John Cage expanded our idea of what constitutes music. Often, his vision is misconstrued as identifying music in silence, which is unsurprising, considering that his lectures and writings have been published in a well-known book under that title. One of his seminal compositions, 4’33”, however, is not so much about silence as it is about the ambient sound that people experience in the world around them. He wanted to turn people’s attention to those sounds. In other works, such as his prepared piano pieces, Cage defied the expectations of what kind of sounds would emerge from an instrument, and in his chance mixing of music, texts, and electronics, he opened up new soundscapes may not otherwise have been conceived.
Cage said that “The sound experience which I prefer to all others, is the experience of silence. And this silence, almost anywhere in the world today, is traffic.” In other words, there is really no such thing as silence, especially in the modern world, in which the hum of automobiles, airplanes, electricity, and all the other ambient sounds of the urban and even rural environment impose themselves on our sonic world. He continues: “If you listen to Beethoven, it’s always the same, but if you listen to traffic, it’s always different.” What he is saying here is that the music of the “masters” is, so to speak, set in stone. It is fixed in notation and only allows a minimum of variability in performance practices. “Traffic,” on the other hand, will be constantly evolving as our cities, technology, and transportation infrastructure evolves. “Traffic” in eighteenth-century Vienna, for example, would sound radically different than traffic today, while a Beethoven sonata still sounds more or less the same as it always did.
Use your promo and get a custom paper on
"John Cage".
In his 1959 recording, Indeterminacy, Cage tells a story about his visit to an anechoic chamber at Harvard University some years earlier. This was supposed to be a room of complete silence, but Cage clearly heard two pitches, one high and one low. When he asked the engineer about this afterwards, he was told that “the high one was your nervous system in operation. And the low one was the circulation of your blood.” This likely confirmed for him the impossibility of silence and the inescapable nature of ambient sound, a revelation that informed many of his later compositions and would influence a generation of composers. Movements towards electroacoustics, acoustic ecology, improvisation, and other approaches to sound and music owe a debt to Cage’s compositions, recordings, and writings.
Music is sound and sound is everywhere. While many others have defined music as “organized sound,” Cage worked against this idea by composing works based on random processes. So-called “aleatoric music,” which Cage was instrumental in developing, uses devices such as dice, cards, and other random elements to determine the parameters of a piece of music. “To determine” is perhaps the wrong verb, as Cage like to call this music “indeterminate.” This can be applied to the entire composition or only to certain elements, resulting in a piece that sounds different every time it is performed. Even 4’33”, a work of supposed silence, is completely different with each performance, being based on random elements of ambient sound created within the audience, the concert hall or whatever venue it is performed in, as well as external sounds from outside, such as traffic. This is a very different conception of music than that of the Beethoven sonata, enshrined in a manuscript and performed with religious adherence to the composer’s “intentions,” or at least what contemporary performers perceive those to be.
