June 2024. Silence: Lectures and Writing by John Cale
1961, Wesleyan University Press, 303 pages. Written in English, read in English.
In music, each note has four aspects: Pitch — what it sounds like; amplitude — how loud it is; envelope — changes in the texture and amplitude of the note across time; and duration — how long the note is audible.
For several centuries — from Bach onwards, composers have experimented with every concievable aspect of how a note should be emitted. By the time the 20th century rolled along, all that was left for modern composers was to try and break the existing rules, by changing the possibilities of each of these four aspects, or even — as John Cage has done in his most famous piece — discarding three of the four completely, remaining with only one — duration — with which he decided to experiment with what would remain of the music.
His famous piece is called “4:33” — named after the entire piece’s duration. In it, a pianist goes up a stage and sits at a piano, and then plays nothing four four minutes and thirty three seconds. The idea, of course, is that the incidental music that occurs is generated by the audience, rather than the pianist on stage. It is easy to come to the conclusion, as I have for many years, that the pianist just follows a stopwatch, and at the 4:33 minute mark closes the lid of the piano keyboard and walks off the stage.
But in fact the pianist turns the pages of the piece’s written partiture exactly when they should be turned, according to valid rules of standard music notation, within which everything that appears on the page are silence symbols, in various durations. And even the phrases — sequences of silence symbols — correspond with Cage’s internal structure of composition with which he wrote many of his other, more traditional, pieces.
What one can learn from Silence, John Cage’s collection of essays and lectures from 1937 until 1961, is that a lot of thought has been invested in appears to be a musical gag, and that this musical piece is one exploration of Cage’s continuing search for the meaning of silence — and the absence of it.
Silence has three main themes, woven throughout the book. The first, is that there is no such thing as complete silence. Sound is always there, ready to be explored, and the manufactured silence of a musical piece such as “4:33” reveals it. Cage also tells (multiple times) of an experience he had in an anechoic chamber where no sound should have been concieved — and yet he was still hearing two distinct sounds. One, the engineer in charge of the room explained to him, was his nervous system; the other, the blood running through his veins.
The second is the immense, unexplored field of opportunities available in integrating chance into decision making — in composing music but also in everyday life.
The third is that everything can be negotiated — nothing should be taken for granted. Apart from the absence of three of the four common aspects of sound presented in “4:33”, and the chance creation of compositions that guarantees that every performance of the same piece is essentially different, Cage talks about challenging even the direction of the score itself, providing for music that should be read upside down, or in a spiral from the middle, rather than left to right.
The negotiation continues even as far as the very building blocks of music itself. Cage provides in this book a transcript of four performances — lectures that he provided, named “Lecture on Something”, “Lecture on Nothing” and “Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?” and “45' for a Speaker”. Each of them is essentially an attempt to treat speech — words, syntax, context, as the building blocks of a musical piece, bound by the same rules that more conventional Cage pieces are constructed — phrases are repeated, constructed in specific patterns, the talk is divided into sections, but the content itself is presented in an unorthodox way. For example “Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?” is written as four lectures — one on each separate stave — that should be provided at the same time (when the talk is provided three of the four lectures are recorded and Cage performs the remaining one live). It is up to the reader to determine whether they want to continue reading this piece in the ordinary way (left to right, top to bottom), which gives it some sense (but it is primarily sense that is completed in the reader’s mind); to read each speech separately — following just the first stave all through to the end, then returning to focus on the second, etc.; or give in to experimentation completely and try reading randomly — from the middle, every fifth phrase, back to front.
Interspersed between the essays and talks are anecdotes — providing a glimpse into Cage’s life, which was not completely absorbed in music. He was an avid mushroom forager and studied their biology extensively; he was a devout Zen follower; his social circle did not include only fellow musicians.
In the introduction, Kyle Gann expressed, maybe implicitly, envy in those who read the book for the first time. He has read the book many times, and every time the book has served a different purpose, provided a different meaning. There are also endless possibilities of how to read the book, given how it challenges the way a conservative book is written — I have decided to read it in the conventional way — front to back, top to bottom — and the ideas have therefore arranged themselves in a specific way.
Perhaps at a later time, I will read it in a different way, and new meanings will emerge.
The July 2024 selection for the David Bowie Book Club will be The Bird Artist by Howard Norman
