Silence. John Cage

a Speaker,” and “Where Are We Going? and What Are We Doing?” All have in common their unconventional layout on the page denoting that they are performative lectures, to be read aloud and heard, with silences interspersed, rather than read on the page. The peculiarity makes these articles more inconvenient to read, but I have wondered if that in itself doesn’t actually increase their effectiveness. Gaps in mid-sentence lead one to pause and take the words in more than one possible sense. Skimming is inherently discouraged. The technique makes one regard each word independently, much as Cage’s music invites attention to each separate sound. Would these words have so sunk into our souls had they been printed in paragraph format for us to breeze through? And the occasional live performance—I once had four students read “Where Are We Going?” in class, carefully timed—is a pleasure.

      Were the book not centered upon music, “Nothing” might have been as suitable a title as “Silence.” Cage opens, “Nothing is accomplished by writing a piece of music.” Time has done little to allay the shock of these words. At best one could utter them cynically, at worst nihilistically. Let us fuse them, however, with what may be the book’s most famous sentence, from “Lecture on Nothing” (and let us give the complete citation for once): “I have nothing to say and I am saying it, and that is poetry as I need it” (p. 109). Now recast the original passive sentence actively: “I have nothing to accomplish, and I have accomplished it—by writing a piece of music.” Just as provocative is a statement in the “Lecture on Something”: “Every something is an echo of nothing” (p. 131).

      What is this nothing that poetry says and that every something echoes? The question is the same as that raised by Heidegger’s elaborate disquisition on nothing in What Is Metaphysics? (1929): whether “nothing” can be a noun rather than simply a logical negation. Taking nothing as what is left when one excludes the entirety of the “what-is,” Heidegger posits it as something one becomes aware of and experiences in the feeling of dread. Working himself into a frenzy of saying what lies beyond words, he arrives at a phrase that the logical positivist philosopher Rudolf Carnap would later deride: “the Nothing nothings” (Das Nichts nichtet).

      But as Cage’s contemporary Paul Wienpahl (1916–80), a Western philosopher whose training in Zen Buddhism went somewhat further than Cage’s, has shown in a commentary on Heidegger, a statement or question that is logically meaningless can still have a use. Wienpahl’s example is the Zen koan, the seemingly nonsensical question and answer the study or contemplation of which can bring about enlightenment or direct perception of reality. Since, in common-language philosophy based on Wittgenstein, we discover a word’s meaning in its use, a koan, being useful, can therefore mean something even if that meaning lies outside the realm of logic. “The positivist,” Wienpahl writes, “arrived at meaninglessness on the intellectual level—and shied away from it. The Buddhist heads into it, takes the next step, and gets to it on the physical or non-verbal level. The positivist got to the notion of the meaningless. The Buddhist gets to the thing.”¹⁰

      Cage wants to get to the thing, which lies outside the realm of logic. To parse his understanding of nothing, let’s examine what he’s talking about in his lecture on “something.” He starts with a platitude that most of us could hear without raising an eyebrow: “Art should come from within; then it is profound.” From here he opens an attack on the psychology instilled in composers by the cultural expectation of making their music profound (I will forego the unconventional typography):

      When a composer feels a responsibility to make, rather than accept, he eliminates from the area of possibility all those events that do not suggest the at that point in time vogue of profundity. For he takes himself seriously, wishes to be considered great, and he thereby diminishes his love and increases his fear and concern about what people will think. There are many serious problems confronting such an individual. He must do it better, more impressively, more beautifully, etc., than anybody else. And what, precisely, does this, this beautiful profound object, this masterpiece, have to do with Life? It has this to do with Life: that it is separate from it. (p. 130)

      This is excellent advice for a young (or not-so-young) composer, or artist in any medium, and one need not study at the feet of Daisetz Suzuki to be bowled over by it. To start out writing a piece conscious of the internalized pressure to be “profound”: this is a recipe for tiresomeness. The platitude Cage begins with is the innocuous-looking surface of a musical condition that, by the 1950s, had reached a point of neurosis. The structure of classical music society encourages an infectious snobbism where-by people who listen to “deep” classical music are more cultured, better, than other people. The contemporary composer is thus placed in a bind that Beethoven himself never faced (though perhaps Brahms, who heard Beethoven’s footsteps behind him, did). The eighteenth-century composer was free to write music based on perceived needs and values in his immediate environment, and was not competing with the past. The music-school-educated, twentieth-century composer inherited a mandate to build upon, and exceed in some way, the music of his predecessors.

      By the 1950s, the one-upmanship of composing had reached a fever pitch. In postwar European music, the intricacy of the one-stave-per-instrument orchestration, the complexity of the rhythms, the detail of the notated dynamics and phrasing, even the size of the scores had undergone a rapid crescendo into intimidating opacity and excess. Since we have hammered into us that profound music is often not understood at first, composers learned that music that was not understood would be assumed profound. To this day, the Darmstadt era of the 1950s and ’60s represents a high-water mark in the professional prestige of the composer, especially in Europe, that many composers look back to with nostalgia. Those composers were accomplishing something, and the world took notice.

      Cage, with his quiet sounds that were like loneliness, had dropped out of the musical rat race even before his absorption in Zen. In Silence he declares independence from Europe. He tells the Dutch musician, “It must be very difficult for you in Europe to write music, for you are so close to the centers of tradition” (p. 73). He quotes the painter Paul Klee: “I want to be as though new-born, knowing nothing, absolutely nothing, about Europe” (p. 65). In 1951 he began using the I Ching to determine the disposition of musical materials, thus removing himself from the results and severing any connection between his personal tastes and his music. And in 1952 he presented nothing most vividly in the form of 4′33′′. No aspect of Cage’s music, I suspect, offended people more than what was perceived as a deliberate abnegation of the ambitions a composer was assumed to nurture. But for those similarly disillusioned, his turning away from this rampant one-upmanship, his willingness to make music-making fun and risky and humble again, is surely a primary cause of Silence’s popularity.

      In this context, let’s turn next to a more polemical essay, “History of Experimental Music in the United States” (1959). Experimental music is a term greatly propagated by Cage. Many composers have objected to it (most vociferously, Robert Ashley);¹¹ Cage talks, at the beginning of his “Experimental Music” article, of having had doubts himself. Cage, though, posits a strict definition: music based on actions “the outcome of which is not foreseen” (p. 69). Since Cage, the term has worked its way through musical society in a vaguer sense, denoting music that does not rely on the conventions of the European classical repertoire, as synonymous with what used to be called “new music,” or “Downtown music.” Michael Nyman wrote a book, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (1974), championing a music open to accidents, surprises, and unpredictable processes, and tracing that music’s history to Cage. Peter Garland writes of an American experimental tradition, broadened to include not only Cage but Partch, Lou Harrison, Pauline Oliveros, Henry Cowell, Morton Feldman, and others.

      Cage’s view in his history is more severe and at times ungenerous. Aspects of music by Varèse, Ives, Ruggles, Luening, Ussachevsky that were once innovative are “no longer necessary.” Cage’s teacher Cowell is barely given a pass because of the indeterminate order of the movements in his Mosaic Quartet. By implication, experimental music is superior or preferable to nonexperimental music, or at least more timely. It turns out that the only composers whose music Cage approves as truly experimental—that is, necessary—are his friends Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, and Morton Feldman. To give this argument an air of objectivity