Daisy Ai

Hist&Lit 4

Dr. Strasser

April 15, 2019

Cage on Silence

In the short essay “Music in The Present Moment”, John Cage first described the nature

of silence as essentially purposelessness, during which the mined is still yet present though

stripped of its right to control.

Cage described the purpose of silence in previous music as “…the time lapse between

sounds, useful towards a variety of ends”. Cage listed some examples of silence being used in

music: “…of tasteful arrangement, where by separating two sounds or two groups of sounds

their differences or relationships might receive emphasis”; “…of expressivity, where silences in

a musical discourse might provide pause or punctuation”; “…of architecture, where the

introduction or interruption of silence might give definition either to a predetermined structure

or to an organically developing one.

But in the absence of goals for silence in music, Cage says, “silence becomes something

else—note silence at all, but sounds, the ambient sounds.” Cage also gave some examples of

sounds that are present during silence: listener’s nervous system in operation or his blood

circulation, or any sound that’s present in the surrounding environment. The point is that

when the ears are listening while the mind has nothing else to focus on, the audience “hearing

each sound just as it is, not as a phenomenon more or less approximating a preconception.”

At the end of essay, Cage also explained that a piece of music that only has silence is not

a preconceived object, and it is occasion for experience, and he also points out that approaching

such piece of music as an object would miss the point of it.