With Cage in mind, Susan Sontag wrote in 1969, "The notions of silence, emptiness, reduction, sketch out new prescriptions for looking, hearing, etc." This radical vision of the artistic and experiential potency of silence is at the heart of Kyle Gann's investigation of 4'33", No Such Thing as Silence. The former Village Voice new-music critic examines the ways in which Cage's piece was and is boosted and derided, and the result is an easily digestible yet illuminating volume.
Gann recognizes that for many listeners, 4'33" seems simply a gag or a provocation. Yet he concludes that really it is "an act of framing, of enclosing environmental and unintended sounds in a moment of attention." To Gann, the piece frames Cage's entire oeuvre, at a stroke communicating his interest in the sounds of nature, the uses and limitations of avant-garde music practice, and his debt to influences from composers like Erik Satie and Morton Feldman to the philosophical writings of Ananda Coomaraswamy and Meister Eckhart....
While compelling as poetry and primary source, Cage's own volume titled Silence (1961) should be preceded by Gann's fascinating primer. Moments of textbooklike exposition (do we need a definition of the Bauhaus movement?) are counterbalanced by energetic accounts of Cage's avant-garde exploits. Gann's keen understanding of the period allows him to productively explore Cage's misinterpretations (of Zen, of the artwork of peers like Robert Rauschenberg), which informed the composer's practice as well. - J. Gabriel Boylan at Bookforum.com