I like classical music - Handel, Bach, Schubert, Beethoven, etc…but I don’t now if I was prepared for John Cage’s 4:33. I guess it could only be a once-off - silence, absolute silence, sold as a conceptual piece of modern classical music. The culmination of all things “modern”, 4:33 had to be created to be appreciated, but from that height no composer could ever escape.

The piece, if you have never heard of it, is pure silence. It is a three-movement composition, but all of it is silence. Performed live, the coughing and grunting of the audience parlays into the track, and it is supposed to be music in a modern sense.

Conceived/composed (?) by Cage in 1948, 4:33 deserves a round sneering. The performance is silent - it’s Erik Satie’s minimalism taken to extremes. Such an extreme, in fact, that you hear nothing, apart from incidental, accidental random sounds (the coughs, etc).

Here is a link to the video on YouTube. As brilliant as the whole concept really is, it can only be done once. I personally prefer Satie’s ‘Gymnopaedies’, but really - is silence by the BBC Symphony Orchestra a valid musical expression? There’s a feeling, with Cage, that he followed destiny and fell upon the concept of pure silence, which then had to be followed to the extreme of its logic.

If you listen to it in a quiet country field, or a busy office on your headphones, good luck to you. It’s not a piece of music you’ll return to. But those four-and-a-half (odd) minutes of silence are up to you. And, when that’s finished, let the music continue. And I put a heavy wager that the song that follows won’t measure up to the 4:33 that Cage set down for all of us to wonder at and YouTube comment against. Here’s a video of the song being performed, with typical BBC irony. Is silence not the language of the world?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under Classical & Soundtrack, Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.