The Digital Avant-garde - Digital Culture - page 62

exempted him from the draft, thus enabling him to continue
his musical work, and presumably bringing him into contact, albeit
tangentially, with many of the technical issues that animated the
post-war ideas of Wiener, Shannon and others, who helped develop
not just digital and telecommunications technology, but also some
of the information discourses described in the last chapter. Though
there is no sense that Cage was explicitly interested in the same
technical problems as Wiener or Shannon, it is plausible that he was
reacting to some of the same concerns about communication and
information that informed the others. When he came into contact
with their work he evidently found it congenial to his own practice.
The publisher John Brockman recalls Cage discussing Wiener's ideas
and those of Shannon and Weaver when he encountered him in
the mid- s, and it is possible that he came into contact with

them earlier. 1 In the context of the War and of the increased impor-
tance and availability of telecommunications such concerns were,
as suggested in the previous chapter, ubiquitous. Cage himself was
fascinated by communications technology as shown by his use of
radios and record players in compositions during the

1960

s. Cage's
exploitation of these technologies coincided with the emergence
in the late '

1940

s of Musique Concrète , which used tape recordings
to produce montages of sound, which could be manipulated in
a number of ways, and which anticipates many elements of digital
musical practice. Among those involved with Musique Concrète
were the French composers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry and
the French-American composer Edgard Varèse. A little later, in the
early '

40

s, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen also started
experimenting with tape and electronically generated sound. Later
in that decade Max Matthews, an engineer at Bell Labs, produced
the first digitally generated music.
The influence of this musical experimentation was profound
and extended across both highbrow and popular forms. Cage,
Stockhausen and others later greatly influenced the more radical

50