John Cage's Entanglement with the Ideas of Coomaraswamy

Dear all,

If any of you are interested in reading or perusing my recently completed PhD
thesis 'John Cage’s Entanglement with the Ideas of Coomaraswamy', it is now
available to read or download for free at http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/1985/

More information on this thesis follows below,

Best wishes,
Ed Crooks

[email protected]
[email protected]

My thesis was supervised by William Brooks at the University of York, UK, and
was examined by David Nicholls, editor of The Cambridge Companion to John Cage,
and Neil Sorrell, an ethnomusicologist specialising in North Indian music and
Javanese gamelan.

Its main focus concerns Cage’s borrowings from Asian and European religious
and philosophical thought; it concentrates on the ideas Cage came to prior to
the early 1950s, although it also looks at the development of those ideas in
Cage’s later thought. In contradistinction to David Patterson’s earlier
landmark study, the focus of my research is less on where and when Cage came to
these ideas than on their meanings and histories. I also consider how Cage
adjusted the material he borrowed in order to suit his own purposes and, from a
postcolonialist perspective, consider what the ramifications of that has been.
In particular, I concentrate on Cage’s borrowings from the British-Ceylonese
art historian and metaphysician Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. I also look at Cage’s
friendship with the Jungian mythologist Joseph Campbell and Cage’s borrowings
from the theories of Jung. Particular attention is paid to the conservative
ideology integral to the theories of all three thinkers.

After a new analysis of the life and work of Coomaraswamy, the investigation
focuses on the metaphysics of Coomaraswamy’s philosophy of art – to which
the phrase ‘art is the imitation of nature in her manner of operation’ was
central. Unbeknown to Cage, the phrase represents one of the most influential
theories in European aesthetic idealism. The phrase originated not with
Coomaraswamy, or with St. Thomas Aquinas, but with Aristotle. In chapter four
of my thesis, I explain the history of the ideas behind the phrase moving from
Platonist mimetic theories of art production, through the origin of the phrase
in Aristotle (Physics: 194a21 and 199a15; Meteorologica: 381b6), to its later
quotation by Thomas Aquinas (Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics: 171, 257-8;
Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics: prologue 1-2; Summa Theologiæ: 1a117.1).
In detailing the ontological and epistemological dimensions of Coomaraswamy’s
understanding of Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas in comparison to the use made of
Coomaraswamy’s work by Cage, the irreconcilable gulf between the beliefs of
Cage and Coomaraswamy becomes clear. I then use these findings to review
connections between Cage and Ruskin, and then Cage and Emerson. I conclude that
Coomaraswamy’s nondualism was opposed to the nondualism Cage and texts on
Cage have attributed to Suzuki.
In chapter five, I investigate the differing approaches of Coomaraswamy and
Cage to rasa, the Renaissance, tradition, ‘art and life’, and museums,
showing that Cage’s view was often antagonistic to Coomaraswamy’s in each
case. I analyse Cage’s use of ‘permanent emotions’ in the Sonatas and
Interludes, Sixteen Dances, and Solo for Voice 58, suggesting that it has
little to do with rasa theory in Indian traditions. 

In the final chapter, I tackle the subject of Cage and Orientalism. This
chapter may be of particular interest to those who took part in the fascinating
debate earlier this year on the Silence list concerning Cage’s prejudices and
politics. 

Along the way there are also numerous other little pieces of information
uncovered that may be of interest: Nancy Wilson Ross’s talk that Cage
famously attended was not called ‘Zen Buddhism and Dada’, instead it was
called ‘The Symbols of Art’. Chiefly Jungian in focus, Zen and Dada were
only briefly mentioned. A copy of the talk is in the Nancy Wilson Ross Papers
in the collection of the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at
Austin. The programmatic content of The Perilous Night appears to have been
Arthurian! In Sanskrit literature there are normally regarded to be six
seasons, not four. Ananda Coomaraswamy was closely involved with the British
Arts and Crafts Movement, and was heavily influenced by the thought of John
Ruskin and William Morris. The Liberal Catholic Church that Cage attended
briefly in his teenage years had little connection with the Roman Catholic
Church – it was a British-Dutch-Australian offshoot of the Theosophical
Society.