In Continuum.

This famous piece of music, 4'33", is John Cage most important work, according to himself of course. One of the reasons for it is probably because of how flexible the piece of music is, having the ability to be played by any possible instrument in the world using the exact same score he wrote in 1952 after his visit to the anechoic chamber of the Harvard University in the 1940s. An anechoic chamber is designed in such a way that the walls and the ceiling cannot reflect sound as a normal room would when a sound is being produced. Instead, it absorbs the sound produced, much like a room with soundproofing abilities, and these rooms are usually used to measure acoustic properties of instruments and microphones, and for performing psychoacoustic experiments. Standing in the middle of the room, John Cage noticed two sounds in the air despite there being no instruments played at that time. It was a very high-pitched sound an the other, a very low-pitched one. 

Intrigued, he asked the sound engineer at the anechoic chamber about the sounds he was hearing, and the sound engineer explained that the higher pitch was the sound of his nervous system operating, while the lower pitch was the sound of his blood circulating around his body. From then on, John Cage became infinitely fascinated with the sounds that a human body can produce, and as a result gave birth to his most important composition - the 4'33". There has been a lot of argument as to whether or not the above account is true or not, but there is no question than John Cage's famous piece became the center of attention in the musical world. Four minutes and thirty-three seconds can be translated into two hundred and seventy-three seconds, which can also in turn be translated to minus two hundred and seventy-three degrees, or what we commonly known as the "absolute zero" in terms of the temperatures. I'm sure that little clue gave you guys an idea of what 4'33" really is. Yes, 4'33" is really four minutes and thirty-three seconds of complete silence, and this complete silence is John Cage's most important work in his career. Believe it, or not.

This piece of 'music' came to me while I was surfing through John Mayer's blog, and I have never heard of John Cage or his famous composition before, admittedly. The video at the end of this entry would give you an idea of what this piece of composition is all about, which really isn't much of a composition to begin with. Though the score sheets are standard ones used, they are just pages after pages of lines without any notes or annotations written on them. Every time this song is being performed, it is supposed to give the listeners a vastly different experience, depending on the environment in which the composition is being enjoyed. You may be in the concert hall, in the car, listening to it on your iPod on a plane, or sitting in front of the computer and stumbling upon it by accident - like myself. Wherever you are, the piece of composition is going to give you a different emotion, or feeling, because not a lot of us takes time to listen intently to silence anyway. We are always thinking about something, aren't we? Even at night, you are thinking about what time to wake up tomorrow morning for school, the assignment you have to hand up, the awful taste of the cheap dinner you and a friend of yours had in town just now, random thoughts about falling through the skies, zebras, calculators, bushes with thorns, smiley faces, rotten apples, worms and whatnot. We are always distracted by thoughts, these psychological 'noises'  as a communication theorist would conveniently term it. When was the last time we sat down and listened to nothing, anyway. 

Some might dismiss this piece of work as one of those arty-farty mumbo jumbo, at least judging from the kind of comments I have been reading on YouTube and websites related to this composition. It is inevitable I suppose, and I guess not difficult for people to dismiss this piece of work as a publicity stunt of some kind, or just a desperate effort of a composer to try something different for the sake of experiments, not exactly for the name of music. Still, you cannot deny that he made his mark as the man that came up with this brilliant idea, of having four and a half minutes of silence tagged to his name forever in musical history. We all know what silence is, but this man took a portion of silence and then gave it a name, his own name. It is like the person who sat down a few thousand years ago, the same man that dictated the names of everything around us. That man was probably very proud of the fact that he came up with those names, and how everyone from then on would be using the names he dictated in the first place. It's the same as John Cage's case, taking a piece of silence and calling it his own. 

I was rather amused at the whole idea initially, I mean the orchestra bothered to turn the pages of the scoresheets even. I have seen a lot of orchestral performance in my lifetime because of my mother's influence, but even she has never seen a performance as odd and unique as this one. We have a full orchestra on the stage, the composer just standing there in silence and not doing a thing until the time is up. Of course, he also has to keep a straight face about everything, not to burst out laughing uncontrollably in the midst of everything. So for four and a half minutes, the audience just sits there and listens to the littlest of sounds in the concert hall, everything from the beating of their hearts to the air-conditioning up above. I guess that was what John Cage wanted to convey in this piece of music, that there is sound even in the quietest of places, perhaps even in space as well. You hear your own system working, the sound around you at home, or in the bus, and it just gives you a reason to put away all kinds of thoughts and just - listen. I suppose, there is sound in silence as well, and it is somewhat like what people do during meditation I suppose. 

So let's do a little experiment right now, at least for myself. I am going to turn off the lights in my room and watch the video below with the music turned off, of course. I am going to blog about what I hear in the following paragraph, and how I am going to feel about it - of course, try not to laugh at my own stupidity at the very same time. It is going to be strangely fun, but I guess there isn't a harm in doing so for sure. So let's do it right now, and hope that my sister is not going to stroll into my bedroom and see me in a strange meditation mode with my legs crossed on my chair. Here, we go. 

I turned off the fan in my room, the music that was playing through the speakers. So I sat there on my chair with my eyes closed for exactly four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Here's what I heard. I heard the sound of the water rolling off the edge of the glass panel at the back of the fish tank and down into the filters below. On top of that, the sound of my sister sneezing next door while typing away on her laptop. As if to hint of its presence, there was a moment or two within the span of time when the wind chime sounded for a few times, until the sound of someone splashing water over a hard surface broke my concentration. Then there's the sound of cars down below, as usual, and the occasional sound of motorbikes tearing through the night. Someone closed the door from above, and children spoke in the distance inaudibly. As the performance came to an end, I took particular notice of the sound I could hear within myself, and it was true that I could hear a high pitched and a low pitched sound that rang constantly inside my head. A very interesting experiment, that was.

I do feel that I am very open-minded when it comes to experimenting music. In fact, that is what I have been doing in the past few days, trying to look for more obscure bands on iTunes that might have slipped my attention in the past. As I looked deeper into the world of obscure music, the names of the bands inevitably became weirder and weirder, and so did the genre of music as it correlated with my exploration into the unknown. It began with Metric, then Do Make Say Think - which really doesn't mean anything, then The Most Serene Republic, then The Octopus Project. Whatever it is, I have discovered and have been moved by a lot of music that I have heard over the past few days, but none as strange as, well, silence. We have heard silence before, in fact silence is everywhere if you are willing to just stop in your tracks for a moment and listen out. It really is quite loud if you allow yourself to hear it, but most of the time we just can't be bothered with something as silly as that. To say that I was deeply moved by the performance of John Cage's famous piece would be lying, but then it was an interesting perspective for me, as it gave me an excuse to not do anything at all and clear my mind of any distractions. 

I guess that is why he considers it to be his most important work, because when we imagine how our world is like, it is probably going to be teeming with life. Like a living organism with a heart and a mind, and a body full of small little particles minding their own businesses and traveling from point A to point B, from point B to point C. At least that is what our society always tries to teach us, to make us believe that our purpose is to be constantly doing something, or be thinking about doing something. Not a lot of people are going to tell you to sit down and think about nothing, because by thinking about nothing, you are thinking about something. I guess 4'33" really is an unique take on that concept from a musical perspective. You can't be hearing silence even if you are in absolute silence, and that concept alone forces the listeners to stop - and listen. If it is possible for everybody to hear this composition at once, wouldn't it be the same as a sort of quiet revolution of sorts, where we might go against social norms and challenge the notion of doing something, all the time? Is is possible to change the world, in silence? Interesting, indeed.