3 minute read

What To Do

Watch this short excerpt of John Cage from the 1992 documentary Écoute. Reflect on his ideas and prepare to respond to the questions below in breakout groups. You can also read the interview transcript at the bottom of the page. Contribute to our class discussion.

Video

Écoute. Directed by Anna Grange and Miroslav Šebestík. France: La Sept ARTE, 1992. Film.

Possible Discussion Questions

These are all fairly open-ended. Choose a handful of them to discuss with the other members of your breakout group:

  • Cage contrasts music as “someone talking” with traffic as “sound acting.” What do you think the difference is between them? What do you think communication and activity are in sound?
  • Does his definition of music as “just sound” expand or undermine traditional boundaries of music?
  • Cage distinguishes “inner listening” (something like: seeking meaning) from “outer listening” (more like: accepting sound as it is). Does one approach resonate more with you? Why?
  • Have you ever experienced appreciating everyday sounds aesthetically, “just as they are?”
  • Marcel Duchamp’s idea of music as a “space art” is cited by Cage. How might this change how we experience or create music?
  • Do you sense connections to sound installations, the visual arts, or electronic music practices?
  • Cage cites Immanuel Kant: “Two things don’t have to mean anything—music and laughter…” Do you agree?
  • How does this challenge the idea that art must “express” something?
  • Cage says his favorite sound is silence, but then notes that modern silence is mostly traffic. What does this reveal about how we tend to perceive silence?
  • How might Cage’s conception of silence apply to today’s digital, noisy environments?

Interview Transcript

When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking—and talking about his feelings or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic here on Sixth Avenue, for instance, I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound. What it does is it gets louder and quieter, and it gets higher and lower, and it gets longer and shorter. It does all those things, which I am completely satisfied with that. I don’t need sound to talk to me.

We don’t see much difference between time and space. We don’t know where one begins and the other stops. So that most of the arts we think of as being in time, and most of the arts we think of as being in space. Marcel Duchamp, for instance, began thinking of … music as being not a time art but a space art. And he made a piece called ‘Sculpture Musical’, which means different sounds coming from different places and lasting, producing a sculpture which is sonorous and which remains.

People expect listening to be more than listening, and so sometimes they speak of “inner listening” or “the meaning of sound.” When I talk about music, it finally comes to people’s minds that I am talking about sound that doesn’t mean anything, that is not inner but is just outer. And then they say, these people who understand that finally say, “You mean it’s just sounds?”—thinking that for something to just be a sound is to be useless. Whereas I love sounds just as they are, and I have no need for them to be anything more than what they are.

I don’t want them to be psychological. I don’t want a sound to pretend that it’s a bucket, or that it’s president, or that it’s in love with another sound. (Laughs) I just want it to be a sound. And I am not so stupid either. There was a German philosopher, who’s very well known, Immanuel Kant, and he said there are two things that don’t have to mean anything: one is music and the other is laughter. (Laughs) Don’t have to mean anything, that is, in order to give us very deep pleasure. (to cat) You know that, don’t you?

The sound experience which I prefer to all others is the experience of silence. And the silence almost everywhere in the world now is traffic. If you listen to Beethoven or to Mozart, you see that they are always the same. But if you listen to traffic, you see that it’s always different.