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Silence: Lectures and Writings

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It's always a strange sensation for me to go into a record store, or even see what's available here, and find so many John Cage recordings in print. As the most essential and avant-garde composer of the century, that's gratifying to me [a composer] but also unnerving that anyone so experimental and uncompromising in the arts would enjoy such popularity.

This book goes a long way towards explaining that. And in many ways, this book stands apart from his music, and can be enjoyed without ever hearing or knowing of Cage's music pieces. Because the music was almost by accident - Schoenberg told Cage that he was an inventor, not a composer, and this book demonstrates that, and goes further to show Cage was a philosopher. Music just happened to be the medium where he best expressed his philosophy, but it could have been painting or film, depending on his path. The book defines a way of living and thinking and seeing, and of course hearing, the world. That's what it's about. And it's beautiful and gentle quality capture the essence of Cage, a true quiet revolutionary. His revolution was profound, and best expressed in his piano piece 4'33", where the pianist does not make a sound at the instrument. The revolution of that event was the most profound and destabilizing in the history of music, and yet it was entirely silent. Such is the power of Cage's ideas that he has no need to really 'lecture' about them, he merely presents them and let's their own strength do the rest.

This is the only book of Cage's I have read, but I found it not only cleared up any questions I had about the nature and intention of his work, but also gave me a much greater appreciation of what a true pioneer he was, both as an artist and philosopher. His humor and passion for life and art are in clear evidence throughout the book; each article or lecture reveals a new facet, a new layer of his boundless creativity and powerful stand for all art. Even though parts of the book may get fairly technical, much of what he says about music applies to life in general and to the goal of pursuing both to their fullest. A must-have for any serious musician or lover of art and life.

I keep reading it year after year and I keep finding sections of it I've never seen before. magic. A the same time, I read the same part overs and over again years later and they just get better.

It's just a remarkable text.

You have to get it.

Having red an increasingly litterature of and about John Cage, Silence is the one I return to. It reveals his ways and his means, as by actually composing the lectures and writings the same way he composed his music. Even if the content often serves only to fill the composition, it is funny and it is full of wisdom. And beautiful. Add up the Indeterminacy recording from Smithsonian Folkways, and you have the best of his writings.

This book is a work of art in itself. John Cage takes so many of his theories and applies them to his writing style, formatting, and type style. I suggest knowing a little about him before reading this book as it is a little easy to get lost in translation (figuratively speaking). Overall, it is definitely worth reading, and it is fairly affordable...a good addition to any collection.

I always think of John Cage as "Klatuu" in "The Day The Earth Stood Still," arriving in a turn-table-shaped rig to deliver the truth about the future of music to the masses. He parks his space ship, and his buddy Gort, on the mall and goes out to make a point. At first only the smartest man in the world could understand the equations he and Billy left on the office black board, but soon everyone would be standing stranded on the streets of Paris and Beijing wondering what the heck's up, and what's all this noise about? Of course, Klatuu gets killed and brought back to life (Cage wisely skipped that), and flies back to wherever he came from (as did Cage a few years back), but our man Cage beats Klatuu by light years, because this MAN FROM THE FUTURE left behind a collection of lectures and writings on the nature of sound, art, literature and BEING that still resonates. This is a fascinating tool box to dig through, even though some of the most interesting selections pre-date Klatuu. One innovation that Cage pioneers in this book is the use of random processes to give form to his lectures. This results in timed "silences" in the texts (very similar to performance scores) and poem-like structures of words. Cage also adds the 20th century's plastic-fantastic Americanized (and therefore ever more elastic) concept of ZEN to the tool box of avant-garde poly-practioners, which results in yet another permission given to innovate. In fact, when I encounter new music, writing, art, one of the basic things I seek is PERMISSION TO DO, and that's exactly what Cage is up to in these lectures. Not only is PERMISSION GIVEN, but he hands over many of the tools to begin. That's why this book is vital, seminal (pun intended) and necessary for every experimentalist in the arts and in life. Cage also has a great sense of humor in these writings. YOUTUBE includes a wonderful video of a guest appearance that Cage made on the old "What's My Line." Before the barely comprehending black & white stares of Gary Moore, Bess Myerson and the crew, Cage plays mix-masters, toasters, and other appliances, watching the clock, as always, and with a straight face bringing the odd beauty of new sound and his own Houdini-like showmanship into America's living rooms, just as he unpacks his ideas in the minds of any attentive reader of this book to this day. As classic as a 1960 limited edition T-Bird guaranteed to bring wows if driven into the 21st century and on and on into the future of human thought.

A great collection of Cage's lectures and writings. Much of it is very abstract, other parts more straightforward and focused on musical form (or lack thereof), much discussion on composition and music of the latter part of the 20th century, how we view music, and the integral role that silence and noises plays in how people perceive music.

John Cage is certainly an individual. His mind is an adventure to traverse, and his philosophy is certain to make you look at sound in a different way. The text consists of his lectures and essays. Interspersed are anecdotes, some of which have have no conceivable point and all of which have no connection to the lectures or each other. Cage's ideas on silence, noise, rhythm, and music are interesting for any musician to explore. He also spends a little time on modern dance. His writings show significant influence from Zen, and some are quite difficult to understand. "Silence" is definitely worthwhile for musicians, philosophers, or anyone ready for an adventure in to the human mind.

Cage's book provides a very necessary voice in cultural and aesthetic discourse, although Cage might say it is not necessary at all! The book's countless vignettes and anecdotes--Cage's questionless questions, answerless answers, answered answers, questioned questions--still challenge the exclusivity of the Eurocentric orientation. With his references to Schoenberg and discussions of atonality and numerous "sidewise" approaches, Cage continually provides one enormous always already unanswered question, albeit with a deep passion for music and a human heart in a stampede of illuminated creativity without limitation.

From a personal perspective, after spending years in a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monastic setting of daily (and at times all-day) group seemingly silent meditation and years of formal koan study, and additional decades formally participating in other spiritual practices, and now currently working on a doctorate in the philosophy of art and aesthetics via what is essentially Continental Philosophy and critical theory, I am relieved to read Cage again. Cage's refrain in his Lecture on Nothing: "Slowly we have the feeling we are getting nowhere," when subsequently combined with his Lecture on Something and the story he tells about Eckhart, who said,"Earth" (that is any something) "has no escape from heaven:" (that is nothing), clarifies why one needs the other, so to speak. Cage brings up Meister Eckhart several times, and those quotes and stories are wonderful to read. To me mysticism and spontaneity, trickster consciousness and the artist as divine fool, so-called right brain thought and speech, should have a chair at the aesthetic-philosophical table; it should not dominate the conversation, but it should definitely have a chair at the table and speak up now and again.

And of course there is no silence in silence because, as he describes, there is always the living body's sounds, the bodily music of circulation and the rest. This book to me leaps over the cognitive mind's impulse to worship rational, thought patterning, the linear argument, and that is not to say that European thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze have not challenged linear thought processes. Deleuze's horizontal rhizome thought challenges the staged verticality of many Eurocentric academic arguments, while Derrida's Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins remains a greathearted book, one that is anything but linear. Nonetheless, despite academic intellectuality's feverish attempts to appropriate Cage's work, conventional rationality ultimately fails at that appropriation, except in name only.

One cannot read this book the first time and ever think about music the same way again. At least I cannot. Indeterminacy, Stockhausen, and "Silence" provide necessary thematic rest stops, and when Cage asks what "relevant action" follows music and answers theater, one immediately thinks performance, then everything about "happenings" and Allan Kaprow, one of Cage students at The New School in the 50's, along with the beginnings of Fluxus in the 60's, Cage's work makes sense of what happened during that era. Clearly, Cage's artistic influence was enormous in his time and the relevance of his contributions continues to this day.

'I have nothing to say and I am saying it', wrote John Cage in his Lecture On Nothing, included in Silence. This collection of Cage's lectures and writings, which spans the two decades before its sixties publication, is perhaps his most important.