About 30 miles south of Tokyo is the city of Kamakura, where the American composer John Cage was taken soon after arriving on his first visit to Japan, in 1962.
There, D.T. Suzuki, the Zen authority from whom Cage had learned about Buddhism a decade earlier, greeted him and his close collaborator David Tudor at Tokei-ji, an ancient temple. Cage was given special permission to ring the temple bell; a photograph captures him inside the bell, slightly bent over and smiling a little as he listens to the reverberations. As Serena Yang writes in a recent dissertation on Cage and Japan, the discussion at Tokei-ji turned to the music of a Zen ceremony at another temple, near Kyoto. Cage exclaimed “this ceremony must be dominated by silence” — in other words, it must be similar to the works that had, by then, made him one of the world’s most important experimental composers.
Cage’s vision of life and music — his embrace of indeterminacy and chance; his use of and trust in silence — was shaped by Japanese philosophy, religion and aesthetics. And the influence of his 1962 visit on Japanese composers was such that it came to be referred to as “Jon Keji shokku”: John Cage Shock. His liberating example helped those composers — who had largely been in thrall to European modernism in the years after World War II — broaden their style, including to use traditional music as source material.
“I think that what we played for them gave them the chance to discover a music that was their own, rather than a 12-tone music,” Cage said, referring to the radical path away from traditional tonality that Arnold Schoenberg had charted a few decades earlier. “Before our arrival, they had no alternative other than dodecaphony.”
Toru Takemitsu, the eminent composer who became close with Cage, later recalled: “In my own life, in my own development, for a long period I struggled to avoid being ‘Japanese,’ to avoid ‘Japanese’ qualities. It was largely through my contact with John Cage that I came to recognize the value of my own tradition.”
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