2/4: Silence

4:33 was a fun piece to watch, especially as performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. All the same, it's hard to find the "correct" way to respond to it. On the one hand I was suprised how incredibly entertaining it was, despite it just being four and a half minutes of silence. It certainly did have a bit of a practical-joke character; in fact, I think I would have enjoyed it even more of the audience had not been in the know. The hilarity of the situation is certainly acknowledged in the forehead-wiping moment. It was impressive and at the same time pathetically comical how seriously quiet the audience was. I would have thought this kind of performance could go either way (the other way being the audience becoming increasingly giggly and mumbly). In their reverent silence, it almost seemed that the audience thought they were in on the joke, when really the joke was, in a way, on them.

The other response comes from the part of me that actually took the performance a little more seriously. In a way, it almost seemed like the periods of silence were just very long, dramatic buildups to the moments of page-turning, where the rustling of paper and the coughing of listeners seemed to make up the "actual" performance. Situating it in a concert hall, the sounds of the coughs did seem to be transformed in to a strange sort of music, reminding me of dull plopps of water or one of those simple percussive intruments that are blocks of wood that you hit with a stick (yeah, I don't know what those are called - as always, I'll blame not being a native speaker.....). Thinking about that, it is interesting that the commentator stressed that the 4:33 of performance time do not count the "pauses" to turn the pages, even though it seems that those moments are closest to resembling the actual performance. Cage obviously made his work cover more than one page... if it had been just 4:33 of complete silence, the piece would have been not nearly as effective.

Looking at the two ways to "read" the piece, it does make me wonder: is only one of them "right?" Does that mean that one of them is "wrong?" Does Cage want you to have a certain reaction? Do you "fail" if you think the piece is funny? Or if you think it's dead-serious? I doubt Cage would say that any of the possible reactions is wrong, except possibly if someone claimed to have the "ultimate" meaning behind the piece.

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Our readings have been making me think about whether there is any sort of music or poetry which can truly be called experimental - not just in its process, but in its result. After experiencing 4:33, I suppose a work could be experimental if the author/performer presented something like 4:33 for the very first time, not knowing what the exact audience reaction would be, but certainly counting on some sort of reaction which would then become part of the performance. The coughing, if not expected, would then be part of a truly experimental piece.