Cage, Scruton, and the Border of Music

John Cage is one of the most admired—and most misunderstood—figures in 20th-century artistic thought. His most famous work, 4′33″, continues to provoke debate, inspire imitation, and invite reverence. As I argued in the previous article, 4′33″ is sincere, bold, and spiritually loaded. But it is not music. And on this point, philosopher and author, Roger Scruton is both uncompromising and correct.

In his treatise, The Aesthetics of Music, Scruton insists that music is not merely organized sound. Music is not physics. It is not the raw phenomenon of vibrating air molecules. Music, rather, is a tonal and intentional structure, apprehended through imaginative listening informed by culture. Notes become music when they enter into relations—melodic, harmonic, rhythmic—and when those relations mean something to a conscious, culturally shaped mind.

Cage’s 4′33″, while intellectually rich and existentially provocative, offers no such tonal structure, enters into no such relations, and makes no appeal whatsoever to a mind shaped by the Western musical culture. Rather, it asks the listener to hear ambient noise as sound-in-time. There is no pitch to imagine, no tension to follow, no phrase to interpret. What it offers is silence-as-stage, framed by a kind of theatrical gesture in place of music. And that is the crux.

So if Cage’s work is not musical sense, then what is it? It is performative.

Indeed, 4′33″ may belong more properly in the lineage of modern drama than of music. Like Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, it stages emptiness as a condition of life. Like Brecht, it draws attention to the performance itself, rather than the illusion of content. And like Artaud, it demands presence, discomfort, and attention from the audience.

In this light, Peter Szondi, author of Theory of the Modern Drama, would not be out of place studying Cage. Szondi’s theory, after all, centers on how modern drama dissolves traditional plot and character in favor of exposing the crisis of subjectivity. What is 4′33″ but a dramatization of that very crisis?

Cage’s earlier percussion works, while rhythmic and sometimes used in modern dance, occupy a similarly ambiguous position. They are fascinating, sometimes even delightful. But they rarely engage the musical imagination as Scruton defines it. They are choreographic scores more than musical ones.

None of this is to deny Cage’s importance. He expanded our understanding of sound, silence, and listening. He forced us to confront the border between art and non-art. But if we are to preserve any meaningful category called “music,” Cage must remain on its edge, or just outside it.

We may call him a conceptual artist, a philosopher of sound, or even a dramatist of silence. But not a composer of music.