Alright, I’m going to teach you one of the easiest songs you’ll ever learn. Go ahead and pick up your favorite musical instrument. The laptop will work, if that’s all you have. Now, concentrate. Position your hands over the buttons, keys, valves, frets, what-have-you. And start. Don’t play a single note for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. There. You just played John Cage‘s 4’33”.
First played at an artists’ benefit in Woodstock, New York, on August 19th, 1952, by pianist David Tudor, Cage’s piece was both hailed as a masterpiece and written off as a guileless, thoughtless gimmick. Tudor walked onstage, sat on the bench, lowered the lid to his keyboard, and did nothing. The piece proposes that the audience should analyze the sounds around them–the way that natural sound in one’s environment can be its own sort of music. But, before getting deeper into 4’33”, one could find signs of the coming “silence” in earlier Cage compositions, as well as a few compositions by other composers.
While others undoubtedly used silence as a great strength in their work, three pre-Cage pieces are noted for the key that silence plays in their inner workings. All the way back in 1897, Alphonse Allais wrote “Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man”, nine blank measures of composition. Seemingly played for laughs as much as anything else (the French humorist also reportedly showed an all-white painting called “Anaemic Young Girls Going to their First Communion through a Blizzard”), the piece can nonetheless be considered a precursor to Cage’s work, though Cage said he hadn’t heard of Allais’ piece at the time. Thirty or so years later, Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff wrote “In Futurum”, another “silent piece,” though one composed of intricately notated rest markers and time signatures (again, Cage was likely unaware). In 1949, French artist Yves Klein premiered Monotone-Silence Symphony, one movement of a single droning tone followed by two movements of silence.
Around the same time that Klein’s symphony debuted, over in America, Cage was gaining exposure as a wunderkind in the world of experimental composition. His pioneering work in prepared piano (opening the lid of a piano and placing objects directly onto the instrument’s strings in order to change their tones) was perhaps his most noteworthy, but other pieces analyzing the importance of chance are very interesting. According to legend, composer Christian Wolff gave Cage a copy of the I Ching, a traditional Chinese text full of different messages about life, one’s particular truth divined by a seemingly random act, such as tossing coins. The pieces Cage composed through the I Ching and other methods of chance were intended to represent the way sounds form in life, rather than being an attempt by man to control nature. Much like 4’33” to come, some critics, and even other composers, found these “compositions” to, in a sense, cheapen the act of composition. Others, though, found the use of chance a revelation, a breath of fresh air in the midst of the classical music world.
But 4’33” represents the epitome of this criticism and applause. Reports say that a great number of audience members at the piece’s first performance walked out, grumbling about the “silence” of the piece. While this wasn’t Cage’s intent, it’s interesting to think that this talk, then, became the piece itself. The “silence” that the listeners found offensive is never in fact silence, instead everything from a cough to a shifted paper program becomes sound to experience. The piece challenges the listener, demanding a reshaping of the definition of music itself. It has also been argued that this piece is the beginning of noise music as an intensive genre.
Later, Cage debuted two sequels, as it were, to the infamous composition. 4’33” No. 2 revolves around the performer performing a particular action, while amplified. The first performance was in fact Cage writing out the score for the piece: “In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action.” One3 followed, a sort of extreme version of the original, in which the entire audience is amplified, pushing the room into the edge of a feedback frenzy.
But, as is often the case with movies, the first is generally regarded as better, more important than the sequels. To that end, many artists have recorded their own versions of 4’33”. A legend in his own right, Frank Zappa recorded his own take on the piece for Cage tribute album A Chance Operation. Hungarian composer Györgi Ligeti wrote Three Bagatelles for David Tudor, three extremely short, silent movements (available on iTunes for $9.99) dedicated to the original performer. Another indebted piece would be Sonic Youth alter-ego project Ciccone Youth’s “Silence”, which clocks in at just over a minute of the title. Sonic Youth later covered Cage in their SYR 4: Goodbye 20th Century album dedicated to covering modern composers.
Cage inspired so many just by having a guy sit at a piano and do nothing. Not bad. So, next time you’re on the train on the way to work, bored in class, or waiting for dinner to cook, try to listen to the “silent” music around you. John Cage would be proud.
Audio Archaeology is a presentation of Media Potluck and Consequence of Sound.
