Home 1. Introduction 2. Markers 3. Archive 4. Audible Markers 5. Visible Markers 6. Notational Markers 7. Conclusion
4.1. A Checklist 4.2. Waveforms 4.3. Examples 4.4. A New Checklist
In this chapter, I will compare performances of John Cage’s 4’33” found online, ranging from a professional film by Cage specialist David Tudor to quirky experiments by amateurs. I will present alternative ways of marking silence; new attitudes for silence; confluences of time, listening, and silence; and contemporary relationships between performer and audience. My observations have also affected my performance practice, as illustrated by checklists I created several decades ago, and a newly updated list that might encourage the openness Cage championed but also afford new interpretations he would never have imagined.
4’33” is not silent (see Chapter 1); neither does it consist of silence. Cage often said it was about listening but also about what he called “interpenetrability,” the way art and real life intertwine (Cage, 1961, p. 102). So, this composition is less about silence than about listening to the sounds that are already there. Yet, it is a compelling example for exploring silence because of the challenge it seems to represent for many younger musicians and the overlaps it affords between the Western Classical tradition and popular modes of performing.
Just as Cage was influenced by diverse and non-musical sources from Zen to Thoreau (Gann, 2011; Silverman, 2010), so did his creation of 4’33” have effects far beyond the world of classical music. It gained instant status as a seminal artwork of the 20th century, an iconic masterpiece of conceptual art (Adolphs & Berg, 2021; Gann, 2013). But 4’33” eventually also came to be seen as a work of kitsch, a faulty paradox, and a symbolic failure of the avant-garde (Kahn, 2015, pp. 165–166). Indeed, Kahn argued that Cage achieved an almost deliberate silencing of the performer and the audience.
Yet in the past decade, the work has gained new life: teenagers, pranksters, heavy-metal bands, architects, and queer activists have embraced it on social media, each finding their group or cultural meaning. And worldwide lockdowns brought a new wave of video interpretations, a rich source in my research. Some aspects of these videos are distinctly classical, employing framing and conventional instruments; other elements are uniquely contemporary. By looking critically at the videos, I discovered a multiplicity of gestures for performative silence. To create the experience of silence on YouTube, performers often embody that silence in novel attitudes.
Some of the videos deliberately engage with the interpenetrability of the artwork and the “real life” happening around the performers. Others focus more on performativity, on the persona of the performer, or on a connection with the unseen viewer. Listening, temporality, gesture, silence, and “real life” are foregrounded in different ways in each example. Some of the performers turn their attention to listening, and others encourage the audience to listen. Some ignore listening and turn their attention instead towards stillness, quiet, duration, time, or the tension between noise and silence, framed and unframed, classical and rock, controlled and uncontrolled.
Even though 4’33” is often considered a work of absence art, not every example involves absence. Walsh writes: “Generally speaking, absence can be registered only when the expectation of something is thwarted or deferred” (Walsh, 1992, p. 80). I find that the most successful examples I will reflect upon below generate a strong expectation (via markers for tradition, loudness or extremes of some sort) and then an equally strong thwarting or deferment (created by non-doing, non-playing, being-silent, attentiveness, or boredom).
In Chapter 2, I made a clear distinction between the experience of the performer and the listener. In this fourth chapter, three main viewpoints are present: my personal perspective as a performer (e.g. an evolving “checklist”), a listening perspective (e.g. waveform analyses), and my perspective as an observer of the YouTube videos. My analysis will mostly neglect audience reactions, except insofar as they obviously influence the performance (talking, noise, laughter, interruptions).1
The Checklist
In the 1990s, I performed throughout Europe as a concert pianist. A staple of my programs was 4’33”. But I found it disturbing that so often it seemed to go “wrong.” For example, during a performance in Paris in 1995, I played Images of Debussy, and then, in a spirit of contrast, Cage’s 4’33”. Someone in the front row began laughing after a few minutes and started to make loud comments to his neighbors in the audience. As I sat there, grimly tracking the stopwatch, my body frozen in place, I became more and more angry at his interference. But I felt that the duration was sacred, and to end the piece early—or worse, to scold him in front of the audience—was out of the question. So I stayed frozen for those endless last few seconds and finally switched off the stopwatch at 4:33. As I did so, I leapt from the bench and rushed at the man as if I were about to jump off the stage. To my gratification, he looked terrified and was quiet for the remainder of the performance. But I felt terrible; I had done something that went against Cage’s non-violent philosophy. I did not want to punish the audience for their behavior.
After much reflection and spurred on by this incident, I came up with a checklist for “authentic” performances of 4’33”.2
A Performance Checklist (1997)
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How to begin the piece:
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wait for silence from the audience before starting
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make sure the stopwatch makes a sound audible to the audience
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How should I mark the movements? (choose one)
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By turning pages?
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By changing instruments?
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By putting the instrument down?
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By breathing, sighing, wiping brow?
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By closing or opening the instrument/case?
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Do not react to interruptions (ringing phones, photographers, catcalls, booing, laughter, a seagull in the theatre). No eye contact.
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The performer is invisible:
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do not make any sounds during the performance
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hold your instrument as if performing
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No Actions: DO NOT pretend to play (strumming strings, moving fingers above the keys, conducting…)
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do not move
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HOLD the audience’s attention! They must not wander off!
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Never smile, no silliness—this is not a joke.
Trifonov’s approach is a perfect example of “shin,” the expressive Japanese word for an awkward silence that fills a space. In this case, the awkwardness arises between him and the audience. His artistic position seems to be imposition, not attentiveness. The uncomfortable silence that he creates is heavily reinforced by the behavioral constraints of a classical music environment. The audience complies with the ritual and sits in mournful silence throughout the performance.
Trifonov’s embodied markers of intense concentration, frozen attitude, and facial tension are all familiar to me and exemplify the problematics of my own approach at the time. Looking back at my checklist, as exemplified by Trifonov’s performance, I am struck by how dogmatic it seems and by my clear wish for a “professional” performer to “lead” the audience. This list implies a conducting role for the performer and a subservient role for the receiver. So when I first read Kahn’s History of Voice, Sound, and Aurality in the Arts many years later, I immediately recognized his claim that Cage was silencing others:
It should be noted that each performance was held in a concert setting where any muttering or clearing one’s throat, let alone heckling, was a breach of decorum. Thus, there was already in place in these settings, as in other settings for Western art music, a culturally specific mandate to be silent, a mandate regulating the behavior that precedes, accompanies, and exceeds musical performance. (Kahn, 2015, p. 165)
As a young concert pianist, I considered that mandate of decorum to be the audience’s duty; I took it for granted. Audience decorum also meant (though I didn’t realize it) audience docility.
Kahn is also concerned about Cage’s imposition on the performer:
4’33”, by tacitly instructing the performer to remain quiet in all respects, muted the site of centralized and privileged utterance, disrupted the unspoken audience code to remain unspoken, transposed the performance onto the audience members both in their utterances and in the acts of shifting perception toward other sounds, and legitimated bad behavior. (Kahn, 2015, p. 166)
In my opinion, however, Kahn has not examined whether silencing a performer (“don’t play”) is different than asking a performer to activate something (“do embody non-playing”). Going back to my performance approach in the 1990s, I did not see myself as silenced or the audience as silenced, even though it is abundantly clear that my checklist was seeking (quite un-tacitly) to mute both myself and the audience. I was elevating 4’33” to an iconic status, trying to protect it from the outside world at all costs. I did not yet see a connection between Cage’s (mild) destabilization of the normative concert hall performative situation and the audience’s frequent transgressions. As I would discover, bad behavior was still legitimized and—here I agree with Kahn—almost encouraged.
Another point my younger self seems to have missed was the question of interruption. And even though I was familiar with this anecdote, I think I missed the point until recently. Cage wrote in his collection A Year from Monday:
One day when the windows were open, Christian Wolff played one of his pieces at the piano. Sounds of traffic, boat horns, were heard not only during the silences in the music, but, being louder, were more easily heard than the piano sounds themselves. Afterward, someone asked Christian Wolff to play the piece again with the windows closed. Christian Wolff said he’d be glad to, but that it wasn’t really necessary, since the sounds of the environment were in no sense an interruption of those of the music. (Cage, 2012, p. 133)
If I were to apply this rule to 4’33”, then all kinds of interruptions might happen and be included in the sound of the piece (or be the sound of the piece). Wolff and Cage are both making the point that there are no interruptions, that the audibility of “real life” is the point, and that the piece does not need to be “protected” from interruption.
For years, I had strived to protect Cage’s legacy from misinterpretation, amateurism, and ridicule, aiming for absolute fidelity to the score and maintaining a stark separation between performer and audience, an adherence to classical norms. Yet I was not uninformed. My checklist was an attempt to preserve the approach I had learned from Cage himself. My desire to respect the composer’s intentions at all costs is similar to what aesthetic theorist Lydia Goehr describes in relation to Stravinsky’s ideal performer:
For Stravinsky it was a ‘moral responsibility’ that the best performance be one that most successfully negates its own presence. The demand here is for performance transparency: performances should be like windows through which audiences directly perceive works. (Goehr, 1996, p. 6)
Stravinsky was reacting against the excesses of 19th-century romanticism and the cult of the soloist performer whose artistic freedom superseded the composer’s choices. Cage shared this same distaste for performers who tried to make the performance about themselves. He attempted to be personally self-effacing onstage: why should others not eradicate their persona as well? But my attempt to efface my persona via the checklist often failed. I was opening the wrong window onto 4’33”. Frustrated by what I considered the failure of the composition, I stopped performing it. A new approach was needed, and that would come much later as part of this research project.