Silence: Lectures and Writings

by John Cage, Kyle Gann (Contributor)

Special edition of the book that revolutionized our understanding of how we make and experience art

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Art, Philosophy, Essays, Poetry, Theory

303 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, philosopher, poet, music theorist, artist, printmaker, and amateur mycologist and mushroom collector. A pioneer of chance music, electronic music and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.

Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33″, the three movements of which are performed without a single note being played. The content of the composition is meant to be perceived as the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed, rather than merely as four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence, and the piece became one of the most controversial compositions of the 20th century. Another famous creation of Cage's is the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by placing various objects in the strings), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces, the best known of which is Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).

His teachers included Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1933–35), both known for their radical innovations in music and coincidentally their shared love of mushrooms, but Cage's major influences lay in various Eastern cultures. Through his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, Cage came to the idea of chance-controlled music, which he started composing in 1951. The I Ching, an ancient Chinese classic text on changing events, became Cage's standard composition tool for the rest of his life. In a 1957 lecture, Experimental Music, he described music as "a purposeless play" which is "an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living".

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls]

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

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[Stuart · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Schoenberg asked me whether I would devote my life to music, I said, "Of course." After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, "On order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony." I explained that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, "In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall."

One day while I was composing, the telephone rang. A lady's voice said "Is this John Cage, the percussion composer?" I said, "Yes". She said, "This is the J. Walter Thompson Company." I didn't know what that was, but she explained that their business was advertising. She said, "Hold on. One of our directors wants to speak to you." During a pause My mind went back to my composition. Then suddenly a man's voice said "Mr. Cage, are you willing to prostitute your art?" I said, "Yes." He said, "Well, bring us some samples Friday at two." I did. After hearing a few recordings, one of the directors said to me, "Wait a minute." Then seven directors formed what looked like a football huddle. From this one of them finally emerged, came over to me, and said, "You're too good for us. We're going to save you for Robinson Crusoe."

In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If it is still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers its not boring at all but very interesting.

Artists talk a lot about freedom. So, recalling the expression "free as a bird", Morton Feldman went to a park and spent some time watching our feathered friends. When he came back, he said, "You know? They're not free: they're fighting over bits of food."

[julieta · Rating 5 out of 5]

I kept running into John Cage, mentioned by many people, from the point of view of music, of poetry, of modernism, or contemporary art. He kept turning up, but I just never actually read any of his work, or even listened to what he has done. I haven't actually listened yet, but I really enjoyed this strange book, which I read most of, some parts I skipped, but I think that would be the point. I did not know of his being a follower of Zen Buddhism, and of his spiritual work, and how that is important for understanding his art. Everything about him kind of explains the way he thinks about music and art, and I just loved it. He is a statement, his life and art, and not in a pretentious way, which is what modernism sometimes comes off as, he's modern in the sense that he breaks all expectations, the way he works, his sometimes funny and sometimes absurd ideas, the way he expands forms and uses them to make a statement. I will keep reading more about him, and learning from this wonderful visionary genius.

[GloriaGloom · Rating 5 out of 5]

E' libro da leggersi con la meraviglia e l'ingenuità che si deve - per tacito patto - a tutti quei bizzarri visionari americani che sparsero nel tormentato orticello della musica novecentesca gioiose sementa che non implicavano alcun manuale teorico d'uso ma solo un mix di congenito pragmatismo ed esaperato individualismo di Waldeniana memoria.
Silenzio - finalmente ristampato in maniera eccelsa nella sua versione integrale dalla Shake, e verrebbe da chiedersi perché una piccola editrice di frequentazioni underground e non una più blasonata collana tipo pbe, ma la risposta è abbastanza ovvia- è uno zibaldone pensieri, scritti, concetti, aneddoti, conferenze, che richiedono letture oblique, aperture di pagina casuali, una predisposizione a lasciarsi contagiare da quella felice ebrezza che è intimamente connessa alla lettura (e all'ascolto) del verbo del signor Cage. E' un piacere anche visivo, a tratti l'occhio sovrasta il pensiero in alcune pagine che sembrano uscire da outtakes di scrittori tipografi alla Cummings. E' lettura che pretende preferibilmene luoghi ruomorosi per consumarsi, vagoni di metro o altri verminai urbani assortiti dove far risuonare nella testa alcuni passaggi, come le quattro conferenze in contemporanea, insieme al ronzio sempiterno del mondo che in fondo è stato il terreno perpetuo di analisi delle parole e della musica di John Cage.
Volendo indossare la maschera di chi la sa lunga se ne troverebbero a iosa di falle, contraddizioni, banalità in mezzo al suono di queste parole. Diremmo guardi signor Cage che la musica è produzione culturale, esperienza condivisa, i suoni non sono "ciò che sono", ma un sistema organizzato di rapporti tra loro e il mondo. Potremmo fare i Theodor "bacchettone" Adorno e tacciarla di "esistenzialismo musicale" e scaraventarla per sempre nel girone del "dilettantismo soddisfatto". Ma non è cosa, perché questo è un magnifico gioco che pressuppone per l'appunto l'ascolto del suono delle parole e non del loro significato.
Ci comporteremmo come quell'altro grande Savonarola, quello Shoenberg che ebbe a definirlo "inventore" , sottintendendo grande invidia ma anche malcelata altezzosità verso chi antepone la prassi alla teoria. Ma forse ha ragione lei signor Cage, c'è così tanto bisogno di teoria in questo cupio dissolvi in cui siamo immersi?

[Andrew]

Silence, how I wanted to like you. But there was so little to actually grasp onto. Some charming anecdotes, yes. But that was about it. Mostly, it was just a morass of chance operations imposed upon the typography. I mean, bonus points, for being theoretically rigorous. However, those same techniques that make John Cage's music so fascinating are a complete disaster when applied to writing. I know I'm not grooving as mystically as Cage would like me too, but I just can't get behind this fucker.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cage was a great multidisciplinary artist and it's a shame that he is best remembered as a musician. Its hard to imagine anyone appreciating his music without first being exposed to his writing. Incidentally, Cage taught at Black Mountain College, the college that I attend in daydreams after graduating from Hogwarts.

[Rae · Rating 5 out of 5]

"What if I ask thirty-two questions?
What if I stop asking now and then?
Will that make things clear?
Is communication something made clear?" (p. 41, 'Composition as Process')

Having finally finished Silence, I'm astonished I've somehow never had this book recommended to me by another writer--only ever by students of Zen and instrumentalists. But nearly everything Cage articulates in his essays about rhythmic structure, space, thought and non-thought, music and silence plugs directly into the kinds of tense obsessions I find myself working through daily as a language person--and I found myself rethinking much of my own approach to 'working' while reading these pieces.

I think Cage takes a more innovative approach to documenting the mind, and its influence over the shape of an innovative nonfiction, than most writers I read. I'm kind of astonished by the degree to which his 'music'-based theoretical framework allows him to shatter and multiply the communicative space of the page. He is a master of formal innovation on the page--because his mind already works vertically, in stacking fashion, and not in the linear lidded fashion of the sentence, perhaps? I have always, always, always felt, as a writer whose first creative life was a musical one, that language could not possibly find a form as staggering or multitudinous as something scored for sound--but Cage has done it.

And: he's as spectacularly funny as he is is brilliant. Why is every essayist I know not talking about his work?

I guess my big question is: how to write now?

If Stein had known of Zen, perhaps, and had more sympathy for her reader's expectation of patterns--

Also: I was surprised by how much I thought and learned about dance reading these pieces, and what it is in choreography that relates to poetic attention, to the tension between grammar/syntax and white space.

[Gerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book will try to edify you about nothing and you will learn nothing / leave with nothing

[Mirror · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not a big fan of (his interpretation of) Zen.

Doubtless an innovator, but this feels really dated and is mainly just an historical document, though he can be quite charming and funny.

[Alina · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was fun to puzzle through Cage's mystical tone of writing, as well as through why I feel opposed to certain of his claims. Moreover, at some parts, Cage articulates what he sees is the heart of new/experimental music. (A disclaimer: I'm no musician or composer, but enjoy listening to new music. So my sense-making of Cage's work is limited by my lack of background knowledge of his field.) This is what I took away from this positive side: Before new music, composers have worked within sound, making pieces that are beautiful, without concern or perhaps awareness of the fact that their works consist in solely sounds, and thereby without inquisitiveness into the possibilities of sound. New music is founded on precisely this awareness and inquisitiveness. Music, noise, and silence are all equally sounds, and recognizing this brings one closer to getting a grip on the phenomenon of sound itself. What is sound itself, and why does this matter? Cage has a fun thing to say: sound "is Buddha," or a Western version of this might be that sound "is Christ." What the heck is that supposed to mean? Cage is never direct about this, but a reader may pick up that "Buddha," in this context, for Cage stands in for the (simplified) Buddhist idea that everything is empty (i.e., all possible things we encounter are always mediated by our conceptual repertoires and cognitive systems, so nothing is truly as it appears; moreover, everything we encounter constitutionally depends on everything else, via a metaphysics of interconnectedness, so the appearance that things are self-standing individuals is illusory, too), and with this realization, one may go about all that one usually experiences with a newfound distance or lightness of touch. I've studied a bit of Buddhist philosophy, and it is interesting to see an American composer so devoted to this school of thought, and to make sense of the power of the artist/composer in light of it. So I guess Cage's obsession with the sound 'itself' is connected to his spiritual practice of forgetting about the imaginings and thoughts that one typically projects upon sound, when one senses it to be music v. noise for example, so that one can have a double book keeping on both that meaning-based projection realm, and the realm of the bare sound.

There's one more positive point that Cage gives, which I found particularly helpful for approaching new music. Much of new music is atonal: its sounds don't flow according to any particular key, of the traditional 12-tone system, but constantly slides between potential keys. Music must have structure in order to be engaged with as music (I don't know how to elaborate on / defend this point, but Cage presupposes it). So the tasks of the contemporary composer is to find other ways to structure a piece, other than the tone of a key. In other words, the composer is freed from the structure of tonality, and so now has the chance to find new ways that may structure sounds, as to push the horizons of the possibilities of music.

I usually don't like obscure writing that aims to be mystical (i.e., it is purposefully confusing or obscure in order to convey some higher spiritual truth, that purportedly simply could not be given to the reader if language were used straightforwardly), but I found quite a lot of what Cage had to say, under this style, interesting and fun to think through. I get the impression that he is indeed a deep thinker, which allows him to write successfully in this way.

In one essay, Cage writes about his piece "Music for Piano 21-52." Like other pieces, he uses a method to randomize his compositional choices, and moreover the finished manuscript only specifies for the performers/conductor the timbre and rhythmic structure of the piece. Other crucial variables that are usually specified in a composition (e.g., architecture of the room in which the performance is given, placement of the instruments, how many instruments) are omitted. Cage then asks "All these elements, evidently of paramount importance, point the question: What has been composed?" I had fun thinking about this. It seems to me that such a piece would serve to bring people together, and to give them just enough infrastructure to allow for performers to be coordinated with one another. Perhaps this could be an analogy: induce some overall bodily/affective state in everyone of a group, like making them excited, so they are affectively attuned to one another, and see what communication flows from that, and what particular emotions each ends up in. Moreover, this makes explicit or leans into the fact that music is always temporal, singular to the moment. There will be differences between each performance of any composition, no matter how detailedly specified it is. Cage's piece here seems to allow for the unique conditions of the present to create the piece. I guess all of this would hold for musical improvisation as well, however, so I'm unsure how this piece relates to improv. At least it deviates from improv in offering performers a score that is supposedly free from all human intention, culture, and tradition (Cage tries to achieve this through his randomization methods, such as by using the I-Ching).

This leads me to the point of disagreement I have with Cage. Cage believes that new/experimental music ought to break ties with all history of aesthetics/music, and aim at transcending any influence that the composer's individual character or psychology might bring. Why? Cage thinks that the present goal of music should be to create new sounds, qua sound itself; it's a particularly fertile time to do this, in light of the invention of computer technologies. Cage believes that this is more readily achieved in a naivete or disregard of history. He even explicitly says that budding composers need not listen to Bach or Beethoven. This seems horribly wrong. All of us, composers and music-listeners alike, are embedded in history. History will inevitably shape what choices a composer makes, and how a listener will hear and interpret a sound. So in order to most powerfully express something musically, one must know about this history, e.g., this enables one to know how listeners will receive something one marks out, or to see the significance of a particular choice, in light of its contrast or relation to other things done in the past.

This brings me back to thinking about what is meant in that music should aim to deliver sound itself (e.g., music, noice, and silence), and to explore the possibilities of sound. However Cage meant this, he must've thought that a disregard for history would be conducive towards this goal. This suggests that he thinks that "sound itself" is a-cultural and a-historical; perhaps he thinks of it as a pure sensory phenomenon, like color sensations, which are universally experienced (as opposed to some perceptual experience that involves more than just sensations, but also the work of the imagination; bringing in interpretation, meaning, symbolism, etc.) But it'd be quite odd for an artist to think that all of music ought to aim at such a narrow goal, to eliminate humanly imposed meaning, and to bring us back to conceptless bodily sensation. That seems restrictively ideological, to say the least.

I'd be curious to hear from someone who knows more the extent to which Cage has influenced new music, and whether his ideology has been taken up, or how people have responded to or challenged it. I can imagine that his ideology could be useful for people to challenge, for inspiring new thought: maybe there are new ways to aim to express oneself, or to disclose culturally-relevant meaning, after some naive way of doing so has been razed to the ground.

[david · Rating 5 out of 5]

More and more - ... - I have the feeling - that we are getting -
nowhere. - Slowly- , - as the talk goes on-
, - we are getting - nowhere - and that is a pleasure -
. - It is not irritating - to be where one is - . It is -
only irritating - to think one would like - to be somewhere else. -

[Max Gibson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well after reading this you will either love or hate John Cage! Personally I think the craziest composer of the 20th Century is indeed very loveable! The lectures and writings are incredibly clever; half of the book does not even mention music! Through intense thought Cage writes in Macro-Micro structures, in structures of chance procedure, and even in structures of such perfect timing that he is creating a piece of music (because a sound can be music) through his words.
The book gives an insight into the type of character Cage was, and that makes his avant-garde music even more charming than it was in the first place.

There is a lot to say about this book, but I think it would be better for anyone who wants to read it, to find a copy and read it!

[Jon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Repetetive and rather less clever than I think it thinks it is, but not without any redeeming features. The play with form justified the reading, but it was not an enjoyable experience. Might recommend at a push.

[Mirjam]

[Owen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an unapologetically difficult book and so is often dense and frustrating. The author has intriguing ideas about the nature of art, music and the existence of silence. The uniqueness of the book is in how Cage plays with structure in his essays and changes the way the narrative is presented to control how the reader perceives his ideas. The idea is similar to a performer controlling how an audience hears the music they are making. There's a definite sense of play here as language is manipulated in ways I have never seen before, but the presentation does not always enhance the reader's involvement with what the text is saying. Most of his big musical ideas come out in the early articles. His academic writing is very dense and assumes a high level of musical knowledge from his audience. He also loves long, meandering sentences with lots of technical terms. I found that most articles were good for about ten pages at a time. Sometimes this was due to the time necessary for processing dense ideas but mostly it was about as much exacting concentration as I was willing to give intentionally frustrating passages.
His stories are both sprinkled throughout the book and presented in concentrated form in one of his later essays. These are usually interesting chunks usually set up as jokes with a punchline. Also, his cues in a 45 minute lecture as to when to cough or make random gestures make the otherwise dense text entertaining. The format of this lecture is amusing, but the text which constitutes it feels like an afterthought and is full of rambling and confusing passages that seem to contain little worth rummaging around for. The only one that I full skipped over was “Where are we going” which has stories chopped up so that four different ones are going at the same time. This technique is meant to simulate the confusion of having to listen to 4 readers at the same time. Like many pieces in the book, it is a nice idea but not pleasant to read.
This is obviously an important and influential book but not one that everyone needs to read. Most of the big ideas in it were summarized quite nicely and understandably in David Byrne's “How Music Works”. Only major Cage fans need to go farther than that.

[Samuel Goff · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Cage and his most famous work "4:33" is one of the biggest influences in my life as a musician. I framed a copy of the score and it hangs in my house. The notion of silence (or as Cage philosophizes, the lack thereof) has informed both my thinking and my playing. Surprisingly in his book titled "Silence," Cage talks very little about his most seminal work. And that's okay. The book is still appropriately named as he takes the notions of his piece and applies it to writing. Much like a lot of avant garde, this book through essays, letters, lectures and criticisms is at various times wonderful, maddening, exhausting, vibrant, long winded, funny and thought provoking. I did not enjoy every second of this book. And you probably won't either. But I will read it again someday. There are a lot of quote worthy moments, in his lecture "Indeterminacy" Cage relates the following discourse between him and Schoenberg.

"Five years later, when Schoenberg asked me whether I would devote my life to music, I said, "Of course." After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, "In order to write music, you must have a feeling of harmony." I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, "In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall."

So yeah, that's Cage. Willful, obstinate, funny and playful. Cage takes his principles on sound, silence, form and time and applies them to literary terms (he first wanted to be a writer). There are very few artists who truly changed the way people make art and Cage can be counted as one of them. Highly recommended.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got turned on to this because John Adams said it was really influential for him. It's a really entertaining read- it's fresh and unpredictable. Cage is nothing if not consistent: he writes experimentally, weird typesetting, chance operations, and all. I came out of reading this being interested in listening to chance music.

In my opinion, Cage's whole "deal" pretty much boils down to Zen. Cage himself is a little timid about saying this, because he recognizes that Zen is a product of a culture he doesn't belong to, and going around saying that he's mastered Zen isn't the kind of thing he would do. But you can tell he knows that not saying "Zen" is just dancing around what he's trying to say.

Musically, he works with sound and chance. He is interested in making music with a wider variety of sounds. This means "non-musical" noises and silence, too. In particular, he wants to interrogate the habit of judging sounds as pleasant or unpleasant, and investigate the possibility of simply being mindful of the present sound.

It's possible to use a wider gamut of noises in compositions without using chance. But to be truly "experimental", Cage insists that the composer give up on the illusion of total control over the performance, and directly incorporate chance. I think this is crucial to Cage's "deal". The point of an experimental piece would not be to show off one's mastery of a technique; the point would be to find out what it would be like to hear new sounds.

I have to bring in Italo Calvino here. Cage does mention his experimental literary group by name. Here is Calvino in The Uses of Literature, talking about Ernst Gombrich's theory of combinatorial play in art:

"At a certain moment things click into place, and one of the combinations obtained—through the combinatorial mechanism itself, independently of any search for meaning or effect on any other level—becomes charged with an unexpected meaning or unforeseen effect which the conscious mind would not have arrived at deliberately..."

Just as Oulipian constraints are designed to create unanticipated structures and patterns in literature, Cage's works do the same for music. But this doesn't get us all the way to chance music: why can't we just use chance during the composition process, then use the written result to produce a deterministic (if random-sounding) performance?
- A stage manager once told me it was a known principle of theater that the eye is immediately drawn to whatever onstage doesn't appear to be controlled by the cast and crew. Think about this the next time you're at the theater and there's a dog, or a baby, or an audience member onstage.
- My old violin professor used to ask us if live performances were preferable to sufficiently high-fidelity recordings, and if so why. She never gave us her answer; she just genuinely wanted to know what we would say. I remember saying something along the lines of "because they could mess up".
- There's a moment in the musical "The Drowsy Chaperone" where an unexpected onstage noise renders a pivotal piece of dialogue inaudible and therefore ambiguous between two different meanings: "live while you can" or "love while you can". It's basically an argument for live theater.

There's a few other possible ways to explain why chance in performance is so important to Cage.
-You listen more mindfully to things that you know have not been predetermined (think how different a Cage piece would feel if you thought it was deterministic)
-It's the only way to capture that feeling of newness with every performance; the work would be a different work without that feeling
-It ensures you keep exploring further into the space of possible new sounds

I think it's probably important to address whether or not Cage is "pretentious". I would say no. He's pretty clear that thinking of music in the way he does ought to democratize it in some sense:

"QUESTION: But seriously, if this is what music is, I could write it as well as you.
ANSWER: Have I said anything that would lead you to think I thought you were stupid?"

Anyone can produce sounds, and those sounds join a soundscape that enters into our stream of consciousness. It doesn't take a genius to make sounds people can enjoy; it's for everyone. Cage actually uses the word "anarchy" a couple of times to describe the future of music. Maybe alongside Cage and Calvino we could put Feyerabend as their counterpart in science (cf. "there is only one principle that can be defended under all circumstances and in all stages of human development. It is the principle: anything goes" from Against Method).

Another charge I think might get leveled at Cage is that he is some kind of rigid ideologue who wants to ban Bach and Beethoven. He does make some provocative statements about how the greats are "useless" now. But really they're just unhelpful to his project, and his project is not everything.

"This also need not arouse alarm, for the coming into being of something new does not by that fact deprive what was of its proper place. Each thing has its own place, never takes the place of something else; and the more things there are, as is said, the merrier."

This also might go some part of the way to answering another question I had about Cage: if he wants to "democratize" or make "anarchic" music, then why should we fund a Center for Experimental Music for him to have a sinecure? Perhaps it's because there is some scholarship involved in making new things that juxtapose usefully or interestingly with what is already known.

Cage also definitely does not want to ban other music. He's having fun, and all he can do is point you in the direction he's facing. It's so crucial to underscore just how much what he's doing is about enjoying life, having fun, or having a sense of humor.

"If you don't like it you may choose to avoid it. But if you avoid it that's a pity, because it resembles life very closely, and life and it are essentially a cause for joy."

If it isn't clear, I think there's something very deep going on here involving a connection between the embrace of randomness and the good life.

[Amari · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although it is often highly irritating both in content and in style, this collection is really wonderful. It is tiresome, provocative, groundbreaking, infuriating, boring, soulful. In short, it bears a notable resemblance to Cage's music.

About halfway through _Silence_, I stopped fighting it. The Zen message began to seep into my pores. I share much of Cage's philosophy, but I suppose I simply wasn't used to moving beyond myself while reading. Then it got tiresome again at the end. Either the book became overly repetitive or I have a lot of work to do where renunciation of the self is concerned. Likely a bit of both.

In any case, obviously a masterpiece not only because of its importance as a relic of contemporary music history, but because it forces you to change your mind about things. Cage says at some point that he feels some hope for humans because he has witnessed instances of mind-changing.

[Tim Reznick Renner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yes, his voice still sounds fresh in the next century. This dear sweet gentle soul turns upside down notions of performance, composition and art. His major theme is the recognition of elements outside the conventional boundaries of Music. Thus his compositions for multiple radios, ambient sound, random occurrences in the performance space... very 1950s. His project to remove the voice of the composer is hard to wrap one's brain around, it could be seen as a cop-out, or as an overly 'oriental' approach to doing a job (that of organizing sounds for an audience's consumption). At its heart it can be a signpost pointing upward, toward a notion of purpose and intention that is larger than any one person.

[Fred · Rating 3 out of 5]

i couldn't make heads or tails of this book. i'm sure there are deep truths to be gleaned, but i couldn't glean them. i would have rather not tried to rate it at all because i don't feel like i ever read the book in anything more than the "processed the words" sense, but i settled on three stars because it seemed neutral and there's no "no rating" option; and i decided to post this review for the benefit of friends who know me and might therefore be able to use this to make some judgment on whether to read the book based on their own intelligence, powers of concentration, and so on...

[Noah · Rating 3 out of 5]

wacky imo

[Urtė · Rating 2 out of 5]

4'33 is super overrated fight me

[Say Mayfire · Rating 5 out of 5]

the book that started it all for me. i have read it so many times that the covers have fallen off and its spine is replaced by a thick layer of tape. a must read for any musician or artist.

[Ralph · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Cage was much taken with silence. And noise, too. According to Gann, he was able to mix the two with no effort. His apartment once had a malfunctioning fire alarm "that beeped all night." No one slept but Cage.

I remained in bed, listened carefully to its pattern, and worked it into my thoughts and dreams; and I slept very well.

He told Gann that a baby crying in a concert hall --- especially during a concert of modern music --- was there to be enjoyed.

It reminds us of Joseph Goldstein's story, about studying in India. Some workmen were making considerable noise with their hammerings and yelling right next to his meditation space. When he went to complain, his master asked him, "Did you note it?" Of course, how could I miss it, he thought. The question was repeated: "But did you note it?"

For fans of Cage, this book is all she wrote of note. Also, because it is by Cage, much of it makes no sense whatsoever, but then again, there is still a fair distance between Silence and Dada. Dada is a babble; Cage's presentations seem to be a babble with purpose ... so much so that it often irritated his audiences. A recent article by Joan Acocella in The New Yorker tells us that "Sometimes I thought that if I heard Cage or one of his followers banging a stick on a stick or blasting static on a sound system one more time I would run screaming from the theatre..." And earlier on, one of the parts of Cage's Lecture on Nothing was "the repetition, some fourteen times, of a page in which the refrain, If anyone is sleepy let him go to sleep." Cage reports that

Jeanne Reynal, I remember, stood up part way though, screamed, and then said, while I continued speaking, "John, I dearly love you, but I can't bear another minute." She then walked out.

Anyone who has studied the techniques of Milton Erickson knows that a sentence, with the word "relax" or "sleep," repeated enough times, will put people in a trance (or to sleep). Or, alternatively, out the door.

§ § §

Many years ago, Folkways issued Cage's Indeterminacy --- a two-disc record being a series of koans, all delivered by Cage, each one lasting a minute. If the story was short, he would slow down the telling so that it fit exactly into a sixty-second track. If it was, long, he speeded up his delivery, racing through it.

This one would be rather slow:

George Mantor had an iris garden, which he improved each year by throwing out the commoner varieties. One day his attention was called to another very fine iris garden. Jealously he made some inquiries. The garden, it turned out, belonged to the man who collected his garbage.

This one runs about the same:

An Indian woman who lived in the islands was required to come to Juneau to testify in a trial. After she had solemnly sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, she was asked whether she had been subpoenaed. She said, "Yes. Once on the boat coming over, and once in the hotel here in Juneau."

Cage had a melodious voice, and appeared to be unflappable. He also had a slow and infectious laugh. I once interviewed him on KRAB radio, in 1968, in Seattle. I asked him the usual dunce-like question about 4'33" --- his concert piece where the musician sits silently before the keyboard of a piano for exactly four minutes and thirty-three seconds. I suggested that it wasn't much in the way of art, but rather a good joke. He got a fine belly laugh out of that one (as did I).

In all, Cage comes off as a sweet, soothing, absurdly funny person. That his presentations goad people to outbursts of rage says less about him and more about them, I suppose.

§ § §

Silence is infinitely quotable, mostly because of the koans. All are a bit floaty, so Cage sticks in names and places and details that leave one befuddled, but you have all the facts you need to befuddle you somewhat less. "Before studying Zen, men are men and mountains are mountains. While studying Zen, things become confused. After studying Zen, men are men and mountains are mountains."

After telling this, Dr. Suzuki was asked, "What's the difference between before and after?" He said, "No difference, only the feet are a little bit off the ground."

There's a lot of music stuff going here which doesn't interest me very much, because when I am listening, for example, to a good performance of a Bach cantata, or to Schubert's Winterreise, words of explanation are furtherest from my mind.

It's not that they have no place, or that criticism isn't important ... but it becomes as attention-grabbing as the baby crying during Stockhausen's Pierrot lunaire or an errant fire-alarm in the bedroom. It depends on the person involved.

Cage doesn't seem to have much use for the Romantics, but in his Lecture on Nothing, he does relate that "Somebody asked Debussy how he wrote music, and the composer said: I take all the tones there are, leave out the ones I don't want, and use all the others." If you read this mot on page 118 of Silence, you will find that the spacing is a bit zany. When Cage wasn't driving people bonkers by repeating the same line over and over, or playing fourteen radios at once, or trying to put people --- or himself --- to sleep, he would attack a few pages of his writings with spaces, breaking up sentences and paragraphs into random hunks. In this one, you'll find four vertical lines --- blocks of words and em and en spaces, all of which have to be a typesetter's nightmare. I couldn't figure out how to reproduce them here even if I tried, so I didn't. He would have wanted it that way.

John Cage and I grew up on Cracker Jacks: we knew that there was always a prize at the bottom of the box after you got through the glazed popcorn. Prizes in Silence include charming thoughts on mushroom and wild plant collecting ... including an account of the time he almost killed himself and several friends. He made a mistake on the identity of skunk cabbage, cooked it and served it up to some buddies. "I was removed to the Spring Valley hospital. There during the night I was kept supplied with adrenaline and I was thoroughly cleaned out. In the morning I felt like a million dollars."

There are also charming stories of people who passed though his life: D. T. Suzuki, Harry Partch, David Tudor, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Henry Jacobs, and the artist Morris Graves who attended one of his percussion concerts and created "such a disturbance that he was thrown out."

Cage can't speak about his friends without sticking in yet another koan. This on Morton Feldman: "We were driving back from some place in New England where a concert had been given. He's a large man and falls asleep easily."

Out of a sound sleep, he awoke to say, "Now that things are so simple, there's so much to do." And then he went back to sleep.

I was smitten by Cage before I met him for interview because he carried such a strange admixture of common sense and plain old madness, neither of which seemed to bother him (like almost killing himself and his friends one night, and, the next day, feeling "like a million dollars.")

I was even more entranced by Cage after meeting him and experiencing his good-humored response to my rather testy questions. After his visit to KRAB we started using selections from the recording of Indeterminacy as fillers between programs. If we had an extra minute, we'd play one. If seven, seven. Or at times, in homage to him, we would turn off the machines entirely and listen to the sound of our transmitter beating out silence for awhile.

One of my favorite koans, repeated here, was "When asked why, God being good, there was evil in the world, Sri Ramakrishna said: To thicken the plot." I swear to you that when I heard the koan on Indeterminacy so long ago the final line came out "To thicken the broth."

I can assure you it would make no difference to Cage. I've always liked food, and think about it a lot, though I am not all that smitten with edible wild plants. Perhaps that's why I heard it as "the broth" and not "the plot."

For more reviews please visit www.RalphMag.org

[Gary · Rating 2 out of 5]

My book group read John O’Connell’s Bowie’s Bookshelf. We each decided to read one of the books talked about on the Bookshelf. I chose John Cage’s Silence: Lectures and Writings. My choice of this book goes back 50+ years ago when I was in high school and I heard one of Cage’s pieces-I do not remember which one. As a college freshman, I played a recording of Cage for my existential roommates. They thought it was rubbish. And now I am back to exploring the thought behind his pieces.

I suspect that I really did not comprehend the depth of Cage, so this review may be more about my perception than his writing. I only got about two-thirds of the way through the book. It is a difficult book to read. Both from the conceptual and philosophical perspective presented, as well as from physically reading the material. Many of the essays in the book were lectures given to an audience, almost like a performance. Cage played around with the syntax to coordinate with his concepts of silence and randomness. For example, the chapter I. Changes was written in columns. Each line was to be read at a pace of one per second. When completed, it would be exactly the same length in time as one of his compositions. There were places where only a word or two was on a line or even lines left blank. This was to indicate pauses for silence. Not so much for drama, but in the spirit of randomness. It made for difficult reading.

About the time I listened to Cage, I became a Christian. My world view is different from Cage’s. From what I can tell, Cage did not think there was too much meaning in the world and definitely there was no meaning in music (Music means nothing as a thing). He used music as a catalyst to other things. He emphasized randomness and silence, not as a brief interlude but as foundational. At each turn, the path which Cage would choose would dehumanize the performers, the listeners. They were expected to be mechanical in nature, not adding their own artistry.

At one point in my notes, I wrote it seems like Cage is doing the opposite of what God did in the Genesis story. According to Genesis, God put his spirit into humans. Cage wants to remove any spirit from the music.

If you are a follower of modern music, Cage or philosopher, then this book is probably a worthwhile read. For the rest of us, I would keep a bottle of aspirin by your side, just being careful not to overdose on it.

[Jim · Rating 1 out of 5]

Meh. His music is genius, his writing/speaking is horrifyingly dull. I get the impression he knew he was being circuitous and meandering and vapid, but just couldn't care less.
No offense meant - and since he's dead I doubt he's going to come haunt me, though he might! - but the experience of reading this brings to mind several things, none of which are in any interesting or worth going on about, so I won't belabor the point, not overmuch anyway.
What this book made me realize is Cage was practically dead before most non-specialists had ever heard of him, and how MCM he was. These ideas were avant garde, novel, different, irreverent, groundbreaking - and any of a number of other similar-themed adjectives - at the time of the writing/speaking/presenting, but are now just moth-eaten conceptual retreads and posterisms that any artist hardly needs explained, and surely don't read as anything but "yep, already know that, John". There has been a lot of thinking and theorizing since 1961 that makes this read rather unremarkable. Handy historical document with a pretty dust jacket, much like the Magna Carta sans pretty dust jacket (those came along in the 1820's; the oldest extant specimen being from 1829), but hardly a book overflowing with genius.
Mini-rant: For all the goings on about 4'33" and its foundational aspects to one's personal musicology and life ethics, just stop. It reminds me of the untold legions of regular people talking about how they knew so-and-so (fill in with appropriate band, artist, "famous" person...) before anybody else did. Who fucking cares? That "famous" person, band, or artist surely doesn't remember you, it would seem.
As can be gleaned, I am not amazed by Cage's writings and "philosophies". Though it is entirely possible Da Vinci bored people to death talking about his paintings too, so there's that to fall back on, John. Oops, you're dead, so you are already on your back! Sorry about that.
Hahahahahaha!

[Sonya Lyons · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cage’s lectures and writings on silence are undoubtedly some of the foundational texts of experimental music, influencing many of the composers and collectives that came after him including Fluxus and Wandelweiser. However, his takes are often fundamentally flawed. The way he views and uses silence may be innovative, but it leads to his philosophy of being a modest witness that dictates not only how he writes music but also how he sees the world as a whole. Cage often rejects Modern aesthetics while not fully acknowledging the fact that there is precedent for many of his choices within the modernist canon. With that said, he is still an extremely important figure and I really enjoy both the way he defines “experimental” music and how he creates a musical blend that is not harmonious but rather the coexistence of dissimilars (very Merce Cunningham individual simultaneous movements). In many ways, Cage’s more radical ideas were curtailed by his own personal hang ups and were only fully realized by later interpreters and composers (Shiomi, Ono, Moorman, Eastman, etc) who recognized the limitations of Cage’s obsession with “letting sounds be sounds” and pure chance operations that lacked expression or messaging.

“This play, however, is an affirmation of life—not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.”

“New music: new listening. Not an attempt to understand something that is being said, for, if something were being said, the sounds would be given the shapes of words. Just an attention the the activity of sounds.”

[Peter Landau · Rating 4 out of 5]

As much as a bellyache about plot, characterization and setting, how often I might criticize the “dream of fiction,” which creates the illusion that what I’m reading is real, the literary avant-garde is a hard road to travel. Music and art can go out into the unknown and I’ll follow happily. Maybe it’s easier, more passive, to listen and watch then it is to read. I blame Evelyn Wood, whose speed-reading courses were the rage when I was young. Speed-reading is just skimming, and while I never wasted any money on speed-reading classes, I’m a superficial skimmer of some merit. It’s a technique that doesn’t lend itself to deep reading. Which brings me to John Cage and his book SILENCE, a collection of early lectures and writings. Cage worked from a process that informed his composition and he uses that structure to present his spoken and written work. Some text is tiny, others are laid out with large blank spaces and one is four discussions meant to be read at once. That spells trouble, but it also had me slow down and pay attention -- I had to in order to even begin to understand what I was reading. Not that I understood much, such as the more technical pieces on his compositional approach. But I did like his portraits of musicians and the Zen-like personal stories he scattered about and ended the book with. Regardless of my shallowness, Cage’s exploration of silence, or the impossibility of such an experience, and how he incorporates that and chance into his work is as inspiring as it can be mystifying.

[Evan Pincus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Had previously read a posthumously published volume of some of Cage's uncollected writings and found it frustrating, which I'd chalked up to the curation, but no, Cage is just a seriously annoying guy, a pretentious white dude way too into zen buddhism and inclined towards questionable experimental formatting in his writings (I had to flip through "Where Are We Going? and What Are We Doing?", which I found to be honest-to-god unreadable - surely there are better ways to put simultanous four-channel audio on the page!). Luckily, I don't have to ask the I Ching how to feel about this, as it's pretty obvious - when you're one of the smartest people to ever live, you get to be annoying, and this book makes it pretty damn clear that John Cage was, in fact, one of the smartest people to ever live. He's allowed to be a little bit antivax, gosh darn it! A charming and funny raconteur, a fascinating music critic (the Satie piece here is a must-read), a damn good composer who despite being best-known for his silent piece that isn't actually wrote a lot of damn good music on paper too. He's essential despite (or perhaps because of) it all, just a totally singular figure in all respects, in totemic genius ways and in rascally lil weirdo ways, and as often as I slammed this book shut in frustration, it just as often made me put it down for a few minutes just to think over what I'd just read, listen to the sound of the nothing that's something, consider new ways of experiencing that without Cage we'd have never discovered.