Passage III

HUMANITIES: Passage A is adapted from the article “Searching for Silence: John Cage's Art of Noise” by Alex Ross (©2010by Condé Nast). Passage B is adapted from the book This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin (©2006 by Daniel J. Levitin).

Passage A by Alex Ross

On August 29, 1952, David Tudor walked onto the stage of the Maverick Concert Hall, near Woodstock, New York, sat down at the piano, and, for four and a half minutes, made no sound. He was performing “4'33",” a conceptual work by John Cage. It has been called the “silent piece,” but its purpose is to make people listen. “There's no such thing as silence,” Cage said, recalling the première. “You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.”

Composer and scholar Kyle Gann defines “4'33"” as “an act of framing, of enclosing environmental and unintended sounds in a moment of attention in order to open the mind to the fact that all sounds are music.” That last thought ruled Cage's life: he wanted to discard inherited structures, open doors to the exterior world, “let sounds be just sounds.” Gann writes, “It begged for a new approach to listening, perhaps even a new understanding of music itself, a blurring of the conventional boundaries between art and life.”

On a simpler level, Cage had an itch to try new things. What would happen if you sat at a piano and did nothing? If you chose among an array of musical possibilities by flipping a coin and consulting the I Ching? If you made music from junkyard percussion, squads of radios, the scratching of pens, an amplified cactus?

Many people, of course, won't hear of it. Nearly six decades after the work came into the world, “4'33”" is still dismissed as “absolutely ridiculous,” “stupid,” and “a gimmick.” Such judgments are especially common within classical music where Cage, who died in 1992, remains an object of widespread scorn.

Morton Feldman, another avant-garde musician, once said, “John Cage was the first composer in the history of music who raised the question by implication that maybe music could be an art form rather than a musical form.” Feldman meant that, since the Middle Ages, even the most adventurous composers had labored within a craftsmanlike tradition. Cage held that an artist can work as freely with sound as with paint: he changed what it meant to be a composer, and every kid manipulating music on a laptop is in his debt. Not everything he did was laudable, or even tolerable. Yet the work remains inescapable, mesmerizing, and often unexpectedly touching. It encompasses some of the most violent sounds of the twentieth century, as well as some of the most gently beguiling. It confronts us with the elemental question of what music is, and confounds all easy answers.

Passage B by Daniel J. Levitin

The music of many avant-garde composers stretches the bounds of what most of us think music is. Going beyond the use of melody and harmony, and even beyond the use of instruments, these composers use recordings of found objects in the world such as jackhammers, trains, and waterfalls. They edit the recordings, play with their pitch, and ultimately combine them into an organized collage of sound with the same type of emotional trajectory—the same tension and release—as traditional music. Composers in this tradition are like the painters who stepped outside the boundaries of representational and realistic art—the cubists, the Dadaists, many of the modern painters from Picasso to Kandinsky.

What do the music of Bach and John Cage fundamentally have in common? On the most basic level, what distinguishes Busta Rhymes's “What's It Gonna Be?!” or Beethoven's “Pathétique” Sonata from, say, the collection of sounds you'd hear standing in the middle of Times Square or those you'd hear deep in a rainforest? As the composer Edgard Varèse famously defined it, “Music is organized sound.”

It is helpful to examine what music is made of. What are the fundamental building blocks of music? And how, when organized, do they give rise to music? The basic elements of any sound are loudness, pitch, contour, duration (or rhythm), tempo, timbre, spatial location, and reverberation. Our brains organize these fundamental perceptual attributes into higher-level concepts—just as a painter arranges lines into forms. When we listen to music, we are actually perceiving multiple attributes.

Each attribute can be varied without altering the others. The difference between music and a random or disordered set of sounds has to do with the way these fundamental attributes combine, and the relations that form between them.