The relation between Sound and Silence

In an interview in 1966, John Cage said: “I realized that a real separation between sound and silence doesn’t exist, but only between the intention to listen and to not do that.”3 In his revolutionary score 4’33’’(Four Minutes and Thirty Seconds), the music is completely absent.Cage assumed that such an absence didn’t really mean the absence of sounds. He invited the audience to listen to the world – the noise in the auditorium, the hum of the city, the wind, the rain. “I decide that what I listen to is music”, said Cage, bringing into his work the “negative”; what was traditionally considered to be the absence of music became part of it thanks to the awareness of this absence.

This aesthetic revolution overcame the opposition between music and silence, demonstrating how the background could be a product of our own culture.About twenty years later James Turrell started working on a theme that he would explore throughout his career, the relationship between artificial light and natural light. He didn’t focus on lighting fixtures or objects illuminated by light; instead, he worked with light itself, light and its antithesis, darkness.

‘Treatise’: A Visual Symphony Of Information Design Treatise by Cornelius Cardew

(Re)Defining the language of sound

Since music is inherently performed in time, the pages should be read in sequence. Lines connect and develop into forms. Forms stretch across pages to create a flow. Read linearly, a visual story begins to emerge. Carew is careful to arrange graphic elements that defy specificity but explore spacial relationships. The composition of form is instructed and a visual language begins to emerge. The eye follows the centerline naturally. It is heavily manipulated for the duration of the score. It is cut, bent, radiated, twisted, doubled, rotated and teleported. The centerline is a path, a thread, and an idea. The centerline is a horizon; a divider between treble and bass clefs, a median between above and below, high and low. The centerline could represent pitch but isn’t expressly mapped to that possibility. The centerline is an abstracted representation of a journey.

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