Book Review: John Cage’s Silence

by Siri Livingston

Most famous for his iconic – and polarising – composition 4’33”, John Cage was a composer, artist, and thinker whose explorations and experiments changed the course of classical composition. His compendium of lectures and writings, Silence, will be of interest to anyone who likes to think about musical organisation and value at a meta level, and those who are fascinated by people who live and think eccentrically, which is, I suspect, most of us with any investment or interest in the arts.

John Cage

From the onset, this compendium paints a picture of a man who liked ambiguity, the frustration of expectations, and absurdity – a kind of contrariness of spirit reminiscent of Erik Satie. In the foreword he recounts an incident during his Lecture on Nothing delivered at the Artists’ Club on Eighth Street in New York, which involved the giving of the same six, randomly-selected, pre-prepared answers in response to whatever question was asked, where good friend and attendee Jeanne Reynal stood up and screamed, “John, I dearly love you, but I can’t bear another minute,” and promptly left. The anecdote is recounted not as a triumph at having irritated and frustrated another human being, but as a kind of soft acknowledgement that his way of thinking and making, his explanations of his own artistry, his music – all contain a challenging preoccupation with form, repetition, and meaning that are, in a myriad of ways, crazy-making. Later in the foreword, he acknowledges the influence that both Zen and Dadaism have had on his thinking, while also stating that he does not wish Zen to be “blamed” for his work, and that he wanted “to free Zen of any responsibility for [his] actions.” Instead of aligning himself fully with either school of thought, he gives two explicitly stated reasons or justifications for all of these lectures and writings. The first is that he sought above all else “poetry,” which he defines as “the allowing musical elements (time, sound) to be introduced into the world of words.” The other stated aim was to collapse content and message into form by communicating ideas via their embodiment rather than by abstract description or definition, such as delivering a lecture on repetition by the actual use of extensive repetition. By virtue of this latter aim, Cage’s Silence is a mixture of spatialised poetry, instructions for performance art, text scores, transcribed or written lectures, and everything evading definition in between – making for a varied and amusingly bumpy read.

First edition of John Cage’s Silence: Lectures and Writings

Of real interest from the 21st-century perspective are Cage’s predictions about the future and purpose of composition. In his lecture ‘Future of Music: Credo’ given in 1958, Cage correctly forecasted the extent to which technology, electronic instruments, and recorded sound would come to dominate music-making, and the ways in which this would blur the lines between music and the “noise” that constantly surrounds us. Some of the conclusions he reaches from the new technologies being discovered in his lifetime – high fidelity recording, and the ability to manipulate those recordings along a continuous spectra like amplitude or overtone structure – are quite extreme. He makes the analogy that writing music with simple rhythms and twelve tones alone is discrete and traditional, like walking, whereas utilising technology to make music of infinite rhythmic and pitch complexity is like flying. The other compositional alternative he seems to endorse is to turn to the sounds of nature, “to give up the desire to control sound, clear [the] mind of music, and set about discovering means to let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expressions of human sentiments.” Having presented these two options – making complex noise-music using the outermost limits of technology, or creating sound-art out of randomness and the natural world – Cage then somewhat paradoxically says that nothing need change in music-making at all, that “the more things there are, the merrier.” He goes so far as to say we should embrace a dominant seventh chord every now and then. While none of this hangs together as the most coherent or well-defended musical philosophy, it’s certainly food for thought for anyone interested in the history of modern composition.

John Cage during his 1966 concert at the opening of the National Arts Foundation in Washington, D.C. © Rowland Scherman/Getty Images

Scattered throughout the book are strange anecdotes from Cage’s life and those of mentors and artist friends. In small italics, these surreal stories of submarines, travel, and mushroom-picking punctuate the ongoing conceptual wrestling, the never-ending tensions between noise and music, sound and silence, choice and non-choice. These serve as nice moments of levity from the dense, sometimes technical, and experimentally formatted meditations on process and musical form. On the whole, the earnestness of Cage’s desire to understand things deeply and well is always tempered with humour and a surrealist, interdisciplinary spirit. The spatialised poetry calls to mind André Breton, and Cage is as versed in theatre, philosophy, and the visual arts – with many mentions of Max Ernst and Gertrude Stein – as he is in music, perhaps more so.

Frustrating, enlightening, thought-provoking, and clever in equal measure, this is the kind of book anyone interested in music would do well to own and return to throughout their lifetime.

Composers and Their Nicknames

 by Siri Livingston 

Being a composer is not a very – how could one put it delicately – commonsense profession. Many of history’s well-known composers were larger-than-life characters who earned idiosyncratic nicknames from their erratic and memorable behaviour. In this article, we take a look at how some of these gargantuan musical figures might have been known to their contemporaries.

Franz Schubert the Mushroom

Image created by ChatGPT

This composer’s musical stature far outstrips his literal stature – Schubert was only five-foot-one, or approximately 155 centimetres. This, in combination with his unusual face and rather pudgy physique, earned him the affectionate nickname “little mushroom” or “Schwammerl.” The composer also had high standards for those he socialised with, and he often asked early in the process of being introduced to someone, “Kann er was?” or “what can he do?” This earned him the nickname “Kanevas.”   

Johannes Brahms, “Young Eagle”

Image created by ChatGPT

Robert Schumann gave Brahms an affectionate nickname as a token of his admiration for the composer’s abilities: “the young eagle.” This bird imagery likely came from the book of Revelations, which references “an eagle crying with a loud voice” (ESV), as Schumann had opined he “believe[d] Johannes to be the true Apostle, who will also write Revelations…” In addition to this admiring nickname, Schumann promoted Brahms’ music in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik magazine, founded by Schumann himself in 1834, and convinced Leipzig publishers to look at Brahms’ compositions.

Strangely, this avian imagery echoes elsewhere in his life, albeit less positively. Brahms once wrote about his own temperament: “I am a severely melancholic person…black wings are constantly flapping above us.”  

Joseph Haydn or “Papa Haydn”

Joseph Haydn

The nickname Haydn was given is a rare case study showcasing the power of words and the way linguistic meaning can change and be manipulated over time. Haydn was the Kapellmeister at the Esterházy court for over thirty years, presiding over a large group of much younger musicians. His benevolent attitude and willingness to stick up for the musicians of lesser status earned him the loving nickname “Papa Haydn.” As Clemens Höslinger notes, “’Papa’ arose as a term… for a father figure, someone who willingly gave advice and who was generally respected.” Eventually, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was among those who referred to Haydn as “Papa Haydn.”

The nickname grew even more popular in the 19th century as Haydn’s contributions to the symphonic and String quartet genres, and to music generally, became more broadly and formally codified. In 1797, the Tonkünstler-Societät of Vienna made Haydn an honorary life member “by virtue of his extraordinary merit as the father and reformer of the noble art of music.”

In the late 19th century, the nickname born of affection and reverence began to take on a caricatural, dismissive quality. “Papa Haydn” became a patronising and dismissive way to paint Haydn’s output as “genial, but naïve and superficial,” notes Höslinger. Recent scholarship has focused on providing a more nuanced picture of Haydn and his diversity and richness as a composer than the ideas that came to be associated with “Papa Haydn.”

Antonio Vivaldi: The Red Priest

Antonio Vivaldi

Gianbattista Vivaldi, Antonio Vivaldi’s father, was a famous Venetian violinist who regularly performed at St. Mark’s Basilica. Despite his son’s clear musical disposition, it was the local custom at the time for upper-class boys to be sent into the priesthood, and the young Antonio became a priest in 1703. This, in combination with his mop of naturally bright red hair, earned him the nickname “the red priest,” which stuck despite his relatively swift departure from the profession. Vivaldi the younger was too frail for the priestly vocation, and his true passion lay with music.   

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, or “Trazom”

Croce: Mozart Family Portait (detail), 1781

Fittingly, we end the list with the composer who sported the greatest variety of nicknames – and proper names – in his lifetime. Mozart was formally baptised in Latin as “Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart” on the 28th of January 1756, the day after his birth, at St. Rupert’s Cathedral in Salzburg.

Following the custom of the Catholic Church, Mozart’s first two names are drawn from the saint’s day of his birth, in this case St. John Chrysostom, “Chrysostomus” meaning “golden mouth.” “Wolfgang” came from Mozart’s maternal grandfather, and “Theophilus” from his paternal grandfather. Interestingly, “Theophilus” comes from Greek and means “lover of God” or “loved by God,” and it is from this that Mozart came to be called by the Latin version, “Amadeus,” or the German, “Gottlieb.”

Mozart worked across cultural borders and was linguistically flexible and very playful about his own name. As such, Mozart would toy with Italian and French, signing letters with “Amadeo” and “Amadé.” He loved to be facetious and would sign letters with purposefully incorrect Latin. Indeed, the popularity of referring to Mozart as “Wolfgang Amadeus” was a largely posthumous and Romantic-era trend, as Mozart never signed a single document “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart” – the closest thing to this that survives in record being a silly mock-Latin signature, “Wolfgangus Amadeus Mozartus.” He also used his names backwards for fun: “Mozart Wolfgang” and “Trazom.”