John Cage’s 4’33”

Today I learned about John Cage, the composer, and listened to his famous but controversial 4'33 piece. If you haven’t heard of it before, this is Cage’s famous silent piece, premiered in 1952 at a concert in Woodstock, New York. You can watch it here.

I had a little context so I made a lucky guess that the point of the performance was the act of listening to it. But it was still hard to listen through to the end. I was feeling restless. From what I had read, the audience didn’t see this coming, so I can imagine people feeling annoyed and confused seeing a pianist sitting idle for the entire duration.

This piece breaks all notions of what music and musical performances are. It got me curious to read up a bit to understand where he’s coming from.

Cage’s Approach to Music

A few aspects of how Cage thinks about music and sound are very interesting:

1. Music is not about the composer or the message. The composer should keep their ego out of the piece and merely facilitate the participation of the listener or the observer. In his own words:

I’m not interested in myself in my work being communication from me to a listener. I want it to be from the sounds themselves to the listener so that I make a music for which I am not so much the composer as the listener too. I’m very impressed by the idea of Marcel Duchon that a work of art is not completed by the artist but is completed by the listener or the observer. So that it can change from one person to another.

2. Let go of control by leaving decisions to chance operations or randomness, like a coin flip, and have faith that “each thing that happens is the best thing that could have happened”. To that effect, the composer would no longer dictate how the audience should perceive or feel about their piece.
3. Since a piece is now a function of random decisions and the environment, no two performances of the same piece can ever be the same.
4. In the video about silence, Cage talks about how he likes listening to the plain sounds of everyday life like the traffic.

Reflections

It’s amazing how Cage breaks away from the conventional thinking and approach to music in such a fundamental way and has the experimental mindset to keep exploring and trying new things to eventually become one of the most influential composers of the 20th century.

I’m not sure how I feel about his work, but I find his ideas to be interesting in different ways. His idea that true silence does not exist and that music can be found in everyday sounds has lessons about mindfulness and living in the present.