What Artists Do. Leonard Koren

and cacophony, or what is sometimes called noise.

       As part of his art-making methodology Cage often

       incorporated chance or unplanned actions. He used

       standard instruments, but in non-standard ways—like

       the sound of an orchestra tuning up. He also used

       non-instruments like hammers and bolts and screws . . .

       and radios for random snippets of talk and music

       programming, and for the static between stations.

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      Mid-career, Cage had an epiphany: why not create

       a composition in which there are no sounds at all?

       According to the artist, “[I wanted to] compose a piece

       of uninterrupted silence and sell it to Muzak Co.”

       (Muzak, as the company was then named, sold record-

       ed “mood music” for different commercial applica-

       tions, such as in elevators and department stores.)

      For all his apparent emancipation from convention-

       ality, Cage was afraid that if he made a piece with no

       apparent sounds whatsoever people might think he

       was putting them on—and he didn’t want that. Ulti-

       mately, two separate but related insights provided

       the conceptual grounding he needed to proceed.

      The first insight came when viewing the all-white

       and all-black paintings of his friend, artist Robert

       Rauschenberg. At the time, monochrome paintings like

       Rauschenberg’s were thought to be artistically “smart”

       because they were artifacts of pure painting. That is,

       they were paintings where the content and subject

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      matter are solely painting, with no extraneous pictori-

       al elements. Rauschenberg, however, had a different

       way of thinking about it. “A canvas is never empty,”

       he said. Cage took Rauschenberg’s words to heart.

       Cage remarked that Rauschenberg’s all-white paint-

       ings were “airports for light, shadows, and particles.”

      Cage’s second insight came when he visited an

       anechoic chamber at Harvard University. An anechoic

       chamber is a room designed to maximally absorb

       sound and attenuate echoes. Once inside the chamber

       Cage thought he would find absolute silence. Instead

       he heard two persistent sounds. One was high pitched,

       the other low. He asked the attending acoustical

       engineer what they were. According to Cage, the

       engineer explained that the high tone was his nervous

       system and the low tone was the blood circulating

       through his veins and arteries. (Scientifically speaking,

       humans cannot directly hear the sound of their nervous

       systems, no matter how quiet the environment. The

       nervous-system sound Cage thought he heard was

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      probably tinnitus, the hissing-like noise sometimes

       referred to as a “ringing in the ears.” It is a fairly common

       condition that can be brought on by exposure to exces-

       sively loud noise. Cage’s tinnitus may have always been

       in the background of his awareness, but the relative

       silence of the chamber brought it to the fore.)

      Both episodes led Cage to understand that even if one

       tried to remove all sources of sensory stimulation—in

       his case sound—an unextinguishable amount of

       perceptible sensory content would exist nonetheless.

       The human mind, it seems, tends to seek differentia-

       tion even in ostensible sameness. Thus reassured,

       Cage set to work on an art piece that employed (and

       was about) the absence of intentional sound. He titled

       it “4' 33".”

      The first performance of “4' 33"” occurred on a warm,