Wagner: Silence can speak louder than sound

Songs that are completely silent can ring far louder than even your favorite hardcore band’s… Songs that are completely silent can ring far louder than even your favorite hardcore band’s signature tunes.

There have always been divergent strains in music; people shading the musical landscape with off-colored crayons far outside the lines. With every successive generation the kids put out something weirder, and it either flopped or became a new possibility.

By the mid-20th century there were expansive musical theories that borrowed from Eastern schools while auditing Western thought. Avant-garde art music emerged as a modern force and would prove to influence not just the thinking of theorists, but also rock ’n’ roll.

Amid all the musical tinkerers of the 20th century, John Cage was the most notorious for breaking the rules. Over a 50-year career, his compositions incorporated sounds from found materials — like car horns and paperclips placed between piano strings — and played with listeners’ expectations of time and space.

Cage believed everything we hear — on the chart or not — is music, and with each composition, he further expanded on this view. After using modifications on existing instruments and instruments found on a city street, he completed a composition in 1952 called “4’33”” that consists of a series of rests for the orchestra not to play. The composition is silent.

The song consists of four minutes and 33 seconds of not just an occasional signal from the conductor to keep the orchestra on silent time, but also the sounds that are inherent in the environment as the piece is being played. Cage figured out how to make music out of someone’s nasty cough or that annoying little kid’s yelling about McDonald’s.

It was controversial in its time and remains an interesting concept today. What are the outlines of what we call music? Where does music begin and sound end?

The diverse experiments Cage conducted didn’t go unnoticed and almost immediately influenced a whole range of artists interested in breaking boundaries and blurring lines. Some identified with the Fluxus movement, which sought to do just those things, whereas others were more directly influenced by Cage’s experiments in songwriting.

La Monte Young was one of Cage’s contemporaries who, in the mid-1960s, brought together a number of other sympathetic artists to create the Theatre of Eternal Music (otherwise known as The Dream Syndicate).

True to its name, the group played drones (sustained single notes) for hours on end, philosophizing on how the improvisational compositions could last for hundreds of years at a time. Followers of the Theatre borrowed heavily from Indian and Middle Eastern musical traditions while employing hand drums, throat-sung vocals and Young’s occasional sax. They also had experimental methods of amplifying stringed instruments.

Because the lineup changed frequently while the group was together in the mid-1960s, several alumni were able to carry the avant-garde ideas to the wider world. One of Young’s gifted students, John Cale, would go on to form a group considered the patriarch of alternative music, the Velvet Underground.

Born in the coal-mining village of Garnant, Wales, Cale proved to be a child prodigy on the viola. After studying music in England, as a young man he traveled to America where he met his childhood hero, John Cage, and continued to pursue an academic path in composition.

Eventually his concentration turned to Young’s drones, which Cale modified and played with in his own recordings. Even as his time with Young’s group waned, he was collaborating with Lou Reed to play rock ’n’ roll in a way that used the same experimental attitude. Reed’s contemporary sense of language combined with Cale’s contemporary sense of sound, and together they wrote and arranged songs that are the first traces of punk.

The Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs” relies on Cale’s moan of a drone through the viola while “All Tomorrow’s Parties” makes use of a prepared piano, fluctuating between two notes that resonate with all the connected strings surrounding them.

The way the two met even centered on experimentation — Reed’s “Ostrich” guitar tuning, making every string a “D” while played open — which is when you play without touching the fret board. Cale was impressed by this nod to a resonant form of drone.

Cage is pervasive in his DNA, even on songs that sound like they could have been written by a delinquent ’50s teen. The collaboration between Cale and Reed continued through one more album before Cale left to spread the seeds of avant-garde music throughout a solo career and various production gigs.

From the drones and noise on The Stooges’ self-titled album to the lucid artistry of Patti Smith’s Horses, which Cale produced, he never forgot his musical past and has lived to see numerous bands cite avant-garde via the Velvet Underground as a major source of inspiration. The different has neared the norm.

New York experimental rockers Sonic Youth continue the mantra today, adding a third bridge to their guitars and preparing their instruments to create audible textures otherwise unavailable.

Though it might be avant-garde, it’s definitely still rock ’n’ roll.