“I have nothing to say and I am saying it.”
— John Cage, in Lecture on Nothing.
Revolutionary composer and thinker John Cage encouraged and exemplified the human acceptance of openness to change, improvisation and innovation. “I don’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas,” he once wrote. “I’m frightened of the old ones.”
Recognizing the principle of life’s unpredictability and finding a new way of living frees a person up, Cage believed.
In her 2013 book “Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists,” writer and classical scholar Kay Larson quoted Cage as explaining, “You see your life in a new light, as a series of seemingly unrelated jewel-like stories within a dazzling setting of change and transformation.”
Every performance of John Cage’s 4’33” is different. It has to be. The composition is an experimental meditative experience. Just listen to it. When nothing happens, everything happens.
Daylight seemed to be on the cusp of fading a couple of minutes before 6 p.m. outside the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum (WAAM) just off the village green in Woodstock last Thursday. A stream of people were arriving to hear this performance of Cage’s 4’33”.
The spotlights inside the gallery had been arranged to focus on the artworks on the walls. Past its daily peak of brightness but well before twilight, natural light filtered through from the front entrance and distinctive oval windows of the WAAM building.
The otherwise empty gallery floor had been filled with rows of folding chairs facing the west wall, in the center of which was a prize-winning painting with a lot of little colored squares flanked by a pair of small weathered ladders. About a quarter of the people in the incoming audience sat with digital devices in hand while they waited.
The room filled in until about 45 people were on hand.
The Impresario, played annually by Norm Magnusson, began the proceedings by briefly describing to the audience what was going to happen in the next hour or so. He particularly praised the presence of Jessie Lee Montague, cast as The Musician. Montague stood guitar in hand and electronic equipment on her right side in front of the prizewinning painting with a lot of squares of various colors on it.
After the Cage piece, The Classical Scholar, played of course by Kay Larson, would talk about Cage and his work, The Impresario promised. . .
The Musician would then end the hour by playing 15 or 20 minutes of her own music. . .
“All right,” Magnusson said.
The 4’33” of silence followed.
And in the naked light, I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never shared
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence,
—Simon and Garfunkel
Most of the audience had heard the Cage work before, and their silence spread via the wisdom of the crowd to those who had not. This audience, for the most part on the elderly side, sat solemnly as though waiting for but not really expecting a sermon to start. The dominant sound was when The Musician, testing her equipment, pressed her foot pedal, eliciting for about a half-minute a sound not unlike the gurgle of the slow cycle of a washing machine.
Four minutes and 33 seconds had passed. Time was up.
The Impresario asked how many members of the audience hadn’t heard the Cage piece before, and a few hands went up. He asked the people under the raised hands what they thought of it, and they told him.
It was time for the next item on the agenda, The Classical Scholar’s contribution. Kay Larson, justly famous writer and translator, had brought with her a copy of her book about Cage, and for the most part she read from it, finding pages with bookmarks in them.
The profound, disturbing and beautifully expressed thoughts captured in Larson’s precise writing somehow lost something in their reading. Almost imperceptibly, the performance became information rather than observation, a collection of aphorisms rather than a glimpse into the dazzling setting of life’s story.
We all have times when we take refuge in rote. We need not apologize. As Cage expressed it, the ego hangs on as much as it can.
Magnusson may have sensed the situation. When The Classical Scholar said, “I’ll stop there,” The Impresario was sitting with his hands before his chest, clasped together as either in prayer or as ready to begin applauding. And when she followed up with “I think I’ll say one more thing,” his hands fell by his sides, Again as almost all of us are, The Impresario was caught between unwavering support for a superstar of intellectual life and the need to stick to the schedule he had announced.
As promised. The Musician, singer, songwriter and guitarist Jessie Lee Montague, performed several solo pieces to conclude the WAAM event. It’s sometimes difficult to perform in front of a bunch of people looking expectantly at you. Montague loosened her audience up with a couple of self-deprecating remarks and launched into her music.
“If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical, it is like developing an ego,” explained Cage, who could be merciless as well as forgiving.” You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off.”
The openness that encourages spontaneity may still be under development in this musician’s work, what better venue than a program about John Cage to take a few risks?
Twilight was approaching when the program ended. A listener driving home to Mount Tremper made the turn on the first curve on the Wittenberg Road only to encounter a large doe standing in the middle of the road coolly apprising the headlights of the approaching vehicle. The deer stared at the eyes of the car for about five seconds – creature to creature — and then broke its trance, loping gracefully off toward the large apple trees in the yard next to what used to be the Odd Fellows Hall.
The driver glanced at the clock in the car. It was 4’33” since the WAAM program had ended.
The players:
Norm Magnusson
According to Wikipedia, Norm Magnusson, 64, began his career creating allegorical animal paintings with pointed social commentaries. Eventually he became more and more interested in political art and its potential for persuasion. Among his local accomplishments was his creation of fake historic signs like this one in Woodstock: ON THIS SITE STOOD A LOCAL MARKET BANKRUPTED BY THE MONOPOLISTIC, MAKE-IT-CHEAPER-IN-CHINA, ANTI-UNION BIG-BOX STORE WHERE YOU SHOP. (EDUCATION DEPARTMENT, 2007).
Magnusson, who lives in Lake Hill, has been organizing the annual performance of Cage’s 4’33” in Woodstock for the past 14 years.
Jessie Lee Montague
“Good music can act as a guide to good living,” said John Cage.
Jessie Lee Montague’s obsession with the guitar and with songwriting goes back to her early adulthood. She does other things to support her musical career. In recent years, she has been a yoga teacher and a hair stylist in the Village of Rhinebeck, where she lives.
One of her best-known song tracks begins: “Trouble come oh once more just knock knock knocking on my front door and I wonder why and I wonder oh what for ….”
Her carefully produced musical tracks and albums are available in digital form.
Kay Larson
“Where the Heart Beats is a book about a man learning to use and trust the void,” wrote New York Times reviewer Ben Ratcliff in 2013. “It’s a kind of love story about overcoming the need for love.”
Kay Larson was the art critic for New York magazine for 14 years and a frequent contributor to The New York Times. Larson began Zen Buddhist practice at Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper.
“This book has been a 15-year journey into the world of John Cage, who was a teacher to so many, and who taught me, too,” wrote Larson. “As real Zen teachers do, he modeled a way of life for me.”
More nothing
It was a glorious sunny morning to hear nothing at the Maverick Concert Hall on a Saturday a couple of months ago. On the schedule of this Family Saturday was not just a performance of John Cage’s 4’33” but also a reading from a book about the world premiere of the piece in this very concert hall.
What a treat the event turned out to be! Fortunately, the book entitled “nothing” was not a collection of blank pages but a story by author Nicholas Day gloriously illustrated by Chris Raschka, about 40 people – adults and children – were at the concert hall.
“A pianist walks onto a barn. Don’t stop him. He’s in the right place,” begins the text, read aloud by writer Day, illustrator Raschka sitting next to him. The two-page full-color spread shows pianist David Tudor walking toward the concert hall in 1952. “He just needs to do nothing,” the next spread explains. And so the familiar story unfolds.
The little kids listen as the suspension of sound is explained to them, It seems okay with them to begin.
It’s very much a family scene. A small baby’s robust yowl erupting in the second row at the beginning doesn’t draw anybody’s attention, it’s happened before. Past the three-minute mark, kids in squeaky sneakers start chasing each other around. The light in the windowed roof changes slightly as a slight breeze moves some of the leaves in a nearby tree.
Nothing?
Join the family! 
