John Cage - 4’33: youtube.com/watch?v=3fYvfEMUJl8
I like music. I was asked the other day what kind of music I listen to. Music. There are no genres, really. You might as well ask a person what kind of colours they look at. The answer will always be all of them.
I had a conversation with a friend of mine from Halifax. He said he once went to a show where a noise band hooked two nintendos up to TVs and played video games, miked the TV speakers and ran them through distortion, reverb and delay pedals. And this went on for a 45 minute set. Then a standard 4 piece rock band got up and played pop songs. His reaction to the noise band was “Hmm, that was alright,” and his reaction to the rock band was “This is shit.” He found these reactions to be funny, set next to each other.
The first time I heard of John Cage’s “4’33” I hated it. It sounds like the ultimate in pretentiousness; a classical orchestra sits completely still, doesn’t play a note, people get dressed up and pay to hear it and critics rave about this piece that exists through its non-existence. And people credit a man for silence.
But then when I thought about it, when I heard John Cage talk about the piece, when I watched a video of this experience, I changed my mind. Granted, I do think some take it a little too seriously, especially in the dissection of it all, but how funny is the whole thing? The fact that people refer to it as a “performance,” a “concert”?
Silence is music, though. As far as I can perceive the universe is made up of two things: 1 and 0. Existence and non-existence. Everything and nothing, simultaneously. The part of this that I cannot fully grasp is that as both existence and non-existence exist simultaneously there is no differentiation. Life cannot exist without death, death cannot exist without life. So does that mean that nothingness doesn’t exist? as it is all 1? Silence cannot exist without music, so doesn’t that make silence a form of music?
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