John Cage and Therapeutic Silence

By Yu Wakao

Music therapists sometimes have to face chaotic atonal soundscapes during sessions and may be tempted to say "Oh, it's like John Cage or Stockhausen!" Unfortunately, a positive meaning is not always intended.

Some music therapists find value in contemporary music and try to use its idioms for therapy. For example, Mary Priestley actively used atonal idioms from expressionism to express the negative aspects of emotions such as hate or anger, which cannot be fully expressed with normal tonal harmonic idioms (Priestley, 1994). This is one of her great achievements. We should also remember the composer Alfred Nieman's contribution as an improvisation teacher of music therapy. The emotional spectrum that Priestley depicted in her book shows how she sought to follow complex human emotions.

In contrast, Paul Nordoff's musical world seems to have never exceeded the bounds of tonality. This may be because he exclusively treated children and also because of his musical tastes, which we can estimate from his own compositions. He also believed in the inherent power of the tonal system (Robbins & Robbins, 1998). Although he tried to work with a very wide range of emotions, he never introduced the expressionist mode.

Can the tonal harmony system express negative emotions? Yes, we can read demonic emotion in pieces of Mozart's music such as the Piano Concerto in D minor. We can even find a description in Plato's work of how demonic the Phrygian mode could be. Musical emotion should therefore obviously be regarded as a relative phenomenon.

The Renaissance initiated the exploration in composition of the range of musical emotion. From Classicism to Romanticism, the tonal harmonic technique developed very rapidly and, as a result, a wide variety of emotion from sadness to joy came to be expressed fairly readily. The harmonic progression of the beginning of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde is often cited to show how music can represent ambivalent feelings of sadness and longing together, and this stage of musical development is just one step from dark atonal expressionism. As we found earlier, this atonal expressionism has become a useful tool for the music therapist.

We must remember that the dominant emotional state of music, especially in modern societies, is that inherited from Romanticism (Wakao, 2000). All pop songs deal with feelings such as sadness, love, and joy and use the tonal harmony system. It is very interesting to observe that when the negative side of feeling has to be expressed, the expressionistic idiom suddenly appears. Think of Star Wars or horror movie soundtracks! We can thus say that new musical conceptions have contributed to the exploration of new channels for expressing human emotion, as we have discussed so far. However, this linear development of the exploration of musical emotion was faced with a serious gap in 1951 by John Cage's indeterminacy.

This gap emerged because of the abundance of intentional expression that had never been questioned before. Subsequently, music with less intentionality such as that of Morton Feldman or Jo Kondo has appeared. Though many varieties exist in the new music, it is possible to divide them into just two major fields: music with intention and music with less intention. Music with less intention is a brand new idea never before seen in the history of music (Wakao, 2000).

How does this mode affect music therapy? Can we use it as a resource? To an extent, music therapy has developed in the direction in which overt and intentional musical expression could be effectively used by therapist and client. The music therapist tries to find a way to channel the client's musical expression, support it, and resonate with it. Many music therapists may therefore be puzzled and confused, as this idea of music with less intention suggests a totally unknown approach.

Of course we can use this resource. Less intentional and less communicative music is a quite usual and normal event in music therapy, as we know. Why should we not make music like that of Cage or Feldman with the client? We can if we accept these less intentional sounds as they are, and do not keep pulling them in the expressive direction.

Less expressive music such as Cage's has sometimes been misunderstood as mere nonsense and chaotic soundscapes. Indeed, this naive misunderstanding was one of the most serious problems Cage had to face in his whole life (Suenobu, 1996). His true intention was to find a particular beauty while cutting down on intentional and assertive gesture in sound, like discovering beauty in natural environmental sounds (Wakao, 2000). Such beauty had not been found until Cage.

But again, can we really share these musical experiences with the client? Cage's 4'33" can be aesthetically interpreted in diverse ways, but there is agreement at least on the point that it demands a certain silence and awareness. In the therapeutic relation, silence can also be interpreted in many ways, positively or negatively. But if we seek the meaning in it and try to empathize with it, then the setting would come very close to the attitude described by Martin Buber (1923) and Gertrud Schwing (1940) of simply being there together (even without words). We can assume this as one existential attitude in music therapy. Here we find the possibility of assuming the contrary polarity, where the existential silence in music therapy would have the meaning:

expression -------- silence

We should not forget that music therapy is the therapeutic method most able to treat silence in a creative way.

Last question: a half century has passed since Cage's 4'33", but there seems to have been no further discovery of musical emotion in any kind of music, which is quite unusual in the past three centuries of music history. Does this mean the end of the history of the exploration of musical emotion? If so, what does this mean for music therapy?

References

Buber, Martin (1923/1970). I and Thou (Walter Kaufmann, Trans.). New York: Charles Scibner's Son.

Cage, John (1961), Silence. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University.

Priestley, Mary (1994), Essays on Analytical Music Therapy. Phoenixville, PA: Barcelona Publishers.

Robbins, Clive & Robbins, Carol (Eds.)(1998), Healing Heritage, Paul Nordoff Exploring the Tonal Language of Music. Gilsum, NH: Barcelona Publishers.

Schwing, Gertrud (1940). Ein Weg zur Seele des Geisteskranken [A Path to the Soul of the Mentally Ill]. Zurich: Rascher.

Suenobu, Y(1996), Kaiso no John Cage [John Cage Remembered]. Tokyo: Ongakunotomosha.

Wakao, Yu (2000), Kanaderukotono Chikara [The Power of Musicking]. Tokyo: Shunjyusha.