When John Cage first composed his infamous piece, 4 minutes and 33 seconds of intentional silence, it was easy to miss the provocation - he wasn’t asking us to listen to nothing.
The invitation was to notice everything we usually miss.
Now, decades later, John UnCaged has returned, this time to share what the silence heard.
In the absence of any performance, this becomes a remembering.
A remembering of the space between.
And what it means when it starts to listen.
Performance Notebook score #433 – notes from the manuscript of a new performance by John UnCaged, a re-exploration of silence - Woodstock, New York
I’ve never really been interested in sound,
only in what’s left when we remove the expectation of it.
What remains, when no one is trying to impress?
When the audience becomes the composer?
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In my latest work, a re-exploration, I removed the score again.
But this time,
I let the silence listen back.
And what did it hear?
A breath that was being held.
A decision that wasn’t being made.
A memory that rose without being asked.
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And what did it feel?
A quiet unease of being truly seen.
An intimacy of the gap not being filled.
A dignity and respect of not being interrupted.
It felt the ache of thousands of unheard moments,
that had gone before, and finally finding somewhere to land.
The silence felt like a pause between generations,
when one carries pain, and the other pretends not to notice.
It felt the shared breath of people no longer defending their identities, just resting them.
It felt like humanity, unperformed.
And what did it mean?
For those brief minutes,
we remembered something ancient.
That we don’t need to make a sound to be changed.
We don’t need to own the room to belong in it.
We need only to stop trying to be anything but here.
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I used to think 4’33 was a mirror.
Now, it feels like a gate.
And the question it asks…
“What might emerge… if the space between could finally listen back?”
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During the writing of this post, a fascinating clip appeared - it shows how a large Glastonbury crowd remained in complete silence for 7 minutes (2’17 more than John Cage’s silence)…
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Silence gives answers to questions words cannot
Rumi
As I sit here right now, I wonder even deeper - what it would mean if the space between never stopped listening?
Maybe we might start to speak differently - slower and truer.
As if every word mattered not because of who hears it, but because of what hears it.
We might stop performing, stop proving, stop narrating ourselves into spaces that were already holding us.
We might then begin to feel that every silence is not waiting for us to fill it, but inviting us to be felt in it.
If the space between never stopped listening, then maybe we’ve never truly been alone.
What if the listening you seek… is already always present?
This is such a powerful reminder and deeply profound. “What if the listening you seek… is already always present?” I loved this. Thank you for sharing and elucidating this subject so beautifully.
the listening IS always ... 'silence is wisdoms best reply' Euripides.
thank you