“Silence” lectures and writings by John Cage

Picked this one up at a quirky bookstore a while ago. You probably know John Cage as that guy who wrote 4’33” that song that only consists of silence. It’s a little more than that, it forces you to listen to all of the unintentional sounds around you instead of something prepared by the musician. And of course the end result is that all sounds become music of some sort. Go ahead, try it out, take all the time you need. I’ll wait right here.

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Anyways, whether you agree or not, you have to admit that sitting on stage for 4 minutes and 33 seconds without playing a single note is pretty balsy for a musician. So I thought that this book would help to get into his head a little more. Turns out that Cage is a pretty great storyteller. Most of them are very short, but they are quite clever and do usually give some insight, rather like a Zen koan.

The layout of the book is really cleverly done, the writings that are in a more typical format are put at the beginning to present this philosophy and train of thought, and the stranger ones are closer to the end. What I mean by the stranger or less typical ones are ones where elements of chance come into play. Such as this entire lecture where the spacing of words on the page are based on random imperfections                            so the                                                             entire lecture                   is written out                                 kind of like                  this. Makes it kind of                                                                hard to follow. There’s also another lecture where he set up 4 recordings of different lectures to play at once, so all of those lectures are printed out on top of each other. That one was impossible to follow, which was the point of course. Then often there are ones with less crazy formatting, but the content is largely this refrain about how we are discussing nothing at all, and anyone who feels sleepy should go to sleep. It can get annoying if you aren’t in the mood.

Anyways, if that doesn’t throw you off, the lectures do show his thoughts on several subjects. They can also get pretty repetitive, the story of him going into an anechoic chamber (a room with absolutely no sound in it) and discovering that he could in fact hear two noises, is repeated quite frequently. (The two noises were his nervous system and respiratory system, therefore we are never in complete silence and there are constantly unintentional noises going on. See kind of where the idea for 4’33” came from?)

Besides that though there’s also frequent demonstrations of his reliance on chance operations (like the imperfections in the paper) and training in Zen Buddhism. It’s quite an interesting read, as long as you keep your mind open to learning things in unconventional ways. Whether you hate or love his work, you have to admit that he had an incredible effect on music today and how we think about music and sounds.