4′33″
4′33″ is a modernist composition by American experimental composer John Cage. It was composed in 1952 for any instrument or combination of instruments; the score instructs performers not to play their instruments throughout the three movements. It is divided into three movements, lasting 30 seconds, 2 minutes and 23 seconds, and 1 minute and 40 seconds, respectively, although Cage later stated that the movements' durations can be determined by the musician. As suggested by the title, the composition lasts 4 minutes and 33 seconds. It is marked by silence except for ambient sound, which is intended to contribute to the performance.
4′33″ was conceived around 1947–48, while Cage was working on the piano cycle Sonatas and Interludes. Many prior musical pieces were largely composed of silence, and silence played a notable role in his prior work, including Sonatas and Interludes. His studies on Zen Buddhism during the late 1940s about chance music led him to acknowledge the value of silence in providing an opportunity to reflect on one's surroundings and psyche. Recent developments in contemporary art also bolstered Cage's understanding on silence, which he increasingly began to perceive as impossible after Rauschenberg's White Painting was first displayed.
4′33″ premiered in 1952 and was met with shock and widespread controversy; many musicologists revisited the very definition of music and questioned whether Cage's work qualified as such. Cage intended 4′33″ to be experimental—to test the audience's attitude to silence and prove that any auditory experience may constitute music, seeing that absolute silence cannot exist. Although 4′33″ is labelled as four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, Cage maintains that the ambient noises heard during the performance contribute to the composition. Since this counters the conventional involvement of harmony and melody in music, many musicologists consider 4′33″ to be the birth of noise music, and some have likened it to Dadaist art. 4′33″ also embodies the idea of musical indeterminacy, as the silence is subject to the individual's interpretation; thereby, one is encouraged to explore their surroundings and themselves, as stipulated by Lacanianism.
4′33″ greatly influenced modernist music, furthering the genres of noise music and silent music, which—whilst still controversial to this day—reverberate among many contemporary musicians. Cage re-explored the idea of silent composition in two later renditions: 0′00″ and One3. In a 1982 interview, and on numerous other occasions, he stated that 4′33″ was his most important work. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians describes 4′33″ as Cage's "most famous and controversial creation". In 2013, Dale Eisinger of Complex ranked the composition eighth in his list of the greatest performance art works.
Background
The concept
The first time Cage mentioned the idea of a piece composed entirely of silence was during a 1947 lecture at Vassar College, A Composer's Confessions. At this time, he was working on the cycle for piano Sonatas and Interludes. Cage told the audience that he had "several new desires", one of which was:Prior to this, silence had played a major role in several of Cage's works composed before 4′33″. The Duet for Two Flutes, composed when Cage was 22, opens with silence, and silence was an important structural element in some of the Sonatas and Interludes, Music of Changes and Two Pastorales. The Concerto for prepared piano and orchestra closes with an extended silence, and Waiting, a piano piece composed just a few months before 4′33″, consists of long silences framing a single, short ostinato pattern. Furthermore, in his songs The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs and A Flower Cage directs the pianist to play a closed instrument, which may be understood as a metaphor of silence.
However, at the time of its conception, Cage felt that a fully silent piece would be incomprehensible, and was reluctant to write it down: "I didn't wish it to appear, even to me, as something easy to do or as a joke. I wanted to mean it utterly and be able to live with it." Painter Alfred Leslie recalls Cage presenting a "one-minute-of-silence talk" in front of a window during the late 1940s, while visiting Studio 35 at New York University.
Precursors
Although he was a pioneer of silent music, Cage was not the first to compose it. Others, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, had already published related work, which possibly influenced Cage. As early as 1907, Ferruccio Busoni delineated the importance of silence in music:An example is the Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man by Alphonse Allais, consisting of 24 empty measures. Allais was a companion of his fellow composer Erik Satie, and, since Cage admired the latter, the Funeral March may have motivated him to compose 4′33″, but he later wrote that he was not aware of Allais' work at the time.
Silent compositions of the twentieth century preceding Cage's include the In futurum movement from the Fünf Pittoresken by Erwin Schulhoff—solely comprising rests— and Yves Klein's Monotone–Silence Symphony, in which the second and fourth movements are bare twenty minutes of silence.
Similar ideas had been envisioned in literature. For instance, Harold Acton's prose fable Cornelian mentions a musician conducting "performances consisting largely of silence". In 1947, jazz musician Dave Tough joked that he was writing a play in which "a string quartet is playing the most advanced music ever written. It's made up entirely of rests... Suddenly, the viola man jumps up in a rage and shakes his bow at the first violin. 'Lout', he screams, 'you played that last measure wrong'".
Direct influences
Zen Buddhism
Since the late 1940s, Cage had been studying Zen Buddhism, especially through Japanese scholar Daisetz Suzuki, who introduced the field to the Western World. Thereon, he connected sounds in silence to the notions of "unimpededness and interpenetration". In a 1951/1952 lecture, he defined unimpededness as "seeing that in all of space each thing and each human being is at the center", and interpenetration as the view "that each one of the is moving out in all directions penetrating and being penetrated by every other one no matter what the time or what the space", concluding that "each and every thing in all of time and space is related to each and every other thing in all of time and space".Cage believed that sounds existed in a state of unimpededness, as each one is not hindered by the other due to them being isolated by silence, but also that they interpenetrate each other, since they work in tandem with each other and 'interact' with the silence. Hence, he thought that music is intrinsically an alternation between sound and silence, especially after his visit to Harvard University's anechoic chamber. He increasingly began to see silence as an integral part of music since it allows for sounds to exist in the first place—to interpenetrate each other. The prevalence of silence in a composition also allowed the opportunity for contemplation on one's psyche and surroundings, reflecting the Zen emphasis on meditation music as means to soothe the mind. As he began to realize the impossibility of absolute silence, Cage affirmed the psychological significance of 'lack of sound' in a musical composition:
In 1951, Cage composed the Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra, which can be seen as a representation of the concept of interpenetration.