John Cage's 4'33": Using Aesthetic Theory to Understand a Musical Notion

Author(s): Mark Robin Campbell

Source: The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring, 1992), pp. 83-91
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3332730
Accessed: 22-09-2019 05:39 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

University of Illinois Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to The Journal of Aesthetic Education

This content downloaded from 130.70.8.131 on Sun, 22 Sep 2019 05:39:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
John Cage's 4 '33 ": Using Aesthetic Theory to
Understand a Musical Notion

MARK ROBIN CAMPBELL

When we are puzzled about what an artwork is, we are in a quand

Usually our predicament begins in wonderment. Questions pop to mi
especially questions about the nature, meaning, and value of the wor
What exactly are the features or aspects or qualities of the artwork
should garner our attention? What are the elements that should focus
appreciation or judgment? What descriptions do we use to define what
work is? Are there some descriptions that count more than others in d
mining what an artwork is? What are they? Does our response have
role in determining what an artwork is? How do we go about dec
what the work is? So begins the puzzle of John Cage's 4'33 ".
Is 4'33" music? Has Cage intended for us to listen to a piece of music
is composed of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence? Is th
listening experience? Can we say that we have had a musical experien
What features can we describe that account for this piece of art as a m
experience? These questions form the basis for our inquiry into unde
standing the nature, meaning, and value of musical experience.

What Is Music? What Is a Musical Experience?

A Langerian Account
Susanne Langer describes music as an experience that is analogous to
life of feeling. In Philosophy in a New Key, Langer argues that the arts
genuinely symbolic and must be understood as conceptualizations and
ticulations of the forms of human feeling.1 Her argument is based on t
axioms: (a) music makes perceptible in form what we experience in hum
feeling; (b) music's meaning or import is nondiscursive and presentatio
and (c) music is a symbol, but its characteristic function is not self-exp
sion but logical expression.

Mark Robin Campbell received his Ed.D. in Music Education from the University of
linois, Urbana-Champaign. He has previously published in the Bulletin of the Co
for Research in Music Education.

Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 26, No. 1, Spring 1992

?1992 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

This content downloaded from 130.70.8.131 on Sun, 22 Sep 2019 05:39:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
84 Mark Robin Campbell

As an expressive form, music exists as a resemblance of the nature of

feeling. Feeling, as Langer uses the word, is much more comprehensive in
concept than emotion and includes the entire range of our conscious
awareness as living, breathing, vital organisms. Music does not symbolize
an individual feeling but accounts for an awareness of how feelings "go."
This unique power allows us to extend our subjective life beyond ourselves
into the creation and experience of artistic products. It is through perceiving
and imagining the whole and its exhibition of the relationships between
parts or points or qualities or aspects that we take its elemental form as
representing analogous relations. So by analogy, we perceive sentience.
Langer's argument about feeling in music is often summed up as: "Music
moves as feelings move." What music "means" for Langer is what she calls
a "presented conception of what life feels like."2 In other words, the import
of music lies in the function of its content and is not referential in context.

Since feelings cannot be articulated in a meaningful way through lan-

guage due to its "closed," denotative, or agreed-upon conception, we must
look for another mode of expressing feelings. Music, by virtue of being a
presentational form of symbolism, is such a mode. The "open," connotative
dynamism of music has the capacity to articulate or tell us all about the very
nature and pattern of feelings.3 From Langer we may glean eight features
toward a description of the nature and experience of music.
Features of Music and the Musical Experience. The experience of music is a
tonal analogue of emotive life. This is the central thesis of Langer's argu-
ment. In Feeling and Form she argues:

The tonal structures we call "music" bear a close logical similarity to

the forms of human feeling-forms of growth and attenuation, flow-
ing and stowing, conflict and resolution, speed, arrest, terrific excite-
ment, calm, or subtle activation and dreamy lapses-not joy and sor-
row perhaps, but the poignancy of either and both-the greatness
and brevity and eternal passage of everything vitally felt. Such is the
pattern, or logical form, or sentience; and the pattern of music is that
same form worked out in pure, measured sound and silence. Music is
a tonal analogue of emotive life.4

No particular feeling or emotion can be assigned as the content of a piece

of music. Music is all expression and articulateness. As a symbol, music's
role is to formulate the life of feeling for objective perception and under-
standing. Due to the difficulty of presenting our subjective life in a discur-
sive manner, music nondiscursively provides a more precise way of articu-
lating feelings. Its superiority over language in articulating the life of feeling
is where music's power lies; for music's significance has the uncertainty of
content that words cannot have. Music is a logical expression and not self-
expression.
The experience of music makes audible the time and sense of its form
and continuity. In Feeling and Form, Langer says that whenever tonal

This content downloaded from 130.70.8.131 on Sun, 22 Sep 2019 05:39:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Aesthetic Theory and Music 85

elements in music form an impression, an illusion is created; that illusion is

called "virtual time."5 Virtual time is lived time: the underlying principle is
passage or a sense of transcience. By means of movement, music presents to
us an apparition or time that seems to be "felt." "The primary illusion of
music is the sonorous image of passage, abstracted from actuality to be-
come free and plastic and entirely perceptible."6 The secondary illusion
music creates is space. Spatialization in music is created and perceived in
harmony and sonority. As in the plastic arts, "virtual space" creates an illu-
sion of depth, whether that depth be restricted or expanded. Space, how-
ever, always remains the handmaid to time. The experience of music makes
time audible and its form sensible.

Music is experiential; it grows from first idea to complete presentation.

Music is an art that grows from its inception, its first imagination, to com-
plete presentation through actual performance. Langer proposes that a mu-
sical work is stagelike in its growth from conception to birth. At first, the
idea exists in the composer's mind; conception is self-generated. The idea
that begins to take shape in the composer's mind Langer calls commanding
form. This "second stage" (the growth of the idea) allows ideas to arise from
a variety of places, often coming from a juxtaposition of themes, harmonies,
or rhythms. Commanding form is the Gestalt. It is the guiding force the art-
ist has for developing a composition's expressive qualities and the criteria
for accepting or rejecting new material in the creative process. "Under the
influence of the total 'Idea,' the musician composes every part of his piece.
The idea as it occurs to him already suggests his own way of composing;
and in that process lies the individuation of the piece."7 One might ask,
then, is the musical work of art complete once the composer himself has
heard it within his inner ear? Langer suggests not: "The composer's piece is
an incompleted work, but it is a perfectly definite piece carried to a per-
fectly definite stage."8 It is through an actual performance that the work is
made complete.
The musical experience is complete only upon performance and de-
pends upon the performer to produce the image of the expressive form. As
the final act in the musical experience, performance functions as the carrier
of musical ideas, from thought to physical manifestation. In ideal perfor-
mance, the performer expresses him- or herself on the deepest possible
level. Expression is feeling, feeling that is real or bound up in something
symbolized by the music. When the performer has marshalled the image of
the expressive form of a piece of music, he or she has championed its feel-
ing over the vital content of the work. The power of musical performance
lies in the concentration of personal feeling in service to the import of mu-
sic. Feeling becomes the driving force-the aesthetic motion behind the
performer's work.
To what extent is the performer involved in the experience of music? The

This content downloaded from 130.70.8.131 on Sun, 22 Sep 2019 05:39:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
86 Mark Robin Campbell

role of the performer in the musical experience is a creative act, just as cre-
ative as composition. Performers need to be able to imagine in their mind
what their muscles feel like as they produce the music heard in their inner
ear. Without this "kinetic hearing" or "muscular imagination," a performer
will not perform or will perform badly. Performers need to relate their
muscular imagination to their "sonorous" or "conceptual" imagination.
This type of inner hearing is a conception of the kind and quality of tone the
commanding form of the piece requires.
Listening is the primary activity of the musical experience. Listening
takes precedence in the musical experience. Yet, Langer makes a distinction
between two kinds of listening or hearing: the physical or actual and the in-
ner or mental. Physical hearing is dependent upon an actual sound stimulus
and our mind's actual sense perception of sound. Intelligent listening re-
quires focused attention on the immediacy of the experience. Careless lis-
tening is a result of superficial attention to the sound being received. A
careless listener is given to mental distraction which, to a greater or lesser
degree, causes him or her to miss the elements of the musical experience.
Inward hearing is the mind at work, beginning with conceptions of form
and ending with a complete presentation only in an imagined sense experi-
ence. During silent music reading, for example, listeners (or readers) rarely
"hear" a written note as an absolute pitch. Dynamic levels are perceived as
points of greater or lesser contrast within the work. The real length of tones
is not always "heard," though it is somehow understood. Since listening is
the primary activity of musical experiences, Langer is careful to stress that
the first premise of listening is not conceptual but sonorous. Hearing music,
then, "is not, as many people assume, the ability to distinguish the separate
elements in a composition and recognize its devices, but to experience the
primary illusion, to feel the consistent movement and recognize at once the
commanding form which makes [the] piece an inviolable whole."9 While
conceptualization, analysis, and evaluation are integral to understanding a
musical composition, these activities should be preceded and followed by
the experience of the total work as an expressive form, the pedagogical im-
port being "synthesis-analysis-synthesis."
The fundamental response in the musical experience is the reaction to
"felt time." Langer asks us to consider that aesthetic responsiveness to mu-
sic is a reaction to the primary illusion, virtual time. For the percipient, this
involves recognizing the distinction between musical elements and musical
materials. "That [responsiveness] is primarily a natural gift, related to cre-
ative talent, yet .., .where it exists in any measure it may be heightened by
experience or reduced by adverse agencies."10 Works of art should be
judged solely on their degree of expressiveness. The artistically good is
whatever articulates and presents feelings to our understanding. It remains
the percipient's responsibility to intuit and appreciate the aesthetic qualities

This content downloaded from 130.70.8.131 on Sun, 22 Sep 2019 05:39:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Aesthetic Theory and Music 87

of a work. The impact of the initial experience is primary, but closer scru-
tiny allows for judgment based on the virtual results, the artist's success or
failure. "The critic must see the commanding form of the ... work, because
that is the measure of right and wrong."11

A Beardsleyan Account
Monroe C. Beardsley offers an approach to understanding music and the
musical experience that is based upon the description, interpretation, criti-
cal analysis, and evaluation of what he believed to be basic to art and to the
experience an aesthetic object offers. For Beardsley, the question What does
it mean to understand music? must be couched in reasons that are purely
objective. Objective reasons must refer to the aesthetic object itself and to
the unique qualities, characteristics, and relationships that give it shape and
substance. The critical question is: What "out there" exists in the aesthetic
object's configuration of qualities and relations that accounts for the aes-
thetic nature of the object and provides impetus for study? It is this ques-
tion that forms the central tenets of Beardsley's argument in Aesthetics:
Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism.12
The purpose behind Beardsley's inquiry in Aesthetics was to discover the
"parts" and then examine how the parts contribute to a particular "whole."

Any part of a sensory field is then itself a complex if further parts can
be discriminated within it. An absolutely homogeneous part of the
field is partless, and such a partless part may be called an element of
the field. Analysis stops with the elements. You can distinguish the
light and dark part in the surface of the moon, but, if within a dark
patch you can find no difference, then that part is elementary.
Such an elementary part must have some qualities, otherwise we
could not perceive it: its darkness, its shape.13

When elements are combined to form complexes, these combinations or

complexes take on new qualities that no longer possess the qualities of the
parts. These new, "regional" qualities allow us to perceive all of the sensory
information the artwork is giving us as an aesthetic object. Since regional
qualities depend upon the highly unique nature of relations between and
among the elements within complexes, specific qualities are not "name-
able" except through example of and experience with artworks.
Regional qualities are more or less categorized as (a) extensive, meaning
they may extend over a large or small portion of the sensuous elements;
(b) intensive, meaning they seem to be influential, or that some qualities are
exemplified in the relations between the parts; and (c) persistent in time,
meaning they may characterize a single relationship or a series of events.
Beardsley has provided us with a model for analyzing the artwork as an
aesthetic object. Statements about content may describe the qualities of ele-
ments and their subsumptions as regional qualities in complexes. State-
ments about form may describe the internal relations among the elements

This content downloaded from 130.70.8.131 on Sun, 22 Sep 2019 05:39:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
88 Mark Robin Campbell

and complexes. Form and content are distinguished, but never separate.
Both elements (content) and their relations (form) are a fusion; they are a
complete qualitative complex. If reordered in any way, original regional
qualities would no longer be the same or would no longer be present. Like
Langer, Beardsley offers several features toward a description of the nature
and experience of music.
Features of Music and the Musical Experience. Auditory movement is the
essential quality of music. Objectively, sounds seem to point to other
sounds. Subjectively, sounds seem to arouse expectations of further musical
developments. Music moves through time and space, in real time and in
subjective time. An essential quality of music is auditory movement.
A musical composition is a complex event and is perceived as such. Ba-
sic to all musical sounds are the qualities of duration, intensity, timbre, and
tone. Within the musical quality of duration is found space, space in the
sense of time or amount of length-shortness and longness and the varying
degrees of both. Within the quality of intensity is found energy-strength
and weakness, both in magnitude and power. Within the quality of timbre
is found color. Tone is musical sound-pitch.
Melody, in its purest form and highest degree, is musical movement.
The fusing together of a series of tones into a single line of movement that
possesses qualities of direction and wholeness and that retains identity and
distinction is a melody. Musical movement is melody. The characteristics
that qualify tones in movement as melody qualify as fundamental elements
of rhythm, tonality, and harmony.
Musical compositions must have texture, but they may have structure.
Texture refers to all changes in music and their relations with nearby parts.
In this context, rise and fall of melody and variations in rhythm and tempo
are examples of texture. Structure is dividing or stopping places in the mu-
sic. Structure is musical pauses, moments of arrest or termination.
Kinetic pattern is the most fundamental aspect of musical form. If music
sounds promissory of something important approaching, it may have an
"introduction quality." If music gives a sense of approaching finality, it
may have a "conclusion quality." If a musical event is happening "right
now," it has an "exhibition quality." If music introduces a sense of tempo-
rary uncertainty or inconclusiveness, or seems to be in transience from one
exhibition to another, it has a "transition quality." It is these patterns of
variation in intensity of movement that give music a propulsive or kinetic
quality.
As a field of awareness, both the composition and the experience may be
perceived, characterized, and evaluated subjectively and objectively by
three criteria: unity, complexity, and intensity. If a musical composition can
truly provide a musical experience, it should be evaluated according to its
degree of unity or disunity, complexity or simplicity, and intensity or lack

This content downloaded from 130.70.8.131 on Sun, 22 Sep 2019 05:39:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Aesthetic Theory and Music 89

of intensity. Unity is a quality of well-orderedness. Aesthetic objects are

evaluated in terms of completeness and coherence within and across com-
positions. Complexity is a quality of number and the differences found
among and between parts. Intensity is a quality of the degree of perceived
kinetic presence.
Music is process; it signifies nothing, nor functions symbolically. Music
is not capable of pointing to anything beyond itself. Specific events, emo-
tions, feelings, images, or psychological states cannot stake a claim to what
music is. Music cannot function as a sign or a symbol, or any other type of
referent. In "Understanding Music," Beardsley does, however, make the
distinction between discussing musical qualities and interpreting music as
a signifier for something that it resembles or as a referent to anything else.14
Metaphors, when used judiciously, can instruct and help us to understand
the regional qualities, since there is no language for describing their exist-
ence in artworks.

Is 4'33" Music? Is It a Musical Experience?

The questions that have formed the basis for our inquiry into understand-
ing the nature, meaning, and value of musical experience have been prima-
rily focused on two concerns: (a) descriptors of elements that define a work
of art, and (b) qualities and features that constitute an artwork and aesthetic
experience. These two concerns may now be applied to understanding the
musical puzzle of John Cage's 4 '33 ". As we already asked, is 4 '33 " music?
Does it provide a musical experience? What features can we point to that
will account for this piece as a musical experience?
Neither Langer's notion of what a musical object is nor Beardsley's
analysis of what he believes to be basic to art and the aesthetic object ac-
counts much for the music or musical experience of 4'33 ". In 4'33 " Cage
presents us with an "empty" art form and asks us to experience its empti-
ness. With a pianist sitting at a keyboard doing nothing for four minutes
and thirty-three seconds, we can hardly say that we are experiencing the
tonal analogue of emotive life, or the logic of expression in musical form, or
a sense of sonorous transience with the plasticity of space, or growth, or
"listening"-in any real or imagined sense. Nor can we say that 4 '33 " is, in
the normative way, a complex event; nor does it seem to possess auditory
movement, nor elements that characterize constituency within wholeness,
nor kinesis, nor much process (if any). If we were to "just listen," as Cage
suggests, what would there be to hear?15 We could argue that there is the
experience of "listening" to the audience or the experience of "hearing" si-
lence, maybe. But while a performer is seated at a musical instrument in the
guise of performing silence, "attendant" background sounds seem to lack
the necessary and sufficient conditions for musical experience.

This content downloaded from 130.70.8.131 on Sun, 22 Sep 2019 05:39:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
90 Mark Robin Campbell

In guiding us to the qualities it possesses, 4 '33 " cannot be called a work

of art, because in it we look and listen for qualitative content that creates
tonal illusions of tension and release in time and perceptible elements that
offer dimensional structure, auditory movement, space, or felt time. Where
are these qualities? We find no relationships within this piece. There is no
object to which we are directed.
Why would we be interested in a piece that requires little undertaking?
What type of experience can it offer? For the listener, 4'33" is emotionally
and intellectually disengaging. What in the work is being "bracketed" for
experience? Silence? If so, the silence is distancing, not for deeper confron-
tation or disinterested inquiry, but because of the absence of articulate
growth. We are waiting for the performer to do something-to complete
the musical creation-but nothing happens. We have little opportunity for
exercising our powers of perception, discrimination, characterization, con-
ception, organization, reflection, or contemplation. We wait in all too con-
scious silence. We are confused, because the experience and the object are
deficient.

Our mind struggles to make sense of 4 '33 ". Is it music? Is it a musical ex-
perience? To answer our two questions, let us sum what the work is and its
experience. There seems to be no clear organization of the expressive im-
port of music, nor any significant form, or logical construction. There is a
lack of wholeness, completeness, unity. There seems to be no development,
no unfolding, no variety, no use of the sonorous or the formal elements of
music, no articulate movement. There is a lack of complexity. There is no
content. There seems to be no commanding form, no process. If silence, by
itself, is presented as art to be contemplated and experienced as a musical
object and as musical experience, what function does it serve in helping us
understand or derive meaning or sentience? 4 '33 " has no aesthetic function,
for in it there is no vitality. In it there is no sense of the life of feeling, no
musical qualities that we can point to and note their resemblance to quali-
ties of human beings, their states of mind, or their activities. If 4'33 " has any
function, it is to make us think about what music is, and when we think
about 4'33 ", it alerts us to the nonmusical. In the final analysis, 4'33" fails to
be, in any aesthetic sense, an articulation of human experience as we have
tried to understand the nature, meaning, and value of music in this article.
4'33 " may be a musical notion, but it is not music, nor does it offer a musi-
cal experience.

NOTES

1. Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Unive

sity Press, 1979).
2. Ibid., p. 247.

This content downloaded from 130.70.8.131 on Sun, 22 Sep 2019 05:39:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Aesthetic Theory and Music 91
3. Ibid., p. 243.
4. Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Scribner's, 1953), p. 27.
5. Ibid., p. 109.
6. Ibid., p. 113.
7. Ibid., p. 123.
8. Ibid., p. 138.
9. Ibid., p. 147.
10. Ibid., p. 396.
11. Ibid., p. 407.
12. Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (New
York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1958).
13. Ibid., p. 83.
14. Monroe C. Beardsley, "Understanding Music," in On Criticizing Music: Five
Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Kingsley Price (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Press, 1981).
15. John Cage, "Cagean Aesthetics," in Esthetics Contemporary, ed. Richard
Kostelanetz (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1989).

This content downloaded from 130.70.8.131 on Sun, 22 Sep 2019 05:39:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms