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SILENCE
Lectures
and
writings
by
JOHN
CAGE
S I L E N C E
50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
With Foreword by Kyle Gann
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown, Connecticut
WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Middletown, CT 06459
© 1939, 1944, 1949, 1952, 1955, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1961 by John Cage
Foreword to 50th Anniversary Edition © 2011 Kyle Gann
All rights reserved
First printing, 1961
Wesleyan paperback, 1973
50th Anniversary Edition, 2011
50th Anniversary Edition paperback, 2013
Manufactured in the United States of America
5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011936816
ISBN for the 50th Anniversary Edition paperback: 978-0-8195-7365-0
Many of these lectures and articles were delivered or published elsewhere from 1939 to 1958. The headnote preceding each one makes grateful acknowledgment of its precise source.
To Whom It May Concern
CONTENTS
Foreword to 50th Anniversary Edition by Kyle Gann / ix
The Future of Music: Credo / 3
Experimental Music: Doctrine / 13
III. Communication / 41
Composition / 57
To Describe the Process of Composition Used in Music of Changes and Imaginary Landscape No. 4 / 57
To Describe the Process of Composition Used in Music for Piano 21-52 / 60
Forerunners of Modern Music / 62
History of Experimental Music in the United States / 67
Erik Satie / 76
Edgard Varèse / 83
Four Statements on the Dance / 86
Goal: New Music, New Dance / 87
Grace and Clarity / 89
In This Day … / 94
2 Pages, 122 Words on Music and Dance / 96
On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work / 98
Lecture on Nothing / 109
Lecture on Something / 128
45′ for a Speaker / 146
Where Are We Going? and What Are We Doing? / 194
Indeterminacy / 260
Music Lovers’ Field Companion / 274
FOREWORD TO 50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
Kyle Gann
Silence by John Cage is the book I’ve reread most often in my life. It’s that kind of book. I kept rereading it partly because what it seemed to mean kept changing. I first read it in 1971, so while this publication marks the fiftieth anniversary of the book, it is the fortieth anniversary of my engagement with it. I was fifteen, and it had a profound, enlivening impact on me. At seventeen I read it again and realized I hadn’t really understood it the first time. At nineteen I revised my impression still more. And probably at twenty-one or twenty-two, and at twenty-five, and a few times in the 1980s and ’90s, periodically finding its meaning in kaleidoscopic flux. Now, rereading it again, intently, cover to cover, at age fifty-five, I get a picture of it I’ve never had before. But I am reluctant to conclude that my current reading is any more real or authentic than the earlier ones. The text remains the same; I change.
For instance, when I was fifteen I thought that Cage’s preparing six answers to give after the “Lecture on Nothing” no matter what questions people asked was a hilariously clever way to get his point across. At fifty-five, I think it must have just been off-putting. Am I right now, or was I right then?
It’s not that Cage is an obscure writer: quite the contrary. He’s breezy, charming, precise, a little stylized at times. He’s even repetitive. The “miserable shaggy nag” story comes up again and again, and the anechoic chamber, and the important question of what do you think about Bach. You get the point. But what is the point? Or are there multiple points? Or, more in accordance with Cage’s popular reputation, is there perhaps no point at all? Cage can be didactic at times, and pontifical, and he does try now and then to convince you that experimental music is preferable to classical music, or that you should enjoy audience coughs and babies crying as much as a symphony, or that he, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown were the only composers in the 1950s tuned in to the zeitgeist. “As contemporary music goes on changing in the way I am changing it,” he jovially thunders in “45′ for a Speaker”; such boldness is bracing for the young, threatening to the old. But along the way he challenges conventional wisdom, deflates pretensions, wipes away misassumptions, erases the slate for us all to start over. Do you see how much easier it is to get people to think for themselves by asking questions than by making pronouncements? Hmm?
And then there are all those wonderful stories that make up the performance piece Indeterminacy, which are probably the dominant items that many people take away from the book. Some of them have become famous in the music world: the aunt who loves her washing machine more than she does Uncle Walter, the trip to New Zealand that never materializes, the nonsequiturs from the autocratic Schoenberg, the fables about Zen monks, the mushroom trivia. The way Cage tells them, devoid of emotional nuance, makes the world itself seem absurd, and all its inhabitants slightly nuts, Cage alone excepted. They are endearing;