Review: No Such Thing As Silence: John Cage’s 4’33” by Kyle Gann


No Such Thing As Silence: John Cage’s 4’33” A Work of Music Criticism Kyle Gann Yale University Press, 2010 255 pages Reviewed by Dan Wang
One late evening in August of 1952, in a half-open barn cum theatre hidden somewhere in the Catskill Mountains of New York, and through the intermittent rain, a man opened and closed a piano lid three times before a silent audience. It was, as Kyle Gann tells it in No Such Thing As Silence: John Cage’s 4’33”, the premiere of a landmark musical work of the twentieth century, a work that would reach beyond that huddled crowd of avant-garde enthusiasts to influence artists as diverse as Yoko Ono, Philip Glass, and The Magnetic Fields. Gann’s book is a dissection of John Cage’s infamous “silent” piece, during which audiences are encouraged to listen—for four minutes and thirty-three seconds—not to the musician on stage but to the unplanned and inchoate sounds of their environment: the hum of the air conditioner, the staccato of raindrops, distant traffic, or even the shuffling and coughing of the impatient. All this, Cage seems to say, can be called music—if only one will listen. READ MORE