One author whose work held special interest for John Cage was Henry David
Thoreau. As Hans Otte recounts in his beautiful liner notes that accompany the
New World Records CD 80540 that captured the collaborative production of
Cage’s Mureau and David Tudor’s Rainforest II as performed simultaneously
under the auspices of the Pro Musica Nova Festival for Radio Bremen on May 5,
1972,
“Cage was introduced to Thoreau's journals in 1966, was reading his work
intensively by 1967, and enrolled as a life member in the Thoreau Society in
1968. It is not difficult to see why he would have been so attracted to this author.
Cage may have been drawn to Thoreau's idealism, his dedication to a life of
simplicity, his distrust of institutions (including governments), and his reflections
on the virtue of “Civil Disobedience”—all told, an anarchic life-view rather similar
to Cage's own. In addition, there was Thoreau's way of perceiving, and
responding to, music and sound in general. (Cage quotes Thoreau has having
described music as “bubbles on the surface of silence”—an aphorism that Cage
himself might have coined, and closer to the sensibility of Japanese haiku than
New England.) In 1970 Cage composed the piece called Mureau, in which
phrases from Thoreau's journals (in particular, passages which touch on the
subject of music) are used as the springboard for an elaborate collage. The
resultant fabric combines elements of sense and nonsense, as it veers between
contextual meaning and a sort of abstract, linguistic vocalise. In discussing
Mureau, the composer noted that the work “. . . departs from conventional
syntax. It is a mix of letters, syllables, words, phrases, and sentences. I wrote it
by subjecting all the remarks of Henry David Thoreau about music, silence and
sounds . . . to a series of I Ching chance operations. The personal pronoun was
varied according to such operations and the typing was likewise determined.” In
fact, the printed text (or score!) of Mureau presents a dazzling, bewildering array
of typefaces, with individual letters or letter-groups offset in italics and/or
boldface. It offers a uniquely Cageian middle-ground between music and poetry.
Significantly, despite the work's striking visual character, it is meant to be read
aloud— performed—rather than perceived only as a visual pattern. A further level
of ambiguity can be found in the work's title, which links the first syllable of Music
to the last of Thoreau.
