4'33''

John Cage was a composer who became fascinated by the possibilities of silence.
In the late 1940's he began to study Zen Buddhism and was told by one of his teachers that the purpose of music in terms of Zen is ‘to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences.’
Cage had also been impressed by the work of his friend Robert Rauschenberg, an artist who had produced a series of ‘white’ paintings. The canvases appeared blank but had been covered with white house paint and changed according to the play of light and shadow over their surface.
When Cage saw these paintings he felt as if a challenge had been laid down to music.
He said:

“The white paintings...when I saw those I said ‘Oh yes, I must. Otherwise I’m lagging, otherwise music is lagging.’”

Cage had used silence in his works previously. ‘The Duet for Two Flutes’(1934) opens with a period of silence, and silence is an important element in some of the ‘Sonatas and Interludes’ (1946-1948), ‘Music of Changes’ (1951) and ‘Two Pastorales’ (1951). His ‘Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra’ (1951) ends with an extended silence and ‘Waiting’ (1952) is a series of silences framing a single, short pattern. In his songs ‘The Wonderful Window of Eighteen Springs’ (1942) and ‘A Flower’ (1950) there are instructions to the pianist to play a closed instrument.
In 1951 Cage visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. The chamber is a room designed to absorb sound rather than reflect it and is also externally sound proofed.
Cage went in hoping to experience pure silence but instead heard two sounds, one high and one low. When he emerged from the chamber Cage asked an engineer what the sounds were. He was told that the high sound was his nervous system and the low sound the circulation of his blood.
At this point Cage realised that any attempt to compose using absolute silence was impossible.
Instead he produced ‘4'33"’ (1952), a composition for any instrument or combination of instruments. The score instructs the performer not to play during the piece across three movements of thirty seconds, two minutes and twenty three seconds and one minute and forty seconds.
Although often described as a composition of silence the piece is actually designed to consist of the ambient sounds that are around the performer as they ‘play’.
The piece was premiered by David Tudor on the 29th of August 1952 in New York at a recital of contemporary piano music.
Tudor sat at the piano and to indicate the beginning of the piece closed the piano’s lid.
He opened and closed the lid to mark the end of each movement while turning the pages of the score, keeping track of his progress with the help of a stopwatch.
The response to the piece was mixed with many people baffled by the whole affair.
Cage was present for the premiere and felt any failure was on the part of the audience rather than the piece:

“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 on the roof and during the third the people themselves made all sorts of interesting noises as they talked or walked out...”

It was later pointed out to Cage that the duration of the piece of 273 seconds corresponds to the point on the Celsius scale of -273 degrees or Absolute Zero.
Cage replied that this was entirely coincidental.
In 1945 Cage met Merce Cunningham, a choreographer. The two became romantically involved and also collaborated on a number of projects.
One of Cunningham’s students was Paul Taylor, who went on to become an accomplished choreographer in his own right.
In 1957 Taylor premiered a new work called ‘Duet’ which used the score of ‘4'33'.
This piece consisted of a dancer and pianist walking on to the stage, standing there for four minutes and thirty three seconds and then walking off.
Louis Horst, another choreographer, wrote a review of the piece for the magazine ‘Dance Observer’.
It consisted of four inches of blank space signed off with ‘L.H.’ at the bottom...