A composer’s anthology of musical manuscripts, gathered as a portrait of the music of his time
What the Work Is
Notations is a book compiled by the American composer John Cage and first published in 1969. It is an English-language anthology built around the handwritten manuscripts of musical works by a wide range of composers, reproduced in facsimile. Rather than a treatise or a listening guide, it is a documentary collection: a gathering of composers’ own notation, presented as visual and historical material.
What the Book Is About
The book’s subject is musical notation itself — the actual marks composers put on paper. By reproducing the manuscripts of many different composers, Notations presents the diversity of ways twentieth-century music was written down, from conventional staff notation to graphic and experimental systems. The organizing idea is that a composer’s manuscript is not merely a neutral instruction for performance but a distinctive document, and that collecting many of them side by side yields a picture of a musical era. The book thus functions as a collective portrait of the compositional activity of Cage’s contemporaries, told through their own handwriting rather than through analysis or commentary.
Significance and Influence
Notations belongs to the same milieu as Cage’s other projects of the 1960s that blurred the line between music, visual art, and documentation. Its value lies in assembling, in a single volume, primary manuscript material that would otherwise remain scattered in archives and private hands, making the visual and material dimension of modern composition available to a broad readership. As a compilation rather than a single authored argument, it stands as a reference point for the study of how composers of the period actually wrote their music.
John Milton Cage Jr. was born on 5 September 1912 in Los Angeles and died on 12 August 1992 in New York City. He was an American composer and artist, and with more than 250 compositions — frequently regarded as key works of New Music — he is considered one of the most influential composers of the twentieth century worldwide. In addition, he produced writings on music theory and composition theory of fundamental importance. Cage is also regarded as a key figure for the Happening movement that emerged at the end of the 1950s and as an important stimulus for the Fluxus movement and New Improvisation music. Alongside his compositional work, he was also active as a painter.
Cage’s Most Important Work
Among Cage’s compositions, 4′33″ — a “silent” piece in three movements written in 1952 — became a key work of New Music. Because not a single tone is played during its entire duration, its performance calls the prevailing conception of music into question, prompting listeners, composers, and performers alike to reflect on music and silence. In a 1982 interview and on various other occasions, Cage stated that in his opinion 4′33″ was his most important work of all.
The Origins of the Silent Piece
The piece was conceived in the years 1947 to 1948, while Cage was still working on his Sonatas and Interludes, and it became the epitome of his idea that fundamentally “all sounds can become music.” His engagement with Japanese Zen Buddhism, which the composer had studied since the late 1940s, is also likely to have had a substantial influence on the creation of his “silent” piece. The aspect of silence had, however, already played a significant role in various works before the composition of 4′33″: the Duet for Two Flutes (1934), composed at the age of 22, begins with silence; silence was also an important form-building element in some of his Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48) as well as in Music of Changes (1951) and Two Pastorales (1951). The Concerto for prepared piano and orchestra (1951) ends with silence, and Waiting (1952), a piano piece composed only a few months before 4′33″, consists of a single short ostinato pattern framed by silence. Furthermore, in his songs The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1942) and A Flower (1950), Cage instructs the pianist to play with the instrument closed, which can simultaneously be understood as a metaphor for silence.
Cage first mentioned the idea of composing a completely silent piece in 1947 in the context of a lecture at Vassar College (New York). At that time, however, Cage was of the opinion that such a piece would be “incomprehensible in the Western context,” and so he wanted to wait a while before realizing it compositionally.
The Anecdote of the Anechoic Chamber
In 1951 Cage visited the anechoic chamber of Harvard University in Boston. This room was constructed so that the walls, ceiling, and floor absorbed virtually all sounds, so that no reverberation (echo) arises; moreover, such rooms are almost completely soundproof to the outside. Cage entered the room expecting to hear absolutely nothing — later he wrote: “I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he explained to me that the high one was produced by the operation of my nervous system and the low one by my blood circulation.” Whether this explanation corresponds to the facts may be left open — in any case, Cage went to a place where he expected total silence and still heard sounds.
The Influence of Robert Rauschenberg
A further impulse for the composition of 4′33″ came from the visual arts. Cage’s friend Robert Rauschenberg produced a series of white paintings (White Paintings) in 1951 — seemingly “empty” canvases (though coated with white paint) that nevertheless change owing to shifting light conditions. This phenomenon was an important source of inspiration for John Cage, as he repeatedly explained later.
The Premiere
The premiere of 4′33″ by the renowned pianist David Tudor took place on 29 August 1952 at 8:15 p.m. in the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock (New York). The piece was played within the framework of a recital of contemporary piano music for the benefit of the Benefit Artist Welfare Fund and appeared on the concert program together with works by Pierre Boulez, Earle Brown, Henry Cowell, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff. On the program sheet of the premiere, 4′33″ was listed as 4 pieces, and the duration of the three movements was given as 30 seconds, 2 minutes 23 seconds, and 1 minute 40 seconds. These details, however, contradict the actual three-movement structure of 4′33″ as well as Cage’s own statements regarding the playing duration of the individual movements. The premiere triggered a veritable scandal, since the listeners did not know that no music at all would be heard in the interpretation of this composition.
In a conversation with John Kobler (1968), Cage remarked, and related on another occasion, that some people had begun to whisper to one another, others to leave. They had not laughed — they were merely irritated when they noticed that nothing was going to happen. Even 30 years later they had not forgotten it and were still angry.
The Concept
4′33″ was written in 1952 for an unspecified instrument or group of instruments and is divided — in the sense of conventional conventions (compare sonata or similar) — into three separate movements. Cage, however, dispenses with note or rest symbols and instead superscribes the movements with the Latin instruction “tacet,” which refers to the silencing or pausing of an instrument (or group of instruments) in the course of a movement. The work thus constitutes itself from random ambient noises that the listener hears during the performance, even if 4′33″ is frequently perceived as “four minutes thirty-three seconds” of silence. According to Kyle Gann, the audience is thereby tricked or forced or seduced into a five-minute Zen meditation, finding itself through listening in the moment of the “here and now.” Later remarks by the composer even reveal that he had subsequently come to the conviction that 4′33″ actually needed no performer at all. Cage himself therefore often characterized the piece as an “act of listening.”
According to Cage, silence must be redefined in order to continue to have a meaning as a concept. He recognized that there would be no objective separation between noise and silence, but only between the intention to hear something and that of letting one’s attention be distracted by noises. “The essential meaning of silence is that one gives up the intention,” he said. This conception represented the most important turning point in his philosophy as a composer. Cage redefined silence quite simply as “the absence of intended noises or as the switching off of our consciousness.”
The Comment Text of the Score Edition
The score edition produced in 1960 by Edition Peters contains the following comment text written by John Cage himself. With this note, Cage explains that “the title of the work is fundamentally the total duration of the performance in minutes and seconds (and the piece can in this respect last arbitrarily long), and it can fundamentally be performed with any instrument or any combination of instruments.” The title 4′33″ in the familiar form goes back to the premiere. The lengths of the three individual movements of 33 seconds, 2 minutes and 40 seconds, and 1 minute and 20 seconds, determined by Cage in aleatoric calculations according to the early Chinese oracle book I Ching, add up to the title-giving duration of four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Moreover, the movement division structures the otherwise unstructured silence: at the Woodstock premiere, the pianist closed the lid over the keys of the grand piano at the beginning of each movement and opened it again at the end — which, according to Ludger Lütkehaus, amounts to a “reversal of the usual musical logic.” Something happens, but nothing is to be heard, apart from any clattering and the movement of the pianist, which one does at least see at a live performance.
According to Hans-Friedrich Bormann, Cage’s linking of the three-movement structure with Tudor’s action of marking the beginning and end of a movement by closing or opening the piano lid has repeatedly led to misunderstandings in the reception history of the work, among others that 4′33″ is a composition for piano (which Cage never said) and that the closing or opening of the piano lid constitutes an action belonging to the composition. In fact, however, Cage in his note would do nothing other than report on the premiere.
The Compositional Process
About the compositional process of 4′33″, Cage related in 1988 in the context of a discussion on the occasion of his lecture at Harvard University. In an interview from 1990, by contrast, he claims that the piece is a “note-for-note” composition and that he used a self-made card game to determine the durations. More precise information about the cards used and the compositional strategy, however, is lacking here. The pianist David Tudor comments: “I understood the piece as a composition and I also understood how it was composed: would not have known that at all, since they measure in Fahrenheit. Cage was, however, quite enthusiastic about it: “It’s wonderful!”
Predecessor Pieces
John Cage was not the first composer to compose a piece without any audible sound. As early as 1907, Ferruccio Busoni wrote in his Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst about the significance of silence in music. Consequently, Paul Hindemith mentioned for the first time in 1916 the idea of composing a piece that should consist merely of rests and fermatas — but it never came to a concrete realization.
The French writer and humorist Alphonse Allais composed a “silent” work with the title Marche funèbre incohérente – les grandes douleurs sont muettes, which was presented in 1883 within the framework of an exhibition at the Salon des Incohérents. At the later publication in the Album Primo-Avrilesque (1897), Allais changed the original title to Marche funèbre composée pour les funérailles d’un grand homme sourd (“Funeral March for the Burial of a Great Deaf Man”) and explained in the preface. The score consists of a sheet of music with 24 empty bars and is superscribed with the performance marking Lento rigolando. In contrast to 4′33″, however, Allais’s piece is meant as a joke. When Cage was once addressed about it, he stated that he did not know Allais’s composition.
Gaston Leroux described silent concerts in the Paris catacombs in his novel La Double Vie de Théophraste Longuet (1903).
In futurum, the third piece from the Fünf Pittoresken op. 31 for piano of 1919 by the Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff, consists exclusively of rests. The piano part is notated by means of an inverted double system of bass and treble clef and the strange time signatures 3/5 and 7/10 as well as superscribed with the tempo indication “Zeitmass – zeitlos.” Although the composer Schulhoff, who was close to Dadaism, divided the rest values metrically in a complicated manner and wrote down detailed performance instructions, nothing is to be heard in the whole piece.
About the piece Silent music (1941) by the American composer Raymond Scott, it was to be read. The American jazz musician Dave Tough joked in 1947 that he had written a theater piece in which a string quartet would play the most progressive music ever composed.
The Monotone-Silence Symphony (unofficially: The Monotone Symphony) of the French artist Yves Klein, conceived in 1947 and written down in 1961 in collaboration with the composer Louis Saguar, is an orchestral work with choir, consisting of strings (10 violins, 10 cellos, 3 double basses), woodwinds (8 flutes, 8 oboes), and brass (3 horns) as well as 20 singers in two groups. The piece is constructed in two parts: a sustained D major triad is followed by “absolute” silence. According to Klein, the choice of volume depends on the acoustic conditions of the concert venue. The details of the playing duration of the two sequences, however, are contradictory, being handed down both as 5–7 minutes of music and 44 seconds of silence and as 2 × 20 minutes. In contrast to Cage, however, Klein is primarily concerned in his “symphony of monotonous silence” with the contrast between the two parts.
Successor Pieces
In 1962 John Cage composed the piece 0′00″, which is also designated as 4′33″ No. 2. It is a Solo to be performed in any way by anyone (“solo that can be performed by anyone in any way”). The playing duration was not specified more closely by Cage. The piece is dedicated to Toshi Ichiyanagi and Yoko Ono and is published by Edition Peters with the catalog number EP 6796. The premiere took place on 24 October 1962 in Tokyo. The original score of the work originally consisted only of the sentence In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action (“In a situation provided with maximum amplification [no feedback], perform a disciplined action”).
