This morning, after I woke up and played Wordle and Connections, I opened up Bluesky and discovered that at least my corner of the social media site was consumed with discussion of postmodern classical composer John Cage and what is probably his most famous composition: 4’33”.
Now, if you’re unfamiliar with 4’33”, the rest of this post won’t make a lot of sense. So before moving on, it’s worth taking a listen. (And, in fact, I found a couple wonderful performances—even if you are familiar with it, it’s worth experiencing again.) I usually think of it as a piano piece, and I believe it was performed on piano at its premier, and this is a video of pianist William Marx performing it. As I was looking at performances, though, I found a performance by the Berliner Philharmoniker that is also excellent.
I’d honestly watch one or both performances before continuing with this blog post. It’s okay—I can wait.
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Done? Awesome. Think about what you noticed in the two performances and I’ll tell you what I noticed.
First, the musicians were there. Their instruments were there. The conductor was there for the philharmonic orchestra. The setting was a setting you would expect for a work of classical music.
Only there was no music. Or, rather, there wasn’t the performance of music by the musicians. But there were ambient noises. In one, there was coughing. (Honestly, I’ve never been to a classical performance where nobody coughed, though often people are capable of restraining themselves until between movements or after songs.) In the other, a minute or so in, there was what sounded, to my ears, like footsteps.
And to some extent, the point of the piece is to bring to the fore these ambient sounds that surround us but that we rarely notice, to raise and center them as sounds worth listening to, even in a formal concert setting. And that discipline can inform us outside of that formal concert setting: John Cage himself wrote, “I’ve spent many pleasant hours in the woods conducting performances of my silent piece, transcriptions—that is, for an audience of myself.”‘
So why did 4’33” come up in my social media-ing? The short version is, John McWhorter, professor of linguistics at Columbia University, wrote an op-ed in which, among other things, he complained that the noise of the on-campus protests meant he couldn’t share 4’33” with his music humanities class.
Plenty of people pointed out the fact that he seems to have missed the point of Cage’s famous composition. And, in fact, that it is the perfect piece of music to teach during loud protests. And, in fact, Columbia is a university in the middle of a city. From my Chicago office, and from my Chicago classrooms, the sounds of the city always seep in. Students can frequently choose whether to listen to me or the sirens, protests, parties, and random people yelling that you wouldn’t think would be so loud on the 14th floor but are.
All of that said, this is a Mormon blog, not a music criticism or a McWhorter criticism blog. But I think McWhorter’s misunderstanding of the power, meaning, and context of 4’33” mirrors a common misunderstanding within Mormon culture and practice: specifically, we get the idea of reverence entirely wrong.
In most Mormon tellings, “reverence” and “quietness” are near synonyms. We prioritize being quiet to invite the Spirit, to hear the still small voice. In fact, for many of us, our introduction to the concept of reverence is through primary songs. These songs explicitly equate quietness and reverence:
Rev’rently, quietly, lovingly we think of thee;
Rev’rently, quietly, softly sing our melody.
Rev’rently, quietly, humbly now we pray,
Let thy Holy Spirit dwell in our hearts today.And it’s not just in primary: as recently as the last couple weeks, I’ve heard requests for quiet that were framed as requests for reverence.
But the thing is, reverence is not the same as quiet. Reverence, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, is “[d]eep respect, veneration, or admiration for someone or something, esp. a person or thing regarded as sacred or holy.” It is also “[t]he state or condition of being deeply respected or venerated; the quality of inspiring feelings of awe or veneration.” It is not, however, the state of being quiet.
That’s not to say that being quiet is inappropriate, or is wrong. It is, frankly, easier to notice the ambient sounds revealed by 4’33” when we ourselves are less noisy (though, as breathing beings with circulatory systems, we will always provide some ambient noise where we are). But creating that silence is not, and should not be, something we raise on a pedestal. Because if we do that, we’ll work to avoid noise and withdraw into ourselves.
In fact, when we prioritize quietness and calm as our ultimate goal, we’re going to miss the things that could save us.
This morning, thinking (and skeeting) about 4’33”, my thoughts turned to one of Jesus’ parable of Lazarus and the rich man. In that parable, a rich man is eats and dresses well. At some point, Lazarus, a beggar, is laid, sick and hungry, at his gate. Eventually, Lazarus and the rich man die. Lazarus ends up in hell, while the beggar ends up in heaven, a classic reversal of fortunes.
Parables tend to be sparce on details, and this is no exception. We don’t know why the rich man didn’t help Lazarus. We don’t know whether he was even aware of Lazarus.
But parables demand that we extrapolate, that we take them seriously and ask ourselves their questions. And I have to ask myself: if I prioritize quiet, if I try not to hear the pain, the suffering, the chaos of the world, does that bring me closer to God? Or does that allow me to ignore (or to miss, which is equally damning) those whose suffering I could alleviate, those whose tears I could wash away.
And I get it: quiet is nice. Order is nice. But God didn’t command us to live our lives quietly. He command us to reverence Him. And to do that, as King Benjamin explained, requires us to reverence our neighbors.
To the extent that we include quietness in our performance of reverence, then, that quietness should be in the service of hearing and noticing the ambient sounds that surround us, so that we can discover the pain and hurt that we can resolve. After all, 4’33” isn’t about the silence—the silence is just a tool to help us hear better.
Photo by Felicia Buitenwerf on Unsplash