The Color of Silence
Two musical works ask us to consider what sound hides and silence reveals.
Silence is of different kinds, and breathes different meanings.
― Charlotte Brontë, Villette
On August 29, 1952, the pianist David Tudor walked onstage at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, NY, to premiere a new composition by the American experimental composer John Cage (1912–1992). Tudor sat at the piano and opened the keylid, after which he did nothing until he closed it over a minute later. He repeated this sequence twice, at which point the performance, which had taken four minutes and thirty-three seconds, was finished.
The audience, though accustomed to avant-garde works, reacted with stunned disbelief. Most people did not understand what they had just witnessed, and some did not realize anything had actually happened. Reaction to Cage’s piece was swift and largely critical, with many people calling it a musical joke or even an insult. Half a century later, when the BBC broadcast a performance of what became known as 4’33”, the following listener reaction spoke for many: “I’ve never heard of such a stupid thing in my life! God rest his soul, but this ‘composition’ by Cage smacks of arrogance and self-importance.” Another listener was slightly more generous: “It sounds a great deal better than the majority of music that is sold today.”1
Cage, who was present at the Woodstock premiere, reacted to the negative audience reception as follows:
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. 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.
Cage said that 4’33” was the most important work of his career, and seeing it performed again today, I sense that he wanted the audience to listen to itself and its surroundings to accomplish two goals. First, to reveal the sounds that are hidden during a typical performance. Second, to highlight the sonic contribution of the audience, a phenomenon that goes unremarked unless it becomes intrusive. Why force an audience to focus on these hidden sounds for over four minutes? I like critic Kyle Gahnn’s answer to that question:
How about a “thought experiment,” a kind of “metamusic” that makes a statement about music itself? For many people, including me, 4′33″ is certainly that, if not only that. One story about Cage recounts his sitting in a restaurant with the painter Willem de Kooning, who, for the sake of argument, placed his fingers in such a way as to frame some bread crumbs on the table and said, “If I put a frame around these bread crumbs, that isn’t art.” Cage argued that it indeed was art, which tells us something about 4′33″. Certainly, through the conventional and well-understood acts of placing the title of a composition on a program and arranging the audience in chairs facing a pianist, Cage was framing the sounds that the audience heard in an experimental attempt to make people perceive as art sounds that were not usually so perceived.
4’33” has gone on to become one of the most (in)famous pieces in Western art music (what used to be called “Classical music”). It is still performed regularly, having won its share of fans over the years. The concert pianist Stephen Hough, for example, believes that 4’33” is especially relevant in the 21st century:
There is music everywhere and it’s becoming increasingly intrusive — it’s in bars, cafés, restaurants, shops, leaking from other people’s headphones, even my bank, often at a volume which precludes comfortable speech or hearing, and which invades our conscious, creating unwanted “earworms” or aggravating my tinnitus. It seems that there is some unseen force which requires us to have a soundtrack for every moment of our day. In contrast, 4’33” impels us to to take time out to listen, and really listen.
Hough sees a strong link between 4’33” and the “White Paintings” by visual artist Robert Rauschenberg, which were also divisive when first made public.
Cage called the white panels “airports for lights, shadows, and particles, establishing an enduring understanding of the series as receptive surfaces that respond to the world around them.” Rauschenberg once referred to the works as clocks, saying that if “one were sensitive enough to the subtle changes on their surfaces, one could tell what time it was and what the weather was like outside.”
I like 4’33”, and I commend the idea of a composer asking the audience to listen to itself (and only itself) and, by doing so, contemplate a space with and without music. As interesting as Cage’s famous composition is, there is a much more obscure work that I find more provocative and exciting to consider. It was created by the French conceptual artist Yves Klein (1928–1962), who is most remembered in art and fashion for his remarkable signature color, International Klein Blue (“IKB”).
Klein set out to create his unique shade of blue because of the failures of two exhibitions of monochrome paintings he staged in 1955 and 1956. The public did not understand his paintings, the art writer Phillip Barcio notes, seeing them as “decoration rather than as abstract expressions of pure emotion.” For his next show, Klein decided to work with only one color that would be invented for the occasion. He collaborated with Parisian paint store owner Edouard Adam, and from their innovative effort came what is now considered “the most vibrant, pure blue possible.”
Klein’s musical composition, in two movements, is called Monotone Silence Symphony. In the first movement, an orchestra and choir create “one unique continuous ‘sound,’ drawn out and deprived of its beginning and of its end.” That sound, a D major chord, is held continuously without adornment or variation for twenty minutes. The second movement is of equal duration but consists only of the orchestra sitting in silence, instructed to remain still and make no movements. Because no singer or standard orchestra instrument can hold a note for twenty minutes, to perform the piece, the D major is transferred back and forth from one group of paired instruments to the other, taking care to make the transition as seamless as possible.2 The conductor is the only performer allowed to move in the second movement.3
Monotone Silence Symphony is a taxing piece to perform, perhaps explaining why it has only been heard live less than a dozen times since its debut in 1960. “You can’t really do a full rehearsal of something like this,” said Roland Dahinden, who has conducted the piece a few times: “It’s too hard. Everyone would just die.”
For critics and audiences who experience it, the performance can create a mystical or meditative state, as a New York Times critic noted in 2013:
…a dozen minutes in, it began to sound strangely electronic (hence Philip Glass), like something that humans could not possibly be producing. Mr. Dahinden moved his body and hands sinuously, striving to keep the chord unbroken and consistent, listening intently for flagging energy and attention until, at 8:31 on the dot, he brought his hands up and together and ended the sound as abruptly as it had begun.
In the audience some people closed their eyes, as if meditating or praying. Others read their programs or held phones and iPads aloft to record the moment. Five minutes into the chord the man to my immediate right, who looked a little like the actor John Slattery, except with a beard, fell asleep and snored softly until the silence began and he woke up.
D major is often called the “Golden Chord” because it was traditionally associated with glory or majesty. Some synesthetes claim to see a yellowish glow when they hear it. It is the key of many famous compositions, including Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” and Mozart’s “Prague” Symphony.
The short video below provides a glimpse into Klein’s piece.
I have heard the entire work, and I concur with one performer who said, “we weren’t so much receiving the music as we were being bound up in it (and in the silence, which was also the music).” It was, she added, “like an ocean . . . tidal. In and out. Coming and going.” For me, the moment when the D major sound stops is a unique sonic experience. It is as if the waters of a deep blue sea I had been floating on for twenty minutes suddenly disappeared, and I dropped to its bottom. Standing in the abyss, I finally comprehend the sea’s vastness and depth.
Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not....blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract.—Yves Klein
The vocalist Laura Glen Louis, who has written eloquently about performing Klein’s work, had a similar reaction:
When the D major tank crashed into the brick wall of silence, none of the soft words served: fade, dissolve, decrescendo. Bang in/bang out. Like the ocean’s surface where water meets air (where most drownings occur). Like that nanosecond when we leave the womb and take our first breath. Like a shot of NOS. Like blasting into hyperspace.
“Without beginning and without end,” is how Klein described his symphony, and he claimed that it was everything “I wish my life to be.” Alas, it was to be a short life, for he died from a series of heart attacks, the last of which killed him on June 6, 1962, at the age of 34. Of all his artworks, it is his one and only musical creation that I most admire. Cage may be famous for showing us the sound of silence, but it is Klein who wraps it in the deepest of hues.
My favorite response was: “I can’t wait for the cover.” I have also heard the joke that Cage must have instructed Tudor to play the piece pensato, though it was actually marked as tacet, indicating a rest. This distinction actually matters since a pensato note is still a note, while tacet indicates the absence of sound but the presence of music.
The technique is known as divisi: group 1 performs the odd-numbered bars, and group 2 performs the even ones.
In her review of the 2013 performance in New York, Sarah Cowan writes: “Klein’s symphony was performed only once in his lifetime, in Paris on March 9, 1960. Extravagant in tails and white gloves, he acted as conductor of a small orchestra and also of nude models who, dripping with his signature International Klein Blue paint, were directed to press, drag, and splay their bodies as “living brushes” against canvas,” which you can see in a video clip of the premiere below.