Cage's Silence and Noise- Ball

In John Cage’s essay, Silence, Cage discusses his theories on sound, music, and composition, which he refers to as simply “the organization of sound”. Cage states that, at almost all times, we are surrounded by sound in one form or another. However, in his Lecture on Nothing, Cage presents an interesting idea. He writes, “But now       there are silences       and the words       make      help make      the silences     ” (Cage 109). In this, the author is suggesting that silence creates sound, and, likewise, sound creates silence. The two could not exist without one another, and the boundaries between the two define how we as humans understand our world aurally. Cage represents this visually by the formatting of the page, exaggerating the natural space between words, visually representing the spaces that sound helps define just as Mallarme did in “A Throw of the Dice”. The representation of space and silence can also be seen in the stories of "Indeterminancy", in which Cage told a number of stories of greatly varying lengths in a time frame of one minute each. In a sense, Cage is doing to music and sound what other modernist artists such as Tzara are doing for writing (or their respective art forms I guess), manipulating the building blocks of the art form (including things that are often taken for granted such as silence or meaning itself) until it is unrecognizable.

I found it interesting how Cage’s theories on sound mirror the discussions we had as a class at the beginning of the semester around sense and nonsense. Just as sound defines what silence is, sense provides a standard by which nonsense can be judged, and the two play off of one another. And just as, on pages 3-5, Cage talks about attempts to fit the sounds of new instruments into the molds cast from old ones, people attempt to judge new language by the standards of works created centuries ago and the standards of sense. As Cage writes, these standards censor consumers of media from new sensory experiences, and, oftentimes, it can create a feeling of not “getting” a form of art such as experimental music or nonsense literature. This creates a cycle in many mainstream art circles: people are not exposed to these art forms, so they do not understand it when they come across it and reject it, and, in reaction, they continue to not be exposed to these forms of art.

wow