Silence

In college (#3) I helped edit a journal. The theme was 'silence'. All contributors gathered together to perform various writing exercises, one of which was to discuss the nature of silence. I made the point that there is no such thing as true silence.

Of course this was famously stated and experimented on by the composer John Cage. He said (in his book called Silence):

                                There is no
such thing as silence. Something is al-
ways happening that makes a sound.
No one can have an idea
once he starts really listening.
It's very simple but extra-urgent
The Lord knows whether or not
the next

He believed in the (he might have hated this phraseology) musicality of sound - the idea that sounds in themselves are deeply active, interesting and pleasing. There's no need to order them or duplicate them as such. They don't need to personify or [snuff break] mean something. Sounds can just be sounds. And it is okay for sounds to overtake what we would like to believe is silence.

His (in)famous illustration is in his piece 4'33'' ( four minutes, thirty-three seconds) where the pianist, or orchestra members, approaches their instrument but plays nothing. The conductor conducts three movements of varying lengths of silence. The music is the concert hall, whatever ambient sounds arise. (Watch a YouTube performance: there's a strange mirror-in-mirror effect. People pay to hear instrumentalists not play, pay to hear each other hold in coughs - being and not being part of the music.)

For some reason this topic, as I find out now and may at one time have known, is not unrelated to the fact that I think of canvases painted white. Robert Rauschenberg, a year earlier than 4'33'', painted White Paintings. He wrote of them in a letter that they deal "with the suspense, excitement and body of an organic silence, the restriction and freedom of absence..." Among other complex ideas, they surpassed the limits of two-dimensionality and pigmentation to create a space-receptacle for shadow, dust, life-noise. Cage and Rauschenberg became well acquainted with each other and shared ideas and influences that go deep. But this entry is long already.... I'll be quiet now.