Imagine an artist in a concert hall who sits silently for four minutes while the ‘music’ is the rustling of seats and coughs from the audience. Well, that artist was John Cage, a contrarian who changed the course of music. But not as we’d normally consider the musician of our time. He had eclectic inspirations from Eastern philosphy to the buzz of the everyday, and he concluded that any sound and even silence could be music. His most controversial work, 4’33”, proved too much for many. ‘Oh, that is just a joke that the composer thought we were stupid enough to buy as music. It is a nothingburger,’ fumed James Levine of the Metropolitan Opera in Chicago. Others applauded his act, in which, to the sound of nothing, he challenged listeners to hear. It was not so much the outrageousness of Cage’s music even his most ear scratching experiments pale in comparison with that of his contemporaries such as Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen or Luciano Berio. Cage’s most famous piece was about more than contrarianism. He was a devout, life long advocate of music. With a vast and intricate body of work, he used sounds in an entirely novel way that hadn’t been considered before. Along with this, he was a deeply complex and mercurial figure, old-fashioned in his optimism and openness, yet implacable and temperamental.
Before his death, he had put his stamp not just on the musical mainstream but also on how people think about art, about performance, about the sound world itself. The story of what happened is a tribute to what can be achieved by pushing back the boundaries of belief into ever more surprising places. Outside the concert hall, the most rhythmic tune can come from the silences all around.
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