Cage

The American composer and active figure in the avant-garde movement, John Cage, presents a very interesting relationship between sound and noise in his speech at a meeting at the Seattle arts society. He depicts this relation through the context and structure of his text.

At one point he writes “what we re-quire is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking.”(pg 109).  With this statement, I feel that Cage is explaining that in order for us to have silence and define what silence is, we need to have sound, which in his case is his talking. And in order to define sound we need to have silence. These two must coexist or not exist at all.

Another example of sound and white noise that Cage presents in this speech is at the beginning. It seems as though he has two separate trains of though regarding music and sound. The first is the statement that we see in all caps, begins with, “I BELIEVE THAT THE USE OF NOISE,” and then this statement is suddenly interrupted with another though, “Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly…”(103).  This is a reoccurring pattern that we see in this section of the text. The part in caps flows smoothly if one where to skip over the non-caps parts. The parts that are lower case begin to seem like white noise in comparison to the caps sections. Its incredible to think that one can actually use words and ideas about a certain subject to create background noise.

In his lecture on nothing, we also see the comparison to music. Some of the lines in his text for instance, are structured like music notes. There is a lot of repetition, the lines are spaced out into four columns and then punctuated to indicate pauses, much like how music notes indicate rests with certain symbols. The silence that is necessary for music is also essential here.  He refers to music as “the organization of sound.” I had never heard of this idea before but it seems to have a valid point. Music is sound, but it is sound arranged in a particular way that it is pleasing to hear the sounds. When listening to parts of this lecture out loud, trying to catch the full meaning was difficult and even annoying with all the frequent pauses. However, there was a certain rhythm and tempo in the annunciation of the word, which was actually quite soothing. Soon, the meaning of the words is forgone while one only hears the rhythm of the sounds. The meaning becomes the background and the sound becomes the foreground.

Through his speech and unique structure of text, Cage explores the concepts of sound, silence, and white noise in a very unconventional manner; he gives silence a whole new perspective.