Notes from a Sojourn
March 27, 2020
The Sound of Silence
On August 29, 1952, a pianist named David Tudor sat at the piano of an upstate New York concert venue to premiere new music by the composer John Cage. The piece was entitled 4’33”.
“…Tudor sat down at the piano on the small raised wooden stage, closed the keyboard lid over the keys, and looked at a stopwatch. Twice in the next four minutes he raised the lid up and lowered it again, careful to make no audible sound, although at the same time he was turning pages of the music, which were devoid of notes. After four minutes and thirty-three seconds had passed, Tudor rose to receive applause – and thus premiered one of the most controversial, inspiring, surprising, infamous, perplexing, and influential musical works since Igor Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps”(i).
Many were incredulous. Some thought it was a hoax, some felt mocked. Others judged it as musically blasphemous. Even today it still makes many people as angry and incredulous as it did in 1952. Try mentioning it in polite company sometime (and tell me what happens!).
But John Cage wasn’t joking. Beyond the histrionics of his critics, Cage revealed something incredibly profound because it is simple: there is no such thing as silence. Not absolutely. By silencing the designated performer, Cage “muted the site of centralized and privileged utterance”(ii) and reframed the environmental and unintended sounds of his audience “in a moment of attention in order to open the mind to the fact that all sounds are music”(iii).
I won’t try or pretend that I can persuade anyone reading this post to like John Cage’s approach to music. But I would ask you to consider how his approach relates to prayer.
Who is the “designated performer” in my prayer life? Who dominates the site of “centralized and privileged utterance”? If I’m honest, I do. Most of the time anyway. So, what if I were to take a page from the score of Cage’s 4’33” when I pray? What might happen if I intentionally silenced my performance to hear Another’s? What might happen if I restrained my utterances to privilege Another’s? What would I hear?
Colin+
(i) Kyle Gann, No Such Thing As Silence: John Cage’s 4’33” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 2-3.
(ii) Douglas Kahn from John Cage: Silence and Silencing in Gann’s No Such Thing As Silence, 18-19.
(iii) Gann, No Such Thing As Silence, 11.
