i love it when a 4'33" discussion comes up. everybody gets so crazy about the issues. loads of fun.

...tho i thought the Cage lawsuit was really stupid.

I think they should make a radio edit that is about 3.2 minutes long.

great one!

A "clean" version (for Wal-Mart) and a "dirty" version (for the rest of us adults).

Seriously, what you're "paying" for is the idea of silence as music. This is conceptual art as applied to music. I also think the suit was outrageous.

..and it goes along with some of the ideas that Zappa spoke about: which is that something is music if you perceive it as music.

Which applies to art in general: it's art if you say it is and can provide a conceptual framework in which to place it.

More Cowbell!

silent, conceptual cowbell

Exactly.

What's intriguing about 4'33 is that it itself is really nothing. Maybe you can argue that the open mics pick up some ambient sounds, but really, how much of the room can you really "hear"? How much of what you attribute to the recording is actually going on around you - or is even the sound of your own body? I remember reading that people being subjected to extreme isolation, where they prevent you from hearing even your own voice in these specially built tanks, reported hearing sounds after a while. It turned out that what they were hearing was their own body process - blood coursing through veins, digestion, heart beats. People make fun of 4'33" but what it does is give the listener a completely different frame of reference which forces you to evaluate sound in a completely different way than you may ever have before. However, the idea of it being "played" live, especially over radio, is pretty comical. I'd love to see the expressions of listeners who tune in right in the middle, and hear the announcers at the end, "You've just been listening to the BBC Symphony Orchestra performing John Cage's classic 4'33"."

here's the zappa quote:

The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for
other arts: figuratively--because, without this humble appliance, you can't
know where The Art stops and The Real World begins.

You have to put a 'box' around it because otherwise, what is that shit on the
wall?

If John Cage, for instance, says, "I'm putting a contact microphone on my
throat, and I'm going to drink carrot juice, and that's my composition," then
his gurgling qualifies as his composition because he put a frame around it and
said so. "Take it or leave it, I now will this to be music." After that it's a
matter of taste. Without the frame-as-announced, it's a guy swallowing carrot
juice.

Of course the other question is can you have ONLY a concept and still have art? Is silence enough of something to give the concept substance? If a tree falls in the woods and the pope hears it will the bear take a crap?

What if the frame itself is the art? And can art be outside of its physical or conceptual frame? Ie, extra-art.

this useless post brought to you by,

Particleman

More recently this has been brought up in a short story by Nick Hornby (High Fidelity) called Nipple Jesus in a collection of short stories he edited called Speaking With the Angel. Check it out Nipple Jesus was Hornby's contribution to the collection.

The other issue here is the notion of an "art world," as Arthur Danto famously characterized it. He says there is a community of art works that interact with each other, so the ral question is where does a given work of art fit in to this greater art world.

John Cage somehow weaseled free music lessons out of Schoenberg, who dropped him because he had, I believe the words were, "no musical ability." He also described jazz as something like "one person trying to play louder than all the others." I have nothing against a good joke, but John Cage was a fraud and a creep.