John Cage, David Tudor and Alvin Lucier, three major figures in the emergence of an ‘experimental’ aesthetic in acoustic and electroacoustic music throughout the 1950s, 60s and 70s, each reference ‘nature’ as an important touchstone of their work. The meaning of ‘nature’ in each composer’s case may well be quite different, but all may be linked in one way or another with embrace of a variability of compositional outcomes associated with the use of chance methods. Signature electroacoustic works by each of these composers pay direct homage to ‘nature’s chance’, expressed in highly individualistic ways.

Nature is invoked by all three composers as practically a tangible presence, perhaps most famously by John Cage, who often repeated variations on this statement:

Nature, for Cage, was at least partly a synonym for ‘chance’. His popularly misunderstood ‘silent’ piece of 1952, 4′33″, is, besides being first and foremost a piece of musical theatre, an invitation to ‘nature’ to populate a passage of time with unforseen (unforheard) events. In Cage’s ongoing invitations to nature-as-collaborator, represented by coin tosses determining random choices from among restricted sets of compositional possibilities, his stated intention, set out as early as 1957, was not to deny traditional audience enjoyments, but to invite rich responses more usually experienced in the great outdoors:

‘These responses to nature are mine’, continues Cage, ‘and will not necessarily correspond with another’s.’ Expectation of a variety of responses is a key feature of Cage’s work and philosophy, as informed by Coomaraswamy.

Notably, Cage, in his well-known essay ‘Experimental Music’ (Cage Reference Cage1957: 7–12) wrote about magnetic tape as a medium which would permit transmutation of ‘nature’ into music, as he contrasted the continuous-time qualities of tape with artificially prescribed pigeonholes of western music theory – ‘scales, modes, theories of counterpoint and harmony, and … a limited number of sound-producing mechanisms’. Characterising these systems as ‘cautious stepping’, Cage presents tape as a counter-model: tape reveals to us ‘that musical action or existence can occur at any point or along any line or what have you in total sound-space’. We were now ‘technically equipped to transform our contemporary awareness of nature’s manner of operation into art’.

When Cage wrote this, he was perhaps thinking of his recent eight-channel tape piece Williams Mix. Completed in 1952, it was the most extreme work of tape composition assembled to that point. A nine-month exercise of eccentric splicing accomplished by Cage (with the help of David Tudor, Earle Brown, and Louis and Bebe Barron) was driven by chance decisions arrived at via the I Ching, the ancient Taoist/Confucian ‘book of changes’ re-purposed as twentieth-century random-number generator.

The I Ching is often described as a rendering of symbols of opposites in nature (for instance air/fire, or water/earth) into a divination system which emphasises continuity and change. Cage is recorded by Joan Retallack as recommending an edition of the I Ching including an essay by Carl Jung on synchronicity (Retallack Reference Retallack1996: xviii), in which Jung contrasts the laboratory environment, where restricted circumstances allow physical principles to be precisely demonstrated and observed, with ‘nature’, in which ‘every process is partially or totally interfered with by chance, so much so that under natural circumstances a course of events absolutely conforming to specific laws is almost an exception’ (C. G. Jung, in Retallack Reference Retallack1996).

Cage wrote to Pierre Boulez about Williams Mix, ‘I have increased rather than decreased the element of chance in this work’ (Cage Reference Cage1952: 132) (following his 1951 Music of Changes, also created using restricted-chance methods). The presence or effects of ‘nature’ were also presumably increased.

Improvisation was famously anathema to Cage. Anecdotal evidence suggests he did not always hew to his stated commitment to chance-based organisation of sound materials, but Cage’s well-known dislike of jazz, and criticism of improvisation as an invitation to fall back on habits and conventions, is interesting to consider in light of the work of his most celebrated collaborator, David Tudor, whose own ‘live-electronic’ music practice displays both appeals to nature and a practice of improvisation which incorporates chance into its very fabric.

Tudor is remembered most often as a brilliant pianist, and as the most devoted interpreter of works by the ‘New York School’ of Cage, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff. He played this role from the early 1950s through the mid-1960s, at which time he underwent a gradual transformation into the practitioner of a particularly sharp flavour of original electronic music. Tudor’s approach to indeterminate scores was to pin them down like butterflies, effectively involving himself as a ‘finishing’ assistant to the composer, defining realisations in which chance remained only as sonic detail (Pritchett Reference Pritchett1993; Holzaepfel Reference Holzaepfel1994; Pritchett Reference Pritchett2004). In a piece such as Cage’s Variations II, that detail could vary tremendously from performance to performance, but the overall structure was rigid.

Tudor’s own music, as he began to identify as a composer in his own right, seems to partly represent a desire for a 180-degree turn away from this rigidity. While some structure might remain, particularly where performance duration was defined by an accompanying external activity such as a dance, much of his music has the character of tapping into an endless, ongoing stream, often without special regard for musical conventions of dramatic climax, denouement, and so on. This might have been observed at a Mills College concert in the late 1960s, where Tudor is said to have been cautiously questioned as his performance showed no signs of coming to a conclusion, while the hour was growing late: his response was to stand up and abruptly turn off the sound, with the comment ‘I still had lots to do’ (Bartlett Reference Bartlett1992). It might also have been regularly seen in performances with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, where the falling curtain at the end of the choreography would bring a sudden and unspectacular end to Tudor’s music.

In 1985, John Cage and David Tudor appeared together in a joint public interview at the ICA in London. Cage offered the comment that ‘David is related to everything else’. Tudor responded, with amusement, ‘And a nature boy, besides’ (Tudor and Cage Reference Tudor and Cage1985). ‘Nature’ reappears often in Tudor’s published statements and interviews as a touchstone for him, and while Cage’s aspiration was to imitate nature, Tudor took arguably a more radical stance: he was nature. Focusing on a large outdoor sound installation project which was in development in 1979, Billy Klüver of Experiments in Art and Technology questioned him: ‘Why do you want to work in nature?’, Tudor responded ‘Well, it’s part of my being. It’s a question I can’t answer because I can’t get away from it’ (Klüver Reference Klüver1979).

Tudor’s work as a composer–performer is peppered with clues as to this relationship with nature, and the extent to which his music was an expression of this. He described his first major work as an electronic music composer, the 1966 Bandoneon! (Bandoneon Factorial) as being uncomposed: the bandoneon was processed heavily through a complexity of circuits inviting the ‘self-multiplying … rebirth of white noise’, and ‘when activated it composes itself out of its own composite instrumental nature’ (Tudor Reference Tudor1966). The strategy of developing pieces for which the score was in fact a physical arrangement of devices representing a vast, though finite, range of improvisatory sonic possibilities was one which Tudor followed again and again.

Creating a situation where the number of variables practically exceeded the performer’s ability to control them all, and where altering one part of the system would cause an unbalancing of the entire ‘organism’, was a key feature of Tudor’s work, and it is here that we see both his embrace of ‘nature’ and of chance. The composer is not appreciating the mountain; he is the mountain, with all its features available to be explored. ‘It seems to me that the way I use the technological medium, it is just more of what’s already there’, Tudor stated (Klüver Reference Klüver1979).

Working within such unstable systems ensured for Tudor a freshness in music-making, necessitating improvisation but denying opportunity to fall into familiar tropes. At the same time, each composition still had an overarching character of sound which differentiated it from another, based on unique arrangements of devices as represented in Tudor’s score diagrams. I have previously depicted Tudor as a herdsman of electrons (Rogalsky and Cameron Reference Rogalsky and Cameron2006: 915): what could be more ‘natural’ than organising sound based on attempts to gather and push and pull those small particles as they fly in unpredictable patterns around the pinball-machine complexity of Tudor’s table-top pieces, with all their potential feedback loops and non-intuitive uses of homemade devices?

Rainforest (1968–73) has been Tudor’s most long-lived work, as it demands little that is specific in its sound materials, while it is highly specific in its physical construction, and unreliant on unusual devices. It is still regularly performed, in versions for dance (Merce Cunningham’s RainForest, 1968) or for large-scale sound sculpture presentation. Tudor’s descriptions of Rainforest over many years present an array of references to nature and the natural: it is variously ‘an environmental piece’ (Tudor Reference Tudor1974), ‘An Electronic Ecology’, ‘an electroacoustic environment’, ‘acoustically environmental’ (Tudor Reference Tudor1981). The piece is described as employing ‘natural resonant filters’ (Tudor Reference Tudor1981), and this is the heart of it: sounds are transmitted through physical objects and transformed by their various acoustic responses. In its 1973 version, which admits any number of performers, any sound sources, and any number of loudspeaker-objects, a complex environment is created where electronically generated sounds intermingle with field recordings and they frequently become confused. What seems to be an electronic sound might well be a recording of a frog pond; what sounds like chirping birds might be a feedback circuit assemblage of guitar effects pedals. Passing the sounds through ‘natural filters’ places them all in similar terrain.

Reliance on the acoustically transformative power of objects and spaces, and focus on exposition of natural processes, have also been hallmarks of the work of Alvin Lucier, who presents a third model of relationships to ‘nature’ and chance. Described by James Tenney as ‘The eloquent voice of nature’ (Tenney Reference Tenney1995: 12), Lucier is the youngest of the three composers considered here, and he counts Cage and Tudor as influential in finding his own niche in the realm of ‘experimental’ music. Cage in particular gave Lucier great encouragement in realising his early piece Music for Solo Performer (1965). That work, in which low frequency brainwaves are amplified and used to control a percussion orchestra, is a vivid illustration of Lucier’s use of chance, different from either Cage’s or Tudor’s: the solo performer must enter into a relaxed mental state which is conducive to production of alpha waves, and any unpredictable disturbance which takes the performer’s focus can cause the alpha waves to stop. When being produced, the waves themselves are not regular or predictable, but occur in clusters and are heard as ‘thumps’ in loudspeakers placed against percussion instruments which cause them to sound. Though designated ‘for solo performer’, the piece also employs an assistant who directs the onstage performer’s alpha waves to different instruments or groups of instruments.

More directly reliant on ‘nature’ as performer is Lucier’s well-known I Am Sitting in a Room (1969), one of the archetypal process pieces of the late 1960s. By processing and re-processing a recording of speech through the same room – playing it back and recording it again, through many generations – the room imposes the character of its acoustic resonances on the speech, which gradually deteriorates into a continuous wash of frequencies which represent the meeting of the voice and the room (and the microphone and the loudspeaker). These chance meetings ‘work’ for the piece for every speaker and every room, while the outcome in each case will be sonically unique. As Lucier has described the piece, ‘Every room has its own melody, hiding there until it is made audible’ (Lucier and Simon Reference Lucier and Simon1980: 37).

Lucier produced a variation on I Am Sitting in a Room in his whalesong-inspired Quasimodo the Great Lover (1970), which specifies a chain of different rooms linked over as great a distance as possible, each room containing a loudspeaker playing the amplified sound transmitted from the previous room, and a microphone to pass the sound along to the next room. The sound source is a musician, producing music based on the ‘music of the humpback whale’ (Lucier Reference Lucier1995: 328). The outcome is somewhat similar to I Am Sitting in a Room, but even less predictable because of the variability introduced by use of multiple rooms.

Another illustration of Lucier’s invitation to nature’s chance is found in his sound installation Music on a Long Thin Wire. Deriving from a demonstration apparatus Lucier was using in a course in acoustics at Wesleyan University, Long Thin Wire is presented as a monochord of many metres’ length, caused to resonate unpredictably in its harmonic modes by passing a simple sine wave oscillator signal through it:

Lucier’s focus on acoustic phenomena stems partly from a desire to create musical work independent of culture – that is, to appeal pan-culturally by focusing on universal principles of sound: ‘I think that acoustical phenomena are universal, not cultural, so I decided among many other things that I’ve been doing, to explore the natural characteristics of sound waves, how they flow in space from an instrument into the room, how they coincide with each other if they are closely tuned, listening to the audible beating, the bumps of sound that occur when two sound waves coincide’ (Lucier and Deforce Reference Lucier and Deforce2003). James Tenney describes Lucier’s work as ‘inarticulate nature speaking to us’ (Tenney Reference Tenney1995: 18), and Lucier suggests he is attempting to evoke that which is ‘unintentionally produced’ (Lucier and Deforce Reference Lucier and Deforce2003) and to ‘put people into harmonious relationships’ (Lucier Reference Lucier1995: 196) with natural phenomena.

David Tudor once described his relationship with nature in contrast to Lucier’s:

Here, as Tudor sets his relationship to nature apart from Lucier’s, he also sets it apart from Cage’s. Lucier is characterised as an aestheticiser of natural processes, Tudor identifies himself as directly representing natural phenomena, and I would characterise Cage’s relationship to nature as similar to that between worker and tool, attempting to bring it into play in a utilitarian manner.

In each composer’s case, ‘nature as chance’ plays a central role in defining the character of electroacoustic works which are strongly identified with each. While none of the three abandons overall control of his work to chance, each describes a relationship to a real or imagined ‘natural’, somehow distinct from ‘culture’, between the early 1950s and the mid-1970s. More work remains to be done in examining Cage, Tudor and Lucier within a broader context, including that of a growing global ecological awareness during the same period, and the work of younger generations of composers and sound artists. As we now face what may be insurmountable ecological challenges, and ponder whether there is any nature which is not cultural, it is worthwhile considering how these composers situated their work in relation to various ‘natures’ and how it may inform what art may be created in a post-digital era.