John Cage “4’33” (In Proportional Notation)

John Cage is a music composer that has been in career for 60 years. With his experimental specialty, he composed roughly 300 pieces that included any sound possible. Cage’s trademark was to find undiscovered sounds that had potential. He would go to endless boundaries to notice every element, from a squeak and honk, as a possible element for his music. Cage, who originally thought the purpose of music was to share emotions, saw a different approach. After the influence Gita Sarabhai, an Indian heiress, Cage perceived sound as meaningless and emotionless. Therefore, he understood it as a catalyst to calm the mind and provide it with a response to universal influences.

During the Romantic Movement, composers inserted control and feelings to their music that dissolved the original act of improvisation in Mozarts’ days. Cage thought it was a mistake and idealized around ‘chance music’ to give performers the freedom to compose. With his 4’33 silent piece composed in 1952, Zen and Dada played an important role in teaching that everything is the same, whether it’s music or noise, it’s a matter of the audience’s perception. Cage’s technique was to scheme silent music with a political statement to revive the silence of industrial America from the revolt and a request for people to listen carefully. With his piece, the attentiveness to silence features unexpected sounds that can create something beautiful. It’s a reminder to be present and realize that there’s no line dividing music and sound.

According to John Cage, chance operations create an acceptance of his work, which excludes the use of emotions on good or bad. It offers a chance to change his mind without rationalizing and immersing into experiences that allows teaching him. Cage decided to use I Ching, an ancient divination text providing random numbers, as the first step to acceptance. To use chance operations, we need to accept whatever result it determines. If it doesn’t satisfy, the solution isn’t to change the I Ching, but to change himself.

Cage’s “4’33 (In Proportional Notation) contains vertical lines that indicate the unit of time as a unit of space on where he wrote one page=7 inches=56 seconds. The distance between the lines translates to the spatial and temporal measurements. Sound exists just as it is, and Cage’s silent piece is a way to understand reality and open up possibilities to ambient sound. Throughout three periods of silence in Cage’s score, the audience could hear various sound backgrounds.

With the sounds that surround the city, we notice everything from the honking of cars up to the tiny bits of our gushing of the wind. Cage’s technique allows our acceptance and awareness of the sounds that the city makes. Through his silent piece, these three periods of silence frames people’s sounds as part of his performance. People made all kinds of sounds from whispering to coughing. These sounds open up an understanding of how the city generates an ample amount of sounds without our realization. Cage’s 4’33 piece requires our acceptance to chance sounds and how they exist just as they are within the society.

For my performance clip, I want to experiment with sound along with Cage’s concepts and technique. Specifically, on noise and practice on Zen Buddhism, I created an instrument to allow an audience to experience a private space. This instrument is a headpiece containing sound canceling headphones with an eye gear. The purpose of this design is to cancel, both light and sounds that might enter. It is going to be performed by one of the volunteers to indicate what sounds that may appear during the instrument’s use. Within a given time of 2-4 minutes, the performer will comprehend what they hear and illustrate an act of meditation.

In conclusion, sound comes naturally to the ear even though we want to cancel them. This instrument acts as an indicator that sounds are still everywhere, even with the silence it brings. The other audiences listening to the performance, even in a silent state, are more responsive to the sounds that they make or unexpectedly hear. This chance operation relates to Cage’s openness to the present and chances of random sounds without defining it as music or not. It is to change our perception that sounds are a form as they are and is seen with no judgment, whether it is bad or good. With this first step of acceptance to chance and change, the audience will get the concept of Zen Buddhism and I Ching applied to this performance.

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