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    Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition
    Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition
    Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition
    Ebook578 pages6 hours

    Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition

    By John Cage

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    About this ebook

    John Cage is the outstanding composer of avant-garde music today. The Saturday Review said of him: "Cage possesses one of the rarest qualities of the true creator- that of an original mind- and whether that originality pleases, irritates, amuses or outrages is irrelevant." "He refuses to sermonize or pontificate. What John Cage offers is more refreshing, more spirited, much more fun-a kind of carefree skinny-dipping in the infinite. It's what's happening now." –The American Record Guide

    "There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. Sounds occur whether intended or not; the psychological turning in direction of those not intended seems at first to be a giving up of everything that belongs to humanity. But one must see that humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world together, that nothing was lost when everything was given away."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWesleyan University Press
    Release dateJun 26, 2012
    ISBN9780819571779
    Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition

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      Book preview

      Silence - John Cage

      THE FUTURE OF MUSIC: CREDO

      The following text was delivered as a talk at a meeting of a Seattle arts society organized by Bonnie Bird in 1937. It was printed in the brochure accompanying George Avakian’s recording of my twenty-five-year retrospective concert at Town Hall, New York, in 1958.

      I BELIEVE THAT THE USE OF NOISE

      Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments. Every film studio has a library of sound effects recorded on film. With a film phonograph it is now possible to control the amplitude and frequency of any one of these sounds and to give to it rhythms within or beyond the reach of the imagination. Given four film phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heartbeat, and landslide.

      TO MAKE MUSIC

      If this word music is sacred and reserved for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of

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