i: 4'33"...
On coming to terms with John Cage after dismissing him entirely
The following is the Prelude (Prologue) to my unfinished musical memoir, "Blues, Preludes, & Feuds." I originally published the work in 2016 as a iOS app. No longer available in that format, it was (and is) a marriage of "creative" memoir and solo piano music. Over time, I'm going to publish the entire thing here on substack. Why? Read on...
“I have nothing to say and I’m saying it” — John Cage
Even before I heard his music, I had decided not to like John Cage. Once I heard it, I liked him less. Only when there was no music to be heard did I begin to appreciate his peculiar genius.
This isn’t a story about John Cage. This is the story of a life unfolding in the context of music. Or maybe it’s about how music constructs a life. But Cage is the right place to start because he always reminds me that the beginning and end of all music is silence. Everything in between is—in another example of Cagean philosophy—up for grabs.
Cage—the 20th-century American experimental composer, writer, provocateur—was in the air in the mid-to-late 1970s, at least among my parents’ modern-art-loving friends. They would mention his 4'33" in conjunction with Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, or Andy Warhol’s soup cans. I’m pretty sure I heard one of his installation pieces at the old Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the hub of this modern-art-loving community. If I did, I probably dismissed it as experimental nonsense.
I was a budding teenage jazz musician at the time with a streak of jazzer self-righteousness. So I tended to view all these artists as weird, old, white folks who wasted their creative energies experimenting with unmusical—or inartistic—concepts because they couldn’t paint or play the blues.
And then there were Cage’s statements about jazz: “I have little need for jazz, I can get along perfectly well without any jazz at all.” That made me angry. For an American musician to dismiss out of hand an entire genre—one that produced the likes of Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis—was the height of arrogance. Particularly from a man who admitted he didn’t understand harmony. And yet . . .
Around that time, I was hosting weekly jam sessions in our basement, consisting of various older (20s to early 30s) jazz cats and me on a Fender Rhodes electric piano. One of the regulars—a rather smug trumpet player in his late 20s—had a habit of lecturing me on what I should be listening to.
“Yeah, Peter, you really need to check out Cecil Taylor, man!” Or Frank Zappa or whoever. He’d shout from across the room in a tone that said, “Of course, you’ll never be in their class.” Still, while I didn’t like him, I’d usually follow his advice because he, unlike me, was an adult musician who had lived. I figured he must know something.
He also had the virtue of being very specific about what I needed to check out. So when he told me, in so many words, that there was no possibility of my being hip if I didn’t check out Cage, he offered a primer: First, check out the pieces for prepared piano, then read Cage’s book, Silences.
And then after I did those things—and only after—I might just be ready to delve into I Ching, the ancient Chinese divination manual that was the basis of Cage’s musical thinking on chance and indeterminacy.
At the library, I checked out Silences and a recording of the piano pieces. I read part of I Ching standing in an aisle at a Rizzoli bookstore. The piano pieces, with their clangorous percussive sounds, were interesting in the sense that I didn’t really like them, but couldn’t forget them either. I don’t remember my reaction to Silences, which I didn’t finish, or to I Ching, which I barely skimmed. Neither made a serious impression. But I kept thinking about both. So I guess they did, even if the thinking was largely derisive.
Into my early 20s, I saw Cage as something of a joke. A musical charlatan who relied on an array of oddball concepts to cover up for a lack of artistic depth and talent. And, of course, he couldn’t play the blues. None of the classical guys could. His music, like a lot of experimental stuff—squeak-and-fart music as one bluesman friend of mine called it—lacked any cohesion or sense of development. It felt like it went nowhere and took its time getting there.
I would joke to my friends that Cage was really a decomposer. He callously deconstructed what musicians passionately had spent centuries constructing, but without reassembling the broken parts back into something worthy and whole. What good were the principles of chance and indeterminacy, worthy and true as they might be, if the end result was sonic chaos?
And for me, Cage’s work 4'33"—four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence—was the apotheosis (or nadir) of this meaninglessness. I did my best to forget about him.
Six years later, Cage reappeared by chance—not coincidentally. I was living in Madison, Wisconsin, biding my time between miserable stints at two of America’s top music conservatories. I had moved to Madison to get out of Chicago. I was chasing after my future wife, which worked in the end, but not so much in the beginning.
I rented a ground-floor apartment across the street from the Badgers football stadium and spent hours practicing Berg’s Piano Sonata and Beethoven’s Waldstein on an upright piano the previous owner had painted bright orange. The piano was loud in volume too—all the better to mask the punk rock blasting from the stereo upstairs. But I still had to turn the fan on high to compete with that.
When I got tired of trying to out-duel the neighbors with solo piano—I should have been a drummer—I’d engage them in rounds of stereo wars, something I did in just about every apartment I ever lived in. Me cranking Stravinsky’s Petrushka, Coltrane’s Crescent, Beethoven’s 7th, Stevie Wonder’s Music of My Mind. The neighbors countering with Naked Raygun, the B-52s, the Ramones. In the end, they’d always win because their music was meant to be played loud. So I’d move on to the next apartment, ready to do battle again.
My stint back at Indiana University as a jazz major convinced me that I was meant to be a composer. So while in Madison, I studied composition with a local composer who taught me nothing. I also studied with a superb classical pianist—a funny and quirky old queen, who kept his young lover in the studio during lessons, terming him the assistant. The assistant did help demonstrate actual piano techniques during the lessons. My teacher insisted I stop playing the Beethoven and Berg, and focus on Bach, Mozart, and Schoenberg. I kept playing the Beethoven and Berg on the side.
As if to prove his quirkiness, he informed me during one lesson that he was putting on an all-Cage concert at a local church that summer. He commanded that I attend, jokingly threatening to cancel my lessons if I didn’t come. He insisted I really needed to hear Cage live. That sounded like my idea of hell, but out of respect, I went.
Well, of course, I loved it.
I don’t remember most of the program, but it included some of the pieces for prepared piano and at least one number with multiple competing radios—reminding me of my battle with the upstairs neighbors.
I enjoyed all of it, but the piece I remember best is his most famous, and perhaps, most necessary: 4'33". It’s not actually called 4'33" of Silence, as I had always thought. And it’s not really silence that you’re meant to experience in the course of the performance. Rather, it’s all the sounds you hear around you when the performers don’t play.
4'33" is scored for any instrument or combination of instruments—a nice touch. There’s actually published sheet music in front of the performer(s), which needs to be there to complete the effect, even if it really isn’t an effect.
As my teacher sat down at the piano, he held the score, an elegant mint-green CF Peters imprint with Cage’s name in big bold letters—right where you’d normally see Bach or Mozart—and the title below. He placed the score on the music stand and slowly opened it to reveal a mostly blank page. All that was there were instructions for the performer(s) not to play for the entire duration of the three-movement piece: 4'33".
This was a solo piano nonperformance. I believe he turned the page at the appropriate time for each movement. He used a stopwatch. All of his motions were slow and elegant. If you’re not going to play, do it with style.
It’s funny as a kind of theater, but there is a deeper point: Where else in a public forum are you compelled to simply be quiet and listen for that long—I mean besides in a Zen monastery? At most, you get a 10- or 15-second moment of silence to acknowledge the death of a sports figure at a game. Four and a half minutes of listening to nothing, which is not really nothing, is radical in our culture.
Cage wanted us to experience everything as music. The coughs, the cars driving by, the shuffling of feet, and most of all, the uncomfortable squirming in the seats. He was saying—like the spatial vacuum where the apparent nothingness contains an infinite roiling mass of potential particles—there is infinite potential music within the silences in our lives. As in the void, the very randomness of the chance interactions held within it the potential to create something entirely new. Cage was looking for a kind of radical acceptance of all that potential. Of course, it’s very much a Zen idea . . . Cage was a practicing Zen Buddhist.
Even after my epiphany in the Madison church, I stand by my initial impression of Cage as a decomposer. But he was a decomposer in the positive sense. Somebody needed to tear down the walls of a Western art music tradition, which had become tendentious, pretentious, non-spontaneous, and just plain dull. He was the playful force in modern music, somehow both gentle and provocative. His music and ideas directly or indirectly influenced everyone from Radiohead to John Coltrane and the entire Minimalist movement.
He influenced me too, but this isn’t that story. This isn’t the story of John Cage deconstructing. It’s the story of my own struggle to rebuild—not the old structures, but new structures out of the remnants of the shattered traditions I inherited. And it is the story of how I was constructed in the process.
Go to the next chapter, …of Silence.
Hey Peter. Great post! In the book “How to do Nothing” by visual artist Jenny Odell (which I once mentioned to you) she describes walking home after a performance of 4’33”. She said she was hyper-aware of every sound around her - things she never would have otherwise noticed. She said the effect last several days. So awesome. Cheers
Awesome!