This Sentence No Verb Rich Cochrane's Blog

A few words may be in order in light of Cage Against The Machine, the campaign to sell enough copies of a John Cage’s notorious “silent” piece 4’33″ to make it the UK Christmas Number One single. I’m not going to say anything very big or clever here, and certainly nothing new, but it might be useful for those who find the whole thing a bit puzzling.

Cage’s piece is a part of the classical tradition and has all of the trappings you’d expect. In fact it’s kind of emphatically part of that tradition; it goes out of its way to “fit in”. Edition Peters publish it, and on the outside it looks just like any of their other scores. It’s typically performed as part of a classical recital in which it will sit alongside other, probably more conventional music. It appears in the programme alongside those pieces, with a composer and a title; it doesn’t draw attention to itself as a “stunt” but sneaks up on you, dressed up as something you’re going to understand. At least, it does if you haven’t heard of the piece before which now, unfortunately, everyone has.

People are often surprised and amused to discover that the piece is divided into three movements, all with explicit timings and all marked tacet (meaning the performer is not to play). In performance the piece usually follows roughly the approach David Tudor took in his premiere: the performer walks onstage, prepares to play and then remains still for the entire period, marking the breaks in the movements by some silent physical gesture (Tudor briefly closed re-opened the piano lid). The three-movement form is another reference to the classical tradition into which 4’33″ seeks to insert itself, like a cuckoo in the nest. Probably, too, it’s designed to help people to stay attentive.

But what’s this piece of music — if we can call it music — up to? To understand that, we need to understand two very simple things about Cage’s attitude to sound.

The first is the purely empirical statement that there is no such thing as silence. Even in an anechoic chamber, Cage observed, we still hear the sounds of our blood circulation and nervous system (Cage was able to try one of these out at Harvard). Our world is full of sound, but we’ve developed the habit of blotting it out in order to focus on specific things: a conversation, the TV or, indeed, the music at a concert. It was interesting to Cage that an audience could sit and listen to a pianist in a concert hall and completely filter out all the environmental sounds that were going on alongside it. This is, of course, often a very useful skill indeed, but it calls into question the ideas that some people have about a concert music being a pure sonic experience, divorced entirely from the mundane material world.

The second is follows on from this. Cage was beginning to question the idea that there is a sharp categorical distinction between music and other kinds of sound. In post-war New York all of the arts seemed to be pushing their traditional boundaries back to the point where they no longer seemed relevant, giving rise to exactly this kind of question. If I’m waiting for a bus and I start to listen to the traffic as if it were music, Cage reasoned, why isn’t it music? More tellingly, what do we need this distinction for? Why not throw it away?

So what 4’33″ provides is a very classical performance in which the sounds you hear are exactly the sounds you would not hear in a performance of any other piece, not because those sounds weren’t there but because you wouldn’t be attending to them. Instead of listening to the piano and filtering everything else out, we get to listen to all that unwanted stuff; or stuff we thought we didn’t want, anyway. Cage really hopes we’ll enjoy what we hear, but if we don’t he knows everything will be fine, because we’ll start to make our own sound: first by shuffling chairs and coughing, then by nervous laughter, and finally by talking, the making of outraged noises, storming out and so on. It’s all indifferent to Cage, the Buddha of the avant garde, as long as you’re enjoying yourself.

Sadly, everyone now knows the secret about 4’33″ and it’s no longer quite the same. Modern performances are often meditative and respectful, with the audience striving to stay quiet throughout, or punctuated by showoffs who know the drill making loud noises. It might be that the piece doesn’t need to be performed any more, or only rarely. Still, it must still ambush some people and take them completely off-guard, and while most such people will merely be annoyed some might find in the experience the sorts of things that Cage hoped they would.

Recordings of the piece have always seemed to me to be of little use; you can, if you wish, listen to your surroundings for as long as you like whenever you like. Having a CD with a little ambient rustling on it doesn’t help us focus on our immediate surroundings in the way Cage intended; in fact, the sounds on the CD are distracting, and begin to function in the same way as the “music” that Cage’s piece removes; 4’33″ may be the only piece of music that can’t really be recorded.

Cage is undoubtedly a modernist — and a Romantic one at that — whereas CATM is clearly a postmodernism phenomenon. Encrusted with minor celebrities and obsessed with media coverage, it’s all about shifting units, creating buzz, raising profiles, the consumer democracy and the Big Society. As such I’m afraid I find it vulgar and unappealing, the kind of recuperation of the avant garde into the mainstream that seems to strip it of everything that makes it interesting and transforms the composer’s name into an opaque brand, to be sported by would-be hipsters and pseudo-intellectuals.

Give me the real stuff any day: now it’s more likely to be composers like Helmut Lachenmann, Salvatore Sciarrino or Richard Barrett who’ll seriously challenge your ideas about what music can be, or of course musicians working outside the classical tradition entirely. Buy one of their records for someone you like this Christmas and skip CATM and the X Factor winners alike.