Race, Noise, and the Politics of Listening: Re-Evaluating John Cage
This research paper was written for CRIT-415: Performance and Art’s final in Spring 2025.
Nearly two decades before the counterculture movement’s legendary culmination at Woodstock ‘69, there was Woodstock ‘52—arguably the most controversial performance to ever debut.1 Pianist David Tudor faced the ivory keys, propped up six pages of blank sheet music, then closed the piano, clicking his stopwatch. After 30 seconds, Tudor lifted the key lid, closed it again, and his hands returned to their clasped embrace. Two minutes and 23 seconds later, he opened and closed the lid, to the sounds of the aisles echoing with frustrated attendees’ footsteps. After another minute and 40 seconds, he opened the fallboard one last time, stood, and bowed to the uneasy audience, concluding his rendition of friend and collaborator John Cage’s newest composition, 4’33” (1952). “Good people of Woodstock, let’s drive these people out of town,”2 one festival-goer joked. But Cage’s sonic philosophy was only just emerging.
In the mid-twentieth century, as the United States navigated the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement and the avant-garde responded to post-World War II disillusionment,3 John Cage emerged as a transformative force in experimental music. His radical assertion that “there is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time”4 challenged not only the confines of “music,” but also the social and cultural orders that had long defined who could be heard and what counted as art. Yet, even as Cage’s philosophy of sound promised a democratization5 of listening, it unfolded within a society deeply structured by race, power, and exclusion.
Cage’s innovations, from the “silent” 4’33” to the prepared piano,6 did not simply dismantle musical hierarchies but completely overhauled composer authority, inviting listeners into a more participatory relationship with sound. However, his universalist ideal—that all sounds are valued equally, and that music should be liberated from expressive intent7—collided with the reality that sonic experience was and remains deeply racialized. This paper argues that while Cage’s use of silence and indeterminacy was revolutionary in democratizing sound, by framing his abstraction of sound as neutral and apolitical, it also inadvertently marginalized racialized sonic expressions by isolating noise from sociopolitical contexts, particularly during the Civil Rights era. Through critical engagement with Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s “sonic color line,” which uncovers how listening practices encode and produce racial stratification8; Douglas Kahn’s overview of Cage’s “silencing techniques”9; Matthew D. Morrison’s “Blacksound,” which excavates the racialized foundations of American sound culture10; and Brandon LaBelle’s “sociality of sound,” which foregrounds the relational and contextual dimensions of listening,11 this paper reexamines Cage’s legacy through the lenses of race, power, and listening. Stoever’s concept of the “sonic color line” is essential for understanding how supposedly neutral listening practices are actually conditioned by white supremacy.12 In her definition, “the sonic color line produces, codes, and polices racial difference through the ear, enabling us to hear race as well as see it.”13 The claim that listening can be neutral is not only inaccurate, but actively detrimental: It privileges white, Western auditory norms as universal, enforcing cultural hierarchies through outwardly apolitical aesthetics. Stoever introduces the idea of the “listening ear” to describe the socially conditioned mechanism through which people make sense of sound based on race, stating, “the listening ear is an ideological mechanism that figures racial difference and positions the listener in relation to a racialized world.”14 In this framework, Cage’s call to “let sounds be themselves”15 becomes problematic: Which sounds are worthy of remaining unchanged, and which are filtered through racialized listening practices as disruptive, improper, or excessive?
Similarly, Morrison’s Blacksound dismantles the myth of disembodied or decontextualized sound by showing how Black performance has historically been commodified, appropriated, and simultaneously erased from its own sonic legacy. He defines “Blacksound” as “not the music or sounds produced by Black Americans but instead the material and fleeting remnants of their performances that have been co-opted and amalgamated into popular music.”16 He writes, “Blacksound … [is] the aesthetic basis of American popular music since its founding in blackface.”17 Between these two statements, Morrison not only maps a history of appropriation, but shows how the aesthetic forms we take as neutral or American are, in fact, deeply structured by racial logics that displace their Black origins. This is not a passive process, but an active one, wherein Black sonic expression is continuously mined for cultural capital while Black authorship and presence are suppressed. In contrast to Cage’s notion of sound as free-floating and unmarked, Morrison insists that sound is always already racialized through the structures of cultural consumption. Thus, Cage’s aesthetics, while progressive on the surface, risk perpetuating the exploitation of Black sonic labor by denying the history of how certain sounds come to be legible—and profitable—in white-dominated contexts.
Cage’s redefinition of silence as active presence sought to collapse hierarchies between intentional composition and ambient noise. His 1951 anechoic chamber experience at Harvard University solidified this idea: “Until I die there will be sounds,” he wrote.18 In 4’33”, the audience’s sounds become the music, reflecting Brandon Labelle’s view that Cage’s experimentalism moved music “beyond symbolic systems and toward immediacy and the profound presence of being there.”19 But this presence, as Stoever and Morrison make clear, is not ideologically neutral. It is mediated by histories of listening shaped by racial exclusion and cultural bias. Cage’s audience, often white, middle-class, and institutionally privileged, co-created the work within a specific sociopolitical frame, that, by default, excluded or misinterpreted nonwhite sonic contributions.
This contradiction streams through much of Cage’s practice. Cage’s aspiration to transcend the material conditions of music is continually checked by his insistence on their presence. Silent Prayer (1948), a proposed silent piece for Muzak, was meant to critique sonic commodification.20 By attempting to erase the typical ambience of consumer spaces, Cage sought to expose the “white noise”21 of capitalism and provoke a more critical, attentive mode of listening, but this gesture risks substituting one form of abstraction for another. Similarly, in Music of Changes (1951), Cage used the I Ching to relinquish compositional control, initiating his embrace of chance operations.22 LaBelle praises this as a shift in meaning-making from composer to audience, a structure filled in through a “plurality of signifieds,”23 with each listener’s depth and breadth of experience and interpretation lending musical context. However, Cage’s viewpoint presupposes a neutral listener, failing to account for which listeners and sounds are structurally empowered to participate in or be heard through such indeterminacy.
This tension became particularly evident during the Civil Rights era. While Cage was exploring the aesthetic potential of ambient sound, Black Americans deployed it out of necessity. Anthems like “We Shall Overcome” were not merely aesthetic artifacts but strategic tools of sound to build solidarity and challenge oppression. As historian and leader of the Freedom Singers Bernice Johnson Reagon notes, these songs were “a natural outpouring, evidencing the life force of the fight for freedom.”24 In contrast, Cage’s refusal of expressive intent flattened difference and risked aestheticizing political sound. LaBelle reminds us that “sound is intrinsically and unignorably relational: it emanates, propagates, communicates, vibrates, and agitates.”25 Cage’s work reframes the listener as co-creator,26 yet the identities and backgrounds of these listeners shape the musical event. Black composer Bill Dixon’s 1969 letter to Cage emphasized that Black performers were excluded from Cage’s framework. Dixon’s critique, echoed by Black contemporaries like Bill T. Jones, highlights that the Cagean avant-garde’s “absence,” “lack of perseverance … to acquaint [themselves] with the merits, achievements and contributions” of Black artists, and even “artistic apartheid,”27 exposes itself as alien and exclusionary to those whose sonic lives are shaped by struggle and resistance. Jones, in his project Story/Time, used Cage’s Indeterminacy format to confront its own racial limitations, reflecting, “Who was he [Cage] speaking to? Whom was he making his work for? Was there room for someone like me in his milieu?” 28
Cage’s emphasis on indeterminacy inspired collaborators like Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg29 to dissolve artistic hierarchies in their respective disciplines. Branden W. Joseph, a scholar of North American and European art after WWII, celebrates Cage’s opening of artistic boundaries. Yet scholar Douglas Kahn’s critique of Cage is incisive: By abstracting sound from its political and historical contexts, Cage’s philosophy can “musically silence the social.”30 Kahn argues that Cage’s “battery of silencing techniques”31 risks reinscribing taste-based exclusions under the guise of radical openness. Kahn’s analysis is especially pointed in tracing how Cage’s early silent works, such as Silent Prayer, which was conceived to resist sonic commodification, may have instead reinforced it by neutralizing protest and noise. This move, Kahn argues, reveals a desire to erase the social and political content of everyday sound, replacing it with a blank neutrality that can be more easily controlled or commodified.32 Cage’s ironic attempt to liberate sound from convention inadvertently participates in what Kahn deems “noise abatement,” or the systematic silencing of certain sonic expressions in favor of others.33
Matthew D. Morrison’s concept of “Blacksound” deepens the critique of Cage’s universalism by dissecting the racialized history of American sound. Blacksound is not simply Black-produced music or sounds, but “the material and fleeting remnants of their performances that have been co-opted and amalgamated into popular music,”34 often without credit or compensation. This history is inseparable from the legacy of blackface minstrelsy, which established the sonic and performative codes that continue to shape American popular music. Morrison unpacks the relationship between performance, racial identity, and intellectual property to reveal how blackface minstrelsy scripts were absorbed into commercial into commercial entertainment through a dishonest arrangement of intellectual property and copyright laws.35 In introducing this foundational idea in musicology, Morrison divulges what is politically at stake, and for whom, in laying bare how the foundation of what we consider American sound is built on practices of exclusion, appropriation, and racial exploitation.
The Civil Rights Movement exemplified how sound was used as a form of collective action and resistance. Joan Baez’s rendition of “We Shall Overcome,” widely acknowledged as the movement’s anthem after her rousing performance at the March on Washington,36 was both an assertion of presence and a refusal to be silenced. As scholar Clayborne Carson, who was present at the march, recalls, “The music was one of the things that held it together because people were coming from all different parts … [with] this desire to make this a unifying event.”37 The music did more than accompany the protest: It constituted the protest itself, creating a sonic space of unified action. Similarly, young protestor Jamila Jones’s defiant singing at the Highlander Folk School raid further demonstrates how sound contests power. When police shut the lights off, Jones began singing “We Shall Overcome,” adding the verse “We are not afraid.” She recalled, “We got louder and louder … until one of the policemen came and he said to me, ‘If you have to sing,’ … ‘do you have to sing so loud?’ And I could not believe it. Here these people had all the guns, the billy clubs, the power, we thought.”38 Clearly, sound possesses the ability to invert power dynamics, transforming vulnerability into strength through united vocalization. In addition, Black communities experienced sonic policing through sirens, surveillance, and weaponized sound, intending to control, intimidate, and discipline in their deployment. The very sounds that Cage sought to liberate from musical hierarchy were, for many, the sounds of suppressive domination.
Facing the future, LaBelle calls for sound art that is “locationally sensitive, self-consciously social, acoustically expansive, and perceptually aimed”39—a vision that acknowledges both Cage’s contributions and their limitations. This approach resonates with Morrison’s call to reckon with the racialized roots of American sound, challenging artists and scholars to confront the legacies of appropriation and exclusion. Gascia Ouzounian’s Stereophonica explores the spatial properties of sound and the technologies that have fashioned our understanding of listening as a spatial and embodied practice. Her work stresses the importance of considering the spatial, contextual, and social circumstances of listening, rather than focusing solely on the auditory content itself.40 This dimensional element of sound is crucial for developing more inclusive sonic practices, as it recognizes how access to sonic spaces are shaped by power, privilege, and social position.
George E. Lewis’s A Power Stronger Than Itself and the work of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians during the mid-19th century exemplify such approaches, centering Black musical traditions and mutual improvisation as forms of resistance and innovation. The AACM’s commitment to “individuality within the aggregate”41 and its strategies for self-production and promotion challenged the racialized hierarchies of the experimental music world during the pinnacle of Cage’s philosophical progression, offering today’s world a model for inclusive sonic practices to emulate. Lewis’s work reveals how the AACM’s approach to improvisation differs fundamentally from Cagean indeterminacy, emphasizing the communal, deliberate, and historically grounded nature of Black experimental music. Lewis’s analysis of migration in the experience of creative musicians is particularly illuminating. He challenges the common narrative that links jazz improvisation to the Great Migration, commenting that this narrative often portrays migration and the development of jazz as a “spontaneous, leaderless combustion.”42 In contrast, Lewis asserts that for Black Americans, migration was fiercely community-centric; almost all of the first generation of AACM members were children of parents who had migrated, and the migration experience, through its displacement, adaptation, and community formation, deeply informed the collective’s sonic outlook.43
Community-led design practices, as discussed in Sasha Costanza-Chock’s Design Justice, illustrate how inclusive sonic practices can be developed by centering the experiences and needs of marginalized communities in challenging the “matrix of domination”44 to build shared power and ecological survival. Contemporary sound art further expands these ideas for inclusive practice. Christine Sun Kim’s 2020 ASL rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner45 centers Deaf culture and challenges normative assumptions about sound and listening, emphasizing the visual-spatial dimensions of ASL and the politics of voice. Kim’s performance at Super Bowl LIV, where she was only fleetingly visible on the broadcast, highlights the ongoing struggle for Deaf representation in mass media. Her work prompts audiences to reconsider not only what they hear, but whose bodies, voices, and languages are centered or marginalized in the collective act of listening. Kim’s hand-drawn sheet music positions the anthem as a visual ritual, reclaiming patriotic sound for those often excluded. Her artistry extends Cage’s invitation to “let sounds be themselves” but with a crucial difference: She politicizes the performance space by foregrounding embodiment, access, and Deaf culture in a national auditory ritual.
Protest silence also continues to evolve as a sonic strategy. In 2016, House Democrats Rep. Jim Himes and Nancy Pelosi protested a congressional moment of silence for Orlando’s mass shooting victims, refusing to let silence substitute for meaningful action. Their refusal was a itself a performative act, transforming absence into presence and demanding accountability. Pelosi declared, “The moment of silence is an act of respect … but it is not a license to do nothing,”46 underscoring how silence can signify respect but also complicity. depending on the context and power relations at play. Similarly, Black Lives Matter activists mobilized silence as a form of remembrance and protest, imposing four-and-a-half minutes of silence and stillness at a 2015 Bernie Sanders rally to honor Michael Brown, whose body lay in the street for that length of time after he was killed.47 These acts reframe silence as charged resistance.
Ultimately, to carry Cage’s innovations forward requires a modification of his framework. John Cage’s democratization of sound and redefinition of silence remain foundational contributions to experimental music and sound art. Yet, his universalist framework, while progressive in deconstructing musical hierarchies, inadvertently marginalized racialized sonic expressions by abstracting sound from its contexts. The critical frameworks examined in this paper—Stoever’s sonic color line, Kahn’s silencing techniques, Morrison’s Blacksound, and LaBelle’s sociality of sound—provide essential tools for reexamining and extending Cage’s legacy beyond its limitations. Reimagining experimental sound requires more than an open ear; it demands a politicized one. To create truly inclusive experimental sound practices, we must not only acknowledge the political dimensions of sound but embrace them and recognize that sounds are never neutral but always embedded in histories of struggle, resistance, and community. The task is not to abandon Cage’s insights but to enrich them with the awareness that silence and sound are never merely aesthetic categories but markedly social and political realities. In this way, experimental sound can become not just a site of innovation but an incubator for more equitable ways of listening and being heard in this still-inequitable world. The challenge is to realize a sonic practice where differences are not erased, but embraced, and where the full spectrum of human experience can resound.
Notes
Will Hermes, “The Story of '4’33"’,” NPR, May 8, 2000, https://www.npr.org/2000/05/08/1073885/4-33.
Hermes, “The Story of '4’33"’.
Sarah Churchill, “4.2: Postwar American Art (I): Postwar American Art 1945–1980,” Humanities LibreTexts, August 16, 2021, https://human.libretexts.org/@go/page/107374.
John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (1961; repr., Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 8, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/publication/2068257?accountid=14749.
David Revill, The Roaring Silence: John Cage, a Life (Arcade Publishing, 1992).
Revill, The Roaring Silence: John Cage, a Life.
Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage, 35.
Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening, 1st ed., vol. 17 (NYU Press, 2016), https://doi.org/10.18574/9781479899081.
Douglas Kahn, “John Cage: Silence and Silencing,” The Musical Quarterly 81, no. 4 (December 1, 1997): 580, https://doi.org/10.1093/mq/81.4.556.
Matthew D. Morrison, “Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 72, no. 3 (December 1, 2019): 781–823, https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2019.72.3.781.
Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, 1st ed. (The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc., 2006).
Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening, 17:46.
Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening, 17:11.
Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening, 17:7–8.
Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage, 10.
Morrison, “Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse.”
Morrison, “Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse.”
Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage, 8.
Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, 2nd ed. (2006; repr., Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 28, https://www.professores.uff.br/ricardobasbaum/wp-content/uploads/sites/164/2020/08/Brandon_Part2.pdf.
James Pritchett, “John Cage’s Silent Piece(s): ‘Silent Prayer’, the First Silent Piece,” The Piano in My Life, September 3, 2018, https://rosewhitemusic.com/piano/2018/08/27/silent-prayer-the-first-silent-piece/.
LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, 2006, 11.
Douglas C. Wadle, “Organized Sound, Sounds Heard, and Silence,” Ergo an Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10, no. 3 (November 17, 2023), https://doi.org/10.3998/ergo.4632.
LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, 2015, 52.
Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Music in the Civil Rights Movement,” American Experience | PBS, August 16, 2018, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/eyesontheprize-music-civil-rights-movement/.
LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, 2015, ix.
LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, 2006, 7.
Black Editions Group, “June 1969: Bill Dixon’s letter to John Cage, ‘And unless you believe, and this then is your way of expressing it, in artistic apartheid...,’” October 1, 2024, https://www.blackeditionsgroup.com/post/it-should-be-obvious-by-now-that-whether-we-the-black-musician-and-composer-get-serious-recogni.
Bill T. Jones, Story/Time: The Life of an Idea, 2014, 101, https://muse.jhu.edu/book/36583.
Branden W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde, 2003, http://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BB06821485.
Douglas Kahn, “John Cage: Silence and Silencing,” The Musical Quarterly 81, no. 4 (December 1, 1997): 559, https://doi.org/10.1093/mq/81.4.556.
Kahn, “John Cage: Silence and Silencing,” 580.
Kahn, “John Cage: Silence and Silencing,” 576.
Kahn, “John Cage: Silence and Silencing,” 557.
Morrison, “Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse.”
Morrison, “Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse.”
US National Archives, “The March on Washington,” September 24, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9RT-YSoJhE.
Scott Simon, “Looking Back on the Music That Accompanied the March on Washington 60 Years Ago,” Texas Public Radio, August 26, 2023, https://www.tpr.org/2023-08-26/looking-back-on-the-music-that-accompanied-the-march-on-washington-60-years-ago.
Jamila Jones and U.S. Civil Rights History Project, “Jamila Jones Oral History Interview Conducted by Joseph Mosnier in Atlanta, Georgia,” interview by Joseph Mosnier, 2011, https://www.loc.gov/item/2015669108/.
Brandon LaBelle, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life, 1st ed. (A&C Black, 2010), xviii.
Gascia Ouzounian, Stereophonica: Sound and Space in Science, Technology, and the Arts (MIT Press, 2021), 3, https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11698.001.0001.
George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2005), xii, https://www.ayler.co.uk/assets/images/A_POWER_STRONGER_THAN_ITSELF.pdf.
Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, 92.
Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, 1–14.
Sasha Costanza-Chock, Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (MIT Press, 2020), 23, https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12255.001.0001.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, “Accessibility: Christine Sun Kim,” 2018, https://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/musical-thinking/accessibility/christine-sun-kim.
Mary Clare Jalonick, “A Day After Shooting, House Democrats Erupt in Protest,” WBMA, June 14, 2016, https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/a-day-after-shooting-house-democrats-erupt-in-protest.
Phil Helsel, “‘Black Lives Matter’ Activists Disrupt Bernie Sanders Speech,” NBC News, August 8, 2015, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/black-lives-matter-activists-disrupt-bernie-sanders-speech-n406546.
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