where the content and subject
35
matter are solely painting, with no extraneous pictori-
al elements. Rauschenberg, however, had a different
way of thinking about it. “A canvas is never empty,”
he said. Cage took Rauschenberg’s words to heart.
Cage remarked that Rauschenberg’s all-white paint-
ings were “airports for light, shadows, and particles.”
Cage’s second insight came when he visited an
anechoic chamber at Harvard University. An anechoic
chamber is a room designed to maximally absorb
sound and attenuate echoes. Once inside the chamber
Cage thought he would find absolute silence. Instead
he heard two persistent sounds. One was high pitched,
the other low. He asked the attending acoustical
engineer what they were. According to Cage, the
engineer explained that the high tone was his nervous
system and the low tone was the blood circulating
through his veins and arteries. (Scientifically speaking,
humans cannot directly hear the sound of their nervous
systems, no matter how quiet the environment. The
nervous-system sound Cage thought he heard was
36
probably tinnitus, the hissing-like noise sometimes
referred to as a “ringing in the ears.” It is a fairly common
condition that can be brought on by exposure to exces-
sively loud noise. Cage’s tinnitus may have always been
in the background of his awareness, but the relative
silence of the chamber brought it to the fore.)
Both episodes led Cage to understand that even if one
tried to remove all sources of sensory stimulation—in
his case sound—an unextinguishable amount of
perceptible sensory content would exist nonetheless.
The human mind, it seems, tends to seek differentia-
tion even in ostensible sameness. Thus reassured,
Cage set to work on an art piece that employed (and
was about) the absence of intentional sound. He titled
it “4' 33".”
The first performance of “4' 33"” occurred on a warm,
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