Cage - Matt

In John Cage's "Lecture on Nothing", he talks about the relationship between nothing and something in terms of noise and silence.

He appeals to the senses; first the sense of sight. He created an image of an empty glass that could be filled with something at any moment. The existence of emptiness in the glass is dependent on the existence of liquid in the glass. He continues this visual appeal by presenting a scenario where a person from a city like NYC travels out to the wide lands of Kansas. Cage says that the city person would see the emptiness and still see something; the absence of the city itself. This illustration alludes to the idea that while one can appreciate the existence of something, one also could easily appreciate the absence of it. He then says that one doesn't even have to be immersed in noise to appreciate silence. In his other illustration, a man is standing on a cliff and just standing in silence and three others contemplate why the man is standing silently alone. The man revealed that he had no reason to be in silence, there does not have to be a reason for silence. Silence can be appreciated on its own. However, one social value of being alone is to "hear" one's own thought; to think by him/herself. So in a way, the physical silence brings about mental noise. Noise can be used to contrast and appreciate silence, but in turn, the silence can bring about other noise until there is a never-ending existence in a gradient between total silence and total noise.

One other example where Cage expresses the relationship of silence and noise is through classical music. He mentions Bach and Beethoven. Bach wrote during the baroque period, when the harpsichord was commonly used. The harpsichord did not have the pedals to mix sounds together. Playing a note resulted in a very brief sound followed by silence. As such, Bach and other composers during the baroque period, not only had to play with music theory to create a musical piece, but they also had to account for the brief sounds of the notes and the almost immediate silence that followed. Thus music during the baroque period was not slow, because notes must be playing at all times to create sound and mask silence. With the nature of the harpsichord, silence was important in the baroque period in that it must be filled.

On the flip side, Beethoven wrote music during the romantic period, when the piano developed the pedals to merge and bleed sounds and notes from one measure to another measure, to create an omnipresent pool of noise. The layers of sound became infinite. A note could resonate for 3 or 4 more measures while mixing with more notes on the way. While the combinations of the music can be beautiful, it can also be overwhelming. The pedal opened the door to mixtures of sound, but that meant that the silence rests brought were equally important. Rests and pauses in conjunction with the drama of  fortissimos and diminuendos and the pedal  further enhanced the drama and beauty of the musical piece.

In progression and transition of the piano and music from the baroque period to the romantic period, we see that when noise is created and how it is created changes, the silence changes to accommodate it and enhance the significance of the sound while standing on its own. In these visual and aural sensory images, Cage sees the relationship of silence and noise to be a very dependent one, much like we found the existence of nonsense and sense to be dependent on each other. The relationship and interaction between noise and silence is more complex than one might initially think, as if they exist and not exist simultaneously.