It is no small irony that John Cage's silent piece (or alliteratively in German, stillen stuck--no wonder German is the language of musicology) has generated the most academic noise of his entire canon. The index of any book on Cage will reference 4'33" more than any other work of his. Musicians who know none of his work in percussion or chance operations have heard of him only through 4'33" (He wrote the one where you go on stage and just sit there, right?") This statement belies a further musicological phenomenon of 4'33"--it is the only piece in the history of music that people feel quite comfortable evaluating without ever having heard (or not heard, depending on the listener's interpretation of the piece,) or even having seen the score. Rejecting 4'33" based only on knowing that the performer doesn't make sound is akin to rejecting electronic music simply on the grounds that it does not use "real" instruments. Both of these criticisms are uninformed and do not consider the nature of actually witnessing a performance. As Richard Kostelanetz wrote in his essay "Inferential Art," referring to 4'33", "...a single hearing or a glance can provide someone with a description of the piece--the absence of declarative content--that is perfectly accurate and yet superficial; for such a summary hardly explains, or even confronts, the real meaning of the work." (Kostelanetz, 1969) However, after study, contemplation, and listening to a performance, 4'33" reveals itself as one of the most engaging pieces of the century.
Some people claim that a good work of art must have meaning on multiple levels of interpretation. While I think this statement is a bit too strong, layers of meaning do make a work academically interesting. Let us then examine the diverse interpretations and aspects of 4'33", so that we can see what makes this piece such a monument in the music literature of the twentieth century, not only by arousing some of the most significant controversy regarding music in the European tradition, but also as a work of art in its own right.
Cage produced four scores for 4'33". (Fetterman, 1995) The first, unpublished and of unknown location, is described by David Tudor, who gave the premier performance of the work, as follows:
The original was on music paper, with staffs, and it was laid out in measures like the Music of Changes, only there were no notes. But the time was there, notated exactly like the Music of Changes except that the tempo never changed, and there were no occurrences--just blank measures, no rests--and the time was easy to compute. The tempo was 60. (Fetterman, 1995)
The second score, published in source, July, 1967, and by C.F. Peters in 1993, is similar, but it does away with staff paper, freeing the piece to be performed on any instrument, not just a keyboard instrument as is implied by the grand staffs of the first version. The score is again read left to right, but the time/space scale has been changed to "1 page=7 inches=56"."
The third and fourth scores differ from each other only in presentation--the third is typed, the fourth hand-written calligraphically by Cage. In addition to performance notes, the score is:
I
TACET
II
TACET
III
TACET
This score implies that it is a single part of a chamber or orchestral work, (Fetterman,1995) possibly to allow for ensemble performances without a conductor beating 60 quarter-notes per minute--instead, the conductor can simply indicate the beginnings and ending of the movements, so that the performers know when to start and stop not playing--or, as it has been put best, "make no intentional sounds." (Taruskin, 1993)
The first two scores are much more typical of Cage's approach to music. His lifelong pursuit of durations as the universal musical element is manifested perfectly in the vertical lines which divide the space of the page. In 4'33", Cage has composed a piece which notates only duration, to his way of thinking the only truly universal way to approach composition, as evidenced by the following quotation:
"Of the four characteristics of sound, only duration involves both sound and silence. Therefore, a structure based on durations (rhythmic: phrase, time lengths) is correct (corresponds with the nature of the material), whereas harmonic structure is incorrect (derived from pitch, which has no being in silence)." (Cage, 1961)
Cage's other lifelong hallmark, chance, also features prominently in his approach to 4'33". He has stated that the durations were determined by a tarot-inspired card spread, and that the movements could be of any length, provided that there were three movements, and their lengths were determined by chance. (Fetterman, 1995)
The most famous way to perform 4'33" is David Tudor's method--seated at a piano, closing the lid to begin movements, opening it to end them, and turning pages as the piece progresses. His is not the only interpretation, though--ensembles; instrumental, vocal, and mixed, have performed 4'33", and even Cage himself has performed the piece seated at a card table. What most performances have in common is their clear social place as a musical performance as all westerners know and revere it. This setting is not essential to Cage's interpretation of the piece. Cage's "favorite piece is the one we hear all the time if we are quiet." (Kostelanetz, 1969) If all that the piece requires is the listener to be quiet, then why place it in the concert hall? Cage took full advantage of his position as a composer to use the concert setting to present his piece. Rather than simply instruct people through the program of the concert that they are to go home and really listen for three consecutive periods of time totaling 4'33", he gives them an opportunity to do so in a concert setting. The performer is on a well-lit stage, executing pre-determined actions; the audience sits in the darkened house, silent in anticipation and observation. Everyone familiar with the concert hall is familiar with the temporal gap between the end of the first applause and the first note of the performance, but before 4'33", who had examined it as a musical work in its own right? Cage stretches these few seconds out into an entire musical work, giving them the same treatment as the most respected piano sonata.
And what is the reaction of the audience? I have seen only a few performances of 4'33", the first of which was given by a choir to an audience with musical training ranging from little to nil. I expected a confused, nervous smattering of applause, but when the piece ended, the choir was given its loudest ovation of the evening--several music students, who were heavily biased against the piece before the performance, literally leaped out of their seats to give a completely sincere standing ovation. So who, or what, were they applauding? Not the skill with which the choir performed the piece, although it must have been extremely tiring to stare so intently at the conductor for so long. I think that it was the applause that Cage wanted most for his works. Following a scathing review of his work for prepared piano The Perilous Night, Cage decided that he needed to "find a better reason for [composing] than communication." The reason he found: "to change the mind so that it does become open to experience, which inevitably is interesting." (Taruskin, 1993) These students found themselves changed in a completely unexpected way by the simplest of musical constructions. The opportunity presented by the conductor to listen for 4 minutes and 33 seconds made them think about sound in a new and very different way, just as Cage had hoped his pieces would do.
The students knew what they were getting, though, at least in part. Most of the audience had no preconceptions, either about Cage or his (in)famous work. What, then, was their experience? After realizing that the choir was not going to sing anything, they might have grown more anxious, wondering if the piece would end without any sounds being made by the choir, or perhaps with a single chord at the very end, or perhaps the choir was making sounds, but were too quiet to be heard. Whatever thoughts the audience members had in mind, their sense of wonder was even greater in exploring 4'33" for the first time than hearing, for instance, a Mozart symphony, which would follow the familiar four-movement structure with easily anticipated key relationships and cadential punctuations.
4'33" is not just a performance piece. As indicated by Tudors approach, extramusical elements play a significant role in the execution of 4'33", but what of the most commonly asked question about the piece, "Is it music?" To answer this question, we must, at least provisionally, answer the unanswerable question "What is music?" For the duration of this paper, please indulge me and consider music to be sound which is perceived and then aesthetically organized. (This is not a rejection of music which cannot be analyzed by ear. It simply states that a printed score is not music, but the sounds produced in the execution of that score, if listened to from an aesthetic perspective, is music. As further defense of this definition is clearly beyond the scope of this paper, or even the scope of this class, I will continue with the matter at hand.) The sounds of 4'33" are all those sounds which occur during the movements--the audience sounds, as is commonly acknowledged, but also those sounds made but not intended by the performer. Most notable in Tudor's performance are the ticking of his stopwatch, the rustling of pages as they were turned, and the opening and closing of the keyboard lid. Common to all performances, the circulatory, respiratory, and nervous systems of the audience members will go on humming their merry tunes, even if they are inaudible to anyone but their owners. Cage was aware of this, as evidenced from this passage from his book "Silence" recalling an experience in an anechoic chamber:
I heard two sounds, one low and one high. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. (Cage, 1961)
And in addition to these ubiquitous biological noises, every environment has it's own background noises. Any urban site has a steady flow of traffic, most classrooms have buzzing fluorescent lights, in a concert hall ushers may pace the lobby in boredom, and so on. Hence, no performance of 4'33" is ever silent.
Tudor's description of the music piece 4'33" is as follows:
It is ... one of the most intense listening experiences one can have. You really listen. Youre hearing everything there is. Audience noises play a part in it. It is cathartic--four minutes and thirty-three seconds of meditation, in effect. (Schonberg, 1960)
A criticism offered to me by a friend is that the form of the piece has nothing to do with the content. He insisted that he could sit down on a street corner with a stopwatch and have the same experience as sitting in a concert hall, listening to a performance of 4'33". He had never, he admitted, seen a performance of the piece. He would not believe, as I maintained and tried to convince him, that the act of seeing a performer or ensemble on stage, directing the whole of their attention to the score in front of them, or toward the conductor, will produce a similar, although highly indeterminate trajectory of sound from one performance to the next. The audience will remain silent for the first, let's say, thirty to forty-five seconds, expecting the piece to begin. Once they begin to get the idea that the performers are not going to make any sound, or at least are going to take their sweet time about it, they will relax in their seats, making the familiar creaking of concert hall chairs; some of the bolder individuals in the audience may whisper to one another in an attempt to make sense out of the event before them. As the disquieting feeling of witnessing a "silent" performance with all the trappings of a traditional piece descends over the audience, nervous coughs, made as brief as possible so as not to disturb the silence, will come forth. The laughter, sure to issue from at least a few people, will also follow a somewhat predictable arc; first mild chuckling as they wonder when the piece will start, followed by real laughter at what a sham the piece is, dying down into nervous laughter as they begin to question their hasty evaluation of the piece, and wonder if, perhaps, those in the audience who are not laughing have a very good reason not to. In my experience, by the end of the second movement, the piece is in no way funny--those who laughed have crawled into their shells either in contemplation of the piece or shame for taking as a joke what those around them are treating as they would any other piece of high art. When Matthew performed 4'33" for Tuesday's section, two students conspired to make paper airplanes and throw them at the esteemed keyboardist. In the making and throwing the students were quite amused by their own antics, but once the planes had flown their course, a sudden seriousness overcame them as they realized that the piece was, in fact, not a joke as they had previously thought.
Finally, as non-musical events, such as page-turning, take place, the audience will react in a semi-predictable way. The pages will at first seem to be a prop to make the piece seem even more a parody of performance conventions, adding to the early comedic effect of the piece. After several page turns, though, which have passed at perceptibly regular intervals, the audience will catch on and realize that the performer is reading from the score--reading what, though, the audience can only guess. Hence, the content--ambient noises--is determined by the form, albeit in a highly indeterminate way.
As an interpreter of music, I feel that there is an aspect of 4'33" which Cage never asserted, but is the most powerful facet of the work. Cage, as Richard Taruskin has said, is dead (Taruskin 1993), freeing his music from his modernist dictatorial grasp. Thus, 4'33" can be interpreted not as a piece of ambient sounds, otherwise unobserved noises raised to art, but as a piece of true silence--immaculate, utopian, and unattainable. Here are the deepest statements to be made.
Cage said that until he dies there would be sounds. (Cage, 1961) Therefore, the silent 4'33" is death--the death that Mahler asks the audience to try on during his second symphony. And just as Mahler's death is both death and resurrection, the void of 4'33" is the void of extinction and the void of creation--the fount from which all life flows. As Paul Griffiths put it "4'33" is music reduced to nothing, and nothing raised to music. It cannot be heard, and is heard anywhere by anyone at anytime. It is the extinction of thought, and has provoked more thought than any other music of the second half of the twentieth century." (Griffiths, 1995) This silent requiem confronts the audience (in this case, someone who looks at the score and contemplates the silences, not the "audience" in the more common sense) with their own mortality, and at the same time assures them that life will press onward, even in the face of non-existence.
The silent 4'33" also explores two significant extremes in music. First, it is the only piece which cannot be produced. Any combination of sounds can, theoretically, eventually be simulated by electronic (or perhaps other, yet to be discovered) means. Recalling my definition of music, the silent 4'33" is impossible to perform for a human audience, since perception requires a working mind, which in turn requires the hum of the nervous system. Perhaps someday we will synthesize or discover life which can perceive sound without creating it, but even then, we humans will never hear true silence.
Music always relies on two factors--time and space. Time, because music is a temporal medium, and space, because the shape of the place where music is listened to will have some acoustic affect on the sound of the piece. The second extreme of music that the silent 4'33" reaches is the elimination of space as a relevant factor. 4'33", as the title suggests, is just as dependent on time as any other musical work, but it is the only piece that can exist independently of space, since it sounds (or rather, does not sound) the same in any place. To illustrate: consider thirty seconds of sound in Hertz Hall during a rehearsal of the University Orchestra, and thirty seconds of noon traffic on Sproul Plaza. Now, remove the sounds one by one--Dr. Milnes giving instructions, sidewalk pentecostal preachers, first violins, street musicians, the hum of the air conditioning system, the shouts of the protesters against whatever is most outrageous that day. Once all the sounds have been removed, the first movement of the silent 4'33" remains, as it will after this process is applied to any thirty second duration of sound.
One of Cage's stated goals in 4'33" was to "erase the boundary between art and life." (Taruskin, 1993) Taruskin goes on to observe, quite correctly, that in composing 4'33" Cage instead broadens the gap between art and life by placing the concert experience of 4'33" on a pedestal for examination by the audience, forcing them to listen to what he has to say by saying nothing. In this respect, Cage fulfills his statement from his Lecture on Nothing: "What we require is silence. What silence requires is that I go on talking." In other words, he has chosen silence for the audience to hear, and for them to hear it, his work must be presented.
Cage's failure to integrate art and life does not, however, negate his piece. The very fact that so much academic ink has been spilled over 4'33" indicates that his more general musical goal, to open the mind to experience, has been fulfilled. And just as music will continue to grow and move forward, successive generations of listeners will attend 4'33" with new ideas about sound and new interpretations of the piece. Cage may be dead, but 4'33" lives on, and will continue to do so for generations to come.
Cage, John 1961 Silence. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press.
Fetterman, William 1995 John Cage's Theater Pieces. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH.
Griffiths, Paul 1995 Modern Music and After. New York, Oxford University Press.
Kostelanetz, Richard 1970 John Cage. New York: Praeger Publishers.
Schonberg, Harold C. 1960 The Far-Out Pianist. Harper's Magazine, June.
Taruskin, Richard 1993 No Ear For Music. In The New Rebublic, 15 March.