Silence: 50th Anniversary Edition (review)

Silence played an important role in transforming John Cage from an underappreciated composer often dismissed as a joker into one of the most celebrated cultural figures of the later twentieth century. Prior to the late 1950s it was difficult for anyone beyond Cage’s circle to gain an impression of the development and range of his work, or the ideas that explained his experiments. Silence was the most significant of a number of factors to rectify this. Part of its success was serendipitous. It appeared in October 1961 just as a generation looking for new ideas emerged to embrace it. Cage’s mix of anti-establishment rhetoric, Orientalist mysticism, and alternative humor made it a bible for young members of the New York art scene. Its influence quickly spread. Despite lengthy technical passages on composition, Cage’s words inspired practitioners in many disciplines to challenge the certainties of European and American culture. Since its release, it has sold more than half a million copies. Silence remains essential for understanding contemporary art music, particularly the origins of the tradition documented by Nyman in Experimental Music (1974), as well as elements of the development of happenings and experimental theatre, modern dance, and conceptual art.

To mark its fiftieth anniversary, Silence has been reissued. With the exception of a redesigned cover and a new foreword, the typography and text of the original remain unchanged. There is still no index. Kyle Gann’s foreword seems primarily targeted at readers new to the book. Although he effectively encapsulates what continues to make the text thought-provoking, engaging, and funny, in sketching an updated view of Cage and Silence, Gann’s conclusions oversimplify the tensions running under the text’s surface. He acknowledges but downplays the book’s didacticism in order to extol it as a catalyst to freethinking. Contradicting the jacket—which states precisely the opposite—he contends that “Cage was no philosopher” (xxv). While this is not incorrect, it unhelpfully elides the considerable amount of philosophizing undertaken by Cage and the importance to his arguments of the ontological and epistemological axioms he theorized. Gann suggests Cage “deflates pretensions, wipes away misassumptions, erases the slate for us all to start over” (x), “he freed us to think for ourselves” because he “didn’t outline for us what to think, or how” (xxv). It is therefore ironic that what is largely missing from Gann’s foreword is information enabling the reader to break beyond the epistemological boundaries of the text.

What could have been discussed? Gann does not consider the book’s structure. Predominantly reaching an audience unfamiliar with the composer’s work, Silence shaped how Cage was received. It created myths about Cage and his art that in turn mold how Silence is read today. Despite reflecting considerable changes in Cage’s compositional methods, beliefs, and influences, the twenty-three texts the book contains, written between 1939 and 1961, were organized out of chronological order giving the false impression that Cage had been advocating a consistent musical and philosophical position for most of his career. Cage’s bad memory for dates accentuated this. Musically, Cage moved from determinate to indeterminate composition; his thought traveled from Russolo and transition, through Joseph Campbell, Coomaraswamy, and Jung, to Suzuki and Zen, fungi and nature, before beginning to investigate anarchism and society. Cage rarely rejected a previous influence, preferring to let his current preoccupations reshape his theories—even when they were incompatible. For example, in the “Lecture on Something” Cage attempted to make Campbell’s Jungian archetypes congruent with the complete rejection of symbolism he associated with Zen (128–45). That the attempt does not appear unsuccessful is due to the methodology Cage employed. To borrow Pierce’s metaphor, Cage’s theories were constructed more like the multi-stranded weave of a cable than the links of a chain. The majority of Cage’s writings at this time rely on the effect of numerous separate threads of evidence from disparate disciplines intertwining to suggest a greater...