Sounds

“…what I was doing primarily was ignoring the difference between noises and musical tones and trying to make a larger group that could be called ‘sounds’ and that would include both. Just as the word ‘humanity’ includes rich and poor, so my notion of ‘sounds’ includes not just noises and not just musical tones, but all of them. After hearing a group of sounds, we say the name of the composer, like Ludwig van Beethoven. I would rather remember the sounds. This stems from a Buddhist idea that all beings, whether sentient, like human beings, or non-sentient, like sounds or stones, are the Buddha, so that we are living in an interpretation of centres rather than moving towards one centre…. Sometimes people get the idea, or get the experience, and it changes their way of living. Sometimes they don’t. Years ago in the 1930s, when I was just beginning in Seattle and I had a percussion orchestra and was working just with noises, Nancy Wilson Ross, who is now an authority on oriental Buddhist thought, came to a concert of my percussion music. She had been in hospital and she was supposed to go back to hospital, but she decided not to. She simply went home. Other people have told me that, after hearing a concert in which noises are honoured as well as musical sounds, they listen to the sounds around them with more attention than they did previously. This is also the effect modern painting has on my eyes. So, when I go around the city, I look at the walls and I look at the pavement as though I’m in a museum or in a gallery. In other words, I don’t turn my aesthetic faculties off when I’m outside a museum or gallery.”

John Cage taken from Speaking of Art – Four decades of art in conversation