Silence, A Year from Monday, M, Empty Words and X (in this order) form the five parts of a series of books in which Cage tries, as he says, "to find a way of writing which comes from ideas, is not about them, but which produces them." Often these writings include mesostics and essays created by subjecting the work of other writers to chance procedures using the I Ching (what Cage called "writing through").
John Cage is the outstanding composer of avant-garde music today. The Saturday Review said of him: "Cage possesses one of the rarest qualities of the true creator- that of an original mind- and whether that originality pleases, irritates, amuses or outrages is irrelevant." "He refuses to sermonize or pontificate. What John Cage offers is more refreshing, more spirited, much more fun-a kind of carefree skinny-dipping in the infinite. It's what's happening now." –The American Record Guide
"There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. Sounds occur whether intended or not; the psychological turning in direction of those not intended seems at first to be a giving up of everything that belongs to humanity. But one must see that humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world together, that nothing was lost when everything was given away."
It’s easy to think seminal American experimental composer John Cage valued silence as an ideal. His most notorious composition, 4'33", instructed its performers not to play a single note. He was a student of Zen Buddhism and a devoted amateur mycologist, both disciplines of quietude. He came to prominence at a time when American art was erasing itself across the board, from Robert Rauschenberg’s white paintings to Merce Cunningham’s formless choreography. The concept of silence came to define Cage so much that it lent itself to the title of this collection of writings.
Silence was certainly an important concept for Cage, but as more of a myth than an ideal; after visiting a soundproof isolation chamber at Harvard in 1951, he heard the blood beating in his ears. And the point of 4'33" wasn't to attain silence, but to underscore its illusory nature, as the rustlings of the audience became the music. And the composer’s reputation for reticence is at odds with the many fine words he produced—as a poet, lecturer, and essayist—alongside his music.
When Cage lectured on his aleatory music, he often brought the processes he described to bear on the texts, and it’s great fun to imagine him delivering these crazy things—full of awkward pauses and evasive logical leaps—to the academy. Small, penetrating anecdotes sprout up in Silence, too, giving us an intimate vantage on the composer’s sensibility; they virtually bleed with grace and mischievous humor (remember his playful television appearances). Silence isn’t just about art, it’s art in-process—an invaluable-if-opaque survey of the mid-20th-century American avant-garde by a rare soul whose open-ended ideas still challenge us today. –Brian Howe
