Art by Jon McCormack.
This episode was written and produced by Martin Zaltz Austwick.
John Cage was a respected composer when, in 1952, he created his “silent piece”, 4’33’’ - a piece that would have the music world scratching their heads. This episode asks whether 4’33’’ is really “silent”, and we explore the history of a piece musicians still talk about today - and speak to the man who campaigned to get it to the top the British charts in 2010. Featuring composers Kyle Gann and Nahre Sol, and artist Dave Hilliard.
MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE
Plastic Furniture by Audioblocks
Sleepwalker by Hey Lunar
Minor Stretch by Sound of Picture
Footnote by Martin Zaltz Austwick
A Bad Crossword (Instrumental) by Martin Zaltz Austwick
Snowmelt by Martin Zaltz Austwick
Slow Minnesota by Martin Zaltz Austwick
Am Trans by Sound of Picture
Got Spark by Martin Zaltz Austwick
Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, and hosted by Dallas Taylor.
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Check out Kyle Gann’s No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage's 4'33" wherever you get your books.
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Find Dave Hilliard on Instragram at davehilliardart.
Listen to more of Martin Zaltz Austwick’s music at palebirdmusic.com.
View Transcript ▶︎
You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.
[Music clip - In a Landscape, performed by Stephen Drury]
John Cage was one of the most significant figures in 20th Century music. He was a student of Arnold Schoenberg, but went on to be an influential composer in his own right. His work drew on Chinese and Japanese influences at a time when American society was just starting to open up to these cultures. He influenced avant garde composers like Phillip Glass and Steve Reich, as well as songwriters and artists like Yoko Ono and Lou Reed, and even Aphex Twin. He was also hugely influential in modern dance. What you hear playing is his 1948 piece “In A Landscape”. This version was recorded in 1994 by Stephen Drury.
[music continues]
This piece is actually not very typical of John Cage’s writing - he’s more known for his innovations in music, and his avante garde techniques. As far as John Cage pieces go, this is pretty much as “mainstream classical” as it gets.
But despite his reputation for avante garde writing, no one was prepared for what he did in 1952. This was the year he created the most daring piece of his career - something really “out there”, even for him. It was called “Four Minutes and Thirty Three Seconds” - It was a piece that some critics even refused to call “music”.
[music out]
Kyle: oddly enough, my first experience with 4'33" was playing it on my high school piano recital. I played it when I was 17 before I had heard anybody else play it.
That’s Kyle Gann, a Professor at Bard College. He’s also a composer, and a former critic at the Village Voice.
Kyle: I bought the sheet music in Dallas for 50 cents.
It’s almost ironic that you can buy sheet music for 4’33”. Because for the entire duration of the piece, the performer plays... nothing at all.
Well, to be technically, the performer is playing “rest” but to the audience, it looks like nothing is happening.
Nahre: I think people just looked around at each other and kind of smiled, then a few giggles here and there.
That’s Nahre Sol - composer, musician, and video creator.
Nahre: I was first introduced to John Cage in an academic environment.
Nahre: At first, it didn't really make sense to me, because here I was in the conservatory. I was really concentrated on playing the piano and when I first heard about Four minutes and Thirty-Three Seconds, it's a piece where you're not playing. So, it just didn't make any sense.
John Cage’s 4’33’’ was performed for the first time in the summer of 1952 by renowned pianist, David Tudor. It was at Maverick Concert Hall, which is an outdoor concert hall in Woodstock, New York [SFX: outdoor ambience, small crowd]. The concert featured all new piano music from different composers.
So, what happened here was a pianist walked out on stage [SFX], sat down at the piano [SFX]. Then, to start 4’33” he closed the piano lid [SFX]. He then sat there in silence, doing nothing, playing nothing - for thirty seconds. At that point, he opened the piano lid [SFX]. And immediately closed it again [SFX]**...**
He sat in silence for two minutes and twenty three seconds. Then, he opened the piano lid [SFX] and closed it once more [SFX]**...**
A minute and forty seconds later, he got up and walked off the stage.
The audience had no idea what to think.
[music in]
Nahre: I think it really pushed the edge around what people considered acceptable in classical music or any kind of music and that, in today's context, sounds quite ridiculous, because almost everything has been done in almost every way.
Kyle: A lot of people were kind of bemused by it.
Kyle: Cage's mother asked one of his friends, "Don't you think John has gone too far this time?".
A friend of Cage wrote to him, begging that he not turn his career into a joke.
John Cage had, well if you could call it “created” a piece of music that really challenged some very established ideas about music composition. It’s something that musicians are still inspired by - and still debate - even today.
[music out]
To understand just what John Cage was thinking, let’s back up to the 1940s. Back then, John Cage was making a name for himself composing for “The Prepared Piano”.
[music in]
Kyle: All during the 40s Cage's big instrument was the prepared piano, and the thing about the prepared piano is you put screws or erasers, or tape or anything on the strings of one note, and every note ends up having a different timbre and so you're no longer working with a continuum of pitch, you're working with a whole bunch of distinct sounds.
The music you can hear is Cage’s “Sonata Number Five” from “Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano”, probably his most famous work outside of 4’33’’.
[Music clip: Sonata Number Five continues]
Nahre: What I find interesting is that when you prepare a piano, you're really dealing with a lot of elements of spontaneity and chance, because here you are dealing with foreign objects that are placed in the piano, and because of this set up, there are a lot of things that are unpredictable, once you do it, and it's really hard to keep the outcome consistent [Music clip: Sonata Number Five, chaotic part of song]. So, just by circumstance, you have to embrace that margin of not knowing the outcome. And so, when I was working with Prepared Piano, at first, I was really frustrated because I really wanted to reproduce a certain outcome.
[music out]
The sheet music for prepared piano has some really detailed instructions about where to place each object. But it’s impossible for every performer to have the same piano, or the same screw, or the same rubber eraser. So the sound you get is always different. This was pretty bananas and pretty alien to the way most composers, and musicians are taught to do things.
Nahre: I definitely have been trained to really put a priority on getting as much control as possible. I'm a little bit of a control freak when it comes to just wanting something to sound a certain way and wanting to play something a certain way.
Today we call a lot of John Cage’s work “chance music”. Basically composers of chance music create some guidelines for the performer, but major parts of it are left up to chance. So, every performance is something really special. Never heard before, and never to be replicated. John Cage used ideas from East Asia to find new ways to do that.
Kyle: It was really in 49 and 50 that Cage started getting heavily interested in zen. There was a tremendous influx of Japanese culture into America right after World War II.
The Chinese Book of Changes, the I-Ching, was a huge influence on John Cage. The I-Ching is over two thousand years old, and it’s pretty complex to explain. But basically you generate random numbers - by flipping coins, for example - and the sections that come up tell you something about a decision you need to make. It’s a bit like a Tarot deck, or a magic eight ball - just much, much, much more complex.
Kyle: You ask a question and it would give you any one of 64 answers randomly. And the synchronicity of the universe is supposed to ensure that that answer will be the right one for the moment, and Cage got interested in this idea and started... even before he wrote 4'33", started using the I-Ching in his composing.
[Music clip: John Cage, David Tudor - I]
This piece of music you’re listening to is Cage’s “Music of Changes” - composed by flipping coins and using chance to make music. This version was performed by Martine Joste [Music clip continues: John Cage, David Tudor - I]. You can hear how there are long periods with no music at all, interspersed with big, loud chords, and melodies which seem… well, pretty random.
[music out]
So, John Cage was getting increasingly interested in chance - in letting the universe provide the answer to the question “what note should I play next?”. But to hear the answer to the question, you have to listen. And in the 1940s, listening to the universe was getting harder to do.
[Musak in]
Kyle: The Muzak corporation was founded in 1934. It really took off during World War II and musicians of that generation were horrified by it, as were lots of other people.
Kyle: There was a case that went to the Supreme Court about it, and it was seen as a terrible scourge by lots of musicians. There were musicians who would make lists of restaurants that didn't play Muzak and only go to those.
But there were attempts to shut down the constant background music.
Kyle: In January of that year, 1952, there was a college student in the Midwest who started selling silent records for jukeboxes. So if you didn't want to listen to the jukebox for a moment, you could put in your nickel [SFX: coin going into jukebox] and it'd play a silent record [SFX: button press, needle drop, soft jukebox motor hum].
John Cage became obsessed with the idea of silence - and the idea that, increasingly, people were losing the option to shut out the background noise of the world. He worried that Musak would stop people from being able to hear silence altogether.
Kyle: He gave a lecture in 1948, and announced his idea to write a four and a half minute piece of silence that he was going to sell to the Muzak Company.
Kyle: It started out I think as kind of a political protest. That if you get a silent piece on Muzak, people get to not listen to anything for four and a half minutes.
So 4’33’’ actually started as an attempt to escape from music being imposed on us everywhere we go. But it struck a real nerve, and quickly evolved beyond that.
Cage was starting to think about silence not as the absence of sound - but as the opportunity to listen. And when he visited a truly quiet place, he made a startling discovery.
Kyle: He came up to Boston and visited anechoic chamber at Harvard.
Anechoic chambers are rooms that are acoustically treated to minimise sound to almost zero. There are no sounds in them - at least, not from the room itself ...
Kyle: He said he heard two sounds in motion and the engineer told him one was his nervous system, the other was his blood in circulation. This has been debunked. You can't hear your nervous system. It's been speculated that he probably had tinnitus like I do. I wish that were my nervous system I'm hearing, but it's the echo of past very loud concerts.
I’ve personally experienced an anechoic chamber, and it’s a really wild experience that can completely change your perceptions about sound and silence. Really, I could hear two distinct sounds. I could hear somewhat of a high-pitched hissing noise [SFX]. I don’t know if it’s a mild tinnitus, but it's something I’ve never heard before in my normal life. It really felt like my brain turning up an amplifier just grasping for anything to hear. And the other thing I could hear really clearly was blood pushing through my body [SFX].
Kyle: It gave Cage the idea that wherever we are, even our bodies make sounds. There's no such thing as a silent environment. As long as you're in your body, you're always hearing something.
This is where John Cage’s interest in chance and randomness met his interest in silence. He realised that creating an environment with no distractions wasn’t about creating silence. It wasn’t even about controlling noise. It was about the sounds that were already there, but you suddenly hear for the first time - when you’re really ready to listen.
That’s what’s so often misunderstood about 4’33’’, people think that it’s a joke, and the punchline is… well, nothing at all. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. What John Cage really wanted us to hear the beauty of the sonic world around us.
[music in]
Our world is getting noisier and noiser, and 4’33’’ has even more importance today than it did when it premiered, over 60 years ago. So much so that it recently broke into the UK pop charts. We'll find out how that happened after the break.
[music out]
MIDROLL
[music in]
John Cage was fascinated by the idea of chance. So he started experimenting with “prepared” piano, and later with the I-Ching. His distaste for Musak and interest in silence took him to the quietest place on earth. Once these two strands of his life met, he created one of the most controversial and influential pieces in history.
[music out]
But here in the 21st Century, 4’33’’ went mainstream, and even got into the UK Top 40.
Dave: So Cage against the machine started as a joke really.
That’s Dave Hilliard - a visual artist and psychotherapist - and founder of the “Cage Against the Machine” campaign.
Dave: What gets to number one in the UK music charts at Christmas, is historically quite a big deal. And so what I think had happened around 2009 and those X factor type shows [X-Factor - Joe McElderry - The Climb in], it started to become quite big. So as a reaction against that, you had a Facebook based campaign to try and get Rage Against the Machine [Rage Against the Machine - Killing in the Name Of] to number one at Christmas. They did that kind of, really just off the back of a Facebook page, and it was this really successful “people power” kind of idea.
Amazingly, Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name” topped the UK charts at Christmas 2009 thanks to this campaign. So in 2010, Dave decided to start his own Christmas number One campaign.
[music in]
Dave: It was a joke really at first, me suggesting 4'33 in the music charts.
It was taking the idea to a kind of ludicrous extreme really. I didn't really have any plans of how it might actually take place. It was literally just me doing something that amused myself. So I created a Facebook page.
At first, the page only had a few followers.
Dave: And I think it grew gradually and after that it started going up into the hundreds. It just started gathering momentum until it got into the thousands really. It was more media attention, and for a while silence became quite hot property. Silence was quite a desirable commodity.
Dave’s Cage Against the Machine campaign shifted from a joke into a reality. He was contacted by a couple of people who had the idea to air 4’33 as a Live Aid promotion.
[music out]
If you’re a child of the 1980s, you might remember the song “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” [music clip in] - with a bunch of celebrities singing in a recording studio as part of Live Aid. Dave and his friends were going to do the same thing… but with 4’33’’.
They managed to bring together some of the biggest names in the UK music scene and booked a studio in London. Performers who couldn’t be in the studio on the day of the recording literally phoned in their performances.
Here is a little bit of that performance.
[Music clip: Cage Against the Machine performance]
So what you hear buzzing in the audio lines and people softly shifting in the room. And yeah… that’s the point. Every performance of 4’33” sounds like the place it is performed. That’s the chance element of the music. When the recording was finished, Dave and his team got ready to share it with the British public.
[music in]
Dave: So yea, there was a Single launch party and somebody, thought it was a good idea to hold it in a London nightclub. It was due to be launched at midnight, but it was just a normal club night. So people had just gone there just for a night out.
When midnight arrived, the DJ stopped the music and played Cage Against the Machine’s version of 4’33’’.
[SFX: music cut out, disappointed audience]
Dave: Most of the people there had not asked to be involved in this performance at all. They hadn't gone out that night and thought, “Should we go and appreciate some avant garde performance art tonight?”. And so at first, if you just stopped playing music in a nightclub at midnight people were quite angry and shouting and “play the music” and “why has this stopped?”.
But, surprisingly, that didn’t last for too long.
Dave: And that reached a peak after about one or two minutes and then it went oddly silent and you could just hear little pockets of people talking and stuff. [SFX: Small conversations] And that was one of my favorite bits actually of the whole experience, was that was like a real enactment of the performance and the people involved in it hadn't asked to be involved in it, but they were having an experience and they were part of the experience and I thought it was wonderful really.
Cage Against The Machine made it all the way to number 21. But for Dave Hilliard, it had never really been about getting it to the top of the charts. For him, that strange moment in a London club was worth all the months of work.
Nahre: It's really about creating the environment for which you can experience sound in a specific way.
That’s Nahre again.
Nahre: Specific, not in terms of how it's imposed onto you, but how you experience that performance. You're just creating a space and that space is filled with sound. I think it's hard to accept for a lot of people to really consider that piece a piece of music, because a lot of the sounds being produced is not by the performer and they're not traditional sounds and there is a lot of silence but I think it really makes you reconsider what silences is, what music is in relation to silence.
Kyle: It's very different depending on where you play it,
This is Kyle Gann again:
Kyle: I find it really significant that the first performances is at a outdoor concert hall in Woodstock, the Maverick Concert Hall [SFX: natural ambience], because you know, it's a wonderful natural environment. When I played it in high school, we sat there and listened to [SFX: HVAC sounds] the auditorium HVAC system. It was a pretty antiseptic space for it, and Cage would have... it's just a much more minimalist performance. Cage would have found that just as legitimate as anything else.
[music in]
John Cage was trying to get us to listen. And this way of listening would have an impact far beyond music.
Dave: John Cage was quite into what we might call Eastern thinking, and things like mindfulness and meditation have been around for hundreds if not thousands of years in those cultures. And in the West we act like we've just discovered mindfulness. Whereas actually these things have been proven to be good for humans for thousands of years.
Mindfulness and Meditation are much more mainstream in the west now - but when John Cage created 4’33’’ in the 1950s, they were relatively new ideas to western audiences.
Dave: It's an experience and that allows you to bring whatever you bring to it. It's not a prescriptive experience and it reflects a lot back to you. That's the sort of thing we'd think about quite a lot in psychotherapy, that all your reactions to things and to other people come back to you and your thoughts and your feelings, it all comes from you. And I think that's a really potentially quite useful and quite profound experience to have. It is what you make it I think. It's what you bring to it.
Nahre: It just makes you a little more present and appreciate things just the way they are, and I think that's what everyone is still struggling to do, which is why Four Minutes and Thirty-three Seconds is still a subject of interest to a lot of people in terms of talking about what exactly is this, what's happening here, what does it mean? Is it really music? Is it sound? Is sound music? Is there a difference? But just really letting go of all of that, and just being and experiencing everything around, including everything that's not happening, it's hard to do.
433 is much more than its face value. Maybe, it’s even more than just a composition. Maybe it’s a philosophical question - unspoken yet universally understood, and worth considering even decades later.
Let’s hear what John Cage had to say in a 1991 interview.
[music out]
John Cage: When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. But, when I hear the sound of traffic, I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting, and I love the activity of sound. What it does is it gets louder and quieter, and it gets higher and lower, and it gets longer and shorter. I’m completely satisfied with that. I don’t need sound to talk to me.
When I talk about music it finally comes to people’s minds that I’m talking about sound, and they say ‘you mean it’s just sounds?’, thinking that for something to just be a sound is to be useless.
John Cage reminds us that music doesn’t just have to be about people sitting on a stage and playing complicated things. And that music isn’t the only kind of sound worth listening to. All sounds are worth thinking about.
[music in]
And in this spirit, we’re going to help you play your own version of 4’33’’ right now. And you and what’s surrounding you are going to be the performer. In fact, if you all play along, this might be the largest and most sonically diverse performance of 4’33’’ ever staged - over a hundred thousand completely different versions of 4’33’’ happening around the world, in wildly different places.
But every version of 4’33’’ will be personal. Completely unique to you.
So, make sure you have four and a half minutes to spare, and do not skip. I don’t want you to think about anything else. I want you to focus all of your thoughts into what you’re hearing. Listen for the high frequencies, the lows, the mids. The loud, the soft. The harmonic, the dissonant. Spend this time as mindful and present in your personal real-life sonic environment. Enjoy the magnificence of hearing and listening. The vibration of the world that in turn vibrates your eardrums.
There will be three movements, and I’ll let you know when they start. Get ready to take in the sounds happening around you right now - wherever you are. Here comes the first movement - it’s 30 seconds, starting [music out] now:
[John Cage’s 4’33]
And here’s movement two. It’ll be 2 minutes and 23 seconds.
[John Cage’s 4’33 continues]
And here is the final movement. It’ll be 1 minute and 40 seconds.
[John Cage’s 4’33 continues]
...and that is the end. You did it.
[music in]
Thank you for taking the time and taking part in this international, multi-location performance of John Cage’s 4’33’’.
So, think about what you heard. And remember these sounds not as distractions, but part of the movement and interaction of life; whether it’s calm or bustling, natural or human made. John Cage taught us an incredible lesson, and that’s that quietness is not an opportunity to stop listening. It’s when we really start to listen and finally hear the world as it is. So, no matter what you heard, you can be sure that your version of 4’33” was unique and never to be replicated again.
[music out]
[music in]
Twenty Thousand Hertz is hosted by me, Dallas Taylor, and produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound design team dedicated to making television, film and games sound incredible. Find out more at Defacto Sound dot com.
This episode was written and produced by Martin Zaltz Austwick, and me Dallas Taylor, with help from Sam Schneble. It was sound designed and mixed by Soren Begin, and Nick Spradlin.
Thanks to our guests Kyle Gann, Nahre Sol, and Dave Hilliard.
Kyle Gann is a composer - find his pieces wherever you listen to music. He’s also the author of No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage's 4'33", be sure to pick that up wherever you get your books.
Nahre Sol is a pianist, composer, educator, and YouTuber, and her website is NahreSol.com - that’s N A H R E S O L dot com.
Dave Hilliard is a visual artist and psychotherapist. You can find him on Instagram at dave hilliard art.
Most of the music in this episode is from our writer, Martin Zaltz Austwick, and I just adore this music. You should go listen to more of this music at pale bird music dot com.
You should also go check out our website, because we’ve posted a few videos related to this episode. The first is Nahre Sol playing a piece for prepared piano. The second is the recording of 433 for the Cage Against the Machine project. Both are so much fun to watch. You can find those at 20k dot org.
Finally, I want you to tell me about your personal 433 performance. Did anything surprising happen? How did it make you feel? Was it a powerful experience, or do you think this whole idea is nonsense? Tell me on Twitter, Facebook, or at hi @ 20k dot org.
Thanks for listening.
[music out]
