I feel that silence says a lot more than words do at times. According to John Cage, silence is one of the most beautiful things. While watching/listening to his video, I found it hard not to agree with everything he had said. No matter how much of a talkative, loud and outgoing person you may be, silence can do a lot for you. It soothes the mind, and allows you to resonate about the importance in life. For him, a silence was simply a span of time that was empty, and he believed that music was built out of blocks of time, and these blocks could contain either sound or silence. As Cage discovered this kind of silence through his composition with time structures, he became more and more interested in ways of composing in which the sounds, relieved of structural responsibility, appeared more casually, with less effort. I found it interesting that something like complete silence could teach you key skills on your work ethics, and your work in general.
Personally I feel that silence is very useful, and as a teenager of the 21st century, finding silence can be a bit of a hard task. This made me realise what Cage really meant about sounds and silence, and how even with less or no sound at all, everything around you still seems more alive and bright than ever. At least, that is what I understood from Cage’s video as he had said that silence was channeled through chance, and was capable of producing endless content of amazing variety, full of both the unexpected and the common, the shocking and the entrancing, the engaging and the dull. To John Cage, silence was what taught him how to compose his beautiful music, and he continued to describe how sounds are made up simply for its own pleasure. We should not try to worry about how they’re formed and the meanings behind it. We should learn to just enjoy them for what they truly are…sounds. This made me think about how I view sounds and music in general. I don’t recall ever really just enjoying the sound of a tune, or song, without thinking about the lyrics, or what it was supposed to mean to me emotionally. So perhaps the next time I come across a beautiful piece of soothing music, or just a simple sound, I’ll try not to think about it much, and try to enjoy what it merely is.
http://rosewhitemusic.com/piano/writings/silence-taught-john-cage/
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