Seventy Years after 4’33″
Daniel Barbiero
August 2022
August 29, 1952, David Tudor premiered 4’33” at the Maverick Concert Hall, Woodstock, N.Y.
Sentences on Musical Silence, Attentiveness and Time,
Seventy Years after 4’33”
In these seventy years following the August, 1952 premiere of John Cage’s 4’33”, contemporary music, both composed and improvised, in effect has inhabited a musical age defined at least in part by this paradigmatic “silent” work. The freeing of silence as a musical parameter in its own right, which 4’33” effectively accomplished, like any kind of freedom can induce a sense of vertigo and the urge to flee it. For a composer, this might consist in, metaphorically speaking, leaving no blank space on the page. For an improviser, sound can appear to provide a refuge from silence in the way that busyness–of any kind, it doesn’t matter what—can seem a refuge from being alone with oneself. And yet once this unease is gotten over, once one resists the urge to play something, anything, and just holds to a stillness in the course of an improvisation, one realizes that silence isn’t a lacuna in sound, a draining away of musical tension and listener attention, but rather is an intimate element within a musical structure that draws attention to itself as well as to the sounding events it links and divides, as well as to the larger, existential event of which it is a part. Musical silence is more than a structural element, in other words; musical silence is one way that the larger problem of silence shows up for us in the various modes and contexts in which we encounter it. To make us aware of these various modes and contexts seems to have been Cage’s original purpose in composing 4’33,” although to be sure, his interpretation of what the work was about changed over the years. Regardless of what the piece “really” means, I believe it ultimately points us beyond an immediate attentiveness to the subtleties latent in our sonic environment. What follows are some sentences on silence, and the ways that silence works through music to take us to a fuller awareness of our situation.
The Problem of Silence
“Silence” is a seemingly simple thing whose seeming simplicity conceals an enigma. What makes silence enigmatic is that it is not an unambiguously defined, clearly delineated condition remaining constant under all circumstances and within all contexts, but rather depends on variations in ourselves and our situations.
Thus there is no single answer to the question, “What is Silence?” “Silence” can refer literally to a situation or state of things, or to, for example, a mode of attentiveness or more generally as a way of comporting oneself.
The problem of silence, to the extent that silence shows up for us in a way that makes it an object of reflection and thus a problem, is a problem related to access: our access to the world around us and the meaning it carries for us, and ultimately our grasp of our being in time.
Silence & Attentiveness (Being in Silence) Under many circumstances, musical circumstances among them, what we think of as “silence” discloses itself as a ground against which sounds appear and into which sounds seem to submerge and vanish. Apprehended this way, “silence” is just another way of saying “sound not attended to,” or better, “sound intermittently attended to.”
This implies that silence is phenomenal, which is to say, a feature of the world to the extent that the world appears to us as we disclose it through our intentional acts, attentiveness among them.
(For “world,” we might substitute the terms “environment,” “situation,” or something similar. The world is always our world, the site of action, possibility and meaning.)
Thus silence is not reducible to a property of the world per se, although it may, and perhaps even must, in fact consist in attentiveness to an actual property of the world independent of our perception. Rather, we grasp (constitute, understand) the world as silent through the way we attend to the world. In other words, “silence” is a way of being in relation to the world as we are directed toward that world through our attentiveness.
Hence silence is a comportment, or way of being in the world as well as a state of affairs within the world.
(Ordinary language doesn’t always make this difference clear. We can say of a place or a situation that it “is silent” just as we can say of a person that he or she “is silent.” One verb phrase is used in both cases. But for an environment or situation to be silent is one thing; for a person to be silent is something else altogether. In the former case, silence is a property of the environment or situation, something that can be predicated of it. In the latter case, silence is a manifestation of a mode of being—a project, or way of projecting ourselves into an engagement with the world.)
“Silence” in the sense of a mode of being describes a particular state of receptivity available to beings able to disclose the world as being a certain way and as holding certain possibilities. As such, silence is an existential event.
To the extent that it discloses the world as being a certain way, silence is an existential state with a pronounced cognitive, and specifically interpretive, dimension. It discloses our relation to the world in terms of our grasp of how things are in the world; it is a judgment regarding our placement within that world.
Being in silence is thus a way of being present to oneself through a particular kind of awareness.
When a musical silence draws attention to itself it creates an opening to an awareness of attentiveness as an intentional act directed both outwardly and inwardly.
Being in silence is a judgment that the world (one’s environment, one’s situation) and oneself in it, is something to be attended to. It gives meaning to the world as something there to be attended to, or something worth being attended to.
This was the underlying, intended meaning of 4’33,” at least as Cage originally seems to have conceived it.
Once 4’33” opened up attentiveness as a possible meaning for silence within a musical setting, any musical silence carried the possibility of directing the listener’s attention to attentiveness itself. Attention to attentiveness simply became one possible meaning of musical silence whenever musical silence was encountered.
Beyond the contingencies of any given performance environment, beyond matters of purely musical considerations, post-4’33” musical silence thus at least potentially discloses the world as meaningful, as having something about it in relation to us that is graspable and of significance to us. Enough so to warrant our attentiveness.
Silence, Awareness and Time
Music is a temporal art for which duration is an essential feature. A musical performance mirrors the flow of time as it unfolds in a set of discernibly sequential sounds; its structure is explicitly linear. In a sense, music is the flow of time made audible. Through its engagement of the senses, a sequence of musical sounds colors time and makes time’s passage explicitly felt.
Our ordinary temporal experience of music likewise is linear. We hear it as a sequence of events moving in one direction. Our hearing it this way is made possible by anticipation. On the basis of what we’ve already heard, we anticipate its next move: the return or variation of a phrase, the beginning of a new melody or entire section, the denouement of a harmonic cycle—in short, the next event to occur in the performance.
(Anticipation is how our awareness of musical time manifests itself, but this awareness is in turn rooted in the deeper structure of human temporality, itself made possible by a synthetic imagination that can transcend the lived present of the here-and-now by recollecting a past and projecting a possible future. Anticipation of what will come next musically, based on what has already happened, is just one form this synthesis of recollection and projection may take.)
A substantial passage of silence in a musical performance dissolves the chain of sounding events and serves to frustrate the listener’s anticipation by bringing forth—nothing. The absence of the subsequent event signals the end of audible movement forward; to that extent a substantial silence brings with it the erasure of the trace of the previous events on which anticipation is based, and consequently renders future events unimaginable.
If anticipation is the way that the temporal structure of music discloses itself to the listener, then silence is musical time without anticipation, which is to say, musical time destructured.
Musical time destructured through silence points to time as the boundary and limit within which musical events occur. Musical time destructured thus presents an image of time in a guise other than that of a forward-moving flow of events.
When silence destructures musical time it reframes the performance and focuses attention on the fact that it is a finite thing bounded on either side by a kind of nothingness stretching indefinitely in each direction.
This apparent nothingness is time as such, as revealed through silence and its destructuring of musical time. “Empty” silence is the analogue of “empty” time just as the ostensible emptiness of time as such has its analogue in the ostensible emptiness of silence.
Paradoxically, “empty” time makes itself a palpable presence, an event impinging on us and soliciting our attention.
By making apparently empty time a palpable presence, silence draws attention to time in a way that the busyness of everyday activity tends to obscure. Silence empties time of the distractions that events in time can hold for us.
(Seen from this perspective, musical events in their linear dimension, as beautiful or compelling as they are as manifestations of art and craft, are analogous to everyday, distracting busyness.)
Consequently, silence presents time as a mute nothingness enfolding and extending beyond the stream of events that take place within it.
Attentiveness to silence then is attentiveness to time as such; to draw attention to one’s attentiveness in silence is to draw attention to time as the frame encompassing sound, silence, and all else.
Hence, musical silence changes awareness of time as a sequential flow of events—of things preceding and following one another in an endless series—to a grasp of time as a palpable presence from which the busyness of the everyday has been stripped, leaving an open field in which we suddenly find ourselves.
Once we confront time in its guise of mute nothingness, we become aware of it as a limit in relation to which the events occurring within it are disturbances of a finite nature.
Musical silence thus makes us aware not only of the sounds in the environment around us, as 4’33” originally set out to do, but of the reality that time as such presents as it enfolds and limits us, just as it enfolds and limits a musical performance of a given duration.
Thus, the ultimate meaning of 4’33,” the meaning that overspills its intended meaning, is one that directs our attention beyond ourselves and the events that fill our lives and—to those willing to listen and to become aware—allows us to grasp ourselves for what we essentially are: finite beings for whom our finitude is always just over the horizon.
◊
Daniel Barbiero is a double bassist, composer and writer in the Washington DC area. He writes on the art, music and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century and on contemporary work, and is the author of the essay collection As Within, So Without (Arteidolia Press, 2021).
©2024 ARTEIDOLIA