John Cage reading question?

Question

I have just bought "silence" and I started reading "Lecture on Nothing", but I find it hard to understand the whole. There are some parts easier then others to understand, maybe its because english is not my mother tounge.
What is his Lecture on Nothing about, I mean what is the purpose of it??
Sorry for my bad english....

Answer 1

this might help, keep in mind this is the person who composed a piece in which the performer, sat down at the piano, opened it, closed it,,,, repeated a few times, then got up and left,,,,,,, did not play a note,,,,,,

"Cage's 'Lecture on Nothing', a reading from 1950, signals a shift in his thinking on silence. He realizes that the important role of silence regarding musical structure does not yet establish a full recognition of its positive qualities. Cage wants to avoid approaching silence from a negative point of view, i.e., as absence of sound. At the beginning of 'Lecture on Nothing', he attempts to arrive at a different relationship towards silence. 'What we require is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking ... But now there are silences and the words make help make the silences ... We need not fear the silences, we may love them' (Cage, 1961, p.109-10). Silence is no longer the absence of sounds; silence itself consists of sounds. Silence begets sounds. Chiasm. Reversibility. Through the intertwining of silence and sound, their mutual penetrability now becomes appreciated. Each retains a part of its antipode; each requires the other as its frame. The necessary interdependency between sound and silence relates to two principal aspects: silence is not only the precondition for sound - this means that silence contains sound - every sound in turn harbors silence as well. (According to Martin Zenck, the 'Lecture on Nothing' points out that the words of spoken language by which the silence is demarcated are in fact the precondition for silence.) The latter principle manifests itself especially in compositions that are on the outer limits of audibility, such as Waiting (Play music) (cf. Cage and Noise). In this 'silent piece', silence does not disappear when a tone resounds, rather, it continuously resonates along with the tones. Here, a vertical conception of silence comes into play. Sound and silence develop in a parallel way without mutual exclusion; the one is always already present in the other (cf. Visscher, p.49-50). "