John Cage: Silence. As much as I tried to force myself to like it, I never enjoyed listening to John Cage’s compositions. But I very much enjoyed looking at his notations as graphics. I also like imagining an audience listening to a pianist to whom Cage assigned the task to not play anything on stage for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, thus creating a pause instead of a sound. The most impressive piece I find is the Lecture on Nothing, especially when read out loud.
In this lecture the content and structure are in inverse relation. While the structure is everything, the content is nothing. Cage writes about banal things like a milkman in Kansas as much as about deep philosophical thoughts, but he always does so in a strictly rhythmic structure. And sometime he just says nothing. However, since the structure is established in the beginning, the content can be left out at times. The pauses can be short, and they can be long. The art is to never make them too long, in which case the connection between one end of the gap and the other would collapse.
This is how we make space. Sometimes I ask my architecture students to give sound to their plans by clapping their hands whenever there is a black line on the paper, in order to check whether the parts of the spatial composition are connecting or falling apart. The question is how much silence is space?