John Cage was a composer, music theorist, and artist who is credited as one of the leading figures of the avant-garde movement in the 1960s. His work has influenced bands as diverse as ambient techno band Aphex Twin to French avant-pop outfit Stereolab to rock bands Sonic Youth and Radiohead. He’s also credited with helping start the modern interpretive dance movement, partly because of his work and romantic relationship with choreographer Merce Cunningham. In this episode of Ephemeral, host Alex Williams looks into Cage’s most popular and controversial creation, 4’33”, which is a four-and-a-half minute long composition performed in complete silence. To learn everything about this innovative piece, he talks with musicologist and composer Kyle Gann, who wrote an exhaustive history for his book, No Such Thing As Silence.
“John Cage believed music was everywhere, including, and maybe even especially, silence,” Alex tells us. When 4'33" debuted, the audience was furious, accusing Cage of everything “from parading around in emperor’s new clothes to attacking the sanctity of music.” But the piece wasn’t born from laziness or cheek; in fact, it took Cage four and a half years to write it. “The worst-kept secret...is that it’s not silent," Alex points out. "The piece is ostensibly made up of the sounds in your environment, the cacophony we consciously or unconsciously tune out as we go about our business.” Kyle played it for his students, asking them to write down what they heard: “One girl said, ‘I never realized there was so much to listen to.’”
It took several years for Cage to get to 4’33”. “Cage avoided harmony and opted to work largely with unpitched percussion,” Alex says. “While chimes, xylophones, tom-toms and cymbals were the norm, Cage arranged for his own ear in what he had available. Auto brake drums, ratchets, tin cans, sheets of metal, and conch shells.” His style worked well for interpretive dancers, and as he worked to compose a piece for dancer Syvilla Fort’s piece "Bacchanal", he invented the prepared piano. “The basic idea is to augment the instrument's sonic range by placing objects between or along the strings,” Alex explains. “This was a complex process for Cage, and a continually evolving array of preparation techniques, notational methods, and compositions ensued.”
Eventually Cage was introduced to Zen Buddhism, and it hugely informed his thinking for the rest of his life. Knowing this, it’s easy to see the purpose behind his silent composition, as Kyle writes in No Such Thing:
“If you are able to appreciate, at least on an intellectual level, that from a Zen standpoint there is no difference between playing a note and not playing a note....If you can turn toward the whir of the wind in the oak trees or the pulse of the ceiling fan the same attention you were about to turn to the melodies of the pianist, you may have a few moments of realizing that the division you habitually maintain between art and life, between beautiful things and commonplace ones, is artificial. And that making it separates you off from life and deadens you to the magic around you.”
Looked at through Zen eyes, the piece is no longer “a joke, a hoax, or a deliberately provocative and nihilistic act of Dada,” as some people originally thought, but “a blank canvas altered by the presence of the listener...A demonstration of the fact that silence is not silent. A display of non-intention. A respite from the noisy world, not of sound, but of one's own mind. A meditation.”
Join Alex and Kyle to learn more about Cage’s life and work, the many performances of 4'33", and hear the piece itself, on this episode of Ephemeral.
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