BWW Blog: Cheyenne Dalton - John Cage, Performance Art, and Sound Design

John Cage, an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher, and artist, was interested in finding and collecting ordinary sounds to use; he wanted to capture and control them to use them as musical instruments. His pieces included normal objects as the instruments, something previously rejected in terms of art and in terms of sound. Most of the people who are interested in sound, then and now, would use the things he recorded in the field as sound effects: a car driving at 50 miles per hour, rain, or the static between radio stations. But instead, he used them to create music. A Chicago critic wrote about one of his concerts and the musicians' use of "beer bottles, flowerpots, cowbells, and automobile brake drums" to create a musical piece some might call noise, but one that John Cage called music.

The reception of Cage's work was much more accepted than the previous noise musicians, and the New Yorkers who saw his concert at the Museum of Modern Art were very "high-brow," in that they weren't perturbed by the otherwise noise of the concert. Cage's manifesto, The Future of Music, included the quote "Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise," and explained how people perceive noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The vent in the bathroom can be art, and the washing machine cycle as well - if only we are to listen to the sounds and not push them aside.

John Cage took leaps towards experimental music. His most famous work was 4'33", which was essentially a four minute and thirty-three seconds composition (with movements) of complete silence. At the very least, 4'33" challenges the idea of music and art. How can silence be art? It certainly opens up a world of thought and discussion, which I believe is necessary to determining what art is. The art in this piece is the sounds that we hear in the background. People sniffling, coughing, sneezing. People whispering, breathing. Birds outside, cars driving by. I think that Cage invited the world of musicians to start working on experimental music.

Ordinary sounds and ordinary movements are art: they're accepted in daily life, so why not onstage or in a concert hall? Experimental art and music forces us to pay attention to the normally unnoticed, which means simply paying attention to what is conventionally hidden. It only takes a moment to listen, and Cage insists that his favorite piece is "the one we all hear all the time if we are quiet."

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