Complete and Utter Zebu

For the next week, you can use the invaluable BBC’s Listen Again service to listen to silence. Yup, appearing in the list of Radio 4 programmes today is the Armistice Day Two Minutes’ Silence. Do they imagine that those who missed it or were unable to mark the occasion at eleven o’clock on the eleventh day or the eleventh month will do so later, chimes of Big Ben at eleven and all?

In case you aren’t able to catch this during the seven days the BBC allows for Listen Again, here it is. Clicking on it should play the mp3 file.

On the subject of silence, we are reminded of the bizarre dispute that ensued after Mike Batt (he of Wombles fame) put a minute’s silence on his album Classical Graffiti to delineate two sections. Tongue-in-cheek, he credited it to Batt/Cage. It was American composer John Cage who, in 1952, wrote the piece 4′33″, which is four minutes and 33 seconds of musicians playing nothing. Very post-modern.

By crediting Cage, however, Batt brought the wrath of the Cage’s estate upon him. Claiming that Cage in fact referred to Clint Cage, a pseudonym for himself, did no good. “I certainly wasn’t quoting his (Cage’s) silence. I claim my silence is original silence…Ours is better silence. It’s digital. Theirs is only analogue.”

In an effort to prove the difference of his own recorded silence, which Batt said was the complete absence of noise rather than ambient silence, there was even a play-off. The performance of Batt’s silence was countered by the Cage estate hiring a clarinettist to perform 4′33″. We tried playing a clip from Batt’s version on amazon but we couldn’t actually tell if the audio player was working or not. Indeed, how could we be?

As Classical Graffiti was top of the classical charts for three months, money was being made and the court case in September 2002 concluded with Batt paying a six-figure sum to Cage’s estate. In vain did he protest, “I have been able to say in one minute what Cage could only say in four minutes and 33 seconds.”

Oddly, in the late 60s, there was a track by John Lennon and Yoko Ono on Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions called Two Minutes Silence. There was no wrangle over that, perhaps because he was a friend of theirs.

So take care. Because until Cage’s copyright runs out in the middle of the century, silence, or the right to reproduce it, is copyrighted as the property of the late John Cage.