To Cage, silence was not necessarily the absence of all sound. He
loved the sound of a truck at 50 miles an hour. Static on the radio.
The hum of an amplifier. The sound of water on water. Most of all, he
appreciated the sounds that were missed or overwhelmed by our
noisy lives.
In 1951, he visited an anechoic chamber, the most advanced
soundproof room in the world at the time. Even there, with his highly
sensitive musician’s ear, he heard sounds. Two sounds, one high and
one low. Speaking with the engineer afterward, he was amazed to
discover that the source of those sounds was his own nervous system
and the pumping of his blood.
How many of us have ever come close to this kind of quiet?
Reducing the noise and chatter around you to the degree that you
can literally hear your own life? Can you imagine? What you could do
with that much silence!
It was a reaction against unnecessary noise that inspired Cage’s
most famous creation, 4′33′′ , which was originally conceived with
the title Silent Prayer. Cage wanted to create a song identical to the
popular music of the day—it’d be the same length, it’d be performed
live and played on the radio like every other song. The only
difference was that 4′33′′ would be a “piece of uninterrupted
silence.”
Some people saw this as an absurd joke, a Duchampian send-up
of what constitutes “music.” In one sense, it was. (Cage thought it
would be funny to sell the “song” to Muzak Co. to be played in
elevators.) But it was also inspired by his lifelong study of Zen
philosophy, a philosophy that finds fullness in emptiness. The
performance instructions for the song are themselves a beautiful
contradiction: “In a situation provided with maximum amplification,
perform a disciplined action.”
In fact, 4′33′′ was never about achieving perfect silence—it’s
about what happens when you stop contributing to the noise. The
song was first performed at Woodstock, New York, by the pianist
David Tudor.* “There’s no such thing as silence,” Cage said of that
first performance. “What they thought was silence, because they
didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could
hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the
barry
(Barry)
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