John Cage: Silence and Silencing

John Cage's ideas on sound, easily the most influential among the postwar arts, were developed with a great deal of dedication, imagination, and good will, within a complex of technical, discursive, institutional, cultural, and political settings, forever changing over the course of a long and productive career. They matured within the sphere of music and, until he began to branch out into other artistic forms, most of the ideas he adopted from elsewhere were brought into the fold of music. He was known for introducing noise and worldly sounds into music, in other words, for stepping outside the confines of Western art music, as well as proposing a mode of being within the world based on listening, through hearing the sounds of the world as music. However, when questioned from the vantage point of sound instead of music, Cage's ideas become less an occasion for uncritical celebration (as is too often the case among commentators on Cage) and his work as a whole becomes open to an entirely different set of representations. What becomes apparent in general is that while venturing to the sounds outside music, his ideas did not adequately make the trip; the world he wanted for music was a select one, where most of the social and ecological noise was muted and where other more proximal noises were suppressed. Moreover, his ideas did not make the trip at a time when the social conditions of aurality and the nature of sounds themselves, in Cage's term, were continuing to undergo major transformations not immediately amenable to music as practiced. By midcentury, two decades after the first large onslaught of auditive mass media in the late 1920s, radio, phonography, and sound film had consolidated in the United States and expanded their overlapping positions. These media introduced on a social scale a newly pervasive, detailed, and atomistic encoding of sounds, gathering up all the visual, literary, environmental, gestural, and