John McWhorter, a New York Times opinion writer who’s also an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, is getting mocked online after he complained on Tuesday that pro-Palestine protests were preventing his students from listening to John Cage’s 4’33”, which consists of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence.
“Last Thursday, in the music humanities class I teach at Columbia University, two students were giving an in-class presentation on the composer John Cage,” McWhorter wrote. “His most famous piece is “4’33”, which directs us to listen in silence to surrounding noise for exactly that period of time.”
“I had to tell the students we could not listen to that piece that afternoon, because the surrounding noise would have been not birds or people walking by in the hallway, but infuriated chanting from protesters outside the building,” McWhorter went on. “Lately that noise has been almost continuous during the day and into the evening, including lusty chanting of ‘From the river to the sea.’ Two students in my class are Israeli; three others to my knowledge are American Jews. I couldn’t see making them sit and listen to this as if it were background music.”
The pushback online by supporters of Palestine was swift: “It really does not get much better than this. Every layer here is tremendous,” one user wrote.
“McWhorter wants the sound of 4’33 to be birds chirping or people chatting, not chanting and police sirens. John Cage got his ass I’m afraid.”
Cage’s piece was an attempt to “attune audiences to the soundtrack of everyday life, to bring them to consider all the sounds around them as music, thus undoing the idea of a hierarchy of sound, opening up the infinite possibilities of ambient sound, and rethinking the very notion of what music is,” according to the Museum of Modern Art. At the piece’s first performance, the “audience waited in anticipation of the performance, but their expectations of a conventional concert were shattered.”
“There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time,” Cage said in a 1957 address to the Music Teachers National Association in Chicago titled ‘Experimental Music.’ “There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.”
“4’33” is the perfect example of how a piece is re-evaluated and recontextualized by the place and time it’s performed in. This happens with all live performances but is the whole point of this particular piece. I’m surprised that McWhorter missed the work’s meaning so completely,” posted @badgerwocky.
“I feel like it has to be a bit, which it isn’t, simply because it would have been impossible for him to get it more wrong,” added @anguilline.
In the column, McWhorter says that the protests would be much less likely to be tolerated if protesters were chanting “D.E.I has got to die,” instead of “from the river to the sea,” and claimed that while “some of the times” the protests have peaceful, “people will differ on how peaceful … [the] sound” of “constant” drumbeats “can ever be.”
“This cannot be real, omg. Imagine thinking that the example people list of ‘common things you might hear around you’ as what you should attend to when listening to 4’33” are, in fact, the only acceptable ambient sounds and are essential to the performance,” posted @Zee_Perry.
“Does he think someone performing 4’33” on the ISS would have to bring a bird into space” they wrote in another post.
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