John McWhorter Has Nothing to Say (And He’s Saying It)

“Everybody’s so angry right now that nobody can listen or talk to anybody else,” Salman Rushdie said earlier this week in an interview with Jon Stewart. “And what’s more, we also believe that being offended is a sufficient reason for attacking something.… And if you go down that road, then we can’t talk to each other anymore.” All of this sounds like an understatement coming from Rushdie, who had gone on “The Daily Show” to promote his new memoir, Knife, detailing his near-fatal stabbing in Chautauqua, New York, an attack—which cost him his right eye and severely damaged his left hand—allegedly motivated by Shia extremism.

I was reminded of Rushdie’s words a day later while reading John McWhorter’s latest opinion piece for the New York Times. McWhorter opens with an anecdote about attempting to teach John Cage’s “4’33”” to his music humanities students at Columbia amid the campus’s growing protest movement in solidarity with Gaza. “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,” he writes, adding that he had both Israeli and American-Jewish students, whom he especially didn’t want to force to “sit and listen to this as if it were background music.”

This isn’t the first bad take McWhorter has had on music in recent years. A 2022 article attempts to free “recent classical music” from what he sees as the burdensome fate of being ugly. Nevermind that the works he cites as “recent” are all nearly a century old. Nevermind that even the staunchest of serialists wrote some objectively beautiful music. Yet it seems easier to forgive McWhorter for misreading an entire era of music than it is for one work—the difference between missing the forest for the trees and missing the trees for the air. (If he has issues with student protests factoring into his experience of “4’33”,” I’d suggest he try listening to the work with this as an aural backdrop.)

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It doesn’t take much work to dispute the idea that Cage intended for “4’33”” to only be underscored by birds or people walking by in the hallway—either pleasant or at worst banal sonic interferences. That certainly wasn’t the effect of the work’s 1952 premiere in Woodstock, New York. For Cage, that audience was an essential aspect of the work’s soundscape, making “all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.” In his book What Will I Be: American Music and Cold War Identity, musicologist Philip Gentry argues that the human element of “4’33””’s world is the key constant to the work’s substance; the piece offers “the chance of intense presence with others.” 

Initial audiences were offended by this offering. The irate post-concert talkback after its premiere led to one audience member famously shouting: “Good people of Woodstock, let’s drive these people out of town!” At a Manhattan performance of the work two years later, a New York Times critic wrote that the work had “nothing in common with the disciplined art of Palestrina, Handel, Mozart, and the obvious B’s.” Rather, it was an example of “hollow, sham, pretentious Greenwich Village exhibitionism.” It’s frankly remarkable that, in a 1957 review of other works by Cage and some of his contemporaries, Times critic Edward Downes picked up on the dramatic tension of the silences that factored into the works presented. 

That tension, Gentry argues, was part and parcel of the climate in post-War, McCarthy-era America. Cage wasn’t immune to this climate. He would have witnessed the chilling effects of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the late 1930s when it grilled Federal Theatre Project head Hallie Flanagan over suspected communist activity within the project. (Cage himself was an employee of the Works Progress Administration, which sponsored the FTP.) Moreover, Gentry notes that “McCarthyism was not merely concerned with the threat of communism.” Male homosexuality was a particularly heated topic for HUAC. Just eight months after the premiere of “4’33”,” President Eisenhower issued Executive Order 1050, which effectively barred gays and lesbians from working for the federal government by banning “sexual perversion” among federal employees. Depending on how Cage viewed his own shifting sexuality in that era, Gentry writes, his work with silence could be read as “not simply passivity and neutrality in dangerous times,” but also as “a calculated act that complicated the very means by which we hear music.”

Even if Cage was basically apolitical (as Gentry puts it), he didn’t hold a willful disregard for the realities of his time. In one interview from 1970, he reveals his anarchistic streak by arguing for music as “a social situation.… an instance of a society that functions without government.” As Kyle Gann traces in his own book on “4’33”,” No Such Thing as Silence, Cage often linked politics with silence. In his 1959 “Lecture on Nothing,” he describes turning towards “quiet sounds” as a response to the onset of World War II, with the explanation: “There seemed to be no truth, no good, in anything big in society.” At 15, Cage won a regional oratorical contest with an address on Pan-American relations titled “Other People Think,” wherein he declared: 

One of the greatest blessings that the United States could receive in the near future would be to have her industries halted, her business discontinued, her people speechless, a great pause in her world of affairs created.… We should be hushed and silent, and we should have the opportunity to learn what other people think. 

Reading these words in the context of Cage’s later writings on nature and silence, I’m reminded of the Palestinian poet Marwan Makhoul (whose words have been omnipresent on social media over the last several months): “​​In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political, I must listen to the birds, and in order to hear the birds, the warplanes must be silent.” What Makhoul doesn’t do here is ignore the sounds of the warplanes wholecloth. Instead, they make their way into his work as a simple fact of the poet’s sonic landscape. 

This is the fundamental listening experience Cage is arguing for: “4’33”” isn’t about listening to the ambient or the banal as “background music.” It’s not even about listening to silence (an impossibility by Cage’s own admission). It’s about listening to what we’re ignoring—it’s about avoiding the road that Rushdie says will lead to a conversational impasse (a road that McWhorter seems content to take). “Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise,” Cage writes in Silence. “When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, it fascinates us.”

At least in that accidental manner, McWhorter proves Cage’s point. ¶