It seems that our world has become a constant feed of information, noise, and entertainment. Our phones live not just in our pockets, but in front of our eyes. The influence of the Internet and its constant stream of information is accessible at any time from nearly corner of our world. Breaking news disrupts our days at hurried speed. And we are fed messages relentlessly from clients, colleagues, friends and advertisers on nearly every flat surface we come in contact with. Each of these distraction enters our mind with one goal: Gain control of our attention and resources.
As a result, we live distracted lives and, hence, our ability to focus, create, and accomplish suffers significantly. It is increasingly clear that these myriad of distractions will not go away on their own. Instead, the responsibility is ours to live attentive, intentional lives amid this growing world of distractive noise. To put it another way, I believe it is our formidable charge to seek out opportunities for silence such that we might truly hear.
This week’s Inspiration story is excerpted from an article entitled “The Sound of Silence” authored by Lucas Reilly published in the latest issue of the magazine mental_floss. I believe it to be an exceptional illustration of the seeming contradiction that silence is the pathway to hearing:
On August 29, 1952, at a rustic outdoor chamber music hall tucked on a wooded dirt road in Woodstock, New York, the piano virtuoso David Tudor prepared to perform the most jarring piece of music ever written. Or not written, depending how you look at it.
Tudor sat at the piano, propped up six pages of blank sheet music, and closed the keyboard lid. He then clicked a stopwatch and rested his hands on his lap. The audience waited for something to happen as a breeze stirred the nearby trees. After 30 seconds of stillness, Tudor opened the lid, paused, closed it again, and went back to doing nothing. He turned one of his blank pages. Raindrops began to patter. After two minutes and 23 seconds, Tudor again opened and closed the lid. At this point exasperated people in the crowd walked out. Their footsteps echoed down the aisles. After another minute and 40 seconds, Tudor opened the piano lid one last time, stood up, and bowed. What was left of the audience politely applauded.
It was nearly two decades before the famous summer of ’69 rock festival that would from that point forward come to identify Woodstock, but what had just transpired was arguably the wildest, most controversial musical event ever to rock Woodstock. The piece was called 4’33”—for the three silent movements totaling four minutes and 33 seconds—and it was composed by John Cage. It seemed like a joke. In fact, it would redefine music.
In his 60-year career, Cage composed nearly 300 pieces for everything imaginable, from conventional piano and orchestra to bathtubs and amplified cacti. Born in Los Angeles to a journalist and an inventor, Cage learned early how powerful new ideas could be. After dropping out of college, he jetted to Europe, where he fell in love with abstract art. At 19, he returned home and started giving lectures on modern art to housewives in his living room. One week, when Cage wanted to teach the ladies about the music of Arnold Schoenberg—the father of a dissonant music called serialism—he audaciously called one of the country’s best pianists, Richard Buhlig, and asked if he would play for his small group. Buhlig declined, but he did agree to give Cage composing lessons. It was the start of a storied career.
Cage, like many artists, took it as a given that the point of music was to share emotions. But, one of his students turned mentor, Gita Sarabhai, an Indian heiress, one day mentioned to Cage that, in India, music had a different purpose. “To sober and quiet the mind,” she espoused, “thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences.” Cage was taken aback. Gita hadn’t mentioned feelings at all. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed she had a point. Sounds don’t have emotions. They’re meaningless. Cage wondered whether Western music had it all wrong.
The idea that music should express feelings was relatively new. Before the Enlightenment, European music was functional—it didn’t gush from a brooding composer’s soul. Instead, it was a conduit for dance, song, or praise. Even in Mozart’s day, it was heavily improvised—the composer’s control was limited. But in the early 19th century, the Romantic movement—a celebration of ego and emotion—erupted, and suddenly, the artist’s feelings meant everything. Composers asserted more power over how their music was played, and improvisation practically vanished. By Cage’s time, classical composers—serialists especially—were micromanaging every detail.
Cage was convinced that this rift was a mistake. Music wasn’t about the composer. It was about the sounds. So he removed himself from his work. Just as Jackson Pollock embraced the uncertainty of splattered paint, Cage started to flip coins and let heads or tails dictate which notes or rhythms came next. His “chance music” gave performers more liberty to play whatever they liked.
In Cage’s compositional mind, the croak of a frog could be just as musical as the purr of a cello if one choses to hear it that way. This isn’t a new concept. Sitting around Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau described the same notion when he wrote: “The commonest and cheapest sounds, as the barking of the dog, produce the same effect on fresh and healthy ears as the rarest music does. It depends on your appetite for sound.”
In 1949, with the debut of Muzak, what Cage considered a cultural plague was now being piped into virtually every nook and cranny of American society. To Cage, this was just more proof that silence was going extinct and he despised it. With modernity, America’s soundscape had dramatically changed for the worst. Traffic drowned out birdsong. Construction clanged through the night. Before the phonograph, you often had to make music yourself. Now it was like wallpaper—just another part of your surroundings. This became the muse for Cage’s idea of composing 4’33”.
After its debut in Woodstock, not surprisingly, 4’33” was greeted as heresy. During a post-concert Q&A session, a peeved audience member yelled, “Good people of Woodstock, lets run these people out of town!” Two years later, popular reaction hadn’t changed. When the piece made its New York City debut, The New York Times called it “hollow, sham, pretentious Greenwich Village exhibitionism.” Even Cage’s mother thought it went too far. But more sympathetic listeners saw it as a perplexing thought experiment. Some musicians, such as John Lennon, Frank Zappa, and John Adams would later even hail it as genius.
The value people who appreciate it see in 4’33” might best be explained by bread crumbs. One day, Cage was at a restaurant with the abstract painter Willem de Kooning, arguing about art. At one point, De Kooning made a rectangle with his fingers and dropped them over the crumbs on the table. “If I put a frame around these bread crumbs, that isn’t art,” De Kooning piped. Cage shook his head. The frame, he argued, meant everything.
Dump a virtuoso violinist on the street corner, and nearly everyone will walk by without a second look. Put the same violinist in a concert hall and 1,500 people will hang on to every note. The concert hall is a frame—a palace for listening—and when you frame silence there, incidental sounds may froth to the foreground. The hum of the lighting. The ticking of your wristwatch. The mad ringing in your ear. If you stop and contemplate the world buzzing around you, you may realize how rich and interesting it can be.
4’33” is a gentle reminder to embrace your surroundings, to be present. If art seems severed from life—isolated in concert halls and art galleries—that’s a matter of your perception. But, as Kyle Gann writes in No Such Thing as Silence, if you pay the same attention to the hum of traffic or the rustling of the wind as you would your favorite album, you just might realize that the line dividing art and life, music and noise, doesn’t actually exist. If you treat every sound as you would music, you just might hear something unexpected, something beautiful. At its core, 4’33” isn’t about listening to nothing. It’s about listening to everything.
“I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.” ? Chaim Potok, The Chosen
Have an AWE-full Weekend!
William J. “Bill” Bacqué