Foraging Tarot #10: Silence, the Commons
I first encountered John Cage’s work at North Carolina’s Governor’s School, a summer camp whose orchestra program was by tryout only. Six weeks of humid summer spent in a cool, dark auditorium whose maple wood boards glowed in the stage lights. To set the stage for the 20th-century music that would be our focus, Randolph Foy, fearless leader and conductor of an orchestra of 15-year-olds, sat before a piano, stopwatch in hand, closing the keyboard lid to perform Cage’s 4’33” for us, and opening it to signal its end. I know we giggled and whispered. I don’t remember anyone booing—we adored Randy too much. But I do remember, will always remember, the questions that followed, that we continued to ask: what is music? what is silence?
While in New York City in the 1940s, avant-garde composer John Cage foraged for mushrooms in the public common space of Central Park. Also a mycologist, Cage was known for positioning mushrooms as “para-musical phenomenon,” both for mushroom’s and music’s proximity in the dictionary, as well as for how each focused his attention. Foraging, its unpredictable outcomes, deeply influenced his aleatory aesthetic.
I keep a deck of index cards with quotes from my research that I call my foraging tarot. I like to draw three and find how they fit.
As Cage said, “(we are the listeners), that is, we would enter in.”
While in New York City in 1946, avant-garde composer Charles Ives’ two works Central Park in the Dark and The Unanswered Question, which explore the entanglements of sound and silence, were first performed together. The very next night in the same city, Cage and his artistic and life collaborator Merce Cunningham gave a concert together. Did they attend to each other, discuss what they shared in common?
Central Park in the Dark scores an urban portrait of the sounds surrounding and yet permeating the bounds of that space—a street parade, a fire engine, newsboys, people leaving bars singing—set against a “sounded silence” represented by the white noise of string chords, the white space of that field.
Cage noted that Ives “knew that if sound sources came from different points in space that that fact was in itself interesting. Nobody before him had thought about this….”
Cage said, “There is no such thing as an empty space…. There is always something to hear.” In the late 1940s, he was still struggling to make a silence.
Silence is not a sound, but a temporality, measured in duration; Cage asserted “silence cannot be heard in terms of pitch or harmony: it is heard in terms of time length.”
I like a long afternoon, two or three hours, to hunt mushrooms. I used to bring my phone to take pictures, but it was distracting so I leave it in the car. While I listen to birds, to the whine of mosquitoes, the scolding of squirrels, I myself am silent. That’s not completely true. I do wetly step through last year’s leaf litter, occasionally click open my mushroom knife and crinkle my paper bag. But this is practice.
It takes a lot of time to learn how to listen, how to pay attention, how to attune—to the world, to each other—whether in an auditorium, or in the woods among the mushrooms. What are we willing to be silent for?
This is a piece about entanglements.
I first encountered Ives’ work at Governor’s School. We performed The Unanswered Question, a piece scored for a stage of strings playing slow and quiet chords, representing the timeless “Silence of the Druids—Who Know, See, and Hear Nothing”; a solo trumpet offstage periodically and plaintively posing “The Perennial Question of Existence” seven times; and a flute quartet in a third location (we were clustered in the control booth with our own conductor at the back of the auditorium) as the “Fighting Answerers” who, after they “realize a futility and begin to mock ‘The Question,’” respond in an increasingly erratic way before ignoring the trumpet who asks the question, unanswered, once more before “The Silences” are left to their “Undisturbed Solitude” (Ives’ program notes, 1953). Instead of our conventional semicircle arrangement on the stage, it was incredibly exciting to play such unorthodox music in such an unorthodox space, crowded into a part of the auditorium we never saw. It was also July, and incredibly hot in that crowded space as we rehearsed—nudging each other with elbows and instruments, music blared in each other’s ears, redolent with teenage sweat and decades of dust. Perhaps not unexpectedly, I fainted, but because of the lack of space I crumpled vertically into silence.
In small ensembles, musicians must be especially attuned to each other when playing. Even when not playing. Even in the silences. My attentive friend, also a flutist, sensed something amiss because she happened to grab for my flute, not for me, as I fell. She made the right choice.
At first, Cage was not much interested in Ives because of his “determined determinacy,” that is, Ives’ work determines the space of “silence,” but also what you will experience in that space. Later, as Cage’s compositional interests focused on indeterminacy, he “was able to approach Ives in an entirely different…spirit.”
Writer and thinker Jennifer Tsing says, “Assemblages, in their diversity, show us what later I call the ‘latent commons,’ that is, entanglements that might be mobilized in common cause. Because collaboration is always with us.”
Commons are bounded spaces that are nonetheless interpenetrated by bodies, by sounds, by mycelium. What Joyelle McSweeney posits as the “necropastoral,” which was never a pristine pastoral hermetically sealed off from corruption, but a site where it and we are broken down, literally co-ruptured.
If a tree falls in the woods, mushrooms will break it down, will even break down its sound to silence. Necropastoral.
At Harvard University around 1952, Cage had his apocryphal experience in an anechoic chamber, which led to his musical experiments to make an expressive silence.
Also in 1952 Cage composed and premiered 4’33”, also called the “Silent Sonata,” a silence measured by time length, by duration. He claimed he composed each individual note of each individual movement, but they were all silent. When David Tudor sat before a piano, stopwatch in hand, closing the keyboard lid to start each movement and opening it to signal its end, the audience laughed, muttered, and booed. Cage said, “They missed the point…they didn’t know how to listen.”
As in the anechoic chamber experiment, Cage’s experimental silent compositions failed: ambient sounds always intruded, broke the sound barrier between noise and silence.
At 4’33”’s premiere, Cage noted, “You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.”
“Try as we might to make a silence,” Cage said, “we cannot.”
Not far from Harvard’s anechoic chamber is Boston Common, the oldest public park in America, the site a mashup of livestock grazing, burials and executions, mustering of militias, and public speeches.
In Nature, New England Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson experiences the “perfect exhilaration” of his vision as a “transparent eyeball” after “crossing a bare common.”
Sometimes focusing the attention requires clearing the senses.
This is a piece about entanglements.
Ives set the first part of his Three Places in New England (1914) on the Boston Common, a tribute to the Robert Gould Shaw memorial there honoring the Boston commander and his all-Black regiment. The movement is a mashup of plantation songs, Union battle anthems, and a driving marching bassline. Ives was also profoundly influenced by Emerson, even composing a piece titled “Emerson” in the 1940s. Ives did, however, admit that “[Emerson] over-disregards the personal unit in the universal,” an absolutism that located truth in a hierarchy, rather than in relationships.
And yet, Ives felt compelled to determine silence for his listener, compose a “sounded silence,” disregard the personal experience of what exists in the space of silence. He tells us what to pay attention to.
But the people don’t like being told what to do. As Deleuze and Guattari theorize, “they begin to burgeon…throwing out rhizome stems…challenging the hegemony of the signifier.”
Alexis Nikole, who posts on Instagram as BlackForager, created “How the U.S. Forgot Our Food,” a visual essay about how after the Civil War, anti-trespassing laws in the South made it a felony for people to forage on land they didn’t own. Soon after, in response to over-depletion of resources, the U.S. created the Park Service—lands held in common good—which were to remain “untouched.” Therefore, no one could forage on private or on public lands. There was a resurgence of foraging with the Great Depression, but because the practice was associated with poor people, that stigma led to an avoidance of foraging, led to much of that ancestral knowledge—an attunement to what’s edible, what’s medicine—being lost.
Cage himself learned to forage as a young man in the Great Depression, and continued to do so throughout his life. As he delighted to point out, “Music and mushrooms: two words next to one another in many dictionaries.” And while his two delights might seem unrelated except by proximity, he cultivated a whole aesthetic based on their collaboration.
I may or may not have cut maitake from the bases of oaks in neighborhood yards; I can neither confirm nor deny that I climb a fallen trunk over barbed wire each summer, past a sign that says No Trespassing (but on the other side it didn’t say nothing), following the lure of chanterelles.
This is a piece about entanglements.
Cage preferred Henry David Thoreau to Emerson, which makes sense—the rambling in the woods, the capacity for noticing. Cage wrote one of his experimental performance pieces, Empty Words, by making random progressive erasures of text from Thoreau’s journals, until we are left with nothing but sounds, then silence. Its duration is approximately twelve hours. As Cage said, “there is no such thing as an empty space.” Or empty words. There is always the noticing.
Is silence itself the Common?
Our ability to pay sustained attention has atrophied, dubbed “brain rot.” The first use of “brain rot” occurs in Walden: “Why level downward to our dullest perception always…? [W]ill not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?” (162).
But perhaps rotting may make way for new life, new possibilities, new modes of sharing resources, even new sounds. Attention. A tension.
Cage once quipped that instead of introducing himself as a composer, he “should have said Decomposer.”
Governor’s School was a summer-long program held at Salem College in North Carolina, a site settled in 1766 by Moravians. The religious sect practiced communal living and shared common property—each day began and ended with the community in worship, music a significant part of their services. Their musical archives are well-preserved, featuring ensembles both vocal and brass, especially trombones. I had just broken up with a trombonist, and now was smitten with a goth percussionist. We frequented the cemetery—the Moravian graves were divided by gender, but they otherwise buried their dead commonly, communally, in the same order in which they died. I preferred the adjoining Baroque headstones and iron fences, tried to lure the drummer there with my fresh body, seduce him like Mary with Percy Shelley.
Scholar David W. Rose proposed the following equivalencies in Cage’s work:
“Mycelium = Silence
Fruiting Bodies = Sounds
Music = Life = Mushrooms”
By the end of that summer, the surrounding woods were full of golden chanterelles, like the bells of so many brass instruments.
Cage appreciated Thoreau’s capacity for noticing, and though Thoreau often notes fungi in his forays into the woods, Cage found nothing in his journals that suggests Thoreau foraged. There is only the noticing.
As in the anechoic chamber, Cage’s silent compositions failed, and in failing, succeeded in creating a space for noticing, to note the silence, focus the attention, to attend to the attending.
Another form of attention is attunement. There is a sacred moment in the orchestra where we all go silent. The oboe plays an A 440Hz for us to tune. In our tuning, we periodically fall silent so the tuning can repeat, call and response, until we are all attuned to each other.
Listening affects what is sounding.
In 4’33”, silence is the mycelium, the space for the listener to enter, to insert the self, to notice, the central park where the individual and the now decentered (de)composer may grow toward each other.
Before and after and between the attunement, there is silence. And within, the great work may begin.
Foraging Tarot cards drawn:
“Many of these mushrooms were gathered by Cage from nearby Central Park” (Kingston Trinder, “II. Where the Whippoorwill Sound and Morel Lay,” section of John Cage: A Mycological Foray 55).
“Assemblages, in their diversity, show us what later I call the ‘latent commons,’ that is, entanglements that might be mobilized in common cause. Because collaboration is always with us, we can maneuver within its possibilities” (Jennifer Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World 134–5).
“[Cage] positioned mushrooms as para-musical phenomenon” therefore Rose proposes the following equivalencies in Cage’s work:
“Spores = Microtones
Mycelium = Silence
Fruiting Bodies = Sounds
Music = Life = Mushrooms” (David Rose, “Notes from Underground: Cage: Two (Diary and Letters). Fungi Vol. 10:1, Spring 2017. p.13)
Additional References:
Brooks, William. “Pragmatics of Silence.” Silence, Music, Silent Music. Ed. Nicky Losseff and Jenny Doctor. Routledge, 2016. p.101 n. 15, 113.
Brown, Richard, “Two Statements on Ives.” Personal blog. 26 March 2012.
Cage, “Defense of Satie” (1948), in John Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970). p.81.
Cage, “Experimental Music” (1955) in Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1961). p.8.
Cage, “Lecture on Nothing” (1959), Incontri Musicali, August. Archived at https://seansturm.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/john-cage-lecture-on-nothing.pdf
Cage, Indeterminacy. Smithsonian Folkways, 1959. Recording.
Cage, A Year from Monday, (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1967). pp.8, 41.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. “Introduction: Rhizome.” A Thousand Plateaus. Transl. Brian Massumi. (Minneapolis: U of MN P, 1987). p.15.
Ives, Charles. Program notes. The Unanswered Question, 1953.
Kostelanetz, Richard. Conversing with Cage. (Routledge, 2003).
“Moravians” on Wikipedia.
Nikole, Alexis, posting as @BlackForager. “How the U.S. Forgot Our Food.” Instagram. 12 February 2024.
Rose, David. “Notes from Underground: Cage: Two (Diary and Letters).” Fungi (10:1), Spring 2017.
Trinder, Kingston. “II. Where the Whippoorwill Sound and Morel Lay,” John Cage: A Mycological Foray, Ed. Ananda Pellerin. Atelier Éditions, 2020. p.47, 55.
Heidi Czerwiec is an essayist and poet, and is the author of Crafting the Lyric Essay: Strike a Chord, and the lyric essay collection Fluid States, selected by Dinty W. Moore as winner of Pleiades Press’ 2018 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, and she is co-editor with Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay. She writes and teaches in Minneapolis, where she is Senior Editor for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. Visit her at heidiczerwiec.com.
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