HPSCHD, Gesamtkunstwerk, and Utopia

By Sara Heimbecker

So much does the outward form change, and yet, after a hundred years, everything
which at the outset was incompatible with accustomed concepts, has faded so much
that one sees more similarities than differences.

— Arnold Schoenberg, Breslau Lecture on Die glückliche Hand

One of the posters created to advertise the 1969 performance of John Cage's HPSCHD on the University of Illinois campus depicts John Cage as a warrior (see fig. 1). Cage wears an Asian warrior's breastplate and nonchalantly slings a medieval battle ax over his shoulder. He appears ready to slay a dragon with three heads—Beethoven, Mozart, and Schumann (whose works Cage "controls" in the composition). Cage's pants, meanwhile, seem to be those of an astronaut, complete with tubing that runs to a reel-to-reel tape machine. Add the mercurial wings on his feet and the halo on his head and he seems the "patron saint" of computer music. He laughs his familiar open-mouth laugh, while the "serious" composers scowl behind him. The harpsichord tucked into the scene between Cage and the tape machine completes the contrast between the old and the new.