Nice article by Paul Smart on 4'33" in the Woodstock Times

No such thing as silence

Forget all the roaring adrenalin and testosterone associated with rock music over the years; Woodstock’s single most controversial performance, the premier of John Cage’s famous composition 4’33” as part of a benefit program put on by the Woodstock Artists Association at the Maverick Concert Hall on the evening of August 29, 1952, was a quiet affair. Wherein lay the foundations of its legacy, and continuing relevancy…including the reasoning behind its performance at WAAM at 7 p.m. Monday, August 29.

4’33”, first performed by David Tudor on a program of piano works before an audience of the town’s culturati, is silent. At least in terms of its piano playing. It involves three movements, all performed within the time span referenced by its title (formally pronounced as “Four minutes, thirty-three seconds.”) The performer closes the piano lid at each movement’s start, then reopens it at movement’s end. There’s a stop watch on hand to ensure the timing’s right.

“I wanted my work to be free of my own likes and dislikes, because I think music should be free of the feelings and ideas of the composer,” Cage later said of the piece he composed to be performed by “any instrument (or combination of instruments).” “I have felt and hoped to have led other people to feel that the sounds of their environment constitute a music which is more interesting than the music which they would hear if they went into a concert hall.”

Cage later revealed a slow genesis for the project, based on times spent in soundproof rooms, where he learned to recognize the sounds of his own pulse, Zen studies, and a series of blank canvases created by his friend Robert Rauschenberg around the same time.

Also on the program he shared at the Maverick that fateful August evening 59 years ago this week were a Pierre Boulez premiere, several other Cage works, two pieces by Morton Feldman, and The Banshee by Henry Cowell, then considered Woodstock’s premiere composer-in-residence.

“People began whispering to one another, and some people began to walk out,” Cage described the Maverick premiere. “They didn’t laugh — they were just irritated when they realized nothing was going to happen…”

Following Tudor’s performance of 4’33”, the audience was reported to have called for running the pianist and composer out of town.

“They missed the point. There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds,” Cage continued in an interview from the 1980s. “You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out… And they haven’t forgotten it 30 years later: they’re still angry.”

For this 59th anniversary performance of the late Cage’s masterwork, Mimi Goese and Ben Neill will perform. Goese is known as the lead singer/co-songwriter of Hugo Largo, a minimalist punk/pop group who released albums on Brian Eno’s Opal label, as well as on Luaka Bop, David Byrne’s label. Neill is a composer, performer, producer, and inventor of the mutantrumpet, a hybrid electro-acoustic instrument. He has recorded eight CDs of his music on labels including Universal/Verve, Thirsty Ear, Astralwerks and Six Degrees. The two’s most recent collaboration, Songs for Persephone, will be released on August 30, by Ramseur Records.

“4’33, on one level, seems to be as close to artistic perfection as an artist can get,” this event’s producer, artist Norm Magnusson, said of the Cage composition he first saw performed by composer/percussionist David Van Tieghem, now a Woodstock resident, years ago. “I have always been surprised at how deeply moved I was by the purity of the work.”

There will be a Q&A after the performance with musicologist Kyle Gann, author of No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33”, and Mimi and Ben will play one of their own pieces.++

For more on this performance of John Cage’s 4’33” at 7:00 PM on Monday, August 29, at the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum at 28 Tinker Street in Woodstock, call 679-2940 or visit www.woodstock.org.

For more on local Cage projects, including a current call for new original works to mark his centennial next year in 2012 in a 120 hour transmission performance a year from this September, visit www.free103point9.org. Or tune into WGXC-FM at www.wgxc.org next Saturday, September 3, for a special conversation with Laura Kuhn of the John Cage Trust , located now at Bard College
.