noise and silence / cage and fascism

I’m sitting waiting for the bus on a busy avenue. I’m in my head, working on papers for school that are due next week—one in about 3 days or so. I’m not sure why I’m always so resistant to sit down and start writing, because once I do start digging in to research, it’s fascinating, energizing, and on a good day, creative as well. I think it’s the difficulty of capturing the perfect sentence – the thought that forms in your head and lingers, hovers there, only to disappear as you dig for the paper, as you pull out the pen, as other thoughts, like scrambling starlets looking for their own exposure, their own moments of fame, come crowding out at you as well, stampeding their way onto the page, destroying, crowding out, the jewel you were trying to keep your eye on.

It’s an 80 degree day and speeding along come several motorcycles with very loud engines. Loud enough that my ear is still ringing from one of them, shattering my silence, scaring away all hovering thoughts, the superstars and understudies alike. And I start to think, as I always do, about motorcycles as a masculine form of transportation, as the one vehicle still allowed to make that level of noise, as men needing to make noise in the world. And then I think of Italian Futurism, the early 20th century avant garde with its love of noise and machine. Of course Futurism was a fascist movement as well in Italy. Pro-war, pro-nation, and overtly, not hyperbolically, aligned with fascism. So that begs the question—is noise pollution, noise that crowds out all other sounds, noise that invades your very mind, inherently fascist?

And then it begs the question of John Cage and 4:33, his piece that is comprised of silence. Of course we’ve talked about it as musical and as challenging the notions of what is or isn’t music, of allowing the environment into musicality, of a framing device that causes you to pay attention to the other noises around you in the moment. But could 4:33 also be anti-fascist? Consider that when he performed the piece in Italy there was a riot at the concert hall. Of course it’s been said that this is due to Italy’s classical musical tradition, its golden ages of art and music (including a long operatic tradition), and the expectations of Italians coming to a music recital. But it’s also worth asking—what does it mean to perform not only a silent piece, a non-musical piece in a recital, but an anti-noise piece 20-25 year after World War II, after the defeat of Fascism which was supported by an artistic movement that was at once patriotic, seeking to create a new modern glorious era of Italian art, jettisoning the classical, ancient, dead traditions, dead intellectual and artistic weight, and which championed noise and the machine as part of that new tradition. Bruitism, the art of noise to elicit a reaction, was a “musical” theory among Futurism and Dada alike. Was 4:33ism then the art of non-noise, the art of silence, to elicit a reaction as well?

Cage has described his own experiments in attempting to work in a “noiseless” chamber, but what he discovered is that there is no such thing as a lack of noise, ever. There is no such thing as complete silence. Even alone in a “sound proof” room, there is still the beating of your own heart, the blood inside your own eardrums. As long as there is life in a body, there is noise to be perceived.

Cage was initially performing this piece decades before this current zenith of our oversaturated, over mediatized, overly noisy world. But as Guy Debord anticipated the excessive mediatization of this world, as Andy Warhol foresaw the realization of our most narcissistic dreams, could Cage perhaps have also in some small way been reading the impending explosion of noisism of our culture (noisism also being a movement or tendency of its own) and proposing a “music” that would bring us back to ourselves, to the sound of our own heartbeats, the blood in our own ears, the silence that drowns out fascism.