The Future of Music: Credo.

A young man in Seattle stands up and tells a small arts society that the future of music is noise.

In 1937 John Cage was twenty-four, broke, and employed as an accompanist and composer for the dance classes at the Cornish School in Seattle. There, to a small local arts society organised by the dancer Bonnie Bird, he gave a short talk and called it The Future of Music: Credo. Almost nobody heard it. It was not printed for another twenty-one years, and not widely read until it opened his 1961 collection Silence. By then it read less like a prediction than a description of what had already happened.

The Bureau files it at M·04 because it is the hinge between the European and American halves of the noise idea. Russolo, at M·01, had proposed in 1913 that noise was music and that the noise-world could be sorted into families. Cage took the same proposition, stripped the Futurist bombast off it, and pointed it at the one thing Russolo could only gesture toward: the electrical machine. Where Russolo built mechanical intonarumori, Cage simply listened to the truck at fifty miles an hour and the static between the stations and said, plainly, that these were instruments.

The talk's most-quoted line is its first capital declaration: I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase. Cage's argument from there is short and concrete. Wherever we are, he says, what we hear is mostly noise; ignored, it irritates, but listened to, it fascinates. He wants to capture and control those sounds, not as sound effects but as musical instruments, and he points at the film studios, which already held libraries of sounds on film, as the place the means already existed.

From this he draws the prediction that gives the text its weight. The old quarrel in music, he argues, had been between dissonance and consonance; the quarrel of the immediate future would be between noise and so-called musical sounds. Harmony, tied as it was to particular fixed steps in the field of sound, would simply be inadequate for a composer faced with the entire field of sound. The job of the new instruments, especially the electrical ones, would be to make any and every audible sound available, at any frequency, amplitude and duration.

He goes further than Russolo in one decisive respect. He imagines composers making music directly, without performers, by drawing or photographing patterns onto a film sound-track, anticipating both the synthesiser and the whole later practice of composing straight to tape. And he ends with a practical demand rather than a poetic one: before any of this can happen, centres of experimental music must be established, equipped with oscillators, generators, ways of amplifying small sounds, and film phonographs, where composers can work with twentieth-century means. The studios he asked for arrived within twenty years, in Cologne, Paris, Milan and New York.

The Credo is laid out in two simultaneous voices. A line of block capitals carries the doctrine, the bald statements of belief, while a second voice in ordinary roman type runs underneath it, glossing, qualifying and illustrating. The reader is meant to take in both at once, the slogan and the footnote, the manifesto and its own commentary. It is a small typographic invention that does in 1937 what Cage would spend the rest of his life doing: refusing the single authoritative line, letting two things sound together.

It is worth being exact about the dates, because they matter to how the text was received. The talk was given in 1937 but not published until 1958, when it appeared in the brochure for George Avakian's recording of Cage's retrospective concert at Town Hall, New York. By the time it reached a wide readership in Silence, the electronic-music studios it called for already existed, which is why a genuine prediction has so often been mistaken for a description.

For all that it was barely heard at the time, the Credo has become one of the two or three texts every history of noise and electronic music reaches for, usually within a paragraph of Russolo. Its prediction that the field would split over noise versus so-called musical sounds reads now as a fair map of the century that followed: musique concrète, elektronische Musik, the tape studios, and eventually the whole industrial and noise tradition this archive keeps.

The Bureau's reading is that Cage's value here is precisely his restraint. Where the Futurists shouted, Cage stated a belief and then listed the equipment. The Credo is the moment the noise idea stops being a provocation and becomes a programme, a thing you could actually build a studio around. That it took the form of a quiet talk to a few people in Seattle, and waited two decades to be read, is entirely in keeping with its author.

Previous in sequence · M·03 Industrial Music for Industrial People, the Industrial Records founding prospectus, late 1976.

Next in sequence · M·05 The Mission Is Terminated, Throbbing Gristle's 1981 dissolution postcard, the first-wave closer.