Cage-Joan

John Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing” illustrates a relationship between silence and noise through deliberate manipulation of text and structure. Often, silence is seen as the absence of noise. Likewise, we often identify noise as the absence of silence. This mutual exclusivity creates this relationship between silence and noise that we are familiar with. However, Cage goes beyond this kind of relation that relies on exclusivity. That is, he points out that there can never truly be silence. Silence will always include noise—specifically ambient noise. Similarly, noise will always includes silence. The following quotation illustrates this: “What we require is silence, and silence requires that I go on talking.”  Cage’s work casts a kind of character onto silence and noise that binds them in this relationship of inclusivity in which silence contains noise and noise contains silence. Thus, Cage plays with the tensions between the exclusive and inclusive components that ultimately bridge silence and noise together.

The author employs the rigorous structure within his work to demonstrate this. Through repetition, he creates the ‘ambient noise’ that is inextricable from silence by turning his own speech into background noise. The excessive redundancy in his text is intolerable for some readers, painful for some, or a soothing lull to others, but he ultimately strives to recreate ambient noise within his own speech. For example, the following passage illustrates this repetition:

“…we are getting nowhere. That is a pleasure, which will continue. If we are irritated, it is not pleasure. Nothing is not a pleasure if one is irritated and then more and more it is not irritating…slowly nowhere….” (120).

The repetition is evident as certain phrases such as “getting nowhere” and “a pleasure” and “irritated” reappear multiple times within a few sentences (120). Yet it is in this mathematical and structured manner that Cage employs this strategy to recreate background noise within his own piece. In a way, he is structuring the lecture so that he is saying nothing and the phrases are simply strung together as ambient noise. This goes to show that silence doesn’t just happen when he is not talking but also when he is talking. This quotation shows how Cage illustrates the interdependency of noise and silence, as well as the tensions between the two.

Something that should also be noted about Cage’s work is its parallel to musical compositions. That is, he employs techniques that are equivalent to measures and rests in musical pieces. There is a lot of space that is deliberately employed and separates the various phrases, words, and even punctuations. Sometimes a single punctuation such as a comma or period occupies a column on the page. The importance of the structure in Cage’s work is that it resonates with those used in music. Both silence and noise play an essential role in music. While noise is defined within parameters of pitch, silence is defined by its duration. Indications of these include rests. In a similar fashion, Cage employs these techniques to signify the role that silence plays in his own work and its interdependency with noise.