Sweeter Life

I
magine the scene in Woodstock, New York, on August 29, 1952. John Cage, that most puzzling of American composers, has come to the Maverick Concert Hall for the first public performance of what will become his most famous, and infamous, work. He is forty years old, with angular features and dark hair and a dazzle of laughter in his eyes. He is pretty much unknown outside a small circle of intellectuals, and, even among that select group, some question the value of his work. His
Music of Changes
, for example, based on the random toss of coins, created more confusion than pleasure when it debuted the previous year.

But picture him there at the Maverick in a dark checked suit, with a white shirt open at the collar. He stands serenely backstage, tapping neither his fingers nor his foot as the crowd files into the hall.

They have come on this overcast summer evening to support the Benefit Artists Welfare Fund and are prepared for an evening of challenging music. The performances will vary, with works by Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and Pierre Boulez. Cage’s newest composition,
4′33″
, will be the second-last selection on the evening’s program, followed only by
The Banshee
, written by Henry Cowell. The young pianist David Tudor is the featured performer.

Cage is pleased with the choice of venue. The back of the hall opens on the surrounding forest, and he can feel the humidity of the summer night and hear the occasional breeze sweep through the trees outside. He is so excited by the possibilities that, when the concert begins, he pays little attention. Instead he thinks about sources and directions, where his music has come from and where it is likely to go. He knows he will be asked how he came to write a piece such as
4′33″
, and he wonders how better to explain that time, not pitch, lies at the heart of music, seeping into our consciousness with every pulse of our mothers’ blood, and that time, the sad half of Einstein’s universe, is what we are born to sing.

When Tudor walks onstage, he is holding Cage’s handwritten score and a small stopwatch. He sits behind the grand piano and arranges his music. Grave and graceful, he lowers the fallboard, the double-hinged cover that protects the keys, then clicks the small button of his timepiece. He sits motionless. He makes no sound. After exactly thirty seconds, he clicks the stopwatch and raises the fallboard to reveal once again the eighty-eight keys. He fills his lungs with air. He takes a moment to compose himself.

The second movement begins in the same way, with the lowering of the keyboard cover. This middle movement is much longer and requires Tudor to turn the pages of the score. He pays no attention to the growing uneasiness of the crowd. Again he makes no sound.

A third movement and still he sits, silent as a mime, dark with concentration. The nervous muttering in the hall grows to a howl of outrage by the end of the piece and Tudor’s departure from the stage after exactly four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. And remember, the audience is comprised of people who cherish the arts, who relish the cutting edge. Even so, they believe, almost without exception, that Cage has gone too far.

The creator hears something quite different that day. Instead of silence, Cage notices the sound of wind in the trees, the complicated rhythms of rain on the roof, the audience chattering like small birds. And he is pleased. It is the embodiment of an idea that came to him a year before.

On a whim, he had dropped by a Harvard lab, their anechoic chamber—what others referred to as “the dead room.” It was, he’d been told, a scientific marvel, a chamber of utter stillness. In that muffled womb of sculpted foam
and baffles, he hoped to experience a silence both perfect and profound. Instead he heard two distinct sounds that day, one high and one low: the thrumming of his nervous system and blood, he was later told, a lesson that would change his music entirely and lead him to
4′33″
.

Because life knows nothing of silence. Between nerves and blood a song will emerge. Between mind and heart a life will flow. Between words and music a story will unfold.

S
eagulls huddled in a field, querulous and surreal in the misty morning light. As a tractor approached, they rose into the air in waves, a reluctant cloud of grey and white flecked here and there with yellow beak and black stripe. When they settled moments later on the freshly tilled soil, they knew immediately that something important had passed among them, that the earth beneath their feet had been altered, made new again.

The wind gathered strength off the lake, scattering the last tatters of fog and dancing the branches of the willow where red-winged blackbirds sang of springtime and distant travel. Beneath the tree, near the edge of the irrigation pond, Cyrus Owen sat with his Labrador retriever, Blackie, and waited for the sun to clear the top of the corncrib by the barn. That would be the signal to head back to the house.

Cyrus, a nineteen-year-old farm boy, was lean and muscular from his share of chores. His shoulder-length blond hair danced in every gust of wind, his eyes never straying from the tractor as it crossed the field. There was an edginess about him, a youthful intensity that some might call a sense of purpose.

To watch him as he sat there—really, to see him anywhere, at school, at home—you would never notice that he was born without a ring finger on his left hand. It was not a big deal for him anymore. He had long ago worked
out most of his difficulties, both physical and emotional, and seldom gave it a thought. Even so, as a matter of habit, he tended to stand with his left hand in his pocket, or to sit with his fist stuck between his legs. It wasn’t a conscious thing on his part, but a residual pose from a more insecure time in his life.

He sat that way now, on a tree stump, his left hand nestled in his lap. He had come to the old place looking for inspiration, a word on the breeze, say, a pattern in the clouds. But there was nothing, or perhaps too much to make sense of. The house had pretty much gone to hell, rented to a meaty-looking biker with a thunderous Harley and a gaunt, freckled girlfriend. The barn was unpainted, showing great gaps in its weathered sides. The coop had burned down years ago. And there was the pain, same as ever, that it wasn’t his father but Benny Driscoll working those fields, using that tractor.

Cyrus scratched the dog behind the ear and Blackie leaned his head back, nose pointed to the sky, his tongue lolling. The dog had fetched without fail, marked innumerable trees and fence posts, and sat now with the one who didn’t kick him, the one who didn’t smack his nose with a rolled newspaper, the one who talked to him and played with him and lifted the edge of the covers at night to let him crawl into bed. Cyrus wished he could be as content as Blackie to sit and let the world roll by. How easy it would be to have no special feeling for the future or the past, to take things as they were and never expect more.

He reached down with his right hand and picked up a large stone, one that covered his entire palm. He squeezed it rhythmically, an exercise he had read about in a magazine (as though it was physical strength he needed just now and not courage). His problem, what had him huddled out here before sunrise, was that he couldn’t decide what he wanted to do with his life; or rather, he had decided but didn’t know if he had the nerve. He had tallied lists of pros and cons, worked out rough calculations, expenses, elaborate economies of favour and obligation that might see him through a rough spot now and again—but he still hadn’t made the leap.

As the tractor reached the far end of the flat, black field and made a wide turn back toward the seagulls, Cyrus got to his feet and, with a grunt of frustration, heaved the rock, watching it smack the muddy bank and then roll below the duckweed and out of sight. Right on cue, Blackie struggled up and
padded toward the pond. There, leaning carefully over the bank, the dog lowered its head beneath the surface of the water. Ten, twenty, thirty seconds passed, until the dog began to tremble with the strain, a quiver that gradually became more pronounced and centred itself near the neck and shoulder area.

“Black,” he called to the dog, “cut it out now. That’s enough, Black.”

And when the old Lab lifted its head from the water and backed slowly away from the pond, Cyrus laughed, a single quack. The dog, shuddering like an Olympic weightlifter, had its jaws clamped around the stone, which it carried over and dropped with a thud at Cyrus’s feet.

The boy winced at the thought of his own teeth grinding on stone, and said, “You are one stupid dog.” Then he pulled up the collar of his faded denim jacket, scant defence against the chill wind, and he and the dog walked slowly across the fields, climbing all the way up to a small orchard on the ridge. From that vantage he turned once again and looked down at the scattering of poor farms along the Marsh Road, with the lake waiting on one side, and on the other the deeper reaches of the marsh itself. Finally, his hands jammed into the pockets of his jeans, he followed the dog along the lane to the large brick farmhouse that was now their home.