Silence. John Cage

so, a twinge of guilt: “ ‘Why, if everything is possible, do we concern ourselves with history (in other words, with a sense of what is necessary to be done at a particular time)?’ And I would answer, ‘In order to thicken the plot’ ” (p. 68). But to thicken the plot was Sri Ramakrishna’s explanation for why there is evil in the world—an admission that this historicism may not be so self-evident after all.

      A peculiarly related complaint is that Cage felt that music should not express the personality of its composer. There are charges one could bring against Edgard Varèse, but the one Cage brings—that his telegraphic repeated notes are a personal signature and therefore draw attention to Varèse rather than to the sounds—seems an odd one, unless we can depart with him from the conventional European musical viewpoint. Cage speaks in his article on Varèse of the advantageous use of discontinuity in order to “divorc[e] sounds from the burden of psychological intentions” (p. 83). This Zen-inspired insistence that art should be freed from psychological intent is one that most people, I think, would find counterintuitive, though it did eventually have a widespread influence on younger artists. In “Where Are We Going?” Cage praises the new experimental music expressly for its indifference to emotion: “Another thing we’re doing is leaving the things that are in us in us. We are leaving our emotions where they are in each one of us. One of us is not trying to put his emotion into someone else. That way you ‘rouse rabbles’; it seems on the surface humane, but it animalizes, and we’re not doing it” (p. 250).

      To quote from the Juilliard Lecture, for a moment, words that would have been in place in Silence: “the most that can be accomplished by the musical expression of feeling is to show how emotional the composer was who had it. If anyone wants to get a feeling of how emotional a composer proved himself to be, he has to confuse himself to the same final extent that the composer did and imagine that sounds are not sounds at all but are Beethoven.”¹²

      Cage, instead, emphasizes the listener’s responsibility for the musical experience, the extent to which the way one listens determines what is heard. We filter what we hear, even at concerts where listening is our chief focus, and our filtering habits are culturally conditioned: “It becomes evident that music itself is an ideal situation, not a real one. The mind may be used either to ignore ambient sounds, pitches other than the eighty-eight, durations which are not counted, timbres which are unmusical or distasteful, and in general to control and understand an available experience. Or the mind may give up its desire to improve on creation and function as a faithful receiver of experience” (pp. 31–32).

      In “The Future of Music: Credo” Cage points out that when we ignore noise, it disturbs us, while “when we listen to it, we find it fascinating” (p. 3). The listening mode he describes is one associated with Zen meditation; it has been said that if a faucet is dripping nearby during such meditation, each drip will be registered in the mind with the same intensity as every other. Cage imagines a listener listening without expectations and without daydreaming, someone who, in the words of Huang-Po’s Doctrine of Transmission of Mind, lets go of his or her own thoughts “as if they were the cold ashes of a long dead fire.” This ideal listener seems sometimes to be equivalent to the “Ground” of Meister Eckhart, the divine spark, the intersection between the individual and the divine,¹³ that he keeps bringing up in the “Indeterminacy” lecture: a consciousness unclouded by categories, intellectual concepts, or desires. Cage urges for the heroic listener, and he uses that word in the sense of the nine Indian permanent emotions, or rasas, that he would have read about in Coomaraswamy (erotic, heroic, odious, furious, mirthful, terrible, pathetic, wondrous, and tranquil), in which context heroic connotes a willingness to accept whatever must be.

      But this fearlessness only follows if, at the parting of the ways, where it is realized that sounds occur whether intended or not, one turns in the direction of those he does not intend. This turning is psychological and seems at first to be a giving up of everything that belongs to humanity—for a musician, the giving up of music. This psychological turning leads to the world of nature, where, gradually or suddenly, one sees that humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world together; that nothing was lost when everything was given away. In fact, everything is gained. (p. 8)

      And, parenthetically, let us compare this with what Heidegger says about how life changes once we’ve confronted the fact of nothingness unflinchingly: “Only because nothing is revealed in the very basis of our Dasein [being in the world] is it possible for the utter strangeness of what-is to dawn on us. Only when the strangeness of what-is forces itself upon us does it awaken and invite our wonder.”¹⁴

      A consequent sticking point in Cage’s writings is the suggestion that all sounds are equal, that we should not filter or make distinctions, that, in the words of Hamlet (repetitiously quoted by one of Cage’s favorite Zen authors, R. H. Blyth), “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” We think of the story about the Roshi’s reaction to a “wretched performance of an excerpt from a third-rate Italian opera”: the young Cage was embarrassed, but the expression on the Roshi’s face was “absolutely beatific” (p. 6). Cage, by implication, learned how to be that Roshi. It gave him a rather dubious reputation as the “anything goes” composer, someone for whom all sounds—and by extension all pieces of music, and all performances—were equally acceptable. Cage spent his subsequent life clarifying, often using the formulation he uses in “45′ for a Speaker”: “Anything does go—but only when nothing is taken as the basis” (p. 160).

      This heroic listener, devoid of preconceptions or ideas, may seem an unrealizable ideal, but as Cage notes, music itself sometimes brings us to that state: “No one can have an idea once he really starts listening” (p. 191). There is a parallel here with my favorite sentence in the book, from the end of “Lecture on Nothing”: “All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear that I know nothing” (p. 126). As a composer myself, I have always found this powerfully resonant. It evokes the state of right-brain absorption that can take place during composing, in which the passage of time ceases to be noticed, and logical concepts fall away, in which the will is moving spontaneously and without charts or crutches. Perhaps in such moments the composer (or at least his or her ego) truly accepts rather than makes. Is this escape from left-brain verbal analysis the nothing that lies beyond logic? Again, “composing in such a way that the process of composing is boring induces ideas. They fly into one’s head like birds” (p. 12). Is getting the chattering left brain out of the way analogous to (or the same as) getting the ego out of the way? Cage wrote at a time when right-brain/left-brain terminology had not yet entered cultural consciousness, but today much popular Zen meditation writing centers on right-brain activity. Cage seems to suggest that right-brain attention to sound itself can bring us into the Zen consciousness he valorizes.

      What is this “nothing” that must be taken as the basis, then? The Heideggerian nothing, the Eckhartian Ground, the heroism that accepts whatever comes, a right-brain absorption in sonic experience? Cage calls for a vast expansion in music’s available materials and structures, and, as a counterpart, also a kind of radical humility on the part of the composer—along with, symmetrically, a radical openness on the part of the listener. He’s interested in how music that “takes nothing as the basis” changes how, and what, we hear. As he writes in “Composition as Process”:

      What happens to a piece of music when it is purposelessly made? What happens, for instance, to silence? That is, how does the mind’s perception of it change? Formerly, silence was the time lapse between sounds, useful towards a variety of ends, among them that of tasteful arrangement … Where none of these or other goals are present, silence becomes something else—not silence at all, but sounds, the ambient sounds … Where these ears are in connection with a mind that has nothing to do, that mind is free to enter into the act of listening, hearing each sound just as it is, not as a phenomenon more or less approximating a preconception. (pp. 22–23)

      Does this imply a new kind of music that has little in common with the old? If so, what happens to the old? To what extent can the listening habits of a society be deliberately or systematically revolutionized? Is a relationship to Zen required? Or do we simply need to relearn to hear music with the left brain out of