Music is ubiquitous in our lives. From the playlists we make for every imaginable activity to the constant drone of mundane pop at restaurants and shopping malls, music is distilled into the very air we breathe. But how many of us sit down to question what music really is? It’s filled our lives to the point that we’ve murdered silence. If quiet is understood to be the opposite of music, it’s also important to define it as we investigate our relationship to its antithesis. How much thought do we give to silence?
I write these words as I listen to John Cage’s revolutionary composition, 4’33”, which is meant to be four minutes and thirty three seconds of literally nothing. It premiered at the Maverick Concert Hall in New York in the summer of 1952, where the audience considered it to be “either a joke or an affront.” The contemporary critical reaction was similar, with one critic describing it as being characterised by “melancholy of impotence,” whereas another dismissed it as a “preposterous stunt.” While musicologists and critics understand its significance now, most of us with a casual interest in classical music treat the piece as a curiosity at best. A common joke in the classical music fandom online is to simply reply with “ ” when asked for their views on the piece. On a surface level, it may seem like Cage is just being lazy, or perhaps just provocative for its own sake. Moving from something like Mozart to literal silence does seem like a devolution in the history of Western music.
Cage, however, thinks that we’re all missing the point. By thinking of the blank notation sheet as an absence of music, we’re focusing on the wrong thing. He agrees with me that music is ubiquitous, but he extends the definition of what music is. He holds that “there’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds.” As I ‘listen’ to 4’33”, I hear the wind howling outside, the drone of my laptop fan and heater, as well as the intermezzo of my fingers clacking across the keyboard.
It’s fun to laugh at the concept of a musical piece that’s just the total lack of music. But this is a conceptual failure, and I think our laughter just masks the discomfort we have with the very concept of silence. Traditional opera music, a la Wagner, takes us out of our boring little lives into fantastical and rich worlds. Just hearing our coughs, our breathing and sighs, the debris of our continued physical existence, grounds us back into the mundane. The brilliance of 4’33” has nothing to do with silence, but rather with noise. Noise is elevated to music in a move the aesthetician Paul Hegarty described as “music itself [being] sacrificed, sacrificed to the musicality of the world.”
Revisiting the two questions I asked at the beginning, I’ll try to answer them in the way I think 4’33” invites us to do. Firstly, what is music? Well, if 4’33” is in fact music, then that ruins any formalist definition of it, that it’s about some specific arrangement of notes or aesthetically pleasing sound. I argue that music is about the ritual, about the framing of the activity. That’s why 4’33” works; the fact that it’s called 4’33”, and that you’re intentionally listening to it, imbues the noises with symbolic meaning. With that, they become music. And what about silence? Well, it doesn’t exist. The brilliance of 4’33” is that, by embracing silence, it simultaneously negates it. And, in the process, it reifies noise. I think, in a way, it reminds us that our lives are musical in their own right.