John Cage: 4'33'’ and the Importance of Silence
A premiere I found to be intriguing was John Cage’s 4’33’’. The premiere of 4’33’’ occurred on the 29th of August 1952 in the Maverick Concert Hall of Woodstock, New York. The title of the piece is a reference to the duration of the piece — four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The tempo was listed as a calm 60 beats per minute, Pianist David Tudor of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania performed the three-movement piece on a small wooden stage, and the audience of avant-garde music lovers, locals, and members of the New York Philharmonic watched as he sat at the piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, with Tudor looking at a stopwatch and only moving to mark the end and beginning of each movement by opening and closing the lid of the piano.
4’33’’ is famous (or perhaps infamous) because of its bold silence. In Conversing with Cage by Richard Kostelanetz, John Cage stated in regard to the premiere that “They missed the point. There is no such thing as silence. What they thought as silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering on the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.” Cage also stated in 1985, “I had friends whose friendship I valued, and whose friendship I lost because of that. They thought that calling something you hadn’t done, so to speak, music was a form of pulling the wool over their eyes, I guess.” As well as “They didn’t laugh — they were irritated when they realized nothing was going to happen, and they haven’t forgotten it 30 years later: they’re still angry.”
I find John Cage’s perspective on silence to be intriguing. When Cage stated that, “There is no such thing as silence”, I was fascinated. It is remarkable to think that all around us there is noise, that there is some form of sound. Unless you are in a vacuum devoid of all things, and your heart was not beating, silence is impossible to achieve. Cage uses this lack of true silence to advocate that there is, in a sense, music everywhere.
Music is ubiquitous, but the exact definition of music is hard to pinpoint. If I do not like the music that is played by others, that is enjoyed by others, is it music to me? At the end of the day, music is just a system of sound-waves that invokes an emotional response, which means that music is extremely subjective, but that is not a bad thing. Those at the premiere of 4’33’’ who viewed 4’33’’ as a joke, the ex-friends of Cage and the people who were “irritated” when they realized no notes were being played on the piano are entitled to their own opinions, but so is Cage. Cage is arguing that music exists everywhere, in everything, and that the true music that was being performed at the premiere was not from the piano, but everywhere else.
While 4’33’’ can be performed by anyone anywhere, and it could have been composed by anyone, 4’33’’ is a statement. The premiere of 4’33’’ proves that music is complicated, subjective, and it can be a battleground of critics throwing around harsh reviews because they may not like or truly understand the music that is being played. The question of whether 4’33'’ is music is up to you, and your thoughts and opinions are as valid as the next person. You don’t even need to enjoy 4'33'’, but what John Cage highlights with his piece is that where there is noise, there is music.
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