Broad Sound

(there will never be silence until death comes which never comes)

– John Cage, letter to Helen Wolff (1954)

Sound?? is a 25-minute black-and-white experimental documentary from 1966. It exists to celebrate the uniquely strange music of jazzman Rahsaan Roland Kirk, who’s at times seen playing three saxophones simultaneously—as in, the mouthpieces to all three are in his mouth at once. Like that. 

Meanwhile, a man in a natty suit prowls the streets of a city. He never intersects with Kirk, but his musings on the titular issue—sound??—interweave with Kirk’s musical curlicues.

“Does it communicate anything?” asks this man, whose name is John Cage. “Must it?” On the soundtrack, Kirk’s flute is low and guttural. “Is it a sound? If so, is it music? Is music the word I mean? Is that a sound? If it is, is music music?”

The camera zooms in very tight on John Cage’s face. It spins. And then, we’re somewhere else.

—

I played my cover of John Cage’s 4’33” on my Wendell Hall concert ukulele—I love the ease and convenience of a ukulele, and don’t like the bad rap they get. I sat in the living room of my home on the south shore of Boston, and used my Sennheiser MD 421-N cardioid dynamic microphone connected to my NEI Neptune six-channel mixer. The mic and mixer are both from the ’60s; no idea when the ukulele is from, but it’s older than that. I like to use old stuff.

I did two takes, but I ended up liking the first best. I did the first from memory, while for the second, I was looking at sheet music. I think, counterintuitively, the sheet music made my mind wander instead of focusing it. Sometimes, playing a song by heart gets you the best results.

—

The UK’s first orchestral performance of 4’33” was held on January 16, 2004 at the Barbican Centre in London. It was conducted by Lawrence Foster, and broadcast live on TV. “Cage wrote 4’33” as a piece in three movements,” host Tommy Pearson informed the viewer during the moments before Foster took the stage. 

When the maestro did appear, Pearson made a hurried disclaimer: “I promise you, this is the piece everyone here tonight has come to experience. There really is nothing like John Cage’s 4’33”.”

After the applause died, Foster raised his baton.

And then, for four minutes and 33 seconds, the orchestra did nothing. They sat with their instruments, but they held still, and kept quiet. So did the audience. Between the movements—which is to say, between the silences—Foster dropped his baton to turn a page and mop his brow, allowing the audience a moment to chuckle and cough. Then, back to the business of being quiet.

Afterwards, Pearson gushed over the surging applause: “Well that’s one of the most extraordinary performances I’ve ever experienced here in the Barbican Hall.”

“You could cut the atmosphere with a knife,” co-host Tom Service agreed.

One YouTube comment, though, summed up the frequent response to this most unusual work of avant-garde composition:

Why??????

—

Last weekend, doing errands with my daughter, I tried to coax her into writing some song lyrics to pass the time in line. She hesitated, of course—though we’d written songs together, now I was suggesting she go it alone, and she felt intimidated by the task. But, I assured her, “Anything can be a song. Any sound can be a song.” 

This delighted her. “Is this a song?” she asked as we walked around the pharmacy, and she would throw out an odd syllable or a grunt. Of course, I told her every time. That was the beauty of songs. Finally, she came to the logical end question, the kind only a young child’s brain can casually introduce while leaving CVS: “Can nothing be a song?”

“Sure, silence can be a song!” I informed her. “You know, there’s a pretty famous piece of music that’s just silence.”

She was intrigued, so I went on: “The performer is supposed to just sit there at their instrument and do nothing. That’s how you play the piece: by doing nothing at all.”

“So I could play it?” she asked, getting excited by the prospect of a classic piece of music she could play with literally no effort. 

“Exactly. The point is for the world around you to supply the sound that makes up the piece. So it’s never the same twice, because there’s no way to duplicate the sounds you hear when there’s no sound.”

I realized then that I’d never actually sat and listened to John Cage’s 4’33”. I knew about the famous piece of modernist composition meant to be performed entirely free of movement, but I knew about it in theory rather than practice. I’d never engaged with it in full. And so, on the drive home, we cued up the official album version of 4’33” and we pressed play. 

It was a struggle to sit there in the silence, and I’ll admit I did talk to her a few times. But, as I excused it, that was just part of this particular rendition of 4’33”. Our voices were supplying the sound. My daughter is wiser than I am, though, so she told me to be quiet. I tried. But we both exploded when we heard what sounded like a door shutting far away from the microphone. It was electrifying. There was something so perfectly counterpointed about that sound at that moment—at that distance, at that volume, filling that particular space in air. No wonder that’s the take they released. This is surely the album-perfect 4’33”.

By the time I got home, I knew one thing for sure: I wanted to cover 4’33” at the earliest opportunity.

—

4’33” premiered at a benefit concert at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York on August 29, 1952. It was performed by the pianist David Tudor, who touched the keyboard only when opening and shutting the lid. Aside from that, his only movement was starting a stopwatch, and turning the pages of the sheet music—which is to say, the blank staves.

Cage was, then as now, known as an eccentric, a renegade, an experimenter. One of his most famous inventions is the “prepared piano,” a piano he retrofitted with everything from screws and nails to pencil erasers between the strings and in the hammers. Among his most renowned works is the Imaginary Landscape series, five pieces that use sounds ranging from tin cans to lion’s roars to—on Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (March No. 2)—24 performers operating 12 radios. This latter piece premiered the year before 4’33”, so there’s no question people expected something unusual from John Cage. But still, 4’33” was beyond the pale for some.

“The audience had come prepared to be shocked,” Cage’s friend Peter Yates recalled in David Revill’s book The Roaring Silence: John Cage: A Life, “but not to be dismayed.”

“There was a lot of discussion,” composer Earle Brown recalled in the same book. “A hell of a lot of uproar… it infuriated most of the audience.”

11 days after the Maverick premiere, the local newspaper ran an anonymous letter from an attendee, one that handily sums up the betrayal felt by this group of musically literate, intelligent adults: 

We had been told that Cage’s show had been quite impressive in New York last winter and we were all looking forward to a stimulating evening of musical experimentation. Precedents were to be broken. The Maverick was to be alive with music on a weekday evening, the sacred hall was at last going to ring with something new. We anticipated an honest, though controversial musical adventure. What did we get? A poorly timed comedy show.

It’s worth bearing in mind that this was the ’50s—the early ’50s. A musical controversy like Dylan going electric was almost 15 years in the future; Elvis hadn’t even recorded “That’s All Right” yet, let alone shaken his hips on TV. Gathering for silence might have sounded like a hip night out for scenesters by the late ’60s. But the number-one Billboard hit of 1952 was Leroy Anderson’s “Blue Tango,” which is exactly what it sounds like: an instrumental tango. This seems like important context when considering the notorious rallying cry that one audience member hurled following the premiere of 4’33”: “Good people of Woodstock, let’s drive these people out of town!”

4’33” remains controversial, even as it’s been accepted as a part of the avant-garde canon. A discussion post on the subreddit r/musictheory boasts a fair share of criticism: “Does the emperor wear no clothes?” one user asks. “It’s funny and all,” another says, “but really not that deep.” A somewhat more generous assessment is still iconoclastic: “By the practical definition—the one most people agree on—this isn’t music … 4’33” is performance art.” Still another remarks, “I understand the point of the music … Doesn’t stop me from using it as a meme every chance I get.”

Having given this much space to the dissenters, though, perhaps I should let Cage speak for himself. Reflecting on the premiere in the book Conversing with Cage, the composer said, “What [the audience] 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. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.”

To get straight to the point, Cage was inviting us to redefine what music is. What is a performance? And, following the thread a little further, what is a recording of a performance? On some level, it sounds like dorm-room philosophizing; on the other, these questions are slippery, and even profound. What are we doing when we’re listening? And, half the time, are we doing it at all?

—

There is a published score for 4’33”, and you can purchase it for your home library. I tried to avoid it, searching around online for a full PDF, but even silence is subject to copyright when put to paper, so I had to buy it.

I wouldn’t describe the commercially-available sheet music for 4’33” as a troll, per se. But it is, in fact, just a large sheet of paper bearing three roman numerals—I, II, and III—below each of which is written the word “Tacet,” the musicological term for “do nothing.” So yeah. I own that now.

Somewhat more interesting is the reconstruction of David Tudor’s now-lost original score. This, at least, features staves, blank though they may be. It spans 14 pages, one staff running horizontally across each page, a note on the title page making explicit that each half-inch should be one second. Tudor created another version for a PBS performance of the piece, while Cage created a few of his own. Each demonstrates a different approach to this problem of playing silence.

In her 2012 book Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists, Kay Larson argues for the profundity of any and all sheet music for 4’33”: “Traditional scores fill their pages with symbols that suggest to performers what sounds they should make … In the score of 4’33” there is no ‘should’.” Larson compares a 4’33” score to an oval drawn by Zen philosopher D.T. Suzuki during a lecture attended by Cage in the late 1940s. Suzuki’s oval sported two piercing, parallel lines that intruded on the shape, opening it up to the outside. “He is describing the human self,” Larson writes of this diagram. “The [oval] is the boundary between us and everything else: the identity that constructs the viewpoint of ‘I-me-mine.’” This oval, as interpreted by Larson, is the “ego boundary,” and it’s “a mirror that reflects the way our own minds are constructed.” And with that, according to Cage’s own later recollections, something remarkable cracked open inside him.

There were other revelations that led to the creation of a blank score. There were French Dadaist Marcel Duchamp’s “works without art,” which Cage nodded at when calling 4’33” an “art without work.” There was the anechoic chamber at Harvard University, where he stepped into what was billed as a space that obliviated all sound, only to realize he could hear the blood in his head pumping away (there truly is no such thing as silence). And there were the White Paintings (1951) of Robert Rauschenberg, a series that blew Cage’s mind with the way the white paint reflected light and shadow in Rauschenberg’s varying panels of one, two, three, four, and seven canvases. “To whom,” Cage wrote in a 1953 statement accompanying the paintings, “no subject, no image, no taste, no object, no beauty, no message, no talent, no technique, no why, no idea, no intention, no art, no object, no feeling, no black, no white, no and.” According to Cage’s own “Autobiographical Statement,” written in 1990 (two years before his death), it was the anechoic chamber and the white paintings that led directly to 4’33”. But to Larson, it all comes back to Suzuki’s oval, and the illusory division between us and the world. “The score of 4’33” is a proposition,” Larson writes. “It says, in notational shorthand: Stop for a moment and look around you and listen … Cage has ‘divided’ what can never be divided. We have to assume that he knew it couldn’t be divided. He would have been aware that in 4’33” he was making marks on the river of infinity.”

“I just love looking at this,” my daughter told me as I showed her Tudor’s blank 4’33” staves.

“I know,” I agreed, thinking of the oval. But then I asked her, “Why?”

“It just feels so good,” she said, seeming baffled herself. “When I see blank space, I just think, what can this be filled with?”

—

Towards the end of his life, John Cage gave a TV interview in which he made a claim about music: “When I hear what we call ‘music’,” he said, “it seems to me that someone is talking … I don’t need sound to talk to me.”

This notion called to mind a few words from Brian Eno, another eccentric and innovator of sound. This January, Brian—whose credits include being a founding member of Roxy Music and a collaborator of Bowie and Bono—taught an online songwriting course through the great School of Song, and in his first lecture, he made a fairly bold claim of his own: “In a certain way, I hate songs … because they usually distract you from music.”

Earlier in that same class, Brian had assigned us the task of writing a song in 20 minutes, with a stopwatch running on the shared Zoom screen. It was an intimidating proposition, but to psych us up, the founder of School of Song reminded us, “A song can be as little as one word long.”

“The one word can be the title!” Brian added. “But it better be a good one, then.”

As a starting point, we were offered G and C, but Brian suggested narrowing it down even further. Why, said this man (who invented the term ambient music after being confined to bed in 1975 and finding he liked the sound of the rain as much as the sound of the faint harp music on the record player), did it have to be two chords? Why not, asked this man (who argued, in his ambient music manifesto, that he was operating in opposition to muzak, which “[regularizes] environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncrasies”), just G? 

“It doesn’t have to be more than one chord,” Brian Eno said.

A song can be anything. 

—

I worked a long time on the mix for my cover of 4’33”. There was a clear digital buzz—in lieu of what we usually call music, the mic elected to pick up my Scarlett USB audio interface—so I added compression and fiddled with the gain. I boosted the lows and middles and ducked the highs. I experimented. I didn’t want that buzz gone entirely; I needed it for some reason. I was looking for something I couldn’t quite hear.

In the meantime, I listened to quite a few covers of 4’33”, of which there are a multitude on Apple Music. I found that most covers fell into one of two camps: either too noisy, or too quiet.

On the one hand, there’s the clear temptation to fill your 4’33” with ambient sound. This is the case with Susanne Kessel’s version, which teems with birdsong; it’s the case with Amadinda Percussion Group’s, which features rain, roosters, and bells; it’s the case with the Normal’s, which includes walking and cars. There’s no conventional music in these recordings, but certainly there isn’t silence, either. There’s the sound of the world. But was this what Cage meant to put his parameters onto?

When I say “parameters,” I’m paraphrasing Cage’s own suggestion. In Silence: Lectures and Writings, he proposed that the word music was a little too loaded, and too associated with the instruments of the past. Instead, he preferred “a more meaningful term: organization of sound.” So any version of 4’33”, if it can be considered music, should be considered organized sound—or, sound placed within the parameters of four minutes and 33 seconds. The quieter the recording, the more the world around the listener—beyond the headphones or the speakers—supplies the organized sound. The more sound the artist organizes for us, the less we can experience our own surroundings. But, on the other hand, the quieter the recording, the less we have to grasp onto—the less awareness we have that there is sound being organized for us at all.

And so there are the versions so silent that there isn’t any ambience to pick up on—the ones by Fad Gadget, Lord of the Lost, and others. For this, the musician could just as easily have created a four-minutes-and-33-second digital gap and pressed export. There’s no situation to envision. When I think of 4’33”, I think of the musician and the conscious choice to sit there and play nothingness. I want to see a person, and believe I’m there with them for the space of the performance. I want to be transported to a place with atmosphere you could cut with a knife, as Tom Service said of the orchestral version. That’s what makes the official album version so fantastic—the tiny shifts. The door shutting. The audible silence.

“Silence is not a question of a little sound or more sound,” Cage says in Sound??. “There’s no such thing as no sound. It’s simply a question of what sounds we intend, and what sounds we don’t intend.”

The more I worked on my mix, the more I felt I had to write something about 4’33”, explaining why I felt so drawn to it; maybe by trying to explain it, I could explain it to myself. Among my research materials, I collected the 25th anniversary edition of Brian Eno’s A Year with Swollen Appendices—it’s a published diary, so not exactly something you need to take front to back. Thus, I dipped in randomly, sort of the way I use my box of “oblique strategies,” Brian’s cards sporting little phrases meant to inspire creativity. On one of my dips, I found Brian jotting down a new oblique strategy—he was writing them during the year he kept this diary.

“What most recently impressed you?” read Brian’s strategic obliquity. “What can you learn from it? What could you take from it?”

I kept mixing. I exported. I listened. I mixed some more. 

—

I found myself dipping in randomly to A Year with Swollen Appendices as I sat by my daughter’s swimming lesson. I was assaulted by echoing noise in that massive greenhouse-like space, and I read Brian’s thoughts on noise:

Noise is random behaviour, or behaviour so complex that we cannot predict it … Noise is not silence but it is also not loudness. It is the absence of coherence … To allow something to become noisy is to allow it to support multiple readings. It is a way of multiplying resonances.

Waiting in the hallway as my daughter changed, I tried to listen to the noise of the world. It was cacophonous in the gym, and with some effort, I could make it sound beautiful to my ear. Was I playing 4’33”, I wondered? Was I doing it even if I wasn’t timing myself? Was I playing a movement, or maybe playing it on repeat? 

I asked my kids to draw the art for my version of 4’33”. I cut a sheet of printer paper into a square, and handed my daughter a ballpoint pen. I drew the shapes “4’33”” on another piece of paper and offered it to her, inviting her to copy my penmanship. When she was done, she passed it to her younger brother, to whom I offered the same invitation. He drew it his way: some odd backwards numbers that he said were meant to be 5’99”. Next it went to their little sister, though don’t call her the baby. I asked her to write 4’33” on the paper, too.

“But I can’t do numbers,” she said, anxiety etched on her face.

That was the point, I explained. 4’33” can be anything. And so can its cover art. She ended up spending a long time on her version of those shapes.

Earlier, we had read some books on Cage. There are two picture books about him, one a biography and the other focusing on 4’33”, so I got both, and we got cozy on the couch. We started with the one about 4’33”, which is titled Nothing, and was written by Nicholas Day in 2024. It’s deftly told, weaving the story of the piece’s premiere with a few brushstrokes on Cage’s life. It’s also a lovely explainer on the piece for children, maybe the audience most likely to be receptive to its philosophical charms. “There is always a whole world out there to hear,” I read my kids. “That was what David Tudor was doing … he was letting the audience hear what was inside the silence.” My kids thought that was interesting.

Then, we got to the page about the piece’s legacy: “Every time, the audience hears something different. They hear whatever there is to hear in that moment. That is the genius of 4’33”. Every time it is written by the listener.”

And something very strange happened as I read those words: my voice started to shake a little bit. But then it stopped. We moved on to the other book, this one titled Beautiful Noise, written by Lisa Rogers in 2023. The book is composed as a series of rhetorical questions: “What if you wished a piano could sound like a whole orchestra,” reads one page, “so you stuck erasers and bolts and screws between and under its strings and made music no one had ever heard before? Then you’d be like John Cage.” My kids thought that was interesting. Then we turned the page.

“What if,” I began to read, “you composed a piece of piano music without any notes and invited people to a barn to hear it, and…” 

We turned another page, and I realized my voice was doing that weird shaking thing again.

“…for exactly four minutes,” read the next page, “and thirty-three seconds the pianist sat at his piano but did not strike a single key, and the only sounds were the sound of the rain and people grumbling that they didn’t hear music but you did?” I read the next part quickly. “Then you’d be like John Cage.” I read it quickly because, for some reason, I was now openly crying.

To remind you, I had never heard 4’33” until the prior weekend. I didn’t know John Cage from John Cale from Nic Cage before my daughter and I stumbled onto a discussion of the so-called silent piece during a trip to the pharmacy. But I felt an urgency surrounding this work. It pulled at something deep and primal in me—the artist as maverick, the term that lent its name to the house of 4’33”’s premiere. This piece was brave, and it was more than that: it was transcendent, not in the crass armchair definition, but in a more theological one—existing apart from and not subject to the limitations of the material universe. 

There was a human being named John Cage. He was born in 1912, a few months after the sinking of the Titanic. He only missed Gustav Mahler by a year. The Rite of Spring premiered the year he turned one. The first clear transmission of music over the radio occurred the year he turned five. What we call “the swing era” was his 20s and 30s. “This Land Is Your Land” was written the year he turned 28. The 45 RPM single was invented the year he turned 37. And the year he turned 40, he composed a piece of music (an organization of sound, even if that sound is simply the sound of our own blood in our ears) that was not subject to the limitations of the material universe. 

If that doesn’t make you choke up, congratulations on being made of stronger stuff than I am.

—

“Do you work ‘inside’ or ‘outside’?” Brian Eno asks rhetorically in his essay “On Being an Artist.” He wasn’t writing about 4’33”, but, on the other hand, wasn’t he?

To work outside is to deal with the world surrounding the work—the thoughts, assumptions, expectations, legends, histories, economic structures, critical responses, legal issues and so on. You might think of these things as the frame of the work.

A frame is a way of creating a little world around something. Traditionally that little world isn’t given much thought.

In classical music, the concert hall, the tails and the black garments are all signs to the audience that they are about to see something located within a particular set of values relating to what musicians do and what composers do and what audiences do.

What they offer is insulation, reassurance, a sense of correct location. They are relatively unquestioned.

A lot of the confusion people feel when faced with new art, whether popular or fine, is the problem ‘Where does it end?’

The biggest arguments about validity are almost always about this subject: whether or not certain things are allowed to be included as suitable areas for artistic attention, and whether or not certain others can be left out. Peter Schmidt used to have a phrase: ‘to omit what no one else has thought of leaving out.’

Some work is almost all frame, which is to say that almost all of its power derives from what can be said about it, what can be drawn into connection with.

These are exercises in the conferral of value.

John Cage and Brian Eno gave a shared interview in 1985, when Cage was 73 and Brian was 37. The moderator from Musician magazine quoted some of Brian’s own writing back to him.

“That’s beautiful,” John Cage said.

“Thank you,” Brian Eno said, and he blushed. Later, Brian offered a few more of his observations on life. The moment of artistic inspiration, Brian said, was “like a crystallization point where you can’t detect any single element having changed, but suddenly things have locked.”

“That’s beautiful,” John Cage said again.

“It’s not terribly miserable,” Brian said of waiting for the moment of inspiration. “It is occasionally for me, but not very often.”

After a pause, John Cage said, “But there’s no other life.”

“Yeah,” Brian agreed.

—

“We’re always listening,” my son told me after we read the picture books about John Cage.

“Sure,” I agreed. “But… not always.”

“Right,” he said, thoughtfully, coming around. “Sometimes we’re ignoring.”

“It just feels like a practical joke,” my wife said, surveying the “Tacet” score for 4’33”.

“Yeah,” I affirmed. “A lot of smart people have felt that way for a long time.”

But if it’s a joke, it’s one Cage found funny on a deep, personal level—he claims to have spent the rest of his life playing 4’33” privately, deriving great personal benefit from the practice. If it’s a joke, it’s one he crafted with great care, claiming to have pondered the piece for years, spending days measuring out the beats and bars of each movement as carefully as he did with his more sonically elaborate pieces (if there can be anything more sonically elaborate than the sound of the world).

Personally, I’m deeply uncomfortable with silence. It leaves space for bad thoughts, for regret and fear. So I cram my ears with podcasts, which feel like junk even when they’re informative, or music, which at least feels some kind of healthy, especially when it’s serene. I tried meditating for a while. It didn’t take. But I’ve been listening to 4’33” as I get ready for the day. It helps dial me in. It makes me mindful.

“How do you start your day?” Brian Eno asked in the first lecture for his online songwriting course. He imagined it involved “getting up and stuffing yourself with stuff—breakfast. Cookies. Maple syrup. The news. The emails. So the first thing that most of us do in the morning is we get up and we input as much as we can.

“That’s our default habit all the time now: we want to consume things. [But] if you can stick it out for a little bit, you find that instead of things coming into you, things start coming out of you. So it’s as if you suddenly start listening to what is happening inside yourself.” 

Listening to 4’33” helps me do that.

But here’s something else John Cage believed: he thought people over-intellectualized sound. As he said on TV late in his life, “People expect listening to be more than listening, and so sometimes they speak of … the meaning of sound. When I talk about music, it finally comes to people’s minds that I’m talking about sound that doesn’t mean anything, that is not inner. [People think] for something to just be a sound is to be useless, whereas I love sounds just as they are, and I have no need for them to be anything more than what they are. I don’t want them to be psychological … I just want it to be a sound. 

“And,” he reminded the camera, and the viewer, “I’m not so stupid, either.”

—

Here’s one last thing John Cage believed: John Cage agreed with Immanuel Kant, who apparently said there are only two sounds in the world that don’t have to mean anything—“One is music. And the other is laughter.” And then, John Cage laughed.

I invite you to enjoy my cover of 4’33”.