When Quiet Returns

so will silence

Photo by Andraz Lazic on Unsplash

This post reprises an article I posted almost exactly one year ago. I was amused to revisit it because for almost three months I have been living the width of a driveway away from the massive rebuild of the house next door— Demolition, jack hammers, bulldozer, cement truck, nail guns, saws, radios, lumber hoists, not the hum of yesteryear. Almost all of the walls came down and it doubled in size.

Let me say at once that my neighbors have been solicitous and apologetic for the hubbub, dust and NOISE of the project. I am happy for this family of 5 turning a small house into their dream home where they will continue to raise a family, just like I did. I am doing fine, I have thick old plaster walls, a pair of noise cancelling headphones and my local library is only a couple of blocks away.

Still I must admit, I could not have written the article this year and when it was written I had no idea that one year could bring such worldwide and local chaos into my quiet life. A peek into the past with a hope for a return of ‘listening to silence.’

When I seek peace and quiet, I realize I have mistakenly assumed silence as a necessary part of that state of mind. It has surprised me to accept with gratitude that there is no such thing as a silence without sound. I can seek and find a peaceful grace in the world as a part of its constant hum and motion.

I’d like you to imagine yourself settling down on a pine bench in a small barn like building on a rainy summer evening in 1952 in the middle of a forest near Woodstock, New York. Parts of the building are open to the forest and you are wondering how muddy the dirt road out will be when the concert is over. There is a good sized audience to hear several modern composers. One is introduced as “Four Pieces” by composer John Cage. The pianist, David Tudor walks across the stage, sits down in front of the piano, takes out and starts a stop watch, closes the piano lid and begins a performance in which he never plays a note during the four minutes and thirty-three seconds of the piece. ¹

Since that time there has been great debate whether that piece by John Cage eventually called ‘4’33”‘ was music or a joke. Cage explained later:

“They missed the point. There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.” ²

Michael Nyman describes it in his book ‘Experimental Music - Cage and Beyond’:

“4’33” is a demonstration of the non-existence of silence, of the permanent presence of sounds around us, of the fact they are worthy of attention...4’33” is not a negation of music, but an affirmation of its omnipresence.” ³

Musak was first introduced in the 1930s and really took off, there seemed to be background music everywhere. Cage worried that people would never hear silence again. In 1948 he made an offhand comment about writing a four and a half minute piece of silence and selling it to Musak. It stuck with him and he began to think deeply about silence.

Cage visited an anechoic chamber, a room designed to maintain absolute silence for different types of acoustic testing. In his collection of essays entitled “Silence,” he writes about expecting to hear nothing and then hearing two sounds in the chamber, one high and one low. The engineer on duty explained that the high sound was his nervous system, and the low sound was the movement of his blood through his body. This experience focused his musical attention on ambient and accidental sounds instead of willful compositional ones.

When I began my substack Listen First (now A Time for Listening), I sought to share an awareness of how important attentive listening is to our sense of connection to one another and the world, how the natural extension of that attention is empathy and more connection. The essays grew more personal as I recognized how much of my life has been enriched by attention and listening to the natural world and how much of my memories center in the delight of being part of that world alone and with my family. My connections to the world continue with a curiosity and desire to observe and listen to its mysteries.

I challenged myself to conduct the John Cage piece,’4’33”‘ this Tuesday morning in my own back yard at 10:20 AM. I live on a quiet suburban street and the backyard is fenced with bushes and trees secluding me from the world. During the piece, I heard the constant bird song of spring⁴, the high pitched tone of a gopher deterrent, the drone of the pool filter next-door, the murmur of voices and laughter of my neighbor and her friend in her backyard, hammering, a distant airplane, the sound of car wheels passing on the street and some buzzy far away freeway noise. My attention kept me aware of my surroundings and I felt how I was a part of this larger world, tuned to my environment like the animals around me.⁴

In his TED talk, Sound Designer, Dallas Taylor ⁵ invited his listeners to experience ‘4’33”’ with him:

“We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reset our ears. And if we become more conscious of what we hear, we’ll inherently make our world sound better. Quietness is not when we turn off our minds to sound, but when we can really start to listen and hear the world in all of its sonic beauty...Listen for the loud and soft, the harmonic, the dissonant, and all the small details that make every sound unique. Spend this time as mindful and focused in this real-life sonic moment. Enjoy the magnificence of hearing and listening. So here comes the first movement. Starting ... now.”⁶

1. Hermes, Will, “The Story of ‘4’33”’, NPR May 8, 2000.

2. Cage, John, “Silence”.

3. Hermes, Ibid

4. During this exercise, I also recorded the birdsong with the Merlin Bird app. Nine different birds were identified during the 4+ minutes and I saw none of them. House Finch, Orange-crowned Warbler, Spotted Towhee, White-crowned Sparrow, Red-whiskered Bulbul, Mourning Dove, Northern Mockingbird, American Robin, Black Phoebe.

5. My introduction into the seminal work of John Cage originated in a TED talk by Dallas Taylor, May 2020, “What silence can teach you about sound.” The idea of trying my own listening experiment also originated from his talk.

6. Taylor, Dallas, TED talk.

If enjoyed this article, you may want to browse the archive of more than 60 articles. At present everyone has access to all articles. They are organized in the three listening topics I explore—Listening to Each Other, Listening to the Heart and Listening Curiously to the World which appear in separate sections on the webpage and in the menu under the title.

Listening to Each Other: These posts delve into the practice of listening to one another and its connection to empathy. Attention is given to techniques, challenges, and rewards of deep listening in our relationships and communities.

Listening to the Heart:These posts share personal narratives and reflections - stories from life’s journey that reveal what we can discover when we pay attention to our own experiences, whether that’s during a quiet moment of reflection or while fishing in a mountain stream.

Listening Curiously to the World : These posts invite readers to join in wondering about and discovering the fascinating phenomena that surround us, approaching nature with both attention and curiosity.