Christian Hansen for The New York Times
The subway provided its own performance of the John Cage piece “4’33” " recently.
Published: August 8, 2012
I HAD a spectacular John Cage moment on an uptown A train recently.
You know about Cage moments, don’t you? We all have them, whether we think of them that way or not. They occur when happenstance kicks in, and surprising musical experiences take form, seemingly out of nowhere. They can happen anywhere at any time. This year, thanks to the Cage centenary, official Cage moments have been plentiful, with performers of all stripes — students at the Juilliard School; ensembles like So Percussion, Iktus Percussion and the pianist Taka Kigawa, and the Flux Quartet and friends — inducing them through spirited renditions of Cage’s music.
But the unofficial moments are the ones to wait for. My earlier favorite Cage moment occurred just over a year ago, when I sprained an ankle and had an M.R.I. The technicians warned me that I might find the noise annoying, but as it turned out, I couldn’t help focusing on the machine’s repeating rhythmic patterns, pitches and changing overtones. I thoroughly enjoyed it, although in truth I found the M.R.I.’s music closer to early Philip Glass than to Cage.
On the A train I wasn’t thinking about Cage at all. I had just heard an exquisitely turned, energetic performance of Schubert’s String Quintet in C at a church in Greenwich Village, and Cage could not have been further from my thoughts. Nor did the crowded subway car bring him to mind at first. But I noticed that it was unusually noisy.
Typically, most of the noise you hear comes from the subway itself: its din drowns out conversations, and people tend to stare at their feet, or at whatever they are reading, and listen to their portable music players. But this Tuesday evening just about all the people were talking, and working hard to drown out both the subway and the chats taking place around them.
I would normally have tuned all this out, but instead I sat back, closed my eyes and did what Cage so often recommended: I listened. I made no effort to separate the strands of conversation or to focus on what people were saying. I was simply grabbed by the sheer mass of sound, human and mechanical. It sounded intensely musical to me, noisy as it was, and once I began hearing it that way, I couldn’t stop.
Strand upon strand of the chatter was animated and midrange: there were neither basso profundos nor soaring sopranos in this choir, but after a moment the pitch levels began to sort themselves out as a kind of orchestration. Argumentative voices created driving, punchy rhythms that sailed over more smoothly floating narrative tones.
At least three languages were being spoken, each with its own melodic lilt and rhythmic character. To my left, a woman’s laughter momentarily changed the coloration of this vast choral tapestry and offset the argument to my right.
Within it all, squeaking metal yielded a high-pitched ostinato, and the ever-so-slightly-clattery rumble of the train was the high-tech equivalent of a Baroque basso continuo. As the train pulled into each station, the muted squeal of the brakes, the opening and closing of the doors and the slight shift in the balance of voices as some people left and others entered, already talking, suggested shifts between connected movements.
As I was listening, I began thinking about “4’33,” Cage’s most famous and, in some ways, most misunderstood piece. It is often described as Cage’s “silent” work; even Cage called it that. And it is frequently treated as a joke by people who have no interest in Cage’s philosophical approach to music and for whom a piece of silent music is, by definition, a contradiction in terms.
But if Cage intended the performers of “4’33” ” to keep quiet, he did not mean for the work to be heard as silence. He wrote it for the pianist David Tudor to perform in a recital at Maverick Concert Hall, near Woodstock, N.Y., in August 1952. The hall, which still hosts an ambitious summer series, is an open barn, set amid acres of woodland. Part of its charm is that the sounds of the environment — birds, crickets, the wind rustling through the trees, the patter of rain — mingle with the artful tones the musicians produce.
Cage had been supplying artful tones since the 1930s, but in the 1940s he began thinking about the music that could be plucked from the air. That was the point of “4’33”.” The pianist was to open the keyboard lid, sit quietly for 30 seconds, then close the lid and reopen it for the 2-minute-23-second second movement, and again for the 1-minute-40-second finale. (Those, at any rate, are the durations printed in the 1952 Maverick program. In the published score, the movement lengths are 33 seconds, 2 minutes 40 seconds, and 1 minute 20 seconds.) The piano was indeed silent, but the Maverick audience had plenty to listen to, or would have if its members weren’t busy being scandalized by what some regarded as a provocation.
Can a subway ride count as a performance of “4’33” ”? Absolutely. Cage later revised the performing directions to allow for readings by any instrument or group of instruments at any duration. And as I was reminded when I revisited Kyle Gann’s delightful study of the work, “No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33” ” (Yale University Press, 2012), Cage eventually came to feel that no performers were necessary.
I have heard “4’33” ” performed by pianists, percussion ensembles, oboists, cellists and orchestras, but none of those versions were as exciting as what I now think of as “4’33”: The Extended Subway Remix” by the A Train Yakkers, an ensemble so conceptual that its members had no idea they were in it.
Cage would have understood.
“No day goes by without my making use of that piece in my life and in my work,” he told the composer William Duckworth in 1982. “I listen to it every day.”
“I don’t sit down to do it; I turn my attention toward it,” he added. “I realize that it’s going on continuously.”
I spoke with Cage only twice: in a telephone interview (he was in Paris) in June 1992 and a few weeks later at a concert of his music in the Summergarden series at the Museum of Modern Art. I was hoping to speak to him again during the coming season, when he was to have celebrated his 80th birthday, but on Aug. 12 — 20 years ago on Sunday — he died of a stroke, and instead of another interview I wrote his obituary.
It was a mad scramble, a journalistic version of Cage’s “Roaratorio.” Editors were faxing stories about Cage taking peanut butter sandwiches to fancy parties and calling to make sure I would account for his importance in the art and dance worlds; colleagues were calling to ask, “Have you heard?,” and I was trying to ascertain whether Merce Cunningham wanted to be listed as Cage’s surviving companion (he did not) while searching for concise ways to put Cage’s extraordinary career in perspective.
Just as I finished writing, Tim Page, then Newsday’s music critic, called to suggest raising a beer in Cage’s memory and volunteered to pick up a six-pack on his way to my apartment. Thirty minutes later he was at my door, holding up a strip of white paper and saying, “Look at this.”
It was the receipt for the beer. The price? $4.33.
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