How To Make The Whole World Sing: “4:33”

We usually think of songwriting as an active process. We sit down, alone or with a partner, kick a few ideas around, play certain passages over and over again, refine them, reshape them, doubt them. We make coffee, play a round of Tetris, have a smoke. Then we go back and refine some more, add a bridge, drop an alternate line into the final chorus. We make a rough demo recording of our efforts, or perhaps record a full-blown master to give to our friend, the one who knows the cousin of Taylor Swift’s yoga teacher. She’s looking for something up-tempo, we’ve heard.

But what we don’t often consider is that songwriting is also a passive process. Every great song begins with a tiny spark of inspiration that none of us can completely explain or account for. The recognition and development of that spark into a good idea is an active process, but the spark itself is not something we can easily control or initiate. It just is. The best thing that we can do is to be ready to catch it when it finally comes.

John Cage’s composition “4:33” has been called everything from a pretentious waste of time to a groundbreaking investigation into the very space from where music originates. The piece calls for the conductor to give a single downbeat with his baton and then wait for the eponymous time period to pass. For the duration of the piece, the musicians do nothing. Yes, nothing. The piece is a study of silence, although its ‘performance’ is never one of total silence. Cage wants us to pay attention to the small, inconsequential noises that happen naturally: an audience member sniffling, the tiny murmurs of butts squirming in seats, the accidental sighs of discomfort from the second chair violist. But the piece’s larger purpose might just be to get an audience to sit quietly in a concert hall. “4:33” is really a group meditation.

I would challenge you to sit through the performance of “4:33” at the link below. Listen to what goes through your head, then let it go and listen some more. It is not easy. We have a natural inclination to want to fill space with something. As songwriters watching all of those gifted musicians sitting there doing nothing, we might begin composing melodies of our own, shaping bits of subconscious detritae into music for them to perform. Or drift into the realm of grocery lists and New Year’s resolutions.

The point of the exercise is not to necessarily produce anything, but just to listen, to listen to what is in our heads that is not yet fully formed. Think of a raging bonfire on a December night, flames shooting three feet into the air, wood crackling, smoke and bits of burnt stuff flying into the sky: This is your brain in the middle of a day of errands, emails, tweets, transactions and phone calls. And now picture a pile of glowing embers in a living room fireplace, seething with red-hot energy, quiet and then… pop. One solitary spark shoots up for a moment against the soot-blackened bricks, and you see it, perfectly clear. This is your brain when you have taken the time to be quiet, aware.

There are a million sparks flying in our heads, hearts, spirits and souls at any given point in the day. But we have to give ourselves the space to see them. As songwriters, it is essential that we find a balance between absorbing fresh stimulae and allowing what we have already experienced to simmer and pop into something that will become our newest take on the world around us, something resembling an original thought. So don’t be afraid of silence. If you listen, it could lead you into more music inside of you than you ever knew existed.

Link for “4:33”