Be Hear Now

I read an essay by music critic Peter Gutman in the Wall Street Journal about John Cage’s work “Four Minutes Thirty-Three Seconds.” Anyone who is familiar with Cage’s work knows that his stock and trade was pushing the envelope of conventional musical sensibilities. Gutman describes “a prior work in which [Cage] had prescribed an adjustment to the volume and tuning of a dozen radios, with the result dependent upon the frequencies and formats of local stations.” Cage was a master of concert concept art. He often liked to carefully script elements of his pieces while leaving other elements to chance in order to create musical versions of Rorschach ink blot tests, the point of which were to aid the audience to a deeper insight into themselves and their perceptions of the world. 4’33’’ is such a piece.

Gutman describes it this way. “In a typical rendition a musician comes on stage, sits at a piano for the four minutes and thirty-three seconds of the work’s title, occasionally sips some water or turns some pages, and then bows and leaves…4’33’’ is considered a ‘silent’ piece but it isn’t at all.” Of course. Those of the audience who have really been listening understand this because in the absence of noise coming from the stage they begin to notice what meditators notice all the time, the rhythms of the pulse and breathing, the ringing of one’s nervous system in the ears, the restless rustling of the devotees shifting in their seats, the counterpoint of street noises and the dynamics of our internal monologues as they fade in and out of this very existential, slice-of-life “piece”. Gutman considers 4’ 33” a masterpiece.

An "old school" critic might find the whole display a bit “precious.” Cutesy. Little more than a transparent conceit. But Cage has done an interesting thing in the creation of 4’33”. Imagine the vaulted ceilings of the concert hall filled with hundreds of modern music aficionados poised in reverent silence at the feet of the man in the tux seated at the oh-so-grand piano. Then all that rapt respectful attention is quietly shifted away from an artistic diversion to, lo and behold, the moment at hand— what the Buddhist monk Thich Naht Hahn called "the most precious thing of all." Cage’s great respect for his audience was reflected in his high expectations of them. While other artists struggled to imitate nature, Cage attempted to go one step further, to include "the model" within "the piece." He essentially held up the picture frame and bid the art lover to look through it at the marvelous but seldom noticed land/mindscape in which we are emersed— the deeper art from which all "artistic expression springs.

He reminded us that, sure, art is wondrous but what about the tree in the courtyard— the tree that made the piano? What about the reverberant empty space of the concert hall through which the sound waves travel to our ears? What about the space between our thoughts that allows that miraculous music into our souls to do its mysterious healing work?

I woke up in the middle of the night last night thinking on these things and I opened at random a book of quotations I have on the shelf called The Little Zen Companion and, I swear to God, it fell open to these two pages. The first contained a quote from the Tao Te Ching: “We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.” The facing page was a quote from the pianist Artur Schnabel, “The notes I handle no better than many pianists, but the pauses between the notes— ah, that is where the art resides!” Maybe my next entry should just be a blank page.

Cage shows us that a musical performance is like an aural pentamiento and if we scrape away the top layer of coloratura we find another movement of everyday sounds. Delve beneath that and there are the internal sounds that remind us that we are living in a body. Peal away another layer and we hear the mental processes jumping from one aspect of our personal story to another like a dozen radios tuned to different stations. Allow the gap between the thoughts to widen and you begin to experience the lush “string wash” of consciousness that underlies it all. Then we really begin to sense as the physicist John Hagelin said, “The whole universe is just a symphony.” and that “We’re all just waves of vibrations of this underlying unified super string field.”
For the sage, the silence is symphonic.