While I hardly seek to use this space to comment on campus protest culture, I was taken this week by a spat over, of all things, how John Cage might respond to this moment.
Though you have not heard John Cage's 1952 composition "4'33"", you might have heard of it. "4'33" tends to be seen a provocative piece challenging conventional notions of music and performance. Cage explores the idea of silence and the ambient sounds that occur in performance spaces.
The score instructs the performer not to play their instrument for the duration of the piece, which consists of three movements totaling 4 minutes and 33 seconds.
Instead, the performer remains still, allowing (demanding?) the audience to experience the sounds of their environment—the shuffling, the breathing, the sniffling, the ambient noises—that are usually considered distractions during a performance.
Cage wanted to draw attention to the concept of silence not as an absence of sound, but as an active presence.
By removing intentional musical sounds, Cage highlights the sounds that tend to go unnoticed or disregarded. In doing so, Cage challenges traditional notions of music and invites listeners to reconsider their perception of sound and silence. "4'33"" is a statement on the nature of music, performance, and the boundaries between art and everyday life.
Cage intended for each experience of "4'33"" to be unique, shaped by the specific sounds of the environment and the reactions of the audience, emphasizing the role of context and interpretation in the experience of art.
This week in The New York Times, John WcWhorter wrote:
Last Thursday, in the music humanities class I teach at Columbia University, two students were giving an in-class presentation on the composer John Cage. His most famous piece is “4'33",” which directs us to listen in silence to surrounding noise for exactly that amount of time.
I had to tell the students we could not listen to that piece that afternoon because the surrounding noise would have been not birds or people walking by in the hallway but infuriated chanting from protesters outside the building. Lately that noise has been almost continuous during the day and into the evening, including lusty chanting of “From the river to the sea.” Two students in my class are Israeli; three others, to my knowledge, are American Jews. I couldn’t see making them sit and listen to this as if it were background music.
I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans or even something like “D.E.I. has got to die,” to the same “Sound Off” tune that “From the river to the sea” has been adapted to. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus. Chants like that would have been condemned as a grave rupture of civilized exchange, heralded as threatening resegregation and branded as a form of violence. I’d wager that most of the student protesters against the Gaza war would view them that way. Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?
Although I know many Jewish people will disagree with me, I don’t think that Jew hatred is as much the reason for this sentiment as opposition to Zionism and the war on Gaza. I know some of the protesters, including a couple who were taken to jail last week, and I find it very hard to imagine that they are antisemitic. Yes, there can be a fine line between questioning Israel’s right to exist and questioning Jewish people’s right to exist. And yes, some of the rhetoric amid the protests crosses it…
The idea is that Jewish students and faculty should be able to tolerate all of this because they are white.
I understand this to a point. Pro-Palestinian rallies and events, of which there have been many here over the years, are not in and of themselves hostile to Jewish students, faculty and staff members. Disagreement will not always be a juice and cookies affair. However, the relentless assault of this current protest — daily, loud, louder, into the night and using ever-angrier rhetoric — is beyond what any people should be expected to bear up under, regardless of their whiteness, privilege or power…
I understand that the protesters and their fellow travelers feel that all of this is the proper response, social justice on the march. They have been told that righteousness means placing the battle against whiteness and its power front and center, contesting the abuse of power by any means necessary. And I think the war on Gaza is no longer constructive or even coherent…
As someone who has a long history as an avid, sometimes angry participant in protest culture (none of which I regret, some of which I might have done differently), I have strong but complicated feelings about the tone and content of American campus protest culture these days. I’m not yet comfortable writing about my evolving feelings about this matter. However, I’m grateful to those who’ve been willing to engage in earnest discussions with me about the promise and peril of campus life and protest culture in the ‘20’s.
More precise, concise, and fully-fledged than my inchoate, ever-evolving thoughts on that matter are John Cage’s 10 Rules for Students and Teachers, which have been hanging in my office for 20 years:
RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for a while.
RULE TWO: General duties of a student: Pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.
RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher: Pull everything out of your students.
RULE FOUR: Consider everything an experiment.
RULE FIVE: Be self-disciplined: this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
RULE SIX: Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.
RULE SEVEN: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.
RULE EIGHT: Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.
RULE NINE: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
RULE TEN: We’re breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.
HINTS: Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully, often. Save everything. It might come in handy later.
I’m homesick, home sick, and home with a sick kid, wondering what John Cage would—or wouldn’t—have to say about this moment.
Wishing you and yours health and wellness as we slide into the weekend.
Yours,
-DL
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