John Cage in Pittsburgh

Last week, I did the second concert this season in the "Symphony with a Splash" I plan and host with the Pittsburgh Symphony. These are concerts for people who don't normally go to hear the orchestra; we do short pieces (including single movements of long pieces), with commentary from me.

This time we tried something really challenging -- John Cage's famous silent piece, 4'33", with the second of Webern's Five Pieces for Orchestra coming just before and after it. We could get away with this because our theme was "Are You Crazy?" -- and we could say Cage was crazy for writing silent music, while Webern was crazy for writing short pieces. The piece we picked is less than 30 seconds long.

Of course, we meant "crazy" affectionately. The idea of combining Cage and Webern was simple. It's helpful to have something leading into Cage's silence. And the Webern, by itself, is hard to listen to, not because it's atonal (I was proud, by the way, that we didn't even mention atonality), but because so much happens in so short a time. By the time you settle down to listen, the piece might well be over. So the long John Cage silence can prepare the Webern, create a quiet space in which Webern's little twists and turns might be easier to hear.

I think this happened. But the Cage, I thought, was in itself extraordinary, and I learned a lot from it. First, though, some basic points, for anyone who doesn't know the piece. The title is the piece's length, four minutes and 33 seconds. It can be played on any instrument or combination of instruments. (Many people think it's a piano piece, because it's most often played that way, but Cage doesn't specify a piano.) And the score says the piece is in three movements, with no sound made in any of them, indicated as follows:

I

Tacet

II

Tacet

III

Tacet

("Tacet" is a musical term meaning "silent" or "doesn't play." If, for example, you're a contrabassoonist and you play only the third movement of a piece, your part will say "tacet" under the titles of the other movements.)

The length of each movement is up to the performer(s). But you have to do something to show where each new movement begins. All of this, I'm sure, seems crazy to some of you reading it. Certainly people make fun of the piece.

But in performance 4'33" can be wonderful. Cage (as we explained to the audience in Pittsburgh) knew that there's no such thing as silence, that sounds of some kind are always being made. So the sounds in this piece are the ones that take place naturally while it's performed. I knew Cage a little, and at least in public, he was one of the most joyful people I've ever encountered. I've often thought that 4'33" (and other silent pieces he composed) were one way that he expressed the joy he felt about even tiny things in the world, in this case sounds that happen unintentionally.

I can go to that place myself, or to a place very similar: I've noticed that when I'm really relaxed, I start hearing all the sounds around me. In fact, it's my way of telling when I really am relaxed. If I hear all the sounds, then I'm not tense any more.

All this, of course (except the part about me), is very well known. Any book on Cage or on 20th century music will tell you everything you've just read. But all of it was new, I'm sure, to most people in the Pittsburgh audience. Certainly when I talked to many of them afterwards, I didn't hear people saying that they'd heard all about this piece.

And what was wonderful was how much so many of them liked it. I'm not going to say some didn't hate it, or simply were baffled. In my role of host, I asked two people in the front row what they thought, both of the Cage and the Webern, and they simply said, "I don't know!" (And yes, with that much animation.)

But afterwards -- in the hall after the concert, in a private discussion with a group of students from the University of Pittsburgh, and even with a woman I met at the airport the next day, as I was heading for the gate to fly home -- I kept hearing how much people liked it. Many of them even made a point of thanking me for programming the piece. (Though I think the idea really came from Robert Moir, the Pittsburgh Symphony's VP of Artistic Planning.) The woman in the airport -- who saw me passing by, and came up to say how much she'd liked the concert -- said the Cage made her think of music paper with nothing but rests on it.

And here's what I learned about the piece. For many people, I'm sure, the division into three movements seems arbitrary, and also a little forced. I mean, sure, a silent piece, but a silent piece in three movements? What's the point of that?

But there's a lot of point. The job of the performer is to frame the silence. And, as part of that, to set the mood of the piece -- to provide an example of attentive listening, and, for people knew to this kind of art, to convey something of the unforced dignity that Cage himself could bring to his own listening.

This isn't so hard if you just sit or stand there. But if you have to divide the silence into three parts, your job is harder. You have to maintain your unforced dignity while you move. And what positions should you take? How much moving should you do? What should you feel like while you move? You have to focus your attention much harder, and also -- if you're really being honest -- ask yourself why you might, at any given time, feel a sudden urge to move. Where should the movements start and end? It's up to you, but the decision should be spontaneous, unforced, and irresistible.

All of which might sometimes be easy, and sometimes not, but certainly required more of me than simply sitting still. I imagine it made 4'33" easier for the audience, because everyone could roughly measure the progress of the piece by how many movements were left. And it taught me -- a lesson I didn't learn, actually, until right now, as I'm typing this -- that it wouldn't be legitimate to play games with the movement lengths, to deliberately make (let's say) the first movement last almost the entire piece, and then rush the second movement and the third, thus making the audience giggle. Even pieces with no notated events have their own unwritten rules (and if you're curious to know more about this in Cage, see my 1980's Village Voice column on "The Cage Style," on my website).