After considering 4'33" and its relationship to both my immediate circumstances (see previous post) and to the liturgy in general, I went on to reread the entirety of John Cage’s most famous and probably most important collection of writings, entitled simply Silence. Aside from providing some playful humor and some typographical delights and inspiration, the lectures and essays on music contained therein continued to provoke my thinking specifically about liturgical music.

For the question of the propriety of the congregation’s behavior not only before and after, but also during, the services (and its relation to everything else going on) – 

Why is it so difficult for so many people to listen?
Why do they start talking when there is something to hear?
Do they have their ears not on the sides of their heads but situated inside their mouths so that when they hear something their first impulse is to start talking? 

– also leads to the question of the propriety of the music not only before and after, but also during, the services (and its relation to everything else going on).

What is truly needed for the liturgy is music to some extent conforming to Satie’s vision of ‘furniture music’ which Cage quotes – 

...music which is like furniture – a music, that is, which will be part of the noises of the environment, will take them into consideration. I think of it as melodious, softening the noises of the knives and forks, not dominating them, not imposing itself. It would fill up those heavy silences that sometimes fall between friends dining together... And at the same time it would neutralize the street noises which so indiscriminately enter into the play of conversation. To make such music would be to respond to a need...

– music ‘conceived by a spirit of humility and renunciation’, which, as Cage would say, does not present itself as a ‘work’ separate, and to be protected, from the flow of life (or, in this case, the concentrated instance of life known as liturgy). 

The music which does this par excellence is, of course, the chant: music that is practically not-composed (in conventional terms), and in its simplest forms is almost not-music (in conventional terms); that is rather subtly differentiated rhythmically, intervallically, dynamically; that is relatively open in form and intent; that indeed serves as furniture (ranging, like physical furniture, from the fairly functional to the ornate and even the symbolic) to the ritual text and ceremonial act, and, short of a violent and deliberate attack, is relatively indestructible. The further music gets away from this basis (especially in conjunction with a poverty in the other component arts of the liturgy) – by cultivating the conflict-and-resolution inherent in tonal harmony and its concomitant forms; by subordinating text to musical-formal demands; by stoking the passions with sharply characteristic rhythms, dynamic extremes, and other thrills – the more space and attention it claims for itself at the expense of the totality and continuity of the whole liturgical endeavor, and the more susceptible it is to disruption by forces that are now external by virtue of their having been excluded from its field of existence or operation. 

  And the foregoing applies not only to sung music: organ (or, theoretically, other instrumental) music in the liturgy is most fitting when it is based on the chant or somehow partakes of its spirit. Perhaps Satie’s vision of ‘furniture music’ is even more appropriate here, where humble and adaptable music, music that can respond to the needs of the moment, music that is closer to Cage’s ideal of being more like spontaneous, unceasingly flowing ‘life’ than exalted, separated, conserved ‘art[-work]’, is most needed. This is why, of course, organists have always cultivated improvisation, cantus firmus and variation techniques being perhaps the most fundamental modes thereof. It would behoove present-day improvisateurs and composers to cultivate other, flexible, techniques more fully as well: the ground-bass and other ostinato types; the rondeau or ritornello (cf. responsorial chant) and music made even more completely of recombinable phrases; music perhaps as automatic or algorithmic as change-ringing (quite the most contemplative, and in some ways flexible and indestructible, form of ‘sound organization’ – also ‘not music’ in the conventional Western sense – that Protestant culture ever devised). One hopes this music is never strictly a background to distracted activity, but rather a helpmate to focused attention – but, as Cage urges, the creator of such music would be well served to abandon the ideals of controlling the soundscape or demanding recognition, as much as of creating telic, self-contained musical forms.