4′33″ (pronounced "Four minutes, thirty-three seconds"[1]) is a three-movement composition[2][3] by American experimental composer John Cage (1912–1992). It was composed in 1952 for any instrument (or combination of instruments), and the score instructs the performer not to play the instrument during the entire duration of the piece throughout the three movements (which, for the first performance, were divided into thirty seconds for the first, two minutes and twenty-three seconds for the second, and the third being one minute and forty seconds). The piece purports to consist of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed,[4] although it is commonly perceived as "four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence".[5][6]
4′33″ is Cage's most famous and most controversial composition,[2] and by far the most well known of the numerous musical works that consist mainly of silence.
Conceived around 1947–1948, while the composer was working on Sonatas and Interludes,[2] 4′33″ became for Cage the epitome of his idea that any sounds constitute, or may constitute, music.[7] It was also a reflection of the influence of Zen Buddhism, which Cage studied since the late 1940s. In a 1982 interview, and on numerous other occasions, Cage stated that 4′33″ was, in his opinion, his most important work.[8]
4′33″ is an example of automaticism. Since the Romantic Era composers have been striving to produce music that could be separated from any social connections, transcending the boundaries of time and space. In automaticism, composers wish to completely remove both the composers and the artist from the process of creation. This is motivated by the belief that creation without social pressure is impossible, there is no way for us to truly express ourselves without infusing the art with the social standards that we have been subjected to since birth. Therefore, the only way to achieve truth is to remove the artist from the process of creation. Cage achieves that by employing chance (e.g. use of the I Ching, or tossing coins) to make compositional decisions. In 4′33″, neither artist nor composer has any impact on the piece, Cage has no way of controlling what ambient sounds will be heard by the audience.[9]
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Silence played a major role in several of Cage's works composed before 4′33″. The Duet for Two Flutes (1934), composed when Cage was 22, opens with silence, and silence was an important structural element in some of the Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48), Music of Changes (1951) and Two Pastorales (1951). The Concerto for prepared piano and orchestra (1951) closes with an extended silence, and Waiting (1952), 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 (1942) and A Flower (1950) Cage directs the pianist to play a closed instrument, which may be understood as a metaphor of silence.[10]
The first time Cage mentioned the idea of a piece composed entirely of silence was during a 1947 (or 1948) lecture at Vassar College, A Composer's Confessions. Cage told the audience that he had "several new desires", one of which was
to compose a piece of uninterrupted silence and sell it to Muzak Co. It will be three or four-and-a-half minutes long—those being the standard lengths of "canned" music and its title will be Silent Prayer. It will open with a single idea which I will attempt to make as seductive as the color and shape and fragrance of a flower. The ending will approach imperceptibility.[11]
At the time, however, Cage felt that such a piece would be "incomprehensible in the Western context," 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."[12] 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.[13]
In 1951, Cage visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. An anechoic chamber is a room designed in such a way that the walls, ceiling and floor absorb all sounds made in the room, rather than reflecting them as echoes. Such a chamber is also externally sound-proofed. Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but he wrote later, "I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation."[14] Cage had gone to a place where he expected total silence, and yet heard sound. "Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music."[15] The realisation as he saw it of the impossibility of silence led to the composition of 4′33″.
Another cited influence[12] for this piece came from the field of the visual arts. Cage's friend and sometimes colleague Robert Rauschenberg had produced, in 1951, a series of white paintings, seemingly "blank" canvases (though painted with white house paint) that in fact change according to varying light conditions in the rooms in which they were hung, the shadows of people in the room and so on. This inspired Cage to use a similar idea, as he later stated, "Actually what pushed me into it was not guts but the example of Robert Rauschenberg. His white paintings… when I saw those, I said, 'Oh yes, I must. Otherwise I'm lagging, otherwise music is lagging'." Cage's musical equivalent to the Rauschenberg paintings uses the "silence" of the piece as an aural "blank canvas" to reflect the dynamic flux of ambient sounds surrounding each performance; the music of the piece is natural sounds of the players, the audience, the building, and the outside environment.
Cage was not the first composer to conceive of a piece consisting solely of silence. Precedents and prior examples include:
| They missed the point. There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out. |
| — John Cage speaking about the premiere of 4′33″.[8] |
The premiere of the three-movement 4′33″ was given by David Tudor on August 29, 1952, at Woodstock, New York as part of a recital of contemporary piano music. The audience saw him sit at the piano and, to mark the beginning of the piece, close the keyboard lid. Some time later he opened it briefly, to mark the end of the first movement. This process was repeated for the second and third movements.[20]
The piece remains controversial to this day, and is seen as challenging the very definition of music.
In defining noise music and its value, Paul Hegarty in Noise/Music: A History (2007) contends that Cage's 4′33″ represents the beginning of noise music proper. For Hegarty, noise music, as with 4′33″, is that music made up of incidental sounds that represent perfectly the tension between "desirable" sound (properly played musical notes) and undesirable "noise" that make up all noise music.[21]
4′33″ challenges, or rather exploits to a radical extent, the social regiments of the modern concert life etiquette, experimenting on unsuspecting concert-goers to prove an important point. First, the choice of a prestigious venue and the social status of the composer and the performers automatically heightens audience's expectations for the piece. As a result, the listener is more focused, giving Cage's 4′33″ the same amount of attention (or perhaps even more) as if it were Beethoven's 9th.[22] Thus, even before the performance, the reception of the work is already predetermined by the social setup of the concert. Furthermore, the audience's behavior is limited by the rules and regulation of the concert hall; they will quietly sit and listen to 4′33” of ambient noise. It is not easy to get a large group of people to listen to ambient for nearly five minutes; unless they are regulated by the concert hall etiquette.
The second point made by 4′33″ concerns duration. According to Cage, duration is the essential building block of all of music. This distinction is motivated by the fact that duration is the only element shared by both silence and sound. As a result, the underlying structure of any musical piece consists of an organized sequence of time buckets.[23] They could be filled with either sounds, silence or noise; where neither of these elements is absolutely necessary for completeness. In the spirit of his teacher Schoenberg, Cage managed to emancipate the silence and the noise to make it acceptable or perhaps even integral part of his music composition. 4′33″ serves as a radical and extreme illustration of this concept, if the time buckets are only necessary parts of the musical composition then what stops the composer from filling them with no intentional sounds?
The third point is that the work of music is defined not only by its content but also by the behavior it elicits from the audience.[22] In the case of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring this would consist of widespread dissatisfaction leading up to violent riots. In Cage's 4′33″, the audience felt cheated by having to listen to no composed sounds from the performer. Nevertheless, in 4′33″ the audience contributed the bulk of the musical material of the piece. Since the piece consists of exclusively ambient noise, the audience's behavior, their whispers and movements, are essential elements that fill the above-mentioned time buckets.
Several versions of the score exist:[24]
Additionally, a facsimile, reduced in size, of the Kremen manuscript, appeared in July 1967 in Source 1, no. 2:46–54; the First Tacet Edition is described in Nyman 1974, 3, but it is not reproduced in that book.
There is some discrepancy between the lengths of individual movements specified in different versions of the score. The Woodstock printed program specifies the lengths 30″, 2′23″ and 1′40″, as does the Kremen manuscript, and presumably the original manuscript had the same indications. However, in the First Tacet Edition Cage writes that at the premiere the timings were 33″, 2′40″ and 1′20″. In the Second Tacet Edition he adds that after the premier a copy has been made for Irwin Kremen, in which the timelengths of the movements were 30″, 2′23″ and 1′40″. The causes of this discrepancy are not currently understood, the original manuscript being still lost.[1]
In 1962, Cage wrote 0′00″, which is also referred to as 4′33″ No. 2. The directions originally consisted of one sentence: "In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action." The first performance had Cage write that sentence.
The second performance added four new qualifications to the directions: "the performer should allow any interruptions of the action, the action should fulfill an obligation to others, the same action should not be used in more than one performance, and should not be the performance of a musical composition."[11]
In late 1989, three years before his death, Cage revisited the idea of 4′33″ one last time. He composed One3, the full title of which is One3 = 4′33″ (0′00″) + . As in all number pieces, "One" refers to the number of performers required. The score instructs the performer to build a sound system in the concert hall, so that "the whole hall is on the edge of feedback, without actually feeding back." The content of the piece is the electronically amplified sound of the hall and the audience.
4′33″ has been recorded on several occasions: Frank Zappa recorded it as part of A Chance Operation: The John Cage Tribute, on the Koch label, 1993; in 2002, James Tenney performed 4′33″ at Rudolf Schindler's historic Kings Road House in celebration of the work's 50th anniversary.[26]
Several performances of 4′33″ including a "techno remix" by New Waver were broadcast on Australian radio station ABC Classic FM, as part of a program exploring "sonic responses" to Cage's work.[27]
On January 16, 2004, at the Barbican Centre in London, the BBC Symphony Orchestra gave the UK's first orchestral performance of this work. The performance was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, and one of the main challenges was that the station's emergency backup systems are designed to switch on and play music whenever apparent silence (dead air) lasting longer than a preset duration is detected. They had to be switched off for the sole purpose of this performance.[28]
A tongue-in-cheek version was recorded by the staff of the UK Guardian newspaper on January 16, 2004.[29]
In 2004, the work was voted to be number 40 in the ABC radio's Classic 100 piano countdown.
On December 5, 2010 an international simultaneous performance of Cage's 4′33″ took place involving over 200 performers, amateur and professional musicians, vocalists and artists. The global orchestra, conducted live by Bob Dickinson, former member of post-punk group Magazine, via video link, performed the piece in support of the Cage Against The Machine campaign to bring 4′33″ to Christmas number 1 in 2010. A second performance took place on December 12, 2010.[30]
In 2010 a group was set up on the social networking website Facebook that encouraged people to buy a new rendition of 4′33″ in the week leading up to Christmas 2010,[31] in the hope that it would prevent the winner of the seventh series of The X Factor topping the UK Singles Chart and achieving the Christmas number one.[32] The group was inspired by an earlier campaign in which a Facebook group set up by Jon and Tracey Morter prompted people to buy "Killing in the Name" by American metal group Rage Against the Machine in the week before Christmas 2009,[33] and has therefore been dubbed "Cage Against the Machine".[34][35] The creators of the Facebook group hope that reaching number one would help to promote the piece and "make December 25 'a silent night'."[36] At its peak on December 14, 2010, the Facebook group had more than 85,000 members.[37]
The campaign received support from several celebrities. It first came into prominence after it was mentioned by British science writer Ben Goldacre on his Twitter profile.[38] Within two weeks, British newspaper The Sun reported that the Facebook group had been backed by more than 3,000 members.[39] One of several similar campaigns, the Facebook group was called "the only effort this year with a hope of [reaching Number One]" by The Guardian journalist Tom Ewing in September.[40] XFM DJ Eddy Temple-Morris also voiced his support on his blog,[41] as did Luke Bainbridge.[42] This version of Cage's work failed to make number 1, but charted at number 21 on the UK Singles Chart.[43]
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