Empty Words by John Cage

Empty Words by John Cage

Performance by Vincent Barras
La Centrale, Sion
From September 26, 2025 at 7:20 p.m. to September 27, 2025 at 7:24 a.m.

Empty Words, by the North American artist John Cage (1912-1992), active in music, dance, visual arts, writing and ecology, was composed between 1973 and 1975. This work, for solo voice accompanied by projections of Thoreau's drawings, very rarely performed because of its radical and extreme character, is designed to be performed, according to Cage's indications, from dusk to dawn, in four parts of 2 hours each, separated by 30-minute pauses. It uses a mixture of words, syllables and letters taken by chance from the Diary of Henry David Thoreau, the 19th-century American philosopher.