Book review: Kay Larson on the zen of Cage

Or to put that another way: silence, the stillness, is the pond into which Cage’s life and influence is dipped, and music and the arts the shingle on the beach from which the pebbles are dropped.

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And Cage played in that shingle, sent notes from “prepared piano” and other instruments… formal and informal… skipping across the silence.

Cage not only invited silence into the concert hall, he also theorized it at length. I’d like to quote here a celebrated passage from his book, aptly named Silence: Lectures and Writings:

What happens to a piece of music when it is purposelessly made? What happens, for instance to silence? That is, how does the mind’s perception of it change?… Silence becomes something else — not silence at all, but sounds, the ambient sounds… Where ears are in connection with a mind that has nothing to do, that mind is free to enter into the act of listening, hearing each sound as it is, not as a phenomenon more or less approximating a preconception.

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Zen is the simplest thing, it’s human nature. It is also the most difficult — it’s what we instinctively shy away from. And it can take all our resources, as those who “sit while going round in circles” well know — to break from the “boredom” of silence into listening, to dip into the sound stream, to hear the stillness.

Somehow, I’m hoping to nudge you into that kind of awareness, so that you can understand from within the taste of silence, the importance of Cage’s life, and of Kay Larson’s book.

Here’s another nudge, from a different angle — the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan‘s poem in homage to one of John Cage’s sayings:

Opening the Cage: 14 Variations on 14 Words

“I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry.” — John Cage

I have to say poetry and is that nothing and am I saying it

I am and I have poetry to say and is that nothing saying it

I am nothing and I have poetry to say and that is saying it

I that am saying poetry have nothing and it is I and to say

And I say that I am to have poetry and saying it is nothing

I am poetry and nothing and saying it is to say that I have

To have nothing is poetry and I am saying that and I say it

Poetry is saying I have nothing and I am to say that and it

Saying nothing I am poetry and I have to say that and it is

It is and I am and I have poetry saying say that to nothing

It is saying poetry to nothing and I say I have and am that

Poetry is saying I have it and I am nothing and to say that

And that nothing is poetry I am saying and I have to say it

Saying poetry is nothing and to that I say I am and have it

— Edwin Morgan, The Second Life

Edinburgh University Press, 1968

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In a follow up post on Monday or Tuesday, I shall describe Larson’s book in more conventional terms, and offer you some details from Cage’s intricate life and extraordinary network of friends..

For now, I just want to give you again that taste of silence from which this whole endeavor springs. Here is the pianist David Tudor, for whom the piece was written, playing 4’33”:

YouTube video

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