John cage music silence bach

I am trying to describe it It was a tone in which all tones resounded while at the same time it contained all the silence.

John cage music silence bach

(Psychologist Silvia Ostertag during a masterclass of cellist Pablo Casals).

[1] In Cage and Noise, I investigate the way in which John Cage deconstructs the borders between music and noise. More familiar, perhaps, is the way in which Cage has concerned himself with the relation between music and silence.

'We should listen to the silence with the same attention that we give to the sounds',  writes Cage. His point of departure is the simple, but crucial observation that the materials of music consist of sounds and silence; that to compose is to articulate these two.

The only parameter of sound that is shared by silence is duration. 'If you consider that sound is characterized by its pitch, its loudness, its timbre, and its duration, and that silence that is the opposite and, therefore, the necessary partner of sound, is characterized only by its duratio