Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)

Studies - Péter Egri: (Per)chance: Joyce and Cage

accidental: it changes with the theme chosen. The general target is, of course, musical tradition as such. In the third part, the original theme returns

—"The Waltz of Flowers," to avoid even the semblance of firm tonality, is accidentally transposed to C-sharp major

—, but now it is completely ironized and annihilated (just as the slightly modified representation of the initial breakfast theme at the end of Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party represents the customary reliability of traditional reality as highly questionable because of the irrational eruption of volcano violence in the middle part of the play). Being accidental and unforeseen, the traditional melody does not and cannot organize the structure of the middle section. It does not and cannot even provide an ironic pattern. All it offers is an ironic relationship. Cage's universal caricature is Postmodern already at this early stage (even if it precedes Britten's Purcell Variations by a few years), and reaches its disruptive peak when Cage later substitutes accidental noise or accidental silence for actual music. In the presence of a particular audience, however, the absence of music

—with occasional coughs from people in the concert hall or with incidental segments of sentences from the radio or even from the corridor

—can be interpreted, in fact, "sold" as a performance of music only once. Experimenting with non-traditional media, Cage has also hit upon the idea that "When a fly buzzes past me now I have, from an artistic point of view, a frightful problem. But it's quite reasonable to imagine that we will have a loudspeaker that will be able to fly through space." (Barnes

—

Kostelanetz, JCA 49) In his tape collage Rozart Mix (1965) for thirteen tape machines and six live performers, the sounds on 88 loops have been divided into categories A, B, C, D, E, F representing "country sounds, electronic or synthetic sounds, city sounds, windproduced sounds, and sounds so small they required amplification." (Kostelanetz, JCA 19) In 1970-71 Cage wrote in his "Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse") that "paper should be edible, nutritious," (Hailes

—Perloff and Junkerman, JCCIA 229) and he, in fact, collected field grass and created edible papers. With all these experiments, Cage has paved the way for Stoppard's playfully ironic play Artist Descending a Staircase (Stoppard, ADS 111, 119, 120, 126-7). 83