This title has been sitting on my brain since May, but I haven’t dared write for my Readership (yes, both of you) may have high expectations with such a long delay. Have no fear, for I’m sure this entry will rank as pithy and ludicrous as anything else you’ll find on this site. Anyway…

I suppose it all began after reading Chris Corrigan’s note about John Cage’s (in)famous piece, 4’33” which has the performer sit in front of a piano for 4 minutes and 33 seconds.

Keep in mind that it isn’t performing silence, as in a crowded concert hall or in the living room full of a familiar audience, there is always something to hear.

Joke or not, the piece does qualify as art. If we take the definition that art has the viewer see something they hadn’t seen before (a different perspective, etc) or has the viewer see a different reality, then just think of the initial stunned audience staring at Cage in front of his piano trying to grasp meaning to what they are witnessing… to grapple with the silence that we usually ignore.

But even if we take the typical definition of art to be a “conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty,” the piece still qualifies. In this case, the orchestration is the assembly of the audience. Coordinating a group of people is a lot like trying to control pigment in a watercolor… sometimes you just have to give up and go with the flow.

But a lot of John Cage’s oeuvre (as well as his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg and the rest of the twentieth century avant-garde) was about randomness … in art and in one’s life. Both dice and mathematics were employed in both composition and performance to demonstrate this.

Of course, you would think that given these thoughts, you couldn’t possible record this 4’33” piece, right? Well, actually, you can in a sense (see this article about how you can purchase silence from Apple’s Music Store). But this piece is clearly performance art.

ASAP == As Slow As Possible

Came across this CNN report (thanks to David Chin) where a town in Germany has decided to perform another work of John Cage and accept his recommendation that it be played as slow as possible. After some debate, they decided to take 639 years to play it… the first note was played in February 2003 and (as of this writing) they have now performed 5 notes.

Talk about the ultimate in performance art.

But the artistic philosophy behind this performance brings to mind the work and ideas of The Long Now, which I’ve mentioned before. How often in our sound bites and two-verses-chorus-verse-solo-chorus song formulas, do we forget to think past our preconceived notions and expectations, past our immediate goals and rewards, past ourselves into the in-perceivable future?

Return to the Silence

But silence is unattainable. I think it would be wonderful to experience true sense deprivation… to turn it off and rest. Even now, as I write these notes, I not only hear the cacophany of my finger-keyboard-performance, but I also annoyingly hear the electronic hum from my baby monitor, my dimmed lights, my computer fan. Then there is the piercing spikes of noise that most of us label as “the house settling.” And let’s not even start with my noisy breath.

Or perhaps that’s exactly where I should start…

For the more we try to remove stimulus, the more our brains manufacture it. Funny huh? Like the phantom feelings from an amputated limb, our brain likes to invent sense-input. So while it doesn’t make sense, in order to get “silence,” we need to concentrate on the noise… concentrate on the present reality that’s bathes us… with the breath that goes in. The breath that goes out.

Eh… maybe I’ll just start up iTunes.