I have always taken for granted that John Cage's 4'33'' was a joke. The idea of a piece of music without any music just seemed like avantgarde arriving at its final point where it abolishes itself. After having read most of this longish essay on 4'33'' (discovered at popshots) I must admit that I was wrong. In the essay it says on the first performance of 4'33'' at Woodstock, New York, on August 29, 1952 by David Tudor, a young pianist:

This account already shows what 4'33'' is about. It is not about silence at all but about its opposite. About noises. The roles of composer/performer and audience are kind of reversed. The audience (plus outside environment) make the "music". 4'33'' is the only piece of music which hands over the performance to the audience. That means of course that 4'33'' is totally different every time it is "played". It is unforeseeable which sounds the listeners will make. In a way it is the most democratic of all compositions. Cage says it better:

But there is another more profound experience behind this piece:

Now this is fascinating. We cannot hear silence (even if it existed) as to be able to listen we have to live and to live our heart has to beat and beat is sound. We enter philosophical territory here. I'd like to quote an extreme point of view. Berkeley's subjective idealism says : "To be is to be perceived." From this follows that not to be perceived is not to be. What we cannot perceive simply does not exist according to Berkeley (he is a kind of doubting Thomas). Ok there are many things our senses cannot perceive but they are there. High frequencies for example. Our ears are not precise enough to hear those frequencies. But this seems to be a completely different problem. Which could be solved by widening the range of frequencies we can hear using transformation (or measuring) devices like radios for example. Not being able to hear silence as we always hear our pulse and nervous system is more like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle which states (in layman's words) that you cannot observe something without changing that which you are observing. This is a fundamental dilemma.

Scientists tell us that there is silence in the space between the stars but this silence is meaningless if we cannot hear it. As meaningless as a God stuck in a black hole, a God whose existence or non-existence wouldn't have any effect on our lives.

People say that silence is unbearable. That it can be used as a torture. But that's rubbish. We can't hear silence. We always hear the rhythm of our body. Maybe this kind of feedback is unsupportable and kills us in the end. Maybe real silence would be wonderful, would be paradise. The torture actually consists in making us approach silence very closely without ever making us reach it. People subjected to this false promise of silence are driven crazy. By themselves.

Thanks to John Cage I now know an answer to the famous koan "What is the sound of one hand?". In the morning it would be the birds singing. In a stormy autumn night the wind blowing etc.

P.S. An afterthought which makes these ramblings rather dubious. What about deaf people? They should "hear" silence, shouldn't they?

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