"There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot"
About this Quote
Cage’s provocation lands like a dare: go ahead, chase “silence” and “emptiness” if you want, but you’ll only end up hearing yourself fail. Coming from a composer, that’s not a philosophical parlor trick; it’s a reprogramming of what music is allowed to be. Cage is attacking the concert hall’s most sacred assumption: that sound only counts when it’s authored, framed, and delivered on cue. If “empty time” doesn’t exist, then the composer’s job isn’t to manufacture meaning from nothing, but to decide what gets treated as meaningful.
The subtext is democratic, even mischievous. Cage refuses to grant special status to “proper” tones over hums, coughs, HVAC rumble, traffic leaking through the walls. The listener becomes a co-creator, whether they consent or not. That’s partly why his ideas still needle people: they don’t just broaden the palette, they dissolve the hierarchy. The virtuoso’s control, the audience’s passive reception, the whole etiquette of reverent quiet gets exposed as theater.
Context matters: Cage’s thinking blooms in mid-century experimental art, shaped by Zen’s attention to the present moment and sharpened by his famous encounter with an anechoic chamber, where he expected nothing and heard his own body instead. The line “try as we may” is the tell. It’s not that silence is impossible; it’s that our desire for it is a kind of denial. Cage turns that denial into an aesthetic: listening as an act of waking up.
The subtext is democratic, even mischievous. Cage refuses to grant special status to “proper” tones over hums, coughs, HVAC rumble, traffic leaking through the walls. The listener becomes a co-creator, whether they consent or not. That’s partly why his ideas still needle people: they don’t just broaden the palette, they dissolve the hierarchy. The virtuoso’s control, the audience’s passive reception, the whole etiquette of reverent quiet gets exposed as theater.
Context matters: Cage’s thinking blooms in mid-century experimental art, shaped by Zen’s attention to the present moment and sharpened by his famous encounter with an anechoic chamber, where he expected nothing and heard his own body instead. The line “try as we may” is the tell. It’s not that silence is impossible; it’s that our desire for it is a kind of denial. Cage turns that denial into an aesthetic: listening as an act of waking up.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
|---|---|
| Source | John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Wesleyan University Press, 1961). |
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