![]() And through this form of pedagogy, he was suggesting that music in its own right was merely practice at being present. When Cage took students out on mushroom-finding field trips, he wasn’t really teaching biology or music so much as a way of living that he himself had learned through mycology and composition as well as his study of Zen. ![]() And musical appreciation is ultimately a sort of mushrooming, in which listeners become their own center through their attention to each sensation. 4’33” is an opportunity for crying babies, fire engines, telephone bells, coughs, and any other chance occurrences, to be appreciated musically. It’s inspired scholarly books and popular diatribes, yet the mushrooms may explain it better than any text or writer. First performed in 1952, 4’33 is his key oeuvre. In order to do this, they have to ignore all the crying babies, fire engines, telephone bells, coughs, that happen to occur during their auditions.”Īlthough Cage composed a vast catalogue of music during his extraordinary six-decade career, he became famous and still remains best known for a four minute and thirty-three second stretch of silence. “Music for them has nothing to do with their powers of audition, but only to do with their powers of observing relationships. “But most musicians can’t hear a single sound, they listen only to the relationship between two or more sounds,” he continued. “It isn’t useful, music isn’t, unless it develops our powers of audition,” he wrote in Silence, a book of essays published in 1961. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library William GedneyĪnd it was from the idea that each mushroom must be taken on its own terms, through direct observation, that Cage connected mushroom foraging most directly to music.
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