In Search of a Silent Night

© Sans façon.  By kind permission of Sans façon.

The holiday season is upon us, in case the endless Jingle Bell Rock loop at Starbucks hasn’t given it away.

-Jon Stewart

A few chocolates, a glass of mulled wine and a CD by the The Sixteen playing quietly.  Sublime.

-Friko

Here today we are doing something special, we are stopping and appreciating the space between things, the unintentional sounds that make up our world.

-Dave Hilliard, Cage Against the Machine

Last year, in her post “Do You Hear What I Hear?”, Wide Open Spaces remarked on the auditory invasion of Christmas music at this time of year:

It’s not that I don’t enjoy Christmas music; I do have a nice collection of CDs that I bring up from storage this time of year.  I just don’t understand the need to have it invade all my listening hours.  Last year one radio station started playing Christmas music on November 1st –in effect, they devoted 17% of their annual product to these tunes. (And need I mention that these tunes are associated with a religious holiday that not all people celebrate?)

As she noted, while there is some decent holiday music out there, “not everything is listenable.  For every Bing Crosby or “O Holy Night”, there is Alvin and the Chipmunks or “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas.”  Blech.”

Blech is right.  Friko, in her marvelous Advent series, lamented this phenomenon as well:

Don't you all hate supermarkets at this time of year?  . . . All I wanted were some food bags and clingfilm for leftovers.  And while I was stomping through the aisles, backwards and forwards, I was forced to listen to an endless loop of Christmas jingles, a tinny, badly arranged, flat, featureless cacophony of sound.

On The Daily Show, in a hilarious Mark Your Calendar segment, Samantha Bee tried to remind us that there's more to December than Christmas and its music.  In the end, though, she gave up:

But really, let’s face it.  All other days bow down to the 25th, Christmas.  It’s the only religious holiday that’s also a federal holiday.  That way, Christians can go to their services, and everyone else can stay home and reflect on the true meaning of separation of church and state.

At times like this, we might long for John Cage’s Silent Prayer, “a piece of uninterrupted silence” that he intended to sell to Muzak as “an attempt to break through the din of mid-century American culture . . .  and to present the beauty that comes out of stillness.”

While Cage didn’t complete Silent Prayer, we do have 4’33", and this year, a campaign called Cage Against the Machine sought to take 4'33" to the top of the UK Christmas charts, with all proceeds going to charity.  (While 4'33" didn't top the charts, it did take 21st place, a remarkable achievement.)

As reported in the Guardian on December 13:

Last Monday, a group of musicians gathered in the intimate surroundings of Soho's Dean Street studio to record a charity single that they hope will compete against X Factor winner Matt Cardle for Christmas No 1. . . . The silent musicians, including the Kooks, Orbital, Enter Shikari, Dan Le Sac, Scroobius Pip, Suggs from Madness, and (by phone) Billy Bragg and Imogen Heap, were recording a cover of John Cage's 4'33", which features four minutes and 33 seconds of an orchestra not playing anything.

At the opening of the session, Julie Hilliard, one of the organizers of Cage Against the Machine, read:

Here today we are doing something special, we are stopping and appreciating the space between things, the unintentional sounds that make up our world.  I now invite you to honor John Cage’s legacy for our culture, bring your individual meanings to 4’33”, and enjoy the next 4 minutes and 33 seconds together.

Watching the rockers sway in silence as they held their instruments was unexpectedly sweet.  I had to agree with Ben McIldowie (Mr. Hudson), one of the performers, when he said, “There is already enough noise out there.  This is giving people a little time to think.”

To think, yes, and perhaps just to be.  My own thoughts turned to a project by British artist Tristan Surtees and French architect Charles Blanc, who work together under the name Sans façon.  John Metcalf worked with Sans façon to create Odd Sympathies, the sonic walk in Cardiff for which Cage’s 4’33” had been the inspiration.

One of Sans façon’s current projects is called Limelight:  Saturday night.  "In 2010 in six cities across the UK and America, a selection of sidewalks has been turned into impromptu stages by turning streetlights into theatre spotlights."  The image at the head of this post is one result.

As I looked at the Sans façon photograph, I listened to CATM’s recording of 4’33” and wondered what sounds surrounded this graceful young man.  The car passing, the hum of a streetlight, his own breathing, his footfalls as he moved?

I felt somehow refreshed, perhaps as Friko felt on settling in at home after that annoying trip to the supermarket:

How much more civilised it was to sit after dinner and write Christmas cards.  A few chocolates, a glass of mulled wine and a CD by the The Sixteen playing quietly.  Sublime.  My rage melted like snow in the sun.

Or as Wide Open Spaces described last year:

One December many years ago, before satellite radio and 24/7 holiday music stations, the head of my department at work let us leave early one afternoon.  As I made my way home, snowflakes began falling from the skies.  And in a wonderfully serendipitous moment, the radio began to play “White Christmas,” one of my favorite songs.  That happenstance became a wonderful Christmas memory of mine.

Whether your holiday is Christmas, or another, or none at all, we here at Raining Acorns wish for you the sounds—and the silences—that bring you joy.

© Sans façon.  By kind permission of Sans façon.

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The photographs in the post are from Sans façon's Limelight:  Saturday night project.  For more great photographs from this project, click here and scroll down to snapshots.

A Potpourri of Sounds and Silences:

Bing Crosby-Fred Astaire, Happy Holidays Remix: 



Drop by Soho the Dog to hear a rendition of Joy to the World like none you've heard before.

To hear The Sixteen, click here.

For a beautiful meditation on silence, read Clare Kirwan's poem The Silence Museum. 

Cathedral Bells:


And for silence of another sort, here's Cage Against the Machine's 4’33”:



The source for the Cage Silent Night quotation is "What Silence Taught John Cage," by James Pritchett.

An excellent L.A. Times essay on the Cage Against the Machine campaign, including references to some intriguing books about silence, can be found here.  The essay notes that, ironically, "FCC regulations against extended periods of silence would forbid this "American Icon" single to be played on U.S. airwaves."