No Such Thing as Silence

On Thursday, April 18th, John McWhorter, associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University, met his class in “music humanities”: a class, one presumes, about what various pieces of music mean. He was slated to discuss John Cage’s famous 4′33″, which, writes McWhorter, “directs us to listen in silence to surrounding noise for exactly that amount of time.”

“I had to tell the students we could not listen to that piece that afternoon,” the column continues, “because the surrounding noise would have been not birds or people walking by in the hallway but infuriated chanting from protesters outside the building.” The only chant he mentions is “from the river to the sea,” a phrase often interpreted as a call for Israel’s destruction. “Two students in my class are Israeli; three others, to my knowledge, are American Jews. I couldn’t see making them sit and listen to this as if it were background music.”

Now, I don’t think McWhorter is adequately registering the urgency of the quickly expanding campus movement for peace, as the destruction of Gaza continues and American military aid continues and increases. But what I want to focus on here is that he badly misconstrues the purpose of 4′33″, one of the most famous pieces in twentieth-century music and in the history of conceptual art.

In 4′33″, as in the first performance in the Catskills in 1952, a performer sits at a piano for four minutes and 33 seconds and fails to play. Cage insisted that the resulting silence and ambient noise constituted the piece of music, as the white paint and whatever illumination and shadows happened to be in the gallery determined the content of Robert Rauschenberg’s monochromatic “white paintings.” The two had been developing these radical and fundamentally influential ideas together at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

As McWhorter says, Cage himself (a devotee at that time of Zen Buddhism) thought of the piece as calling on the audience to attend mindfully to the quotidian or seemingly insignificant surrounding sound in the concert venue. “There’s no such thing as silence,” Cage declared. “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.” At various performances in various venues, you might indeed have heard birdsong, the HVAC system kicking in, someone shuffling their feet, a truck rolling by.

However, I don’t think you would have been listening rightly if you heard these things as “background music.” Though the length of 4′33″ was allegedly inspired by the length of a song as presented by the Muzak system for automated elevator and office music, Cage’s composition was an attack on Muzak, not an example of it. Attending closely to HVAC systems or bodily sounds or even birdsong can help you become aware of many aspects of the environment that your body is inhabiting right now. HVAC systems and coughs have a context, a sociopolitical and historical location, economic implications. They’re located within systems of race and class. What birds you can hear now, if any, are a register of the nature and condition of your environment.

Cage wrote to bring our attention fully to the sound already around us, and hence to bring us into a more vivid awareness of who and what and where we are now; a conceptual work, a spiritual discipline and a political act.

Now, that you hear the HVAC system kicking in does not entail that you approve of HVAC systems or that you are personally comfortable with the current climate-control situation. That you are listening to people chant does not entail that you agree with them, any more than looking at Goya’s “black paintings” means you approve of war. But it is happening right now in your environment. Playing 4′33″ in the classroom might make students but also professors aware of the sound around them and hence of the situation on campus in a different way. Heightened awareness of the aural surround is what 4′33″ means.

That is its power, and to leave four minutes and 33 seconds of unfilled time in a music humanities class as a crowd of protesters chant outside is one possible culmination of Cage’s work, which is “classic” in the sense that it seems to adapt to every context in which it’s performed, retaining and altering its meaning. I think Cage himself would have been moved and impressed by this use of his conception, whatever he might have thought of the protests themselves. Either way, playing 4′33″ in the classroom (which I too did for many years) brings us to awareness of our world now.

You get the idea that McWhorter just kept lecturing so he wouldn’t himself have to hear the chanting. He didn’t want to create an atmosphere in which what was happening could come to full awareness, either his own or his students’. Perhaps McWhorter talked right over an excellent moment for his students to understand Cage, and for their teacher to fully confront the urgency of the protests in which his campus is engulfed.