.Silence.

I miss John Cage, even though I never had the chance to meet him personally and tell him how I admire his childlike smile, the soft and gentle voice, the eagerness to reach out towards a far horizon where all the arts come together in a single, gloriously eclectic language.

My favorite piece from this undeniably remarkable composer/inventor is perhaps his best known composition.
4′33″, is a three-movement composition, performed without a single note being played.

Cage drew the inspiration for 4'33", as the work is known, from the visual arts: from the series of "white" paintings by his friend and sometime colleague Robert Rauschenberg
As Rauschenberg postulated the dynamic of his paintings as their reaction to the changing light in the room in which they might be hung and the conditions created by people coming and going in those rooms, so Cage conceived 4'33", as a piece of music constantly in flux, subject to the ambient sounds surrounding each performance.

Arnold Schoenberg, whose composition classes Cage attended,informed his 22-year-old student that he was not really a composer at all, but an inventor. Cage took this as a compliment.There has been a continuous cloud of protest on both sides:

"It became clear to the both of us", Cage wrote, "I certainly had no feeling for harmony, and Schoenberg thought that that would make it impossible for me to write music. He said, 'You'll come to a wall you won't be able to get through.' So I said, 'I'll beat my head against that wall.'"


Before watching/listening, please turn down the volume of your speakers!

"There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. Sounds occur whether intended or not. One must see that humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world together, that nothing was lost when everything was given away."

John Cage, Silence, 1973