The I Ching

[markt]

Don't know if this warrants its own thread but I was planning on picking up a copy of the I Ching and, given that I'm seeing all sorts of differing opinions online regarding translations and versions, I figured that there would probably be some Cage afficionados here on ihm who know a thing or two about it...

Right now I'm leaning towards this Wilhelm/Baynes one:

(but leaning towards it mostly because it's the one John Cage would have used (I think, if I'm wrong about this then call me out on it! ))

Thoughts on this version? Thoughts on any of the other ones?
Also, if anyone who's ever used the I Ching (in composition or otherwise) has anecdotes, admonitions or anything of the like then post up!

[patois]

I like to compare versions, but of the translations I've come across, the Stephen Karcher version has been the the one I've gotten the most out of.
Each individual Chinese word in each of the verses is given multiple translations, allowing for the broadest possible interpretation and rendering it a lot less cryptic than some others that give a single translation (although they may adhere more closely to the original image behind the verse - that can be interesting too, but requires a more in-depth knowledge of Chinese history/culture to be applicable to one's personal circumstances).



I have no idea how Cage used the changes in a compositional sense and would be interested to learn, myself...

[markt]

Thanks for the response, Patois. A few other places I've looked online have said outright that a person ought to get a couple versions - which isn't exactly feasible for me... I have records, dvds and books of poetry that I desperately need to buy as well! - but you make a good case for this Karcher version. I'm planning on ordering a version next week when I get paid so any other suggestions before then will be taken under advisement.

As for this:

I have no idea how Cage used the changes in a compositional sense and would be interested to learn, myself...

Keeping in mind that my only insight into the actual nuts-&-bolts workings of the book come from a Philip K Dick novel (the one where the Allies lost WWII... can't remember the title right now) and may be a bit sketchy: I'm also interested in this.

Do any of the more scholarly cats here know of/have on hand/have a link to an essay or book that goes into any detail? I'm thinking specifically about "Music of Changes" but anything would be better than nothing (even if it required an interlibrary loan on my part... )

The standard wikipedia answer is something like: "Cage asked it questions about duration and placement of sound events" - so anything a bit more in depth would be tops.

[nicenick]

handy online version of the wilhelm translation here:

http://www.akirarabelais.com/i/i.html

i'm a fan of the classic wilhelm version, but would also recommend this book by his son:

http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-I-C ... 0691001715

a very interesting commentary in and of itself, but has some interesting insight into the historical context of wilhelm's translation, which definitely skews thing towards a western christian ideology.

favorite i ching anecdote is bob dylan's take, from a 1965 interview:

Q: What about religion and philosophy?
A: I just don't have any religion or philosophy, I can't say much about any of them. A lot of people do, and fine if they really do follow a certain code. I'm not about to go around changing anything. I don't like anybody to tell me what I have to do or believe, how I have to live. I just don't care, you know. Philosophy can't give me anything that I don't already have. The biggest thing of all, that encompasses it all, is kept back in this country. It's an old Chinese philosophy and religion, it really was one… there is a book called the "I-Ching", I'm not trying to push it, I don't want to talk about it, but it's the only thing that is amazingly true, period, not just for me. Anybody would know it. Anybody that ever walks would know it, it's a whole system of finding out things, based on all sorts of things. You don't have to believe in anything to read it, because besides being a great book to believe in, it's also very fantastic poetry.

[Herb Levy]

For the most part Cage used the I Ching as a random number generator. He would assign a range of musical parameters or choices into the 64 hexagrams. A simple version of this would be to spread a series of relative dynamic levels from, say, ppp to FFF across the hexagrams so that the seven levels (ppp, pp, p <no dynamic marking> F, FF, FFF) would be assigned to groups of 9 hexagrams (1-9, 10-18, etc) and then throw the I Ching. When you get a hexagram, the number of that hexagram signifies what dynamic marking would be apply to the score. In this instance, 7 (dynamic levels) goes into 64 nine times with a remainder of 1, the 64th hexagram (which I guess would not literally need to be hexagram #64) would be null and if it came up you'd have to throw again. Cage had tables of the number 64 divided into various even quantities to ease this process.

Even someone wrote a relatively simple computer program generate random numbers for Cage.

[markt]

This link is great, nicenick. Props to AR.

I'm wondering about this, though:

wilhelm's translation, which definitely skews thing towards a western christian ideology.

This is a sentiment I've seen repeated a couple times in a couple places online but I don't know exactly what to make of it. The only knowledge of Wilhelm I have is from his Secret of the Golden Flower (I was doing a paper on Charles Olson and was really only skimming for quotes). I don't know if this is a whole can of worms but could you expand on this a bit? Is the work simplified within a binary or hierarchical framework? Or is it westernized in some other way entirely...

(that Dylan quote rocks, btw... Bob's interviews were so much more fun to read before he found Jesus )

and a big thanks to Herb for the info but I'm still not totally sure how the text is being used. Maybe these would be questions better asked after I've familiarized myself with the text a bit but:

I'm still wondering (and I hope I'm not muddying things up too badly here) how specific events/tone clusters/notes were chosen in a piece like "Music of Changes" (just to use that one as an example). If one throw is determining the dynamic level of an event then what's determining the event itself?

If MoC is an indeterminate piece using the I Ching then the events should be dictated, in some way, by what's written in the text, no?

As I said, I have almost no idea what I'm talking about (let's just assume I have none whatsoever) but are random notes just assigned to random hexagrams which are then thrown - or are the descriptions given by the I Ching meant to dictate what type of event occurs?

That's what I was trying to ask earlier

There are some bits of the score for MoC online and it's full of tone clusters and extended techniques - I guess I assumed that the I Ching was dictating the density, proximity and (tonal?) makeup of these events somehow...

[nicenick]

This is a sentiment I've seen repeated a couple times in a couple places online but I don't know exactly what to make of it. The only knowledge of Wilhelm I have is from his Secret of the Golden Flower (I was doing a paper on Charles Olson and was really only skimming for quotes). I don't know if this is a whole can of worms but could you expand on this a bit? Is the work simplified within a binary or hierarchical framework? Or is it westernized in some other way entirely...

well i read the commentary ages ago so i remember only the vague outlines, but i think essentially wilhelm translated the idea of the superior/inferior man in terms of christianity's father/son... so in many places in the wilhelm commentary you find God popping up, whereas the idea of God appears only infrequently in the chinese text. also if i remember properly, wilhelm was a big believer in jung and in the idea that the west was in a point of crisis (this was around the buildup to WWI i believe) and needed strong men to counter the rising influence of inferior men... so there's a lot more emphasis given in the task to the development of a superior man, versus the more confucian philosophy of the original text.

prob best to take a look at the commentary as this is most likely a horrible butchering!

i know nothing about cage's use of i ching, but for a related use of i ching as decision-making device check out philip k dick's "man in the high castle." it's a great book; dick apparently used the i ching whenever he reached a crossroads in the narrative to decide which way to turn. and the i ching features prominently in the narrative itself. from an interview:

VERTEX: Do you use the I Ching as a plotting device in your work?

DICK: Once. I used it in The Man in the High Castle because a number of characters used it. In each case when they asked a question, I threw the coins and wrote the hexagram lines they got. That governed the direction of the book. Like in the end when Juliana Frink is deciding whether or not to tell Hawthorne Abensen that he is the target of assassins, the answer indicated that she should. Now if it had said not to tell him, I would have had her not go there. But I would not do that in any other book.

from http://www.philipkdick.com/media_vertex.html

[Herb Levy]

and a big thanks to Herb for the info but I'm still not totally sure how the text is being used. Maybe these would be questions better asked after I've familiarized myself with the text a bit but:

I'm still wondering (and I hope I'm not muddying things up too badly here) how specific events/tone clusters/notes were chosen in a piece like "Music of Changes" (just to use that one as an example). If one throw is determining the dynamic level of an event then what's determining the event itself?

If MoC is an indeterminate piece using the I Ching then the events should be dictated, in some way, by what's written in the text, no?

As I said, I have almost no idea what I'm talking about (let's just assume I have none whatsoever) but are random notes just assigned to random hexagrams which are then thrown - or are the descriptions given by the I Ching meant to dictate what type of event occurs?

In terms of his general compositional practice, once Cage arrived at a hexgram, after throwing coins or manipulating sticks, it didn't matter if the hexagram was the Gentle, Thunder above Mountains, or the Grinning Monkey, or what any of the interpretive traditions said about that particular hexagram. There's not a lot of poetry in this process, any particular hexagram was little more than a randomly arrived at number between 1 and 64. Throwing the coins or manipulating the sticks was a way to make decisions among an array of choices that were not dictated by Cage's personal tastes.

Cage did, however, choose the array of choices. Cage does talk in interviews about how many times he had to throw coins, say, (I don't remember which method he used, though coins seems more likely) to arrive at a single event in a score & in some cases it was very complex. One hexagram might select a particular octave range, another a particular note in that octave, another the metric value of the note, another to determine if it was a single pitch or an aggregate (then if it were an aggregate, how many pitches in this aggregate followed by the whole 2-3 step process of selecting each other pitch), another the dynamic marking if any, and others for various other aspects of how that particular event might be played. It was not simple and it was not used to make the process easier, rather it was a way to make choices without being overly influenced by whether he liked the result or not. Eventually someone, Andrew Culver, I think, developed a computer program that picked numbers from 1-64 randomly so that Cage didn't have to keep tossing coins.

In the case of Music of Changes, I think he had a chart of specific pitches and aggregates that he was choosing among & only those options were possible. I don't remember how he arrived at this array of options. For details on that and much else, you should look at James Pritchett's The Music of John Cage, a very good book which goes into the compositional techniques that Cage used for many of his works over the course of his long career.

[cdeupree]

My I Ching books are packed up at the moment, so I can't verify details. But IIRC Wilhelm's translation is actually a double translation, from Chinese to German, then from German to English. I don't know if this matters or not. It certainly hasn't stopped it from becoming a standard, but I attribute that to a) being more readable than the Legge translation, the only other English one at the time, b) being the only widely available English version for many formative years through the 1950s and 1960s, and c) having a high level of scholarship generally. According to Revill (p. 130) this was the translation Cage used, and the original book was a gift from Christian Wolff, whose father published it. Based on chronology, Revill suggests that Cage used an advance copy.

I've used John Blofeld's translation for divination because it's smaller, more concise, and specifically geared toward the divination part. I always like Blofeld's other books, and found his translation was nice for when I wanted a simple reading of the basic hexagrams without multi-page commentary. Blofeld's introduction has the best instructions I've seen for divination, both the coin toss and the yarrow sticks methods.

Thomas Cleary has published a number of alternate I Chings. I've got the Taoist, Buddhist, and one other which escapes me at the moment. Interesting perspectives on the various commentaries.

[Herb Levy]

Throwing the coins or manipulating the sticks was a way to make decisions among an array of choices that were not dictated by Cage's personal tastes.

What I wrote earlier today, might be more clear, and certainly more accurate, if it read:

Throwing the coins or manipulating the sticks was a way to make decisions that were not dictated by Cage's personal tastes, among an array of choices that were dictated by Cage.

[patois]

Throwing the coins or manipulating the sticks was a way to make decisions among an array of choices that were not dictated by Cage's personal tastes.

What I wrote earlier today, might be more clear, and certainly more accurate, if it read:

Throwing the coins or manipulating the sticks was a way to make decisions that were not dictated by Cage's personal tastes, among an array of choices that were dictated by Cage.

And possibly more fun (and certainly more tactile) than pressing a button labelled 'generate' . But really, without a dialogue with the essential imagery of the hexagrams, it sounds like he wasn't actually using the I Ching as a compositional tool per se; rather, the divination method.

Or perhaps he engaged with it in that way in other contexts?

[markt]

Big thanks to nicenick, Herb and cdeupree for the thoughtful and thorough responses! (nicenick - that was the Dick novel I was thinking of yesterday... it's a great one!) FWIW, I think I'm going to get the Wilhelm with the goal of checking out other versions later...

I went to my school library and put in interlibrary loans for the Wilhelm commentary and that James Prichett book (I've been meaning to read something like the latter for a while now - this is a good kick in the ass to finally do it)

I also searched through an e-book version of "Conversing with Cage" - a collection of interviews cobbled together by Richard Kostelanetz. Herb's explanation is on point - and I think a lot clearer than Cage himself! - but I copy-pasted a couple quotes on specific pieces from the man himself for anyone curious:

Re: Music of Changes

John Cage: When I first began to work on “chance operations,” I had the musical values of the twentieth century. That is, two tones should (in the twentieth century) be seconds and sevenths, the octaves being dull and old-fashioned. But when I wrote The Music of Changes, derived by chance operations from the I Ching, I had ideas in my head as to what would happen in working out this process (which took about nine months). They didn’t happen!—things happened that were not stylish to happen, such as fifths and octaves. But I accepted them, admitting I was “not in charge” but was “ready to be changed” by what I was doing.

Interviewer: You use the I Ching to make choices in composition. Is this use of it separate from the book’s guiding or spiritual purposes?

JC: Yes. It’s not entirely separate from it, but I don’t make use of the wisdom aspects in the writing of music or in the writing of texts. I use it simply as a kind of computer, as a facility. If I have some question that requires a wise answer, then of course I use it that way. On occasion I do. But if I want to know which sound of one hundred sounds I’m to use, then I use it just as a computer.

Interviewer: Is this considered an improper use of the book?

JC: By some people, I think, who are superstitious about it. The mechanism by means of which the I Ching works is, I think, the same as that by means of which the DNA—or one of those things in the chemistry of our body—works. It’s a dealing with the number sixty-four, with a binary situation with all of its variations in six lines. I think it’s a rather basic life mechanism. I prefer it to other chance operations. I began using it nearly thirty years ago, and I haven’t stopped. Some people think that I’m enslaved by it, but I feel that I am liberated by it. (233-234)

Re: Cheap Imitation

my questions to the I Ching, by means of which I write my music since the last twenty-five years, were: Which of the seven modes, if we take as modes the seven scales beginning on white notes and remaining on white notes, which of those am I using? Second question: Which of the twelve possible chromatic transpositions am I using? Third question: Now for this phrase for which this transposition of this mode will apply, which note am I using of the seven to imitate the note that Satie wrote? And where he repeated a note I also repeated the chance-given note—but then for each note I asked again which note I am to use and I maintained the rhythm and that was all. For the second and third movements I maintained the intervallic relationships for half a measure. Otherwise, I asked these questions all the time. And I was able in that way to write a piece which was not the Socrate but which would fit a choreography based on the Socrate. So I called it Cheap Imitation. My title was also an imitation of Satie’s titles. (83-84)

Re: Études Australes

JC: It uses, as I always do, the chance operations of the I Ching whenever a question needs to be asked; otherwise, it uses star maps of Atlas Australes—that’s why the pieces are called Études Australes. They move, as not all of my music but a great deal of it does, from one situation to another, so that the first etude has the fewest aggregates, the fewest chords, and the last one theoretically has the largest number of aggregates or chords—two notes at a time, three, four, and five at a time. I had made a catalogue of what triads, quatrads, and quintads could be played by a single hand unassisted by the other, and I found that there were around 550 four-note chords and five-note chords for each hand. This permitted the writing of a music which was not based on harmony, but it permitted harmonies to enter into such a nonharmonic music. How could you express that in political terms? It would permit that attitude expressed socially. It would permit institutions or organizations, groups of people, to join together in a world which was not nationally divided.

Interviewer: What relationship did that have to those aggregates you mentioned before?

JC: After I had the notes, one of the questions I asked was, which of these notes are aggregates, and which are single notes? In the first Etude that question is answered by only one number [out of sixty-four possible, through the I Ching], whereas in the thirty-second Etude it is answered with thirty-two. It ends with a situation which is half aggregates and half tones, or potentially that. (91-92)

[markt]

and here's Cage speaking about the I Ching more generally:

JC: Most people who believe that I’m interested in chance don’t realize that I use chance as a discipline. They think I use it—I don’t know—as a way of giving up making choices. But my choices consist in choosing what questions to ask.

Interviewer: And also choosing how to follow the answers you get.

JC: Well, my use of the I Ching in my work is just a mechanism of the chance operation. But I think if you use the I Ching as a book of wisdom, there, too, it’s difficult to know how to ask the questions. Very often you can ask a question and then find out that it gives you an answer that makes you aware of another dimension you haven’t thought of. If I ask the I Ching a question as though it were a book of wisdom, which it is, I generally say, “What do you have to say about this?” and then I just listen to what it says and see if some bells ring or not.

Interviewer: So do you use it for…

JC: On occasion when I’m troubled. But I haven’t been troubled for quite some time—that is to say, I haven’t been so troubled that I felt the need to ask it.

[Herb Levy]

What I wrote earlier today, might be more clear, and certainly more accurate, if it read:

Throwing the coins or manipulating the sticks was a way to make decisions that were not dictated by Cage's personal tastes, among an array of choices that were dictated by Cage.

And possibly more fun (and certainly more tactile) than pressing a button labelled 'generate' . But really, without a dialogue with the essential imagery of the hexagrams, it sounds like he wasn't actually using the I Ching as a compositional tool per se; rather, the divination method.

Or perhaps he engaged with it in that way in other contexts?

The various interview excerpts posted by markt probably answer your specific question here, but it may need saying that Cage's use of the I Ching as a tool began and continued through the period when he was most aggressively trying to create music without self-expression.

Because Cage was choosing the questions and the array of potential answers that the I Ching could chose between, it's obvious that he couldn't be entirely successful in avoiding habits and/or self expression, but at that point in his career, it's equally obvious that he had little musical use for, or interest in, the "essential imagery" of the texts.

[patois]

Indeed, Herb. One of those things I'd often wondered about but hadn't set out to research before. Many thanks to markt for taking the trouble to post up the quotations, cheers.