February 16, 2012

Instructions
I. Darwinian Grammar and its Eventual Undoing
II. The Rand Corporation, John Cage and the I Ching
III. Arbitrating the Arbitrary: What of the Undone?

A Million Random Digits With 100,000 Normal Deviates is a text created by the Rand Corporation and published by the Free Press of Glencoe, Illinois, in 1955. The book was created to fill a need in testing computational algorithms where a large supply of unique and nonrepeating number sequences are required. Or, as stated in the its introduction, the book was made "to solve problems of various kinds by experimental probability procedures which have come to be called 'Monte Carlo methods'" - the reference being to numbers generated by spinning a roulette wheel. "Many of the applications required a large supply of random digits or normal deviates of high quality."

This was a problem relatively new to the nascent computer age and its solution was, of course, a product of its time. But it's hard to imagine that the publication of book wasn't also a bit of corporate braggadocio, a jet age equivalent of Watson, the IBM super-computer that was pitted against human contestants on the game show Jeopardy. Or, for that matter, as a collated and bound parallel to George Mallory's response when asked why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest. The book was made in part, no doubt, because the possibility was there.

The passing of five decades has rendered the book endearingly quaint. The very thought that a mammoth sequence of numbers generated by a computer should be stored and delivered to users on paper is, well, kind of adorable. Leafing through its pages, however, is strangely mind numbing. As an illustration of the sheer size of a million it's staggering. It can also be seen as a map to the weird world of numbers, where the concepts of numbers don't always agree. The "reader" is forced to deal with the notion of a "million" - its mass, its weight, the sheer volume of one million nonrepeating numeric sequesnces.

Like A Million Random Digits With 100,000 Normal Deviates, John Cage is a rockstar of sequencing. He used randomization procedures, or what he called "chance operations," to guide the composition process. Throughout a long and rich career he sought to eliminate the ego from the artistic process, preferring to give greater emphasis to the experience of sound than to its expressive potential. He defined music as "organized sound" and famously said that he'd quit listening to records in favor of the sound of traffic outside his Manhattan apartment.

In order to eliminate his own ego - his artistic choices and preferences - from his work, Cage needed a tool, an outside agent to guide his practice. For Cage did still have a practice, and what's so often misunderstood about him is that his was not an anything-goes aesthetic. His enjoyment of traffic sounds notwithstanding, he was not making field recordings. He wasn't staging chaos. His own sounds were organized. But as an unfortunate product of his charisma and popularity, he has become a sort of unwitting mascot for mayhem. Such sonic events as a recording of breaking glass or a guitarist breaking a string on stage tend to be called "Cagean" when in fact they have little to do with any of Cage's work except perhaps for an interest in sounds that aren't typically considered to be musical. The presentation of arbitrary sounds as art was never Cage's intent.

To solve the problem of the exertion of ego, Cage turned to a text dating back to the 2nd or 3rd millennium BCE. The I Ching is a complex system of diagrams that function as a cosmological map, a system for philosophical guidance and a procedure for divination. Like Tarot cards, the I Ching allows a user to ask a question and then take an action (dealing cards in the Tarot or tossing coins in the I Ching) to be guided toward an answer. And in a sense like A Million Random Digits With 100,000 Normal Deviates, the I Ching is able to provide endless direction. Cage could pose questions about instrumentation, length and number of parts, for example, the coin tosses then serving to build a skeleton for a composition.

We might here refer back to the Rand rasion d'être, "to solve problems of various kinds by experimental probability procedures." Cage was trying to solve the problem of finding new ways to organize sound by using probability procedures, which is to say by applying a process - not by arbitrary selection. In the 1960s Cage was introduced to a computer program that simulated the I Ching procedure, allowing for even more complex determination procedures. By virtue of this new technology, he was able to generate the 18,000 virtual coin tosses that formed the backbone for the composition HPSCHD, a massive work built from recordings of harpsichord music composed by Beethoven, Shumann, Schoenberg as well as a randomization piece composed by Mozart's based on the dictates of the rolling of dice. The piece premiered at a 16,000 seat auditorium at the University of Illinois in May, 1969. In addition to the tape soundtrack, there was live music and video projection. It was the largest scale project Cage ever undertook.

Afterwards he bought a computer to install in his apartment that would generate random I Ching sequences. He resisted a suggestion that he use a simpler process of computer-generated numeric sequences, however, wanting to retain the diagrams of the ancient text. Rand's randomization text, perhaps, wouldn't have held the same poetic beauty for Cage. But all was not lost for any artistic aspirations Rand's voluminous work might have had. The experimental poet Jackson Mac Low - inspired both by Buddhism and Cage - devised a method of creating poems through chance operation. To regulate his decision making, Mac Low implemented both the I Ching and A Million Random Digits With 100,000 Normal Deviates.