“After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music,” Aldous Huxley wrote. Silence is bigger than music as a result of it’s its central organizing precept, the best way the damaging house round an object is what provides it a form, the best way you’re keen on somebody for what they aren’t — the one who is not going to break a promise, the one who is not going to go a collapsed bicycle with out selecting it up, the one who is not going to interrupt your reverie however will as a substitute wait silently beside you till you open your eyes, is a selected sort of individual, and it’s one another’s particularity that we love. Simply as an individual consists of their nos much more so than their yeses, sound turns into music via the silences between its notes — or else it could be noise.
4 days earlier than his fortieth birthday, John Cage (September 5, 1912–August 12, 1992) immediately and completely broadened the that means of music by deepening our relationship to silence with the premiere of his now iconic composition 4’33”, impressed by his formative immersion in Zen Buddhism and “carried out” by the virtuoso pianist David Tudor in a barn-like live performance corridor in Woodstock, New York — 4 minutes and thirty-three seconds of pure silence, instantly rendering musical the ambient sounds of bizarre life.
Author Nicholas Day and artist Chris Raschka carry the story of this quiet revolution to life in Nothing: John Cage and 4’33” (public library) — a spare, vibrant serenade to Cage’s masterpiece and its lasting existential echoes, difficult our most simple assumptions about what makes something itself.
The story begins and ends with Tudor sitting on the piano that fateful summer time night in 1952, however within the smallness and stillness of that second myriad questions concerning the nature of sound and the character of consideration come abloom, questions on learn how to hear and what to hear for, about who it’s that does the listening, concerning the very nature of the self.
Within the biographical afterword, Day writes:
What’s music?
What’s silence?
Can silence be music?
Can music be silence?[…]
Are there even solutions to those questions?
For Cage, the questions have been all the time the vital half, as a result of the questions have been extra attention-grabbing than the solutions. The questions typically led to extra questions, as a substitute of solutions.
Like Beatrice Harrison, Cage was taken to a live performance as a small little one and stood within the aisle spellbound via your entire efficiency. He fell in love with sound lengthy earlier than he took his first music lesson. In a sentiment frequent to everybody who places something of magnificence and substance into the world, Cage would later replicate:
We make our lives by what we love.
Complement Nothing with Kay Larson’s beautiful meditation on John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the inside lifetime of artists — one of many best books I’ve ever learn — and Cage’s symphonic love letters to the love of his life, then revisit different fantastic picture-book biographies of cultural icons: Keith Haring, Maria Mitchell, Margaret Clever Brown, Emily Dickinson, John Lewis, Ada Lovelace, Louise Bourgeois, E.E. Cummings, Jane Goodall, Jane Jacobs, Frida Kahlo, Louis Braille, Pablo Neruda, Albert Einstein, Muddy Waters, Wangari Maathai, and Nellie Bly.
Illustrations © Chris Raschka courtesy of Neal Porter Books/Vacation Home Publishing; pictures by Maria Popova
