John Cage Collaborates with the Archive's Terms of Service

by republic

Notes:

• For AlexSeanchai.

          

Notes:

Socrates: My initial thought is that clearly this isn't "fic", it isn't a transformative work. It's nothing, it's like a joke without a punchline.

Glaucon: Well, do you consider 4'33" to be music?

S: I think not. Music is sound organised in time, is it not? So while 4'33" might be a commentary on music, it can't be music by itself.

G: Is silence, though, not an essential part of music? Can we agree that one can't have music without silence?

S: I don't think that's necessarily true - you could have silence at both ends of a work to book-end it, but there be no silence within the music itself. A fragment of song heard over the hubbub of a city street would still be music. So no, you can surely have music without silence.

G: I'll concede that. Let's then consider whether silence is at least an important component of music itself. By that I mean, not just that musical performances are commonly framed by silence, but that silence is an integral part of much (if not all) music. And not just the rests between phrases, or where some parts are silenced to change the texture of the sound or allow a quieter voice to be heard. Silence is used to frame the rhythms of phrases, to articulate staccato, to give music the space to vanish into infinity.

S: I'll agree that music would be much poorer without silence. But it doesn't follow from that that a piece consisting entirely of silence is music. I think you must have at least some sound for there to be music.

G: Let us beg that question for a moment. Can we at least consider that 4'33" is part of the minimalist movement of the 20th century? Klein's Monotone Symphony is a single chord followed by an equal silence, which you must concede is music; Cage extends that to its logical conclusion of just the silence. If you won't concede that 4'33" is music, and want to insist that Klein managed the minimum piece of music, would you allow that 4'33" is a valid part of the argument about what music is?

S: Yes - after all, here we are arguing about whether it's music or not, which I think means it must be a valid part of that argument!

G: Well, then, if 4'33" is a valid commentary on music, isn't this work a valid commentary on 4'33"?

S: I don't think that follows at all. Consider: what is it like to experience a performance of 4'33"?

G: Well, you go to a concert hall, you might have dressed up for the occasion. There are all the usual accoutrements of a musical production - a programme, the rest of the audience, performers dressed formally, and so on.

S: Yes, but that's about the accidents of the performance, if you will, not the substance. What about the substance of the performance? What is that like?

G: I don't want to concede that those are all mere accidents, but leaving that aside for now, the experience of the performance itself will depend on the exact circumstances. The concert hall will, of course, never be silent. Even assuming that the audience maintain attentive silence (rather than talking or walking out), there might be weather or traffic outside, people coughing, all sorts of interesting sounds.

S: And would you be listening out for those sounds? Trying to ignore them? Nodding off?

G: Certainly not nodding off! I think it would depend on my mood, but I would expect the sounds I heard to keep my attention. I mean, part of what Cage was driving at was that there's no such thing as silence, so listening to all those "other" sounds seems an important part of attending a performance of 4'33".

S: Well, this thing you want to call fic has none of that, does it? It takes no time to read, and the author has had to fool the Archive's mechanisms that prevent you accidentally posting an empty work. There is no performance here, no sounds filling a precisely-defined period of silence in a concert hall. How can you say this is a transformative work, or, indeed, a work at all?

G: But it does have many of these things - it has all the framing of a work that you'd expect: it has a title, and tags, both of which put it into the context of works on the Archive about 4'33". In the same way Cage distilled the argument of what is or isn't music into a carefully framed silence, the author has here distilled the arguments of what is or isn't a transformative work into a carefully-framed silence upon the page. Even the title explicitly raises the question of whether it's a transformative work or not - Cage's question about what is or isn't music is transformed into the question of what is or isn't a transformative work.

S: Cage's work has content, though, doesn't it? This is the absence of anything, whereas 4'33" is the absence of notated sound, but in a way that makes space for ambient sound.

G: The work itself, perhaps (though there are characters written, even if no words), but the experience of reading it (and the surrounding matter) isn't empty at all, is it?

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 5 of The John Cage sessions