The Other Side of Silence

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter.

—John Keats

At every moment we are bombarded by sound waves, light waves, gamma rays, x-rays, the solar wind. All around, through, and even inside of us is restless movement: the brain muses, nerve cells flare, hair grows, food becomes flesh, not to mention all that is going on at the subatomic level. Our senses can only register a narrow band of all this movement, but even what we can sense is far too much for us. To think, to function in the world, to survive, we have to ignore most of what we can see and hear. We need silence.

We need peace of mind to concentrate, which is not possible without silence. Music and poetry—without silence—impossible. Without silence, our dreams— sleeping or waking—are not possible. Without dreams, there can be nothing to imagine, nothing to hope for, no future. Even love is not possible without meaningful silences, and I would go so far as to say that, without silence, there is no freedom.

The composer John Cage was in search of silence when he entered an anechoic chamber at Harvard University in 1951. A soundproof room about the size of an airplane hangar, an anechoic chamber is designed so that no sound or any other type of wave can enter, and inside there are no echoes of any kind, no reflections of sound or radio waves. These chambers are commonly used by the Air Force and military contractors to test electronic equipment in quarantine from any interfering or contaminating waves.

I literally expected to hear nothing, Cage said. Yet having stood inside the chamber for a moment, the closest to noiselessness that any human being can get, he heard two sounds, one high pitched and one low. When he asked a technician what these sounds were, Cage was told the high sound was the sound of his functioning nervous system and the low sound was the sound of his blood circulating. Cage was both startled and impressed by the experience. Try as we may to make a silence, he said, we cannot (Solomon, 3).

Being a composer, Cage had a powerful interest in what silence was or was not, and he went on to muse about it for the rest of his life, even writing a book titled Silence, in 1961. Since there could be no such thing as the absence of sound for a living, breathing human being with a pulse, what then could silence be? It was a matter of intent, Cage decided: The essential meaning of silence is the giving up of intention. Silence is not acoustic. It is a change of mind. A turning around (3).

Cage then set out to capture silence in his famous composition Four Minutes and Thirty-Three Seconds, or Four Thirty-Three, as he liked to call it. The idea for the length of the composition came from the average duration of a piece of canned music (a term used to describe Muzak in the 1960s). Cage even had the notion of sending a tape to the Muzak Company of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. Zen Buddhism had been an influence on Cage for years, and other ideas and influences came along as the years went by, among them a conversation that had a tremendous impact on the way Cage thought about music: Cage asked an Indian student who was studying with him what the purpose of music was, and she replied that the purpose of music, according to her (Indian) teacher, was to quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences (5). Cage was carrying these influences along with him when he saw Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, whose example helped give him the courage to follow through on 4′33″. If Rauschenberg could paint nearly blank canvases that captured the play of degrees of ambient light and shadow within a frame, Cage could frame silence within a musical score (4).

The composition was finally “performed” by pianist David Tudor in a concert for the Benefit Artists Welfare...