What Artists Do. Leonard Koren
and cacophony, or what is sometimes called noise.
As part of his art-making methodology Cage often
incorporated chance or unplanned actions. He used
standard instruments, but in non-standard ways—like
the sound of an orchestra tuning up. He also used
non-instruments like hammers and bolts and screws . . .
and radios for random snippets of talk and music
programming, and for the static between stations.
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Mid-career, Cage had an epiphany: why not create
a composition in which there are no sounds at all?
According to the artist, “[I wanted to] compose a piece
of uninterrupted silence and sell it to Muzak Co.”
(Muzak, as the company was then named, sold record-
ed “mood music” for different commercial applica-
tions, such as in elevators and department stores.)
For all his apparent emancipation from convention-
ality, Cage was afraid that if he made a piece with no
apparent sounds whatsoever people might think he
was putting them on—and he didn’t want that. Ulti-
mately, two separate but related insights provided
the conceptual grounding he needed to proceed.
The first insight came when viewing the all-white
and all-black paintings of his friend, artist Robert
Rauschenberg. At the time, monochrome paintings like
Rauschenberg’s were thought to be artistically “smart”
because they were artifacts of pure painting. That is,
they were paintings where the content and subject
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matter are solely painting, with no extraneous pictori-
al elements. Rauschenberg, however, had a different
way of thinking about it. “A canvas is never empty,”
he said. Cage took Rauschenberg’s words to heart.
Cage remarked that Rauschenberg’s all-white paint-
ings were “airports for light, shadows, and particles.”
Cage’s second insight came when he visited an
anechoic chamber at Harvard University. An anechoic
chamber is a room designed to maximally absorb
sound and attenuate echoes. Once inside the chamber
Cage thought he would find absolute silence. Instead
he heard two persistent sounds. One was high pitched,
the other low. He asked the attending acoustical
engineer what they were. According to Cage, the
engineer explained that the high tone was his nervous
system and the low tone was the blood circulating
through his veins and arteries. (Scientifically speaking,
humans cannot directly hear the sound of their nervous
systems, no matter how quiet the environment. The
nervous-system sound Cage thought he heard was
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probably tinnitus, the hissing-like noise sometimes
referred to as a “ringing in the ears.” It is a fairly common
condition that can be brought on by exposure to exces-
sively loud noise. Cage’s tinnitus may have always been
in the background of his awareness, but the relative
silence of the chamber brought it to the fore.)
Both episodes led Cage to understand that even if one
tried to remove all sources of sensory stimulation—in
his case sound—an unextinguishable amount of
perceptible sensory content would exist nonetheless.
The human mind, it seems, tends to seek differentia-
tion even in ostensible sameness. Thus reassured,
Cage set to work on an art piece that employed (and
was about) the absence of intentional sound. He titled
it “4' 33".”
The first performance of “4' 33"” occurred on a warm,
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