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SILENCE - John Cage

Let's start with the person behind this unique performance: John Cage. A student of Arnold Schoenberg, who described himself as an inventor of sounds and always emphasized that experimentation was particularly important when it comes to music.

His definition of music was always that all “sounds heard are music” and it doesn’t need to be a certain structure or harmony. The world is full of sounds, it only needs an audience to receive those and listen to them.

 

“There is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound.” - John Cage

 

 

John Cage also always draws comparisons to nature in his pieces, because everything that happens in nature, all sounds, whether random or not, result in music according to his view.  Which is why, in another piece, he wanted the composer to play a piece of wood. He should interpret the annual rings as notes and play the piece of wood.  Or another comparison is also that nature is constantly changing, evolving and never standing still. This comparison of constant change, he wants to convey with his pieces as well.  To show us that things that seem very tiny or inconspicuous and unimportant, like the beat of a butterfly's wings, can nevertheless have a great impact. The flap of a butterfly's wings that seems so inconspicuous, but by all appearances can cause a tornado. This is the kind of comparison John Cage wants to achieve with his piece. The supposed silence in the piece is not what matters to him here, it is about the listeners, the audience. As he said, sounds are created everywhere and as soon as these are heard, music is created according to his definition. Because if we look or rather listen more closely at the performance of 4'33 we will perceive many sounds. Raindrops pattering on the roof and all the noises made by the audience, because some of them didn't know what was going on and started talking to each other, leaving the hall or other noises that were made during the performance. Exactly these background noises were the main part of the piece, the music in the sense of John Cage. Since at the same time there were also people present who perceived all these sounds and which, just like in Nature or many other pieces by Cage, had no real structure.

 

 

Therefore John Cage initiated the discussion about sounds as music with his compositions. 

He shows us that we can change and reinterpret certain concepts and think further than just  what the traditional systems have taught us. Because our mind is usually trained to combine music with sounds that are in harmony with each other, which is not the case with John Cage. For him, music is not about perfection or to bring order out of chaos, but rather to be more open and to enjoy sounds that arise unintentionally in situations, as in 4'33, and to see them as music.

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