In this week’s New Yorker, Alex Ross has a lovely and thoughtful piece on the nature of noise. He looks at it from many angles—etymological, aesthetic, political, technological… One of Ross’s insights is that the division between say music and noise is one of power or aggression. Electing to listen to the unrelenting sounds of Merzbow is very different than getting stuck in a hotel next to party, even if the decibels of the former are much greater than the latter!
The piece got me thinking about a short journal entry I wrote for a grad school class back in 2018. While Ross ponders the dividing line between noise and music, I thought about the nature of silence versus quiet. So here it is, with a major hat tip to Rebecca Solnit, and some musings on John Cage, Colin Kaepernick, and Megan Rapinoe:
In 1951, composer John Cage visited an anechoic chamber at Harvard University. This room was designed to absorb any possible sound made within it, rather than reflect it back toward a listener. When Cage entered this supposedly silent room, he instead noted that “…I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation.” Less than a year later, in August 1952, pianist David Tudor gave the premiere of what would become Cage’s most famous (or infamous) work—4’33”. Composed in three movements, the work calls for a pianist (or other instrumentalist) to simply sit on stage and make no intentionally “musical” sound for the allotted time. When recalling the piece’s premiere, Cage noted, “There’s no such thing as silence. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.”
Cage’s experience in the anechoic chamber and his 4’33” pose a striking challenge to the notion of silence as an acoustical phenomenon—even in an ideal acoustical environment, the complete absence of sound is impossible (at least for those with no auditory disabilities). Acoustically-speaking, silence and quiet are identical physical phenomena, meaning their psychic differences must arise from another source. In her essay “A Short History of Silence,” Rebecca Solnit posits “silence as what is imposed and quiet as what is sought.” She continues, “The tranquility of a quiet place, of quieting one’s own mind, of a retreat from words and bustle, is acoustically the same as the silence of intimidation or repression but psychically and politically something entirely different.” In Solnit’s view, silence is authoritarian, while quiet can be liberating, “making room for the speech of others.”
Seeing silence and quiet as a political dichotomy squares with Cage’s influential aesthetic. In a public speaking contest at the Hollywood Bowl that Cage won as a teenager, he proclaimed, “We should be hushed and silent, and we should have the opportunity to learn what other people think.” Many of the pieces he composed in the years leading up to 4’33” are quite subdued, exploring the lowest dynamics of musical instruments. “When the war came along, I decided to use only quiet sounds,” Cage noted in a retrospective interview. “There seemed to be no truth, no good, in anything big in society. But quiet sounds were like loneliness, or love, or friendship.” In contrast to the mythic, Western ideal that a great piece of music must be a profound utterance of a singular (and male) genius, Cage’s pieces of the 1940s and early 50s create a resistant practice to that notion, one that invites a listener to create their own, subjective experience. While the so-called “great works” of the European classical music tradition demanded submissive silence (no applause between movements!), the works of Cage and many of his contemporaries upend this hierarchical relationship between the art and its participants (whether maker, interpreter, audience, or some combination). In short, quiet art listens and liberates.
This notion of silence and quiet as opposed, rather than similar phenomena can help explain the potency of certain protest practices. One of the most talked-about protest practices in contemporary America are the Black Lives Matter protest actions carried out by athletes during the playing of the US national anthem before sporting events. These protests by high-profile figures (like former NFL player Colin Kaepernick and US soccer star Megan Rapinoe) and school-aged players alike are distinctly quiet in nature—a reverent kneel, a position associated with mind-quieting spiritual practice. What gives these acts the potency of spectacle is the fact that this quietude is practiced in direct juxtaposition with the national anthem’s practice of authoritarian silence. The acoustical experience of the song itself is less vital than the enforced silence that surrounds it (please rise and remove your caps). By performing a personal, quiet act in response to a monolithic, silent one, these protesters upend the power dynamic of the US national anthem ritual, similar to how 4’33” upends the power dynamic of the classical concert hall.
At the end of “A Short History of Silence,” Rebecca Solnit emphasizes the importance “…of using any privilege we may have been handed to undo privilege or expand its scope.” Professional athletes and successful artists alike have significant privilege and status—they have speaking platforms from which to be heard and valued. A quiet act from this space of privilege does exactly what Solnit advocates, inviting others in. Silenced listeners are now performers whose sounds and stories can be heard.
Kevin Laskey 