![]() In this talk, Cage described his musical ambitions, how they were dashed, and how he came to become a seeker of spiritual wisdom that could inform his musical life. What was the context of Silent prayer, then? We can start with the context of “A Composer’s Confessions” itself. The radically different historical context of Silent prayer makes us rethink Cage’s motivations for a silent piece, and hence for 4′ 33″. While Silent prayer is not 4′ 33″, the two works are clearly connected-they are both silent pieces. There would be relatively few coherent paragraphs remaining, stranded in the sea of black. Imagine taking the entire literature on 4′ 33″ and redacting all mention of the anechoic chamber experience, “no such thing as silence”, ambient sound, chance, and Zen. It demands that we explain what a silent piece meant to John Cage without recourse to any of these things. The existence of Silent prayer means that John Cage conceived of a silent piece without any of these things as preconditions. While he no doubt had heard of it, there is no reason to believe that Cage had any special interest in Zen in 1948. Cage spends a good deal of time in “A Composer’s Confessions” describing his spiritual investigations and does not make a single mention of Buddhism in any form. Blyth’s book on haiku, published in 1949. The first mention of Zen in Cage’s writing does not occur until a letter to the editors of Musical America in 1950. The music that he was writing at the time of “A Composer’s Confessions” was the Sonatas and interludes. Cage’s first use of chance operations was still three years away (1951’s Concerto for prepared piano). In 1948 he had no interest in paying attention to ambient noise, much less considering it to be music. A few months after the lecture at Vassar, for example, he delivered a lecture at Black Mountain College in which he described silence as “the opposite, and therefore, the necessary partner of sound.” It was not until some time after 1950 that he began defining silence as unintended sound. In 1948, Cage still thought of silence as the absence of sound.
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