In 1961, Wesleyan University Press published a set of “Lectures and Writings” by John Cage called, simply, Silence. “It’s the book I’ve reread most often in my life,” writes the composer-critic Kyle Gann in his illuminating foreword to the 50th anniversary edition. I know exactly what Gann means: With each rereading, Silence seems as charming and challenging as ever, but also somehow different — not quite what we thought it was. In the sixties, it was Cage’s “scandalous” ideas that were most influential: his rejection of melody and harmony (indeed, all traditional elements of music) and his declaration that “there is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time,” with its corollary that all sounds we hear must be understood as equal. “Wherever we are,” we read in the book’s first essay, “what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.” The “very life we’re living” is “so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.” Sunny and serene, Cage was known as the composer who introduced chance operations generated by the I-Ching into music, and, soon enough, into poetry as well.
