I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.” John Cage’s famous line appears three times in his book Silence, which the Wesleyan University Press has reissued in a smart 50th anniversary edition that also coincides with the centenary of the author’s birth. Composer John Cage is often described as the most influential musician of the last half-century.
He has defined — and continues to define the concept of “avant-garde”, not just in music but increasingly as writer and visual artist. He was to music what Jean-Luc Godard is to film and Marcel Duchamp was to the visual arts — a radical experimentalist who constantly sought to reinvent the art form. Boldly conceptual, and to many, frustratingly impenetrable — his pieces stand among the most important works of music created in the 20th century.
A self-devouring paradox, Cage’s modest avowal neatly draws attention to the impossibility of saying nothing, for once a frame of communication has been set up, be that frame a book or a musical score, a sheet of paper mounted in a gallery space or a performance scheduled in a concert hall (and Cage worked in all these media), emptiness will speak.
His formidable body of work can seem forbidding. His output was broad and deep; his music was never meant to be accessible in the populist sense. His most famous musical statement, 4’ 33”, requires the performer to remain silent for four minutes and 33 seconds. Like much of Cage’s work, the 1952 piece rests somewhere between music and performance art, a deliberate muddying of cultural categories. It is a space, within which members of the audience can react, and others hear that reaction; it is an invitation to pay attention to what is normally unvalued; and, perhaps ideally, it is an opportunity to listen to silence as keenly as we listen to music.
Another of Cage’s favourite maxims, taken from Ananda Coomaraswamy and delivered five times in Silence, was that the purpose of art is to “imitate nature in her manner of operation”. This is almost another way of stating his first catchphrase, since natural objects and phenomena have nothing to say. We say it for them and in doing so, experience their silence.
Cage discovered the writing of the Indian art theorist Ananda Coomaraswamy — on which he based his notions about the role of nature and the emotions in his music of the ’40s and early ’50s at Pomona College when Coomaraswamy’s musician wife, Ratan Devi, visited the campus. He went to Europe thinking himself a writer, but, after a few piano lessons at the Paris Conservatory and a year wandering around Europe and North Africa, he returned to Los Angeles in 1932 a composer of mathematically constructed scores and also a painter.
Richard Buhlig, the first important musician to take an interest in the young composer, was a student of Hinduism and Buddhism. It is Buhlig who planted the seed in Cage that he needed to do something about his obviously large ego and get beyond his likes and dislikes so he could be open to new discoveries. He told Cage that listening with preconceived notions was listening with opinion. Cage, who died in 1992, never stopped composing, or at least creating in some way. He made excursions into the visual arts and theater. The centenary of his birth has occasioned a number of celebrations around the world.