Living In Your Letters

John Cage replied personally to every letter ever sent to him.
("I fight each day a losing battle against paper," he wrote to Mr. William E. Ratliff.)
UbuWeb catalogues the Memogram Correspondences.

Leave The Audience In Silence Like My Name Was John Cage

It's easy to talk about Cage's 4'33" - but have you ever actually seen a performance all the way through? I THOUGHT NOT. This one is a (rockin' (sort of)) full orchestral version.

In That Easy Silence That You Make For Me

The quietest place in the world? The anechoic chamber of Orfield Labs in Minneapolis. It's a room within a room within a room - a six-sided steel-insulated chamber on springs, surrounded by a five-sided steel-insulated chamber, surrounded by a larger room with 12-inch walls made out of concrete. (And the smallest room is also filled with wedges made out of fiberglass.) So: enter the space, and you hear -9.4 dB. Or rather: you don't hear, because the low threshold of human hearing is around 0 dB.

That's a quiet room - but not without a certain music of its own?

John Cage says:
"Going into the anechoic chamber at Harvard University, I expected to hear no sound at all, because it was a room made as silent as possible. But in that room I heard two sounds. And I was so surprised that I went to the engineer in charge … and said, There’s something wrong, there’re two sounds in that room, and he said describe them, and I did, one was high and one was low, and he said, the high one was my nervous system … and the low one was my blood circulating. So I realized that … I was making music unintentionally continuously.”

Kitchen Song

And here's Mr. Cage mucking about the kitchen, making noises, talking about Yoko Ono and vegetarianism. All in a day's work, my friends.