Silencing the Sounded Self by Shultis Christopher;

Author:Shultis, Christopher; [Shultis, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of New England
Published: 1998-03-16T05:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 1.

The first page also has thirteen hexagrams derived from the I Ching, with some (but not all) of the corresponding numbers written out below. Cage discussed how he employed the I Ching in “To Describe the Process of Composition Used in Music of Changes and Imaginary Landscape No. 4”:

What brings about this unpredictability is the use of the method established in the I Ching (Book of Changes) for the obtaining of oracles, that of tossing three coins six times.

Three coins tossed once yield four lines: three heads, broken with a circle; two tails and a head, straight; two heads and a tail, broken; three tails, straight with a circle. Three coins tossed thrice yield eight trigrams (written from the base up): chien, three straight; chen, straight, broken, broken; kan, broken, straight, broken; ken, broken, broken, straight; kun, three broken; sun, broken, straight, straight; li, straight, broken, straight; tui, straight, straight, broken. Three coins tossed six times yield sixty-four hexagrams (two trigrams, the second written above the first) read in reference to a chart of the numbers 1 to 64 in a traditional arrangement having eight divisions horizontally corresponding to the eight lower trigrams and eight divisions vertically corresponding to the eight upper trigrams. A hexagram having lines with circles is read twice, first as written, then as changed. Thus, chien-chien, straight lines with circles, is read first as 1, then as kun-kun, 2; whereas chien-chien, straight lines without circles, is read only as 1. (S, pp. 57–58)

In “Diary: Audience 1966,” the first hexagram (see Figure 1) corresponds to number sixty-three on the chart and is placed first, next to the roman numeral I. The next hexagram is thirty.33 However, since the first hexagram has a changing line in the li trigram (straight, broken, straight), it changes that trigram to chien (straight, straight, straight) to form the chien-kan hexagram of five. In like fashion, thirty becomes twenty-one to form the first large part of the “Diary.”34 Consequently, it is a reading of the changing lines that enables thirteen hexagrams to produce twenty-one numbers. Symmetrical alteration (four texts, part I; three texts, part II; four texts, part III; three texts, part IV; four texts, part V; and three texts, part VI) seems likely to have been planned. However, following Cage’s previous use of at least a hundred words per structural unit, one discovers that such a relationship is literally produced “by chance.”35

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