Sounds of Silence

As part of the nineteen fifty two Summer series, this Friday night benefit concert featured works by a cavalcade of

avant garde composers. So I'm just getting their start. It began with a piece by John Cage which would later be titled water Music, then eighteen year old Christian Wolf's four piano Morton Feldman's Extensions Number three, the premier Sonata in two parts by Pierre Blesse, five intermissions by Morton Felton for a prepared piano by Christian Wolf, and before the night wrapped up with the Banshee by Henry Cowell.

There was to be one more piece, a new piece written by Cage and debut tonight virtuoso performer David Tudor took the stage two doors, set down at the piano, placed the score in the stand, took out a stop watch and closed the lid over the keys. He started to stop watch. Thirty seconds later, he opened the lid, then closed it back over the keys. He did the same thing two minutes and twenty three seconds later, turning the pages of the score, all the while performing each

of the actions as quietly as possible. And a minute and forty seconds after that he stood as if to receive applause. In all, four minutes and thirty three seconds had elapsed in which two door played no notes four thirty three, as the pieces most commonly referred four and a half minutes of inaction. You see. John Cage believed that music was everywhere, including and maybe even especially silence.

But what is silence? That summer night and upstate New York, and with an angry mob of a crowd, as David Tudor recounts, one patron exclaimed, good people of with stock. I think we should run these people out of town. That was the reaction. Audience members were incensed. They may have asked for their money back if it hadn't been a benefit concert, Cage would be accused of everything from parading around an emperor's new clothes to a deliberate attack

on the sanctity of music. And while these attitudes have persisted, they are now accompanied by a plethora of other readings. For the last sixty five years, four three spark debate, inspiration, and all levels of study. It's been performed, recorded, interpreted, parodied. Every textbook on modern American music has a blurb on John Cage and his so called silent Peace. I, like many students, enrolled and intro to music appreciation, covered four

three in class one day. For some reason, if I remember correctly, Dr Doll felt the need to queue up a YouTube video of an orchestral rendition of the piece, and then she instructed the class to stay silent, just listen. This is one of those big classrooms with maybe a

few hundred seats. You can imagine there was some snickering, but four and a half minutes is actually kind of a long time for the uninitiated, and by and by the intentional sounds drifted away after the orchestra and the video took a bow, and the virtual audience gave rapturous applause. Dr Doll surveyed the class, what did you hear? Because, of course, the worst kept secret of four thirty three is that it's not silent. The pieces ostensibly made up

of the sun. In your environment, they could cough me be consciously or subconsciously tune out as we go about our business. The first performance, for instance, through Cages eyears, consisted of wind stirring in the trees, rain pattering the roof, and towards the end people talking are walking out. Oh my best friend was. I had students right down the sounds they heard during it, and one girl said, I

never realized there was so much to listen to. This is Kyle Gann, who read the exhaustive history of four three. No such thing as silence. Yeah, that's been my uh best selling book. It was it's in a series of American icons and other things in the series, or like the Empire state Building in the Hamburger and Gone with the Wind. So I had been fanatical about cage when I was young. You know, I played four thirty three on my school senior recital and it seemed like a

way of getting back to my route. A few pages of blank sheet music may not seem like it took all that much concocting. The Cage said on numerous occasions that this was his hardest piece to write, and then it took him the longest coincidentally, four and a half years. I think it was a big professional risk. He had a precarious reputation as a composer already, and it was the kind of thing that's gonna make a lot of

people not take him seriously. I think he did not want to do it until he had come up with a really serious rationale. A fifteen year old high school student delivered his prize winning speech on Pan American relations

from the stage of the Hollywood Bowl. One of the greatest blessings of the United States could receive in her near future would be to have her industries halted, her businesses discontinued, her people speechless, a great pause in her world of affairs created, and finally, to have everything stop that runs until everyone should hear the last We'll go

around and the last echo fade away. Then, in that moment of complete intermission of undisturbed calm, then we should be capable of answering the question, what ought we to do for we should be hushed and silent. We should have the opportunity to learn that other people think. Born John Milton Cage, Jr. He grown up mostly in California, the son of a journalist mother and a father who

was an eccentric inventor. After high school, Cage enrolled in Pomona College to study theology, thinking he'd like to be a writer, but dropped out in his second year. He spent some years drifting through Europe and experimenting with writing, architecture, painting, and theater, but by ninety three he decided he would dedicate his life to composition, and he did. Cage bounced from coast to coast, studying with a litany of composers, but it all culminated in Los Angeles with Arnold Schernberg.

Shechrnberg was a giant an iconoclastic figurehead of the avant garde. Before fleeing his native Germany in the wake of the Third Reich, he pioneered the twelve tone technique, in which the twelve semi tones of the Western scale are ensured equal distribution. Effectively, the sacred European musical model had been turned on its head. Other composers had employed chromatic systems,

but Schrimberg's became the gold standard for the twentieth century. Cage, who lived almost exclusively in poverty into his fifties, could not afford the lessons, but Scherenberg, perhaps because of Cage's vigor and dedication, offered to tutor him for free, a gesture Cage never forgot, tutoring many of his own pupil's gratis Throughout the years following. Cage looked up to Shermburg immensely, but the teacher and student did not always see eye

to eye. I certainly had no feeling for her many and Cherenberg got attack would make it impossible for me to write music. He said, you'll come to a ball you won't be able to get through, And so I said, I I'll beat my head against that wall. For a guy who flipped the script on tunnel harmony, Schoenberg had a strict rubric for composition. I love what Cage says about writing twelve D on music because it's exactly mirrored my experience, which is you run up and down that

road matrix like a rat caught in a trap. You know, the next pictures are always spelled out for you. Struggling to support himself and his new wife, s Cage cycled through a variety of jobs up the West Coast, some musical, some not. Perhaps internalizing Schenberg's criticism, Cage avoided harmony and

opted to work largely with unpitched percussion. But while chimes, silophones, Tom Tom's and symbols were the norm, Cage arranged for his own ear and what he had available auto brake, drums, ratchets, tin cans, sheets of metal, and conch shells. The rhythmic thrust of his music and it's unorthodox orchestration found a welcome pairing at the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. Modern interpretive dance and Merce Cunningham. John was open, wasn't

so much learning as absorbing. As a dancer and choreographer, Merce Cunningham was a leading force in twentieth century dance. He could take something which was unfamiliar and discern something about it that nobody else, perhaps had even ever figured out. Cajun Cunningham collaborated endlessly on multimedia projects, developing their philosophies and artist rees in tandem. The partnership would endure for the rest of Cages life. Cage was commissioned by dancer

Sylvia Fort to accompany her new piece buckan All. It would have been perfect to use percussion instruments accompanying her dance, but the theater in the Carnegie School had no wings, and the house was very small, and there was just room for our grand piano. So the music had to be made on a piano. It couldn't be made with percussion instruments. And the time was short because she had asked me to write the piece on Tuesday and the performance was on Friday. So I thought, what's wrong is

not me because I'm working his conscientious again. The trouble is with the piano. So I decided to change it. Within these limitations, Cage, the consummate inventor, found a spark of inspiration. I went into the kitchen and got a pipe plate and came back and put it on the strings, and I knew I was going in the right direction when I heard the sound. But it bounced, so I I thought, we'll have to put something that'll stay in position,

and so I got a nail and it slipped. Then I got a would screw and with the goose it was just right. It stayed in position, and shortly I had such fascinating possibilities that I wrote the Baccana very quickly. Cage developed an instrument he would experiment with extensively in the next decade, and one of his many musical inventions that garnered curiosity in his career, the prepared piano. The basic idea is to augment the instruments sonic range by

placing objects between or along the strings. This was a complex process for Cage, and a continually evolving array of preparation techniques, notational methods, and compositions ensued. By the mid forties, Cage was in some level of personal crisis, perhaps because of his financial struggles, his lack of job security, or because his work was not being properly appreciated. I don't think you can really talk about it without also talking about the crisis he went through with his marriage UH.

He came out as a gay man. He UH left Zenion and started living with Merce Cunningham, and it was a deeply troubled time for him. The distress was evident more and more Cage channeled powerful, consuming emotions into his works for Prepared Piano. This came to a head with the Perilous Night. Cage poured his soul into the composition, but reviews were harsh, and looking back, Cage expressed his satisfaction at the piece, likening it to a tower of battle,

too many voices talking at once. If all the emotion he was putting in, all the self expression he was channeling through his music, was lost in translation, then what was the point in Cage began tutoring for free of course Indian student gitas rob High. He put the question to her, what is the function of music? Two? Sober and quiet the mind, thus making one susceptible to divine influences? That was about her teacher had told her was the

purpose of music. Therefore it was the traditional purpose from ancient times. This idea became cages mantra to quiet and sober the mind meant for him not to express emotions in his work, as he had done with The Perilous Night. Quite the opposite. Music should not feel like the composer's speaking at all. Cage looked for sources that supported his conclusion.

Like thte century theologian master Eckhart, a man should also be free from all things and actions, both inwardly and out loudly, or Indian historian and philosopher Ananda K. Kumar Swama. Our conception of art has essentially the expression of a personality, our whole view of genius, are impertinent curiosities about the artist's private life. All these things are the products of a perverted individualism and prevent our understanding of the nature

of art. Or Hamlet because there's nothing either good, but thinking makes it so or Marcel de Champ, the French born painter and sculptor, is undoubtedly associated with his nineteen seventeen work Fountain, a mass produced journal turned upside down and submitted for gallery display. De Schamp's statement called the whole social contract of art into question. The advent of the ready made brazenly decreed that art no longer needed

to express the views of its creator. It didn't even need to be manufactured by his or her own hands. To de Schamp, the transmissi and of meaning through the visual aesthetic was nowhere near as important or interesting as the intellectual quandary a posed cage looked up to De Shamp tremendously. I'm very impassed by the idea of Marcel Duchamp that a work of art is not completed by the artist, but it is completed by the listener or the observer, so that it can change from one person

to another. As a decoy for his friendship, Cage worked up the courage to ask to Shamp, a chess master, to teach him the game. They played often for the next two decades, and even turned in of Chess into a live musical performance. Cage always lost. And then there's Eric sat The Cage never met Sati, who died in

nineteen the older composer gave him considerable influence. In the nineteen sixties, Cage arranged the first ever performance of Vexations, a single page of music with a note from the composer suggesting it be played eight and sixty times in succession. The concert lasted over eighteen hours by some standards. Satia has thought of as the precursor to ambient music. Music. The move Blemont, or furniture music, is how Sati described a series of short pieces he wrote in the nineteen

tens and twenties. They could be rearranged like furniture as the performers saw fit, and repeated endlessly in an effort to blend into the sounds of the environment. A single performance was given during the composer's lifetime stage during the intermissions of a play, to fill the background while people were getting up, going to the bathroom, maybe getting a drink. However, when the music began, the audience quieted down, took their seats,

and politely direct did their attention to the orchestra. Despite Satia's reprobations reportedly shouting, go on, talking, walk about, don't listen. Sati's experimentation with the fundamental structure of music seemed to be what informed Cage the most. Certainly, the t offered the image of a much calmer, not so gold directed music.

It was easy for Cage to use the ty as proof of his arguments about the rhythmic structure of music being the important part, and that you could just outline a rhythmic structure and then fill it in, which is what Cage did a whole lot of in the forties, and in a way you can say he spent the rest of his life outlining the rhythmic structure first and then just coming up with something to fill it. Cage give a lecture at Vassar College and which he pitched

some new composition ideas. I have, for instance, several new desires. Two of them may seem absurd, but I am serious about them. First, to compose a piece of uninterrupted silence and sell it to the music company. It will be three or four and a half minutes long, these being the standard lengths of canned music, and a saddle will be silent prayer. The second idea he mentioned was composing for twelve radios. It came to fruition in one as

imaginary landscape number four. Silent Prayer is clearly the progenitor of fourty three, the title of the proposed piece, As Gan points out, it was an undeniable link to their perennial philosophy by Aldis Huxley, a study of religious theologies that Cage cited as one of his most influential reads. Chapter fifteen is entitled Silent Chapter sixteen Prayer. The main difference between Silent Prayer and four thirty three is one

of intention. It. Just gribing Silent Prayer, Cage seems less concerned with sobering and quieting the mind, but with opposition, perhaps even protest, to the music company Muzak. Those low key instrumental arrangements colloquially known as background or elevator music. By the nineteen forties, the company was spreading from city to city hawking its catalogs of stimulus progression music. The conceit was that muzak enhanced workplace productivity and made workers happier.

Music is now being piped into banks, insurance companies, publishing houses, and other offices where brain workers find that it lessens tension and keeps everyone in a happier frame of mind. Factors that distract attention change of tempo, loud brasses, vocals are eliminated, orchestras of strings and woodwinds predominate, the tones, blending with the surroundings, as do proper colors in a room. The workers should be no more aware of the music

than of good lighting. The rhythms reaching him subconsciously create a feeling of well being and eliminate stream of the thousands of venues music infiltrated during the era, it meant formal opposition. In the nation's capital, a public program called Music as You Ride piped music into d C busses under the auspices of improving everyone's commute. A group of opposed writers organized and sued the city, claiming that they had become a captive audience for corporate interests and that

their First Amendment rights were being violated. The case reached the Supreme Court, where the judges ruled in favor of the city, but the backlash crystallized the way a lot of free thinkers felt about Muzak. Well, like most musicians, I think most of the words I used for music would not be sayable on radio. Is a podcast, you can say whatever you want, right, Okay, Well, it's awful stuff.

I hate going to the grocery store and listening to these horrible arrangements of old sixties songs that I thought would die out decades ago. It's insidious, you know. I think the Cages generation was right to be horrified by music, And it's a terrible thing for a composer, because you're trying to concentrate on your own music and you good ideas in your head, and this stuff is just blasting

at you. The idea that Cage could write a silent piece the same length of time that music was sold in it was kind of a political gesture, a freedom from corporate control for a couple of minutes that later turned into the Zen aspect of it we know now, but it would It's turned out it's kind of a political protest. Cage's interest in Zen also began with Altis Hucksen. Huxley pointed out that all the various religions who were we're in the same that they simply had different flavors.

So in his book you were able to taste all the various funds, and I found the taste of Zen Buddhism, Martin mind I king than any other. The embodiment of Zen involves silencing the ego, that chattering voice in the back of your head, working and working, and then in that silence comes the ability to recognize the innate connection between all things and furthermore, the lack of difference between

all things. Right after World War two and not not many people remember, there was a tremendous interest in everything Japanese hiku flooded into America. Japanese paintings became very popular, and he was part of a very broad interest in Japanese culture in the art throughout the ages. The philosophy of Zen tends to be housed in the realm of storytelling. The what's the sound of one hand? Pappy the Haikup the old Pond, A frog jumps in pluck. John Cage

was particularly fond of recounting ancdotes about his teacher. I said Suzuki. I was struck by a story about Suzuki di sas he attended an conference of philosophers in Hawaii and the first day, after a lecture, when they all went out into the hall, another philosopher asked Suzuki what he thought of the lecture he had just heard, and Suzuki said, it was a very good lecture, but the

important thing is zen is life. And the next day there was another lecture, and the same philosopher asked him after that one what he thought of it, and he said it was also very good, but the important thing is zen is death. And the philosophy was surprised and said, how can you say life one day and death the next? And Suzuki said, and then there isn't much difference between. He said. It was then that saved him from needing psychoanalysis and helped him find some calm in his life.

I think his personality went through a big change around ninety. He became kind of saintly and humorous and much calmer and he was, he was amazing figure. After that as an approach, completely reshapes how one looks at four three. Gan writes in his book, the sense phenomenon, no matter how small or ephemeral, is not trivial, because the meaning or meaninglessness, if you prefer, of all existence is in

caps related within it. Substitute for the PLoP of that frog, any sound that one might hear during four three, the rain pattering on the roof of the Maverick Concert Hall, for instance, and the connection between cages, silent peace and zen starts to emerge if you are able to appreciate, at least on an intellectual level, that from a zen standpoint, there is no difference between playing a note and not

playing a note. The chord on the piano and a call from an audience member behind you, and the pattern of the rain on the Maverick Concert Hall roof are not different but the same thing. Then you may be able to think of four thirty three as something more profound than a joke, a hoax, or a deliberately provocative and nihilistic active data. If you can turn toward the whir of the wind in the oak trees, or the pulse of the ceiling fan the same attention you were

about to turn to the melodies of the pianist. You may have a few moments of realizing that the division you habitually maintained between art and life, between beautiful things and commonplace ones, is artificial, and that making it separates you off from life and deadens you to the magic around you. While Zen would continue to be an influence on Cage for the rest of his life, he never took up one of its fundamental practices, sas and meditation.

Instead of sitting cross legged and reflection, Cage formulated music to quiet the mind. The ego has the capacity to cut itself off from the rest of mind or to flow with it, and it does that by developing likes and discikes, taste in memory. And if you do is Zen wants you to do, get a free of your tastes and memory and likes and discikes. H then you

have to discipline yourself. And my discipline was that of the eaching and shifting my responsibility from making choices to asking questions and getting the answers by means whom they ancient kin testing method of the eaching. The eaching is an ancient divination method of Chinese descent. You pose a quandary to the eaching, any sort of dilemma you'd request oracular guidance on. Three coins are tossed. Each heads is worth three, each tails is worth two. Add them up.

The possible sums six through nine each correspond to a style of line. Would you then draw? Repeat this process five more times, stacking the lines vertically going upwards, so you end up with a stack of six lines hexagram. This is called There are sixty four possible hexagrams. Each is accompanied by a text that you are then left to interpret to your situation. I think the philosophy of the eaching is that everything that happens is part of

a specific, unique moment and fits that moment. So if you consult the eaching, it will give you a number and a reading that have to be right for that moment. It's just a face in giving yourself up to randomness and maybe kind of a roar shock test that reading that reading at your particular moment is going to be just the right thing for you. But whereas one might normally ask the eaching for career, relationship or spiritual advice,

Cage went beyond asking for music advice. Somehow he translated that into the idea that the eaching would always give him just the right sound at the right moment. He ranged three charts, each with the possible hexagrams. The first contained rhythmic patterns to determine duration, the second sonorities, and

the third corresponded to dynamic markings. By this method, Cage painstakingly composed Music of Changes, a single phrase of music at a time David Tudor debuted at so the notes and pieces like Music of Changes that were written with the eaching are records of what eaching numbers came up at that particular time. He used a similar technique to compose four thirty three, but simply omitted the charts for

pit dynamics, requiring only chance determination of the length. You won't believe this, probably that I wrote for thirty three a note by note, and all of the notes were silent, but they all had different lengths, and when I added them all up, they came to four thirty three. That same year, Cage's friend and collaborator Robert Roschenberg, lit his own fire in the art world. The white paintings are exactly what they sound like a series of modular panels

painted in all white. But despite claims of Emperor's new clothes, prank, hoax, and stunt, the critical response has shifted dramatically over time. From the Museum of Modern Arts website, Rosenberg's primary aim was to create a painting that looked untouched by human hands, and so it's simply arrived in the world, fully formed and absolutely pure. From the Guggenheim. Rachenberg's uninflicted all white surfaces eliminated gesture and denied all possibility of narrative or

external reference. Cage, as you can surmise, wasn't thralled. What could be freer from likes and dislikes Again, Cage saw the rules of art changing and a pathway opening up before him. Cage would later say the push to finish four thirty three required not guts but the example of Robert Rachenburg, and in the introduction to his n books Silence, Cage makes sure the score is set straight to whom it may concern. The white paintings came first, My silent

peace came later. The culmination of all of this may have been enough, but there was one more stop on the path to four three. It was after I got to Boston that I went into the Anacoi chamber at Harvard University. Anybody who knows me knows this story. I am constantly telling it. An antacoic chamber, as in echo three, is a padded room specifically designed to absorb all sound reflections. They're usually in laboratories or universities, like the one Cage

visited at Harvard, and used for designing technology or studying acoustics. Anyway, in that silent room, I heard two sons, one high and one low. Afterward, I asked the engineer in charge, why if the room was so silent, I had heard two sounds. He said, described them I did. He said, the high one was your nervous system in operation. The low one was your blood in the circulation. The way Cage tells the story, this was the moment that secured it for him. For the first time, he was sure

there was no such thing silence. I found out that silence, as the absence of sound, doesn't exist. Those two sounds are built in to the listener. I don't intend my blood to circulate, it just circulates. And I don't intend my nervous system two be turned on it just is. Therefore, silence is non intention. Add to the list of definitions.

A work governed only by duration, a frame drawn to focus your attention, a blank canvas altered by the presence of the listener, a rejection of taste, a demonstration of the fact that silence is not silent, a display of nonintention, a respite from the noisy world, not of sound, but

of one's own mind, a meditation. Cage was dismissed for four thirty three and a lot of other things he did by the real snooty classical critics at the large, big city newspapers, but he was very warmly treated by critics all across the country, and you know, non music critics, I mean just people who wrote about him, and they really get four thirty three. It's not a hard piece to explain why he did it or what the experience

of listening to it means. I think in the book I say it's his best understood piece and his least understood piece. Well. Four three eventually became an obligatory mention in the composer's byline. The piece was by no means famous overnight for a decade after Cage wrote for thirty three. I don't think it's I don't think I got much traction at all. Don't think many people found out about it. He was still not very well known after he wrote it.

He only mentioned the piece twice in his book Silence. Silence, a collection of cages lectures and essays from the last two decades, was published in through Wesleyan University Press. In large part, it's a manifesto of what Cage had come

to believe about music. It was Silence that made him famous in nineteen so I think the piece took a long time to get off the ground, and it really became famous because everybody read Cage's fantastic book, and the book made him financially successful and secured his career, and four thirty three became kind of the emblem of the book. I mean, the book is called Silence. They're very closely associated now. Keijan thought resonated particularly with the next generation

of composers. Minimalism music, concred and acousmatic music, two works that criss cross pop in the avant garde. Like Laurie Anderson. I suppose that's what I like a lot about Cage. He's pretty funny. It makes me laugh, I Trista, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and any piece who's intents are spelled out in a note from the composer, like Lamont Young's composition, which consists of instructions like the performer should prepare any composition and then perform it as well as

he can. Cage himself conceived of two sequels zero zero zero in a situation, provided with maximum amplification, performing disciplined action and one cube booty sound system in the concert hole so that the whole thing is on the edge of feedback. It's out actually feeding back. For thirty three has been performed by countless individuals, symphonies, high school students,

rock bands, techno artists. One of the most famous renditions by the BBC Symphony Orchestra was broadcast live over Radio three. It's made its way into the pop sphere two recorded by the likes of Frank's Appa and The Magnetic Feel Else. It was even somewhat flippantly turned into a Ringtown dance book provides a detailed discography of fourty three. There are a lot of recordings at four thirty three, and there

are three ways to do it. Wanted just to have a blank section on your disk, nothing on there at all. What most people out for is recording some natural environment like that. I heard a recording made at a in a lush tropical forest in Japan with the brook running and everything, and some people like Frank Zapp is recording actually perform it and record themselves performing it, and you

can tell they're there. And at the end of his recording, Frank Zappa gets up and walks away, and so you're listening to it, and you're listening to nothing except maybe you hear a little bit of shuffling or anything. And then at the end he said, oh, that's Frank Zapple walking away. We'll take this Zappa option. I encourage you, wherever you are, whatever you're doing, to stop and take seventy three seconds to just be quiet and listen. Afterwards,

this music will click on. It was composed with chance methods and features my college professor Francisco Albo giving me feedback on my paper about John Cage Stop Watching. Three to one one Ephemeral is written, is sampled by and produced by Annie Reese, Matt Frederick, and Tristan McNeil, with additional mixing from Josh Thin and technical assistance from Sherry Larson. I cannot recommend Kyle Gan's work enough. No such thing as Silence is just one of many books and articles

he has written. And his music is fantastic too. Learn more about him at kyle gan dot com and more on everything you heard here at ephemeral dot schet means much. I feel us visus what the bar scooch those the pilots is um music is not about about something. He's not about the expression of the composed music is the embodiment and we have to either observer works. Don't know, but I think this is the super rises question in business.

Next time on the season finale of the summer and cleaning on a closet, we found some old dick to belt. I've tried to rig up the machine to see if we could pick up some right. This is an odd tape. This is a bit historical story. The problem is thirty one years of magnetic decoration. I have no idea what it's gonna look like. These are role These are about five different takes or spliced together. Here they're a take.

The images were jumping, the sound got worked. Don't know whether it sure it sure, It seems like a cool She was afraid she would forget what it sounded like. Forty years shorty one years later, I can't understand why I recorded so much of it, disbelief that anyone ever would be interested in listening to this. How nice it is for us to be in here playing with this machine, like years of recording over the same tape. Yeah, I don't think there's any audio really, so I don't think

there's much. Visit is in the world wide and interact with this, and so the media at the room. It's on rock podcast and media is that I radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you list in your favorite chairs,