What my grandmother taught me about John Cage

An elder's advice on the avant-garde

My grandmother has always thrived on being enigmatic. I think it is a large part of why she has lived to almost one hundred.

Like all people who have lived a long life, she can unexpectedly share a new story that casts her character in a fresh light. For example, it wasn’t until I was an adult that she mentioned that she had attended London’s Royal College of Music. She briefly spoke about Vaughan Williams being in the adjacent room and feeling out of place.

When I was a child we visited her home regularly, which contained a beautiful piano that stood proudly like a statue in honour of my late grandfather, who by all accounts was a superb pianist. When she moved to a new home the piano disappeared.

One day she visited us for Sunday lunch. On our simple upright piano was some Bach sheet music I was learning; I think a prelude or fugue. She walked into the room, sat down at the piano, sightread the piece perfectly, and then casually walked off. I was stunned. I never saw her touch a piano again.

She loved music and often went to classical music festivals. In her flat, she had rows of CDs tidily stacked one on top of the other. We used to talk about music a lot, she was knowledgeable and artistically open. We once went to a concert by the virtuoso pianist Joanna MacGregor, who performed Oliver Messiaen’s Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus. The suite was dissonant and challenging, and she loved it.

While I was a music student, I bought a copy of John Cage’s book Silence. I had imported it from the United States from a hip new company called Amazon. I spent weeks anticipating its arrival but felt deflated when it finally did. The book struck me as repetitive and tedious. I bought a couple of CDs to go with it — before CDs were primarily hung from scarecrows — but I didn’t connect with the music either.

I can’t remember exactly what I said to her, but I imagine it sounded like an earnest music student wishing to rebel against something they didn’t immediately like or understand. Her response took me by surprise and echoed through my mind for years.

‘Now, you must be very careful in making firm judgments about composers. You might not like John Cage now, but your taste will change throughout your life, and when you are a bit older you might find that you really like John Cage.’

When your grandmother is defending the avant-garde you know you’ve lost the argument. She had caught me out, and was warning me of the dualistic trap — ‘this is good, that is bad’ — which narrows our artistic appreciation and understanding.

I knew better. Although I took it for granted, I was raised to avoid forming judgments about music without repeat listening and wide exposure. Only when I was older did I realise that many people do not treat music in this way: it’s instant gratification or nothing. Yet what differentiates music from novels or films is the extent to which repeated listening can transform one’s emotional and intellectual experience of the art. I have watched my favourite film — if I push myself to actually have one — three times, whereas I have listened to cherished pieces of music hundreds of times, often for months and years on end. While no rule says that music can’t act as a simple comfort in life, I could never settle for this, as it means missing out on the adventure of challenging oneself to experience music through the perspective of a new idea, culture, or period.

As a general rule, I think it is reasonable to say that the further the music comes from geographically or in time, the more listening is required to gain an appreciation of that music. It took me several years of study and countless live concerts before I began to truly appreciate South Indian Carnatic music. I persisted because I sensed there was something there for me, and that sense was right.

When reaching back in time, I try to imagine what it must have felt like for people to have experienced that music when it was modern: after all, all music was once modern. Though early classical music might sound quaint to 21st-century ears, in its time it was highly experimental. I think we can still enter into a state of mind where we can experience some sense of its prior modernity. When I was listening to lots of early music, I would sometimes put on headphones and walk around highly urbanised areas of London. I felt that by being in a modern space I could more easily imagine the music as being contemporary.

Although I still only listen to a portion of John Cage’s music, my grandmother was ultimately right. When my wife became pregnant with our first child we were advised — and good advice it was — to create a playlist with music that could be listened to before and after the birth of our baby. I made a six-hour playlist, amid which was a composition by John Cage which suited the heightened, vulnerable, life-changing moment of the arrival of a child.

Years on, I remind myself of my grandmother's comments and how her youthful curiosity helped inspire my relationship with music. More generally, I feel grateful to have been raised in a family in which art was not treated as an abstract object of study but as an essential and living aspect of human enrichment. Of course, I have developed certain ideas, opinions, and convictions, but I feel less of a need to pitch my tent. It is exciting to know my taste will change and evolve with life. There are composers and musicians whose music will light me up in the future but do not yet. As with everything in life, music is dynamic, and therefore it seems simpler and easier to go with that.