CMU reports:
The BBC Symphony Orchestra will perform John Cage's legendary piece 4'33" - just under five minutes of complete silence - as part of a season celebrating the avante garde composer's work. What's more the performance
will be broadcast on both BBC4 and BBC Radio 3 - the latter will have to
turn off its emergency system which cuts in after a few minutes of silence.
When Cage wrote the piece in 1952 he said the work aimed to demonstrate that
"wherever we are what we hear mostly is noise".
The BBC are keen to stress the silence you will hear at the Barbican Centre
this weekend is Cages and not that created by Wombles man Mike Batt. As
previously reported Batt had to pay a six figure sum to a charity after Cage's people threatened to sue him over a silent track on one of his albums which he co-credited to Cage.
Article comments
1 - Mark Saleski
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.
2 - Craig Lyndall
I think they should make a radio edit that is about 3.2 minutes long.
3 - Eric Olsen
great one!
4 - ClubhouseCancer
A "clean" version (for Wal-Mart) and a "dirty" version (for the rest of us adults).
5 - Eric Olsen
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.
6 - Mark Saleski
..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.
7 - Eric Olsen
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.
8 - Joe
More Cowbell!
9 - Eric Olsen
silent, conceptual cowbell
10 - Joe
Exactly.
11 - Tom Johnson
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"."
12 - Mark Saleski
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.
13 - Eric Olsen
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?
14 - ParticleMan
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
15 - Craig Lyndall
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.
16 - Eric Olsen
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.
17 - David
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.