John Cage’s radical ‘4’33”’ a lockdown soundtrack?
• The avant garde composer’s 1952 work comes to mind during the current quietness we are listening to
There are many different kinds of silence. There is the silence of a concert audience just as the conductor’s baton is about to fall. There is the silence that has descended on our cities under lockdown — not total silence, but a hush, as the background noises of cars, trucks and air traffic have been largely removed. And there is the silence of 4’33”.
In the 1940s, the avantgarde composer John Cage became fascinated by silence, and its visual counterpart, white space, as well as exploring Zen Buddhism.
Cage also experienced an anechoic chamber, a soundproof space where the only sound is that of blood rushing through the “listener’s” head. And he had a friendship with artist Marcel Duchamp, whose 1917 urinal had shown that anything could be art. Likewise, Cage decided that anything could be music: a food mixer, the quacking of a rubber duck.
He developed an affinity for the art of Robert Rauschenberg, whose White Paintings he installed as backdrops for performances of his music in the 1950s. These paintings sparked a realisation in Cage that art could become a backdrop, a kind of blank canvas, against which we could experience the world around us.
All of which led Cage to create 4’33”, a work of silence that can be performed by any number of players. His piece is divided into three movements, which, at the premiere in 1952 at an outdoor music hall in Woodstock, New York, were signified by the pianist David Tudor closing and opening the lid of his keyboard.
Some in the audience walked out, and it was reported that at a Q&A after the performance, an audience member yelled: “Good people of Woodstock, let’s run these people out of town!”
What Cage’s piece is saying, of course, is that there is no such thing as silence. At each performance, there will be ambient sounds, coughing from the audience, rustling, breathing. And there will be the “sounds” of thoughts in each audience member’s head.
There have been several recordings of 4’33”. Frank Zappa did a version for the 1993 John Cage tribute album A Chance Operation; it is the sound of a studio with a person present. The Amadinda Percussion Group from Hungary, which has a long association with Cage’s music, recorded it twice, in 1989 and in 2014; the second recording is an outdoor version, with insects and the ambient sound of nature.
In 2010 a group of rock and pop musicians that included Billy Bragg, Imogen Heap and Orbital recorded a version that they hoped would become a UK Christmas number one (their inspiration was an earlier, successful attempt to get Rage Against the Machine’s protest song Killing In The Name to the Christmas top spot). Cage Against the Machine is dominated by the hum of amplifiers; a video of the recording in London reveals some irksome rock’n’roll “look at me” antics from the musos in the packed studio. It reached number 21 in the charts.
In 2002, the English songwriter, producer and composer Mike Batt (who wrote Bright Eyes) assembled a classical crossover band, The Planets, whose album Classical Graffiti included a 4’33” tribute. A One Minute Silence was credited to “Batt/Cage”. This was Batt’s little joke, as the “Cage” was his own pseudonym, Clint Cage. But the inclusion of “Cage” alerted the late composer’s estate and soon a lawsuit for copyright infringement was on its way.
“You can’t copyright silence,” Batt told the Daily Telegraph in 2002. “There’s too much of it about.” But it seemed that they could. Batt settled out of court for a rumoured six-figure sum.
In 2019 the indie label Mute Records paid tribute to the work with a triple album of 58 versions. Stumm433 is available as a five-CD box set, or as a deluxe vinyl box set — each signed by the label’s founder Daniel Miller, and each including a set of candles “with the scent of silence”.
New Order’s version brings us the hum of what sounds like a piece of electronic equipment, as well as sounds of some kind of human activity. Wire’s has ambient noises from what sounds like a tunnel in a London Underground station. Former Wire member Bruce Gilbert’s has cars and vehicles, but these seem distorted to create a sense of menace. Richard Hawley’s has the sounds of the countryside — perhaps |recorded near his home town of Sheffield.
Some proceeds from sales go to the British Tinnitus Association, providing support to people who can never escape the noises inside their heads.
In the coming months and years, there will be countless silences as we remember and pay tribute to those who have lost their lives in the pandemic. Football fans will be familiar with these occasions: the intense focus of the minute’s silence, the meditative atmosphere, the sense of being part of something collective. And then, when it’s over, the cheers of relief. /©