‘There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.’ – John Cage.

The 2010 campaign to get John Cage‘s 4’33 to the coveted Christmas number 1 spot in the pop charts registered on the radar of most UK music fans. 4’33 is, of course, the composers infamous 1952 reflection on the nature of music, composition and sound – four and a half minutes of apparent silence, encouraging listeners to pay attention to the ambient sounds around them. Whilst the recording didn’t hit Number One the campaign prompted debate, amusement, outrage and delight – Cage’s intention, I don’t doubt.

I have long been intrigued by Cage and while I ‘get’ 4’33 as a statement, I consider it overstated – the natural end point of a path of creative philosophising past which not much more needs to be said. It somehow shouts it’s intent through the silence. However, I adore his earlier pieces for prepared piano and other similarly rhythmic experments in extended technique. It was with curiosity, then, that I attended this performance – part of the Cage 99 series at St.George’s Bristol which celebrated the 99th anniversary of Cage’s birth rather than the 100th, echoing composer’s own convention-defying spirit.

The night started with a performance of 4’33 by pianists and improvisors Tania Chen and Steve Beresford. I want to put inverted commas around performance, but I will refrain! Hearing the piece live (again, the desire for inverted commas) added nothing to my perception of it – I still get it; I still consider it an overstatement. The self-concious opening and closing of the piano lids (the pianists only interaction with their instruments) seemed contrived to me, but I am aware that the cultural context of the 1950′s is long gone.

Straight after came a selection of pieces from Music for Piano, Cage’s series of experiments in zen-like, automatic music creation. Each piece consists of a short phrase made with the piano as a noisemaker as opose to an instrument. The body of the piano was struck, the strings were plucked and rubbed, dissonant chords were juxtaposed with individual, sweet ringing notes. There were some interesting noises and the occasional serendipitious marriage of parts hinted at a melody or rhythm. All the pieces were short, studiedly sparse and existed in their own sonic universe.

While I hate the ‘anybody could do that’ argument, I think that if you put anyone with an interest in sound in front of a grand piano and said “see what noises you can make – don’t go crazy, but have a play”, they’d come up with much the same thing. The performance left me cold, it felt like there was almost nothing to say about it. It lacked emotional context or hooks. Again, I’m aware that the time when such experiments were new and even shocking is long gone, but even so, it felt like the sonic equivalent of reading an artists notebook – preliminary ideas, ponderings on the nature of their art. Is it necessary or rewarding to perform such pieces?

After the interval the musicians were joined by alternative comic Stewart Lee, one of my favourite stand-ups. He read short stories, selected at random from a pile, while the pianists improvised sounds with their pianos and a variety of childrens toys and noisemakers. This was Indeterminacy, a seeming development of the ideas explored in Music for Piano. Some of the stories were amusing, and Lee’s deadpan delivery suited their often inconsequential, diary-like structure. Again, some of the noises made were wonderful, my particular favourite being the hand-fan held to the piano strings resulting in undulating, textured drones. It was, however, somewhat boring – a word one probably shouldn’t use in a seroius review of classical music, but there we go. The lesson of the excersize was nothing new to me.

I fear this music (inverted commas) has dated irrepearably. The ideas Cage was exploring have undoubtably and tangibly influenced much music since, but to me these very early stepping stones have little or no impact anymore – the debt to Cage needs to be respected and remembered, but more interesting things have been done since.

There were aspects of the live experience that were fascinating to me, though. One was the obvious intention of the composer for any sound to be considered a part of the performance. In post-concert discussions people were clearly trying to work out how they fitted in. It also struck me that whilst one could go anywhere where there is relative silence (a church, the countryside) and decide to scrutinise the sound and the sound alone, the very fact that a performance of Cage’s music is deliberately and directly about the sonic environment subtly but essentially changes the way one listens. A church or a hilltop holds it’s own aesthetic and personal implications. A concert hall is about sound and performance. For this reason, the relevance of Cage’s musical aesthetic will live on.