La Voz de Galicia – February 8, 2026 →
The work 4’33’’ by John Cage is one of those compositions in contemporary music that made history for many reasons. Among them is the fact that the printed score, divided into three movements, simply says tacet, a term used in classical music to indicate a prolonged silence; and the total length of the movements is four minutes and thirty-three seconds of… “silence.” Another reason is that its first performances caused quite a stir at the time (it premiered in 1952), since it is ultimately a complex exercise in the way we listen and in how we accept what is and is not music.
This week, a colleague gave a talk about the piece that made me reflect on how my perspective on silence has changed over the years. In truth, silence does not really exist; there is always something sounding. Cage himself confirmed this when he visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard University (a room that absorbs sound waves) and, in that silence, heard the frequencies of the sounds of his own body.
Four and a half minutes of imposed silence out of context (outside a library, a waiting room, a church, a classroom) leave room for many sounds. And I am not just talking about the sounds around us that we are not always aware we are hearing (a cough, a bird, the rustling of clothes, breathing, cars passing by), but about those sounds within us that sometimes never stop buzzing. I am talking about that inner voice, the voice of our conscience, which keeps talking and talking and cannot be silenced… If only I could calm the sounds of my thoughts by writing a tacet in my mental score, even if only for a second.
