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 Chapter 2, I presented three potential types of markers in terms of what they do: imposing, summoning, or describing silence. There seems to be a close connection between the experience of time and these three functions:
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A marker that imposes silence can represent discreet points in time in the form of signals (turning the glass, overtly shouting “Ruhe,” or more implicit cultural codes);
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A marker that summons silence is often more continuously present, as in aspects of ambiance, architecture, nature sounds, or immobility;
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A marker that describes silence can arise from markers that are changing over time, such as gestures, movements, sounds, or facial expressions that shape the experience of silence.
However, these correspondences are not one-to-one and should not be seen as prescriptive. They can describe many situations. In the performance of silences, multiple markers are usually present and acting at any given time, confusing the temporalities involved. This section concentrates on the audible (and visible) markers for silence within the YouTube setting. I have selected seven examples, aiming to exemplify eloquent silences within performances of 4’33”. The performers are chosen for the variety of silences they embody: David Tudor, William Marx, John Cage himself, J Kim, Sis Leyin, Lito Levenbach, and the band Dead Territory. These online examples are then followed by two personal experiences from my own practice: one from a national broadcast in Russia and the other from workshops I led at a hospital in Paris.
I was eager to observe David Tudor performing because he gave the first performance and is closely associated with Cage and the piece. Tudor’s style is sober, restrained, and self-effacing. There is no audience sound at all.
What is remarkable is that there are two very strong and unexpected markers in this performance: a highly audible stopwatch and highly visible page turns. The frantic ticking of the stopwatch is both mesmerizing and distracting—emphasizing duration and creating speed and rhythm where it is not called for. The ticking leaves less room for silence or listening. Maybe this sound was only audible to the performer and the camera and would not have been audible to an audience. Like Dramm’s composition Ruby for piano and metronome, it raises the issue of what the performer hears in contrast to what the audience hears.1
Tudor’s use of page turns at apparently random moments surprises me.2 Non-playing page-turning might be a tacet maneuver. Or the page turns might be markers for time. Or they could be markers to indicate that performing is still going on. But page turns are not indicated in Cage’s score. For that matter, most versions of the score are only one page long. The numerical and durational precision of the title–4’33”–might well suggest that it is (also) about time. In an interview, Cage said, referencing Erik Satie:
Of the four characteristics of the material of music, duration, that is time length, is the most fundamental. Silence cannot be heard in terms of pitch or harmony: it is heard in terms of time length. (Kostelanetz & Cage, 2003, p. 81)
Cage’s suggestion that silence is heard in terms of duration contrasts with Antheil’s idea for the silences of Ballet mécanique: “Here I had time moving without touching it” (Antheil, in Whitesitt, 1989, p. 105). Tudor is figuratively and literally touching time (the page-turning is a tangible gesture with his fingers). Confirming Barthes’ theory about captions giving silence meaning, Tudor has achieved a depiction of “silence as time” via page-turning.
Tudor’s style and demeanor defined the world premiere. He set the tone for an accepted performance practice of 4’33”, which continues to this day: The pianist is central, and there is no reference here to “real life,” which seems entirely excluded from the film. The pianist projects an attitude of authoritative stillness emphasized by the darkness around him. And yet this recording has what could be considered as major audible and visible distractions: a clock ticking and enigmatic page turns. Tudor’s interpretation seems neither about silence nor about listening. The ticking clock and the punctual sequentiality of the page turns could summon but also impose silence, yet they are most understandable as markers for chronicling time.
With over 7 million views on YouTube, this video is astoundingly popular. Marx embodies a traditional classical authority with his nimbus of white hair and his impeccable tuxedo, which he wields as markers for silence. Yet the film is also funny. I think the secret of his success lies in a Dadaist absurdity; he takes the piece to its classical extremes (Steinway grand piano, tuxedo, Roman profile, black and white filming). His performing body is held with brio, with majesty. Marx is unquestionably playing to the crowd, enacting “exceptionality” for the audience. His performance is both pedagogical (“this is what the piece is about”) and entertaining (“enjoy it”).
He holds the stopwatch up in his hand while he performs, sending a strong signal to the audience to pay attention. He shows the watch clearly, in a palpable expression of time’s passing and his control over it. But there is a major difference to Tudor’s stopwatch: Marx’s stopwatch is silent, it is more visible than audible. He is using the object as a marker to impose silence. Despite its gentle irony, this type of performance may be exactly that which aggravates Kahn, for silence is imposed by employing all the cultural markers of classical music. Kahn rebels against the “site of centralized and privileged utterance,” which in this case is very clearly marked by a tuxedo-clad, white-haired Aquiline-profiled classical pianist. Marx embodies centralized privilege. His strong embodiments and charismatic gestures are quite the opposite of Cage’s self-effacing demeanor (see below). However, Marx exposes the implicit codes of imposing silence so theatrically that they can hardly be taken seriously anymore. The markers lose their summoning power and become descriptions of a silence vocabulary that can even evoke laughter, which is definitely part of the appeal of this performance.
This video is one of the rare performances on film of 4’33” by the composer himself. The performance is not a smooth one. Cage re-starts the piece after someone yells, “Ruhe!” and there is a noticeable crescendo of the audience talking. Cage barely conceals his annoyance with the situation, and towards the end, he loses track of the timing. The violence of the text behind him may or may not have escaped his notice, but the audience’s inattention must have given him the impression that he was not being taken seriously. Probably, he hopes to summon silence, but his markers (embodied stillness and an empty glass) do not succeed. Cage is performing for himself but hopes that the audience will come to a knowledge of listening, silence, or attention. Audience inattention (or possibly “real life”?) seems to have intruded hopelessly into the performance.
The shouting of “Ruhe!” is an instructional audio marker that tries to impose silence (and fails). It is a signal which points in time. It is hard to tell if Cage is more annoyed by the shout, which goes strongly against his ideas about 4’33”, or annoyed by the audience noise, which obviously and audibly marks their inattention. He is trying to connect the movements and the passing time of the artwork via his body, his downcast eyes, and his hands resting flat, in repose, on the table. The work seems a connective knot to him and a background not to the audience.
The preceding three videos are performances onstage or in public venues filmed from one point of view: an audience member’s front-row center seat. The solo performer is centered on a stage, or as if on a stage; statically at a piano or a table. The video experience attempts to duplicate the experience of being there in the actual venue. But in the examples that follow, the performer-stage-audience roles are abandoned in favor of more flexible models.
The scene is a park by the sea. There is no concert hall, no instrument. The relationship of the performers to each other and the camera is strained and awkward. The three movements are quite different audibly and visibly. The second movement is most intriguing because American performance artist J Kim (the performer in the yellow hoodie) is silent and focused on the performance while two people sit next to him on the same bench, ignoring the camera and having their own conversation. We hear them talking and see them gesturing, but the wind obscures their words. As with the audience in the previous video, these two people are apparently ignoring the performer. This audible/visible marker of noise for silence highlights the contrast between the main performer and the two others, making Kim’s actions seem “more silent.” The fact that the conversation appears to be ongoing and unrelated to Kim also reinforces a sense of ongoing time, a continuous present. Is Kim sending a message that he is experiencing silence despite the “real life” sounds around him? Or is he looking at us, trying to impose silence upon us in the context of our “real world,” not his?
I like the suggestion that silence can reference presence in such strong ways. Kim is staring directly at the audience. Nonetheless, he is firmly anchored in the landscape, on the rocks, focused on his present here-ness. He has an attitude of watching, looking directly at the viewer, potentially connecting to the YouTube audience, which will watch later after he has uploaded it. But in this Zen here-ness is also a “hear”-ness, an attitude of listening, a connective knot between the performer, his friends, and the viewer.
Sis Leyin’s performance is representative of the many quarantine versions of 4’33”. The tiling deliberately recalls endless Zoom meetings during lockdown. A quote from Leyin: “The world isolates us […] so I lost my temper and didn’t create or play any music.” By not creating, she was engaging in a type of self-silencing. And the experience of lockdown was often one of being silenced (by the authorities, by the threat of illness). For Leyin and countless other artists, maintaining a creative voice under these circumstances was painful and isolating.
Her primary emotive quality seems to be an attitude of resignation. The claustrophobic cinematography, consistently framed against the same drapery and under dim, bluish lighting, encapsulates the essence and eternity of lockdown. Meanwhile, her yawns, her drooping sleepy eyelids, the sound of the space (an oppressive room tone sounding like a fan or air-conditioner with maybe some traffic sounds in the distance), and an incongruous bird chirping (does she have a pet bird in the room?) signal for silence. These contrasting visual and audible markers form an apt representation of a not-being, a not-hereness, a “not” that represents the removal of outside stimuli, and also a type of boredom, an imitation of “real life,” that parallels Cage’s aesthetic of listening closely.
Staying silenced for a prolonged period of time is difficult, and a certain amount of potential noisy energy seems to build up in the muscles. Think of the fidgety energy and coughs released in the interlude between the movements of a symphony. Think of the anxiety of a prolonged theatrical pause. To remain still in a fidgety world is a tensile performance; an effort. (Mock & Counsell, 2009, p. 215)
Leyin has chosen to enact four different characters, each with their own fidgety world, each visibly (performing) an effort to remain still, each with a different shirt, makeup, hairstyle, and persona. Common to all four is a range of vague facial expressions, distracted smiles, rolling eyes, and biting her lip; these facial embodiments invite a reflectiveness, perhaps summoning silence, in an endless continuous present. Her gaze (even more than in the Kim example) is very present. More than the other performers, she seems to be directly connecting with the YouTube viewer, not so much listening as reaching out to evoke or summon listening and possibly silence.
Lito Levenbach is the performer in this multi-instrumental montage. The editing and the mise-en-scène are very clever. There are three movements, each exactly 91 seconds long and hardly distinguishable except as blips on the waveform. It took me several viewings to realize that his hands perform a two-second strumming motion (in all 12 videos) to mark the changes between movements. He makes creative use of tiny changes in clothing and sunglasses, but his expression is serious, neutral, and respectful, as if he were following a conductor. There is very little sensation of connecting with an audience—he appears to be performing for himself.
He chooses to remain motionless. His intro and outro are minimal and, at first, too subtle to distinguish from the actual performance. But a closer analysis reveals that it visibly and audibly starts at 5 seconds and ends 4 minutes and 33 seconds later. He is rigorous about the overall timing, more so than any other performer I studied, although he does not follow Cage’s 1952 timings for the movements. And he plays the piece very quietly. It is entirely without irony, a refreshing change compared to Kim’s or Leyin’s hyper self-consciousness.
One of my favorite versions of 4’33” is a video by the band Dead Territory, an Austrian group known for their heavy metal style. As I engaged more and more with covers of 4’33”, I was struck that metal bands seem to make more powerful, insightful interpretations of 4’33” than classically-trained pianists. Could being educated in the classical tradition be a handicap in performing Cage?
There are different approaches from each performer. From left to right, performer one mostly freezes. Performer two marks the beat. Performer three (the lead vocalist) embodies listening most effectively: his stance, his attitude, his hair gestures, and his crossed hands all communicate embodiments of attentiveness or attention. Performer four looks a little lost, unsure of his role, but mostly imitates performer two, nodding his head to an internal or imaginary beat (the fact that their beats are not in sync is only somewhat noticeable).
There is a controlled wildness to the buildup: The hair tossing, the guitar tuning, the intro riff, the insertion of earplugs—all these are done with absolute integrity and seriousness. And these performative rock-n-roll gestures abruptly cut off at the moment that the performance begins. There is something leftover of the classical setting of Cage’s piece, yet re-interpreted in a stylized language of noisy rebellion. The musicians treat silence as the absence of sounds, but they also allow the non-musical or non-intended sounds of real life to enter the frame. We hear the humming of the amplifier, small shuffling of clothes and hair and feet, and extraneous or accidental guitar sounds, all superimposed on a very quiet room tone.
During the performance, the musicians keep an intense bodily pose with their instruments and a rapt but relaxed focus on their faces, ending at precisely 4:33. They nod to some kind of internalized beat. Is this open listening, as Cage desired? Or is their embodiment of an internal beat creating a confused image of continued musical intentionality? They seem to be listening to their own music, which is not exactly Cage’s idea of listening to the world around them.
One intriguing ambiguity about the performance comes from the framing. It is not so much the absence of sounds that frames the music here; it is “non-musical” music that frames the “musical” silence. There is a frame of quiet (getting ready to perform) followed by a typically loud rock-style prelude (shouting “1,2,3,4!” and playing a drum roll), both of which precede the actual performance and put the “real life” component into the framing elements rather than the artwork itself.
A typical reaction from the commentary: “The best part is that it comes from a metal band. It adds more tension. We know you’re all wound up inside. We know you’re itching to pound out sound.” And that, for me, is the genius of this performance: it is all about control; it is about holding a ticking bomb that does not explode. The thwarted threat of violent catastrophe respects the score but also updates Cage’s artwork for our time, for summoning silence can also arise from suppressing sound.
Own Practice Experience: A Live Broadcast (All-Union Radio, Moscow)
In June of 1993, I was invited to perform 4’33” live on All-Union Radio in Moscow. As we were ushered into the studio, our translator whispered that today’s audience was only one million people. The Soviet Union was collapsing, and listeners had new choices. But it was not over yet at the national radio. As eager as the general public was to hear Western pop music, they also wanted to discover the Western avant-garde. Hence, my performance of Cage’s silence piece live on the air.
The broadcast, for an immense audience under chaotic conditions, was a confrontation of silencing and eloquent silence, absence and presence, agency and aleatory. The radio show was in such a turbulent time, that we were never sure it had been actually broadcast. Although it was “live” on-air for the entire former Soviet Union, the deteriorating infrastructure meant that signals may never have left Moscow and may never have been transmitted beyond the roof of the radio building. I never found out what the audience thought of the performance. Did that million dutifully listen to the silence? Did the potential listeners even know that there had been a performance? Could they tell the difference between musical silence and technical silence? Did they tune out or switch stations? Were they entranced, inspired, bored, or confused? With all the chaos and the power cuts, did they just assume that the station had gone off-air? Was the silence politicized? How much explanation was given before the performance began? Was it treated as a pedagogical opportunity or a spontaneous happening? These questions were never answered for me as a performer.
Salomé Voegelin has theorized a mode of listening that might reduce the dominance of the visible in favor of other senses (Voegelin, 2010, pp. xi–xiii). Her approach offers intriguing possibilities for analyzing my radio performance since all visual elements and clues were removed. One of the many paradoxes raised by this broadcast was that I felt silenced, unable to communicate with the audience since I couldn’t see them. And the opposite is also true—they couldn’t see me either. Did the piece thus lose value? Or did it gain in value because the visual was eliminated in favor of the (in)audible?
As the performer, I was only concerned with one thing: time. It was going too slow; it was taking too long. I began to fear I had set the stopwatch wrong. As the silent audience of my fears, I suffered an eternity in those four and a half minutes. No one was visible in the control room. The only audible markers for silence were the small sounds of our bodies. There was no audience feedback. In this agonizing performance, it was as if time stood still, thus the opposite of Tudor’s performance, in which time could be heard distinctly ticking.
I found it nerve-wracking standing in front of the microphone and comprehending how many people were listening. But I also knew they were not listening to “me” because the microphone transmitted none of the sounds I was hearing (my breathing, the beating of my heart). What the microphone transmitted were low-level noises, the hum from the electrical equipment, and the background sounds in the studio. The resultant quiet noise emitting from the user’s radio would then resonate with other “real life” hums and vibrations at home or in the car of the listener, creating small sounds on varied timescales. Listeners would have heard the background sounds of their own world, of their own personal soundscape: maybe the whoosh of their car’s tires, the creak of the radiators in their kitchen, or birds chirping outside.
In addition to the noises of their personal soundscape, they heard the vibrations of their radio as it broadcast the audio artifacts of the Moscow recording studio. Whatever those quiet hums might have been, they were probably quieter than the localized noise of their kitchen, car, or office. I can imagine that many experienced frustration rather than silence: “What’s wrong with my radio?” (the personal); “What’s wrong with the station?” (the administrative); or “What’s wrong with Moscow?” (the political). All these would have been interpretations of the silence as extreme not. Many might have switched stations, choosing to silence Cage; others might have heard it as music or found it soothing.
The resulting situation was an interesting experiment in shared listening in that the broadcast became a space for active contemplation and imagination for the listener. Moreover, the performance tied in nicely with Cage’s idea that this piece is going on all the time around us. Whether or not 4’33” was actually broadcast, whether or not the intended audience heard it or not, listening to “real life” was achieved that day on an impressive scale.
Own Practice Experience: 4’33” in Healthcare (Workshops at Hôpital Goüin)
Is there a way to bring performances of 4’33” closer to the listening experiences that Cage described? I explored this question in workshops I led for many years for hospitalized patients in long-term care.3 One of our favorite exercises was to sit in a circle, with no particular expectations, and close our eyes and listen. This ring of people contained no designated performer; we were all performers and listeners at the same time. We might listen for a minute or five minutes. We would stop when concentration seemed to be flagging. The result was a bit like Cage’s personal silence meditations in the forest and less like the YouTube performances above. By removing the designated performer, the audience had become the performers themselves. As a group, we became a flexible and continuous marker for summoning silence, a state that recalls Cage’s idea of tuning into a silence that is already there. This led to a phenomenon Margulis describes as meta-listening:
Experiences during silent periods also point to the active, participatory nature of musical listening. […] the listening itself often becomes an object of listening. In these episodes of ‘meta-listening,’ the music seems to purposefully place listening habits or beliefs on self-conscious display to the listener, weaving this into the fabric of the aesthetic object. (Margulis, 2007, p. 274)
I found this to be an excellent way of experiencing silence as a group. Without the framing components of Cage’s reputation and instructions, we achieved a constructive and positive type of silent listening that was often more interesting than what I achieved onstage. Acheson hears symphonic silences here: “That is one of the beauties of silence—that, when multiple people perform it at once, their silent voices are raised in unison, creating not cacophony, but symphony” (Acheson, 2008, p. 549). One could argue that this unison silence has little to do with performing, that listening or feeling is not performing.4 Perhaps it is a listening exercise in the manner of Deep Listening (Oliveros, 2005). As with Oliveros’ exercises, the communal ritual becomes a supporting framework for the silence. But I think that what we did was both listening and performing, knotted together. Moreover there was an ingredient of play, with its elements of exploration, learning, and risk. Sitting in a circle, we watched each other performing listening as we watched ourselves listening and as we performed silent listening for others.
