciplined action was Cage writing that sentence. The score of Variations III (1962) abounds in instructions to the performers, but makes no references to music, musical instruments, or sounds.
Many of the Variations and Cage’s other 1960s pieces were “happenings”, an art form established by Cage and his students in late 1950s. Cage’s “Experimental Composition” classes at The New School influenced the formation of Fluxus, an international network of artists, composers, and designers. The majority of his students were visual artists and had little or no background in music. They included Jackson Mac Low, Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, George Brecht, Ben Patterson, and Dick Higgins, as well as many others Cage invited unofficially. Famous pieces that resulted from the classes include George Brecht’s Time Table Music and Al Hansen’s Alice Denham in 48 Seconds. As set forth by Cage, “happenings” were theatrical events that abandon the traditional concept of stage-audience and occur without a sense of definite duration. Instead, they are left to chance. They have a minimal script, with no plot. In fact, a “happening” is so-named because it occurs in the present, attempting to arrest the concept of passing time. Cage believed that theater was the closest route to integrating art and real life. The term “happenings” was coined by Allan Kaprow, one of his students, who defined it as a genre in the late fifties. Cage met Kaprow while on a mushroom hunt with George Segal and invited him to join his class. In following these developments Cage was strongly influenced by Antonin Artaud’s seminal treatise The Theatre and Its Double. In October 1960, Mary Bauermeister’s Cologne studio hosted a joint concert by Cage and the video artist Nam June Paik (Cage’s friend and mentee), who in the course of his performance of Etude for Piano cut off Cage’s tie and then poured a bottle of shampoo over the heads of Cage and Tudor.
Cage’s fame began to bleed into mainstream entertainment dur
