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John Cage: Concert for Piano, Solo for Clarinet (p. 121) Edition Peters No. 6705-CL © 1960
by Henmar Press Inc. New York. Reproduced by kind permission of Peters Edition Limited, London.
Swept Under the Carpet with John Cage
By Miklos Legrady,
edited by Gabor Podor
John Cage’s experiments with sound mark him as one of the great artists of his generation. This current critique does not doubt him but it does light up both his insights and misconceptions. I am not here to downplay Cage, whose talent is obvious. But I am here to chastise an art world failing at language, truth, and logic, in order to deify talented artists whose ideas and assumptions do not always succeed at proving their point. If we have not seen as far as others, it is possibly because giants were standing on our shoulders. Sol Lewitt, for example, wrote in Artforum (1)that in Conceptual art the idea is dominant while the execution is but perfunctory. But then he was disappointed in perfunctory executions of his own work, yet he never revised his writing. It would have been embarrassing, after being published in Artforum. We only learned this when Larry Bloom published his biography in 2019(2) , which means that for 50 years, universities propagated the news that skill was unimportant.
In fact, skill consists of a mastery of the media, therefore it is a skill in clear messaging. When your statement is unclear, your message is confused. And so, believing that the idea was the dominant aspect of a work of art, in the year 2020, at Basel Miami, three certificates sold for $125,000 each attesting that a banana was a work of art. As reported in Wikipedia, “Comedian is a 2019 artwork by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. Created in an edition of three (with two artist's proofs), it appears as a fresh banana duct taped to a wall. As a work of conceptual art, it consists of a certificate of authenticity with detailed diagrams and instructions for its proper display.” Had Catellan believed that his banana was worth $125,000, when performance artist David Duna rushed in and ate the banana, Catellan would have called for a stomach pump to retrieve his valuable property. That Sol Lewitt also made mistakes does not disparage the greater good of his work. But the consequences of his mistake expand in concentric waves. Once the cat is out of the bag, who knows what disasters will follow? For example, in 2025 this very author produced an artist certificate stating that 1kg. of nothing in this room was a work of art. (3)
John Cage is not a traditional musician whose works aimed at acoustic attraction. He may even be better described as an acoustic artist who experimented with the extremes of sound. Some successful, others questionable and open to criticism. Cage may well fall under the category of 20th century nihilist artists whose work found no criticism as it was barely understood in his own time even as it gathered much interest for it’s experimental progress.
But we may well call him an acoustic artist rather than a musician, when compared to his peer, Phillip Glass. Glass’s work is beautiful and one may listen to Tubular Bells over and over because of the work’s beauty. John Cage, on the other hand, was one who shares responsibility for the word “beauty” no longer being found in a description of music. I believe this is a mistake, for beauty attracts while Cage’s work does not depend on attraction. It interests us but one would not listen to any of Cage’s works more than once for its acoustic content. Beauty attracts but its counterpart is ugliness, repulsion, boredom. One approaches the later out of curiosity, or scholarship, but rarely repeats the experiment, unlike music, to which we listen over and over
John Cage’s extremism and experimentation propelled him to world wide fame, but he also held mistaken assumptions which no one dared question. For example, there is such a thing as silence. Silence is the absence of intentional sound, the space between. Silence separates musical passages to give the mind time to absorb the theme, and if someone should cough or move their chair in the audience, no one believes such ambient sounds are part of the artist’s musical intentions unless clearly stated. And then we must ask if that sound is worthwhile listening to, we must judge if it is good art.
Cage is famously quoted as saying, "There's no such thing as silence," a concept central to his iconic conceptual work, 4′33″. Cage argued that perceived silence is actually filled with ambient sounds, from wind to human bodies, and that these accidental sounds constitute the true "music" of the piece, encouraging the listener to be mindful of their surroundings. His experience is based on time spent in an anechoic chamber, where he could still hear the sounds of his own circulation.” But Cage’s assumption is a moot point. It is based on his idea that ambient noise is music, the music of the universe and of the human body. However, there is no music of the universe or the human body, for none of these are intentional. Music is always an intention even when including accidents and chaos. Ambient noise contains no intelligence; there is no consciousness present in accidents, nor any artist’s statement. Art means a mastery of media to express an intention based on an artist’s vision. Art is always a conscious statement, even when including accidents. A painter who locks the doors of a gallery for the length of their show obviously has nothing to say, they are impotent. An artist’s absence is not a statement; it is a denial, of no importance when referring to art, except among nihilists. For Cage it’s different. His exploration of the edges was worth the effort, but it does not seem he learned the right lessons from this one, though he produced other works that merit admiration.
Once intention is taken into account, silence is the space between two intentional sounds. The space between two unintentional sounds, on the other hand, is always filled with other unintentional sounds. To gape, open mouthed, at any utterance without using our own brain cells to judge what is being said, says something very sad about an audience of supposedly the most intelligent scholars in the art world.
Cage’s stature brought credibility to everything he said, right or wrong. We, his heirs, need to know which is which. John Cage’s composition RGAN2/ASLSP - As SLow aS Possible, consists of eight pages of music performed as slow as possible. The first note was played on an organ in St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt in 2001. The next note was played on February 5, 2024. The next chord change for John Cage's "As Slow As Possible" will be performed August 5, 2026. The following chord will be on October 5, 2027. This acoustic work is due to end in 2640.
This work is conceptually linked to astronomer Enrico Femi’s paradox (“Where are they?”) concerning the existence of aliens. A signal we send out might travel 80 light-years to reach a galaxy with a civilization able to understand it, and their reply would take another 80 light-years to reach us, which means 160 years between signal and response.
However, another of John Cage’s work, 4’33” is not a musical work but a failed experiment. Music, like all art, is always an intention and not an accident, though accidents and chaos can be integrated as accent or counterpoint. The desire and intention of this work fail because we do not listen to ambient noise as we do to music. John Cage was also mistaken when he said that everything we do is music. If everything we did was music, then nothing we do would be music; the term would cease to exist. There would be no need for a word like music if it does not describe something which differs from everything else. We already have a perfectly good word we call “everything”, which we use to describe everything. Linguistic classes exist to express pragmatic differences. If all words have the same meaning, then thoughts, ideas, and communication come to an end. Hannah Arendt wrote if men were not distinct…they would need neither speech nor action (4)
Design Guild Heores: John Cahe. The Design Guild.
Kyle Gann wrote about John Cage’s 4’33” of silence that “it was a logical turning point to which other musical developments led. For many, it was a kind of artistic prayer, a bit of Zen performance theater, that opened the ears and allowed one to hear the world anew. To Cage it seemed, at least from what he wrote about it, to have been an act offraming, of enclosing environmental and unintended sounds in a moment of attention in order to open the mind to the fact that all sounds are music.” This author disagrees, saying only intentional sounds are music. One story about Cage recounts his sitting in a restaurant with the painter Willem de Kooning, who, for the sake of argument, placed his fingers in such a way as to frame some bread crumbs on the table and said, “if I put a frame around these bread crumbs, that isn’t art”. Cage argued that it indeed was art. The question then becomes "is it any good as art, since it is exactly the same as everyone else’s framing"? There is no skill involved.
Kyle Gann also wrote “certainly, through the conventional and well-understood acts of placing the title of a composition on a program and arranging the audience in chairs facing a pianist, Cage was framing the sounds that the audience heard in an experimental attempt to make people perceive as art, sounds that were not usually so perceived. One of the most common effects of 4’33”, possibly the most important and widespread effect, was to seduce people into considering as art phenomena that were normally not associated with art. Perhaps even more, its effect was to drive home the point that the difference between Art and Non-art is merely one of perception, and that we can control how we organize our perceptions.” (5) Not true. As Sol Lewitt learned, the difference between art and non-art is one of skill; a work lacking skill is juvenilia, commonplace, hence overshadowed by more skillful renditions. Andy Warhol's films explored the possibility of boringwork as art, but he eventually said his films are more interesting to talk about than to watch.
The truth is that everyone who attends 4'33" soon gets bored. Accidental noise does not fascinate us for very long, while an amazing work of art does. Yes, we can control ourselves and stay seated, but such disappointment is not the point of art. Shocking the bourgeoisie may call attention to the artist the way a child's shrieks call attention to the child, but such behavior does not inspire desire for a repeat performance.
When de Kooning framed toast and Cage called it art, did anyone ask if it is good art? Is framing a bread crumb great art, fascinating, instructive, transcendent? What kind of art is it and how does that framed toast compared to regular toast? How does that compare to the greatest art works our civilization has produced? Because if it is just a commonplace act with no scholarship, mastery, or effort, then it is obviously not a work of art, there is no art to it.
Observation, seeing or hearing something, is not art; it is the act of perception. When Cage claims that silence reveals ambient sound as music, he made an assumption but he didn’t prove it; the reality test shows the opposite. There is always an audience for music but little audience for ambient noise. No one has ever repeatedly listened to a recording of 4’33” the way they listen to their favorite music. John Cage actually proved that ambient sound is not music. He is a man of great talent but no one is perfect.
Footnotes
1
Sol Lewitt, Paragraphs on Conceptual Artm 1967, Artforum.https://www.artforum.com/features/paragraphs-on-conceptual-art-211354/
2
Larry Bloom, Sol LeWitt: A Life of Ideas, Wesleyan University Press, 20193
Miklos Legrady, One Kilogram of nothing, artist;s website, 2025https://legrady.com/
4
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, The Disclosure Of The Agent In Speech And In Action p175\http://www.rainbow-season.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/action-Arendt-the_human_condition.pdf5
Andrew Hamlin, Kyle Gann. No Such Thing As Silence: John Cage’s 4'33", music works, Yale University Press.2011https://www.musicworks.ca/reviews/books/kyle-gann-no-such-thing-silence-john-cage’s-433