Cities are noisy. There is always noise. Traffic and airplanes and people. Horns and sirens and alarms. Dogs barking. There’s a party across the way or someone playing guitar upstairs. Even in a city’s distant reaches, in the dead of a summer night, the fans of air conditioners thrum.
Maybe the sounds of cities aren’t cacophonies but more like the familiar tumble of an orchestra tuning itself before a symphony: those trills, scales and bleats that soon shake themselves into order. The composer John Cage considered this and wrote scores for two cities, 49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs for New York City in 1977 and A Dip in the Lake: Ten Quicksteps, Sixty-two Waltzes, and Fifty-six Marches for Chicago and Vicinity a year later.
He plotted random points on maps then connected the dots with a straightedge and felt-tip pens. The score for Chicago looks like this:
Cage didn’t offer explicit instructions on how to realize his scores. His own interpretation was to make each point where the map-lines intersected represent a note. Then, in New York, he tape-recorded couples waltzing at each of the 147 intersections and assembled the snippets in random order for playback. In Chicago, he did much the same but let his recorder run without preplanned activity in the background, to capture raw city sound. The result would have sounded like this, neither melodious nor congruous. But as an idea, I like it.
To play the Chicago score in 1982, Cage spliced together random lengths of his city-sound audiotape and broadcast the results from 12 loudspeakers mounted on a steamboat docked at Navy Pier and trained west. What a noise that must have been. And how the city must have felt, startled by the unfamiliarity of its own voice: “Do I really sound like that?”