Musicology Annotation << Back CHENYU BU SOUND AS SILENCE: Nothingness in the Music of Anton Webern and John Cage Lipov Anatoliy In Being and Nothingness, Sartre presents nothingness as the basis of being and the beginning of its nothingness, i.e., nothingness. In this paper I will extend the notion of nothingness beyond the paradigm of being to the world of sound and consider silence as a sound state in order to approach the experience of Sartrean nothingness in the context of contemporary classical music. After reconstructing Sartre's deduction of non-existence, I will introduce the concept of sound in relation to the entire sound space limited to our pure auditory experience. Thus, silence is the non-existence of sound, derived from Sartrean non-existence. The subsequent distinction between absolute and relative silence will then lead to a further discussion of the relation of sound to silence as analogous to the relation of being to non-being. Noting that different techniques are applied to silence in music, the author dwells on the modern repertoire and analyzes the role of silence in the third movement of Anton Webern's Five Pieces for Orchestra and John Cage's «4'33» as the embodiment of nothingness in sound space. Keywords: Jean Paul Sartre, John Cage, Nothingness, existentialism, Anton Webern. DOI: 10.25791/musicology.5.2025.1431 Pp. 10-16.