There are many classically trained musicians in my extended family, the most significant being two high school cellists who live with me. They are the reason I purchased a bigger car, with which I transport their two massive instruments in bulky hard cases, to private lessons, chamber groups, and youth orchestra practices. These young musicians live in the world of musical perfectionism: there are seating auditions and placement videos, recitals, concerts, and public performances where the whole point is to perform the music as written with perfect articulation, tempo, and musicality.

Nicholas Day’s Nothing: John Cage and 4’33”, illustrated by Chris Raschka, is a musical equivalent of a breath of fresh air to this stressful musical perfectionism. Its subject matter is an experimental musician and composer whose work poked at the very concept of what constituted music. What if an accomplished pianist sat down to perform not a traditional piece of music, but instead gave audience members four and a half minutes of piano silence? The audience would lean in, at first expectant but growing increasingly confused, frustrated, fidgety, and maybe even angry. There would be chairs squeaking, muffled whispers, coughs, and maybe the hum of an HVAC system, and other peripheral sounds from the outdoors. These things, to John Cage, constituted a certain kind of music. In the absence of formal music, there was a different kind of music. There is something in absence, in other words.

Chris Raschka’s Caldecott-worthy illustrations take on a conceptually daunting task of visually representing absence. Just think about what a monumental task that is. It’s not thirty-two blank pages, but illustrations that find a way to show there’s sound in silence, or something in nothing. If that seems impossible, it nearly is, because there is no easy way to represent sound, let alone what sounds lurk in absence, but Raschka makes it look effortless.

Raschka is no Caldecott stranger. The Hello, Goodbye Window, written by Norton Juster, and A Ball for Daisy both won Caldecott medals, and Yo! Yes? garnered a Caldecott Honor. He has taken on musical themes in the past (Charlie Parker Played Be Bop; Mysterious Thelonius; John Coltrane’s Giant Steps; and Hip Hop Dog) and continues to push his illustrations to do increasingly more difficult, abstract, and conceptual work with Nothing.

The watercolor, pencil, and ink illustrations never fill the page or allotted space; there is a sense of artistic restraint here that allows the reader to breathe and imagine. The book begins by representing the traditional bass and treble clef and staff lines in a whimsical manner: sure, there are a clef and staff lines, but on them are also random musical notations (sharp signs, rests, fermatas, trills) alongside colorful geometric shapes, scribbles, and even the head of a cat and bird. This is not a typical musical composition, and a clever visual representation of what Cage’s music is conceptually getting at.

The crux of the story is David Tudor’s performance of Cage’s 4’33”, which took place in the Maverick Concert Hall, located in Woodstock, New York. Clad in a tuxedo, Tudor sits at a grand piano in what seems to be a normal piano performance, and yet nothing happens. Or does it?  A double-page spread on a pastel yellow background is filled with the word nothing scrawled across it. Another double-page spread features Tudor at the piano, hands in his lap, while members of the audience are rendered as dabs of color that suggest faces, with only a line for a facial silhouette, a brown blob for hair. It’s as if Raschka is giving us the absolute minimum in order for our minds to get the suggestion of a concert hall full of audience members in their seats, curious, questioning, and wondering just what is going on, because it sure is something. 

Nothing is an ambitious, conceptually adventurous book and should be among the top of Caldecott consideration lists; Raschka’s abstract, minimalistic illustrations strike a most difficult balance and give readers just enough of something to understand what nothing might sound like.

[Read The Horn Book Magazine review of Nothing]