Silence

"Absolutely. He marked out certain extremes in the avant-garde which have yet to be matched. He went all the way. He covered the entire spectrum of what you could do with sound, from noise – with the most dense and enveloping assemblages of sounds – to, famously, silence. In his composition 4’33” , the performer is directed to make no sound and the work, the music, becomes whatever is going on in the room where the listeners are gathered. Silence is one of the great music books . Purely on a literary level, there’s something about Cage’s style which is tremendously unique, something quite special in the history of literature . There’s a gentleness as well as a bluntness in terms of how he goes about presenting his ideas. There’s a poetic quality, even a mystical strain, but there’s also great clarity. He’s also really quite funny – there’s a wryness that goes through all his work from beginning to end. No one was ever entirely sure how serious Cage was about all of this. Some people suspected that it was all some kind of grand put-on. It was not. He was deadly serious. But there was always a certain deadpan quality to his style, a certain understatement, a trace of a smile. It’s a wonderful quality for an artist to have. “People who care deeply about music want someone listening to this vast quantity of new music and singling out voices they should pay attention to. The role of the critic will remain strong.” Cage encountered so much hostility in the course of his life, so much scepticism and outright rejection. But he remained unflappable and it never seemed to get the best of him. This power of resistance and of remaining steadfast is very impressive to behold. Even if you don’t like his ideas or his music, as a personality and a cultural figure there’s something heroic about Cage, almost saintlike in terms of how he moved through life. Every time I pick up this book I’m won over again by the incredibly sophisticated charm of the writing. All he wanted was to make people think differently and to step out of their humdrum daily selves. His entire project was to shake his audience out of a certain slumber, and it was a deeply philosophical project in the end. You could make a case for Cage being a great philosopher. If there’s one composer aside from Wagner who’s had a deep and lasting impact on philosophy, on the theory of art and on any other form of intellectual commentary, it’s Cage. There’s a sense in which Cage, deep down, was a rather traditional man, a kind of American who looked back to some lost American paradise. This is a simplification and I wouldn’t go too far with it, but there was an element of him which looks back to [Henry David] Thoreau – he loved Thoreau’s writing. The happily lonely man out there in nature, the solitary frontiersman, the pioneer, out on the plains in his cabin against the winds and the rain – there’s an element of all these iconic American images in Cage, a longing for it. When he confronted noise, the city, technology and new media he often eagerly absorbed it into his work, but I think he was always fighting against it and trying to acclimatise himself to a kind of alien landscape, searching for pockets of peace and serenity. At the centre of his career, that contains so much deliberate uproar, is the silent piece. It was first performed in a little concert hall in upstate New York, the Maverick Concert Hall, which is partly open to the outside and is in the middle of the woods. The silence – the ambient sounds – that the audience would have been listening to on that occasion was reportedly a bit of rain, birds, rustling and the rest of it. So at the heart of this career is a Thoreau-like, serene immersion in the sounds of nature. That is the silence that Cage was seeking and that he felt was being lost."

"John Cage is one of the composers most associated with minimalism. He’s a kind of pioneer, not just in music, but also for the arts, and for philosophy as well. He studied avant-garde classical music and was practicing a lot of the ideas we’ve been discussing earlier than other people. In the 1940s and 1950s, he had already cultivated an interest in Zen philosophy. He experimented with these forms of emptiness in art that were very radical at the time. He is most famous for his composition 4’33 , which is, legendarily, four minutes and 33 seconds of a musician not playing anything. That piece debuted in 1952, a decade before the Minimalist visual artists were active. And he’d been thinking about a silent piece of music for five or ten years before that. So he was really onto aestheticized forms of absence. His work is really interesting—not just as music, but as philosophical provocation: What can a piece of art be? Can it be nothing? Can it be just a framework for other experiences? Cage was also interesting as a kind of showman, or a theorist-slash-performance artist. He would take these ideas that he had about music or noise or sounds and insert them into very mainstream contexts. He once went on a late night TV show to perform this piece called ‘Water Walk’ that basically consisted of him futzing around with a bunch of mundane objects, boiling water, throwing a flowerpot in a bathtub and hitting things. So he had this absurdist mode of making art. I think he appreciated art as a good joke. Humor is a big part of Zen Buddhism. The absurdity of a Zen koan. They’re not jokes , per se, but they are funny. I think, to Cage, any reaction was a good reaction. He didn’t care how you responded to what he had made. He just cared that it was made and got a response. Like at the 4’33 premiere, which happened at a concert hall in upstate New York, it was the last composition of the night; the pianist wasn’t playing and people got annoyed. They started rustling around and leaving and starting their cars. To him, that was fine. He didn’t care; the sound of people being annoyed and the rumbling cars was part of the composition. His vision was so capacious that anything could fit within it. Which can present its own problems, obviously. But all of these actions, and all of this thinking, weren’t just translated into his composition, but also a lot of writing and lecturing. To me, one of the core ideas of Minimalist artists is that anything can be art, or art does not need to consist of anything in particular. So it’s a way of animating empty space, or space that might otherwise seem empty—either of form or content. Cage found a way of translating that idea into writing as well, which I find super compelling and mostly impossible. Silence collects his most influential writing. There are lectures where he just fills space, either on the page or in time, with just whatever content: “I have nothing to say / and I am saying it / and that is poetry / as I need it.” He said: “What we require is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking.” In the book, silence is not an absence of sound, but a space in which any content can happen. So, in that quote, “what silence requires is that I go on talking,” speaking does not break silence. It’s more like the continued filling of space is silence in a way, which I really liked. It’s very hard to explain. Yeah, definitely a showman. But at the same time, the idea of Minimalism is that what matters is not the content, necessarily, but creating a space for reaction. Creating a space and then filling it in whatever way occurs to you. In the way that Judd fills an empty room with a single box, Cage fills a half-hour lecture with one phrase. And that’s just as meaningful as a bunch of other words. The words are just content in the void. I love this idea of art as just a framework, of art creating empty spaces rather than filling empty spaces. The writing in Cage’s book is just relentless. Challenging and relentlessly interesting, but also very funny. And at least, on the page, you don’t have to sit there and listen to him repeat the same thing 14 times. The Minimalist visual artists worked a lot with space: animating empty space, creating empty space, whatever. Cage worked a lot with duration: filling empty time or creating empty time. It’s really interesting to see that on the page, because time marks are like a composition framework for his speeches, where he arranges them in time and creates empty spaces within the lecture. That’s a hard thing to aspire to in writing, and it’s really remarkable that he succeeded."