Silence. John Cage

no courses until the spring of 1952.⁴ Cage’s first printed reference to Suzuki comes in his “Juilliard Lecture” of that same year.⁵

      The MOMA percussion-ensemble concert, on February 7, 1943, resulted in a bemused two-page spread on Cage in Life Magazine. Nice as the publicity was, it failed to rescue Cage from genteel poverty, and he spent the rest of the decade writing mostly keyboard works that could be performed solo. The 1940s brought the beginnings of a historic collaboration between Cage and the dancer Merce Cunningham (1919–2009); Cunningham choreographed much of Cage’s music, and Cage was the founding music director of the world-famous Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Then in 1950 Cage met two of the three protégés whose names figure heavily in this book: Morton Feldman (1926–87) and Christian Wolff (b. 1934), the latter only sixteen at the time. Encouraged by Cage to follow his muse, Feldman began writing pieces (Projections I–V, 1950–51) on graph paper, indicating only relative registers of notes played (high, medium, low), and leaving the pitch to the performer. Although Feldman resumed conventional pitch notation soon afterward, these chance-accepting pieces made a big impression on Cage, possibly even moving him closer to the idea of chance composition himself, and their technique is referred to often in Silence.

      Wolff was the son of publishers, and made Cage a gift of a book his parents had just published: the first English translation of the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes. Intended as both philosophical system and divinatory oracle, the I Ching contains commentaries on sixty-four hexagrams, patterns of six broken and unbroken lines, which are meant to be obtained at random by drawing yarrow sticks or, more often today, tossing a set of three coins six times. Cage began consulting the I Ching for all problems of his everyday life; then, in a massive piano piece titled Music of Changes (1951), he used the oracle to generate random numbers to determine pitch, duration, dynamics, and other aspects of notes, to create a music totally independent of his own tastes and preferences. This was radical, but not as radical as the piece he wrote the following year, using the I Ching to determine only durations, and leaving out pitches and sounds altogether: 4′33′′. At the August 29, 1952, performance in Woodstock, New York, David Tudor sat at the piano for that amount of time, four minutes and thirty-three seconds, and played—nothing. The piece the audience listened to consisted of whatever sounds occurred during the interval.

      4′33′′ was a scandal, but contrary to what one might assume from its iconic status today, it did not alter Cage’s reputation overnight. (You’ll notice that, even though it remains his most famous piece, 4′33′′ is only mentioned twice in Silence, never by name, but as “my silent piece”: in the introduction to “On Robert Rauschenberg” and in the concluding “Music Lover’s Field Companion,” where a private performance is humorously described.) Cage continued scraping by on temporary jobs, though several events in the ’50s expanded his fame and influence. In October 1954 he and David Tudor began a two-month tour of performances at Donaueschingen, Cologne, Paris, Brussels, Stockholm, Zurich, Milan, and London; Cage later complained that they were treated as idiots and clowns.⁶ Nevertheless, in Germany he became good friends with Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007), as he had with Pierre Boulez (b. 1925) in Paris in 1949, though you might not think so from the sidelong glances he throws them both in “Erik Satie” and other articles. From 1956 to ’60 Cage taught a course in Experimental Composition at the New School for Social Research in New York, where his students (including Toshi Ichiyanagi and his wife Yoko Ono) would go on to form the Fluxus movement, which pioneered conceptual art under his influence. On May 15, 1958, Cage’s friends presented a Twenty-Five-Year Retrospective Concert for him at Town Hall in New York, attended by a thousand people, some of whose catcalls and disruptive clapping (but also wild cheers) can be heard on the recording of the event. And a few months later Cage and Tudor were invited to the new-music festival at Darmstadt, where they were taken more seriously than in 1954, and started to have an impact on European music. It was here that the three lectures grouped together as “Composition as Process” (“I. Changes,” “II. Indeterminacy,” and “III. Communication”) were delivered.

      Cage’s sunny personality and odd performances brought him publicity beyond the closed circuits of contemporary music. In January 1959 he appeared on an Italian quiz show Lascia o Raddoppio, on which he won five million lira by correctly answering extremely detailed questions about mushrooms; he also performed his pieces Sounds of Venice and Water Walk. In January 1960 he appeared on the popular American television show I’ve Got a Secret, hosted by Garry Moore, with fellow guest celebrity Zsa-Zsa Gabor. Again Cage reprised Water Walk, and Moore called him “the most controversial figure in the musical world today” (the episode is multiply archived on YouTube). In June 1960, the publisher C. F. Peters agreed to publish Cage’s musical works, a significant boost for his more serious reputation. At the same time, Cage left the New School because he had been invited by composer Richard Winslow to teach for a year at the Center for Advanced Study at Wesleyan University.

      Winslow also contacted Wesleyan University Press about the possibility of publishing a book of Cage’s writings—and in October 1961, Silence hit the bookstores. More than anything else to that point, it made Cage famous. “I’ve had more response from the book,” he said, “than I’ve ever had from the publication of a record, the publication of music, the giving of a concert, the giving of a lecture or anything.” Seven thousand copies sold by 1968; today, the number exceeds half a million, including numerous foreign language editions.⁷ Thousands of lives were changed as a result of the book’s publication. To cite one of the most celebrated examples, composer John Adams received Silence as a present from his mother in 1969, and his enthusiasm remains vivid in his memoir from four decades later: “what he represented stood in sharp contrast to the depressing tone of the postwar European avant-garde and the pseudoscience of serialism. I read Silence and A Year from Monday, and I kept going back to them almost as if they were sacred texts. The personal style of Cage’s prose was refreshing, inviting, and inclusive.”⁸

      Not only is there little mention in Silence of 4′33′′, but also there are few mentions of the prepared piano, and not much about percussion. There is, instead, plenty of talk about electronics, serialism (the expansion of the twelve-tone idea to all aspects of music), and a younger generation of artists, including Feldman, Wolff, Rauschenberg (whom Cage met in New York City in 1951), and Jasper Johns. Silence offered Cage the enviable opportunity, at age forty-nine, to reinvent himself for a younger generation—to a point that the previous Cage of quiet, lyrical prepared-piano music almost disappeared from his popular image. And the book’s timing was serendipitous: a new generation was poised to swing away from its parents in open revolt, embracing everything that had hitherto been banished. In subsequent books, Cage became less focused on music, and presented himself along with Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, Norman O. Brown, and others as a group of thinkers engineering a new kind of society. Silence would remain his supreme statement on music.

      Let us turn to the book. The twenty-three articles, essays, and lectures in Silence range in date from 1937 to 1961. Cage’s next book after Silence, A Year from Monday (1967), opens by noting David Tudor’s disappointment that his 1952 “Juilliard Lecture” wasn’t included in Silence, so he includes it there, but the material in that lecture overlaps so much with the “Nothing” and “Something” lectures that to group them would have seemed repetitious. No other items in A Year from Monday are pre-1961. In short, Silence seems to contain everything that Cage felt was most important in his writing up to that point. Intriguingly, a late 1959 memo to Wesleyan University Press in which Cage listed the book’s potential contents is almost identical to the book’s actual contents, except that instead of the essays on dance there was originally to be “A Few Ideas about Music and Films.”⁹

      Given the impact Silence had not only in music but in the other arts, it is odd to note how musically technical some of the articles are, notably the first two Darmstadt lectures and the detailed descriptions of how he composed Music of Changes, Imaginary Landscape No. 4, and Music for Piano. These are balanced, though, by the four brief statements on dance and the extensive article on Rauschenberg, which has been ubiquitously quoted