A few years ago, I kept a notebook for a camp where I drew the day’s soundscapes:
Likely, this was the result of a neurotic urge driven by the lack of access to recorded music at the time. I wanted to listen to something. Still, the camp was a lovely, lush place, with its own sort of innocent totality; I could watch the time pass under the rocks in a river creek, and eventually, the world filled itself out, exposure to harmony mediated through birdsong. Music became everything and nothing.
It was here I understood John Cage.
Imagine: You watch Cage sit the virtuoso David Tudor on his piano bench, on a late 1952 summer afternoon in Woodstock, New York, your ears filled with the night’s erudite programming and eccentric etudes. You look on as Cage pulls out his stopwatch and gazes reverently at the closed lid of the grand piano for four minutes 33 seconds, performing nothing except static silence.
Of course, this wasn’t silence for its own sake. Four years prior to Woodstock, Cage would write Silent Prayer, a piece described by him as a singular idea taking on “the color and shape and fragrance of a flower.” He intended for the composition to be sold to the Muzak corporation as an act of resistance against the company. It wasn’t hard to see why: Muzak’s ultimate goals are succinctly summarized by academic Branden Joseph as “nothing other than the instrumentalization of sound for the aims of increased production and profitability,” relocating music from the aesthetic to the commercial, a tool of scientific management tracing back to Ford’s production lines.
Cage’s initial intention with Silent Prayer was to impose silence as a destructive vehicle against Muzak’s industrial complex, but the silence continued to develop. The silence of 4’33”, the destruction of that Woodstock rehearsal hall, was metastatic — the uninterested works of harmony replaced by pure sound, the spreading of classical music’s privileged frame of listening disappates into its surroundings. “Cage was able to understand silence and noise as two sides of the same coin,” Hannah Pivo, professor at Columbia University, said.
Cage says of his peculiar piece, “What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.”
A version of his thesis plays out today, where music has proliferated from concert halls to bars to discotheques and out to the wider world; your Instagram friends brag about their recapped minutes of music streaming, which number on 10% of their waking hours — a walk, a workout, a car ride, everything, proprioception mediated by a headphone and a beat.
But to listen to Cage in this way is anodyne. His destruction of the concert hall was only fertile in recovering a reverent listening of the world; today, we listen to music to not listen — the silence Cage attended to is constantly filled. The locomotive force of the 808 pushes from the home to the workplace, from errand to errand; Charli xcx checks to-do lists, fills the betweens of folds of your laundry. Albums dissolve to songs on playlists, dissolve to snippets on short-form videos to energize neuronal connections to the next swipe of the finger.
It’s difficult to listen to anything except for the constant, nascent whir of the modern world. The music of today understands and shields us from this, orders the world under metered time. Modernism has given up on music’s ability to reach for the aesthetic deep, give teleological completeness; a fiction of the total world has replaced it, a humdrum weaving of material reality the consumer sits on top of. A pounding on your gym headphones functioning like the next trendy pre-workout, lyricism of dopaminergic meaning.
A hole must be poked through that web to reach the ordinary, the undercurrent, the minute. Literary scholar Julian Murphet writes, “That saying nothing, letting the material be, lovingly and without the violence of transformation, might yet transform it into what it is not, and what no highly wrought work of art can any longer be: an intersubjective promise of happiness, poetry sans the poem.”
To attend to the ordinary in a world where the ordinary has so thoroughly succumbed for commodified images and symbols, then, becomes revolutionary.
Perhaps I am not interested in the hero’s journey at all; to trek on is to posit an art out of heroism as an elevated experience, and I am perfectly happy with the ordinary world. Instead, I choose to dip my hand in my own amorphous percipience — the background thrum of material literality, the machine boiled to its constituents of the copper and silicon in Earth, the automobile skimming the road as a heron skims the water, an old sycamore in a traffic light — and hear.
Daily Arts Writer Darrin Zhou can be reached at darrinz@umich.edu.
