John Cage's 4'33"

Popular myths no.433. You are referring to David Tudor's performing version, devised by him for the première, and oft-repeated since. There is however nothing in the score which indicates a piano is required, let alone what a pianist should do.

But not "ha-ha" funny.

this thread is a waste of human effort, the sort of aimless meaningless anything-goes sort of special improvisation that creates buffoons out of all who bother covering, re-listening and maybe even reconsidering this piece
(ie i am a lame third-rate goof for participating here regardless of whether you agree with me or not, and this is beneath the heaviest of punk gestures)
surely you have better things to do with your time, as this piece sets such a low benchmark for time-spending
but who would bother reading this anyway
of is this frat/ prat/ chat room humour ?
jokes are no good 2nd time around or second-hand

this thread deserves a computer-crashing hyperlink (so please insert/delete a more benign link here)

was that you gg?

It's also not an "improvisation" of any kind.

i don't know what he was thinking when he wrote 4'33" though as this was maybe his breakthrough piece -- the correct critical mass in terms of audience and exposure, the "rite of spring conditions", maybe he was giggling post 4'33" (fun cf: the mood post Sept. 11th, but hardly a year zero type re-defining moment some people maybe think of it as)

however much cage was serious fun then i still think there were problems with content, his swing too far in the it's all good/art direction

he's even more now dead a waste of time and effort imo, at odds with all other musical exprience on most levels, and btw jess i think your suggestion would create too much empty gestation in my life (from what i assume of that lifestyle), too much a vote for cage style self-celebrated preoccupation (like his mushroom collecting), but this john cage stuff is more self indulgent than is usually acceptable on the web, so am not apologising although can understand it annoying

or maybe he liked to smile for the camera. that would be too far fetched tho'.

I saw a performance of 4'33" on Friday night. It was done more as a theater piece, I thought -- dramatic "my hands are on the keys" motions. They were clearly trying to do the original version of the piece, in three movements and played on piano. Also, for some reason, it was amped, which created a loud buzzing noise.

This right after a performance of "Music for Marcel Duchamp" where the keyboardist flubbed a few of the lines. Sigh.

It was all in all a disappointment: I had great expectations for the piece (it was the first time I'd seen it live), but it was performed in such a smug and shallow way that I couldn't get much out of it.

Uhhhhh, you can't listen to gin.

You can listen to silence though!

good crack. all the pieces were enjoyable but Symphony no. 4 by Ives was probably the best in a completely over the top mentalist fashion. It seemed at times like every instrument was playing a different tune as loudly as possible. Plus they did odd things like station a few violins at the back of the hall so it was like you were hearing everything in stereo.

i was tepmted to go to a few of those concerts,but in the end only managed to get to the steve reich one in the national gallery,which was excellent...

hey, I was at that! good fun, yes? actually, they should really have put that on in the concert hall as it was probably the best thing all weekend.

because I didn't know how long the piece was I wasn't able to fully relax into a nice snooze. which was annoying.

this 'geezer' doesn't really. Philip glass is 'boxed in' with the minimalists. People like terry riley, steve reich.

John Cage isn't a minimalist. but he has composed a piece (roarotorio) which is a piece inspired by Finnegans wake. the extra track on it has him reading extracts from the book. its fab!

http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2747103

The piece is written in three movements, though.

More than anything else, it's an excersise not in composition but in listening. It doesn't make much sense as a recording (you could just sit on the couch for four-and-a-half minutes, with the stereo off), but as a concert hall event, it's fascinating. It draws a great deal of attention to the passage of time, and to the way that our perception of time is affected by what we're doing -- or not doing.

4.33 also focuses listeners on the difference between the composed, structured, governable component of a given moment in "musical" sound, and the part that has nothing to do with what the composer is able to control (the noises of the listener's body, those produced by other listeners, and even the concert hall or playback system itself).

In this sense, it's a brilliant and supremely elegant strategy against audience passivity, and even against the very idea of "the audience." In 4.33, the audience is as much the performance as John Cage's piece.

No matter how hard you try, it is simply impossible to hear the piece in its "pure" form. Total silence is unattainable, so the piece is inherently self-subverting. Which is pretty damn cool, when you think about it.

I mean, you can look at 4.33 as a positive response to the phenomena of audience noise -- the enemy of most "serious" composers and musicians.

And it's suspenseful as hell. And it's conceptually fascinating. And it challenges the idea of "composition" as much as that of "music". And, come on, it's funny.

In it's day, this piece was truly revolutionary. Sure, it now seems a bit trite, but that's beside the point.

This sounds like a Maakies comic waiting to happen.

LOL

if i thought anyone had actually been listening, i'd be more contrite.

It's like saying "vegetables are good for you". The natural (and perfectly justified) response now is "yeah, and?". There's really no reason for anyone to try and make the point any more. But if you'd been the first person to think it, the first person to say it, then that would have been major.

Interestingly, I once had a music professor point to the intro of Beethoven's 5th symphony as a precursor to Cage's 4'33". In traditional symphony structure, there must be an introduction before the main theme. But Beethoven's 5th seems to start immediately with the main theme. On closer inspection, though, there is an introduction: it's the eighth rest which precedes the three eighth notes in the theme. So it uses silence in a pivotal and functional role.

Well, not quite. The first version was written in three movements, and for piano; it was quickly revised to be for any instruments, with no movements (and I believe for any length of time).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4_33

To me, 4'33" has always seemed right on the end of some new continuum. That's how it feels, how i imagine it. Yet i've never sat through the piece actually performed.

Well i've always thought the concept was cute. Now i don't admire cute things the way i used to, so i'm less keen to let 4'33" mark out that continuum end point i've imagined. Even a reduced just-Cage continuum doesn't seem to work. 4'33" used to feel like an exclamation mark and so i wanted to assign it points for that, but now i'm not sure it belongs at the end of anything.

I suppose this is along the lines of what Tim just said. I do like trying to imagine 4'33" as like any other Cage piece by forcing myself to think about it less. Is it easier to imagine the visceral impact of this piece than of other music ? Does this mean it leaks into my thinking about other music ? Is it that or maybe the suspicion of leaks that means it annoys me so much ?

A portion of 4'33" is this week's "Discovery Download" on US iTunes. IT IS TO LOL

I really wish John cage could have taken into account ahead of time the widespreadness of this work and its effect on idiotic teenagers and undergraduate students, because the amount of "dude did a song by silence LOL" attitude I've had to put up with. . .

Also it is in 3 parts; I've seen an picture of the score, and it's there: tacit, tacit, and tacit.

related:
Please stop referencing 4'33" by John Cage

I originally posted this thread with about 100 hard returns, so that you would open it and see just white space, but that was stripped out by the ILM code and the joke never worked. That was disappointing.

I really wish John cage could have taken into account ahead of time the widespreadness of this work and its effect on idiotic teenagers and undergraduate students, because the amount of "dude did a song by silence LOL" attitude I've had to put up with. . .

This is exactly what iTunes are doing, or were doing, anyway- I'm guessing some smartass thought it would be hi-larious to roll it out for April Fool's. They've actually changed the description to something a bit more respectful; last night's originally had a bunch of "wacky" suggestions like setting it as your ringtone for someone who calls you too much.

Well, there's something to celebrate about people age 15-24 having their minds blown. That's a fun part of life, when all the assumptions that were hammered into you as a kid give way.

xpost.

Ugh, awful.

But most of the time minds aren't being blown. It's not much different than looking at a monochrome painting and saying "ha ha, that's not art, there's nothing there", i.e. its usually both condescending and a reaffirmation of your implicit assumptions by removing any seriousness or credibility that is in the work.

I've never heard of teens LOLing over 4'33'' .. but if you say so...

Is it wrong of me to have it on my iPod? It sounds best when I'm away from the kids.

I've been reading and enjoying Kyle Gann's 4'33" book. It was a Christmas gift--I'm a complete novice. I played a YouTube video of David Tudor's orginal performance for my grade 6 class, and that sparked some interesting discussion. Listening to Thirteen Harmonies right now; much of it is quite beautiful (parts remind me of the Fargo soundtrack, of all things).

The post-sea-change Cage I have been digging lately is the series of Imaginary Landscapes. Tapes, turntables, radios, a damn good time.

I'll never stop loving the prepared piano stuff the best, though.

excellent OP

The point is that relabelling silence as music is quite frankly a cunt's trick. Silence is one of my few pleasures and for Mr Smart- Aleck Cage to roll up and say "Ha ha it is music too!" is below-the- belt. Next you will be telling me that gin is music.

― Tanya, Thursday, 21 February 2002 01:00 (11 years ago)

love is like a bottle of gin, but a bottle of gin is not. like. love.

http://i.imgur.com/ejZSc5P.jpg

the emperor in his new clothes must have been listening to 4'33''.

http://images.nuchan.org/nu/src/1379456824120.jpg

he brought nothing down a peg

lol

here's a comic from 1932 by someone called Hy Cage:

http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/features/images/cartoon10.gif

when it comes to Johnny himself, everybody digs the blank staves but this versh is obviously the best:

http://hyperallergic.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Cage_433_3-1200.jpg

thought about 4'33 during rzewski's piano concerto a few months ago, the dynamic range tending to the pppp and the usual diegetic murmurings seemed to be amplified above the music, feldman and his subtly shifting patterns and long durations also accentuate ambient noises

http://i.imgur.com/ZCbcAnA.png

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voqCQSDAcn8

https://youtu.be/voqCQSDAcn8

Sometimes I truly believe this piece is the pinnacle of music in general. It's absolutely flawless, and always a pleasure to listen to.

Fucking hell.

‘the protests are robbing my Columbia students of listening to John Cage’s 4’33, the piece of music that is explicitly designed to force you to listen to…what’s around you.’ absolutely perfect pic.twitter.com/8rmj1m1QVY

— BO (@bo_austin_) April 24, 2024

He is THIS (🤏) close to getting it!

For fuck’s sake…

Lol what a dick, if only Cage had put the correct ambient sounds in the score

what must it be like to have a brain that big, i wonder? does it hurt the inside of his head?

can Columbia fire a professor for being exceedingly stupid and incapable of grasping simple points?

there was some old new left essay I read once condemning cage's philosophy for promoting political quietism in its radical acceptance of everything and I sort of vaguely agreed with it at the time

mcwhorter is somehow simultaneously weaponising and falling short of that possible strawman version of cageism

pretty impressive that mcwhorter found the single song in all of human history that is least disrupted by ambient noise to complain about being disrupted by ambient noise

— noam chompers (@NoamChompers) April 24, 2024

I’m not defending this moron but I’m thinking now that a pianist doing a performance of 4’33” and shushing the crowd every time someone made a noise would be a p good bit

I guess some people would argue that it's not that 4'33'' isn't 'disrupted by ambient noise', but rather the fact it's disrupted by ambient noise is the point, idk?

are there examples of people intentionally doing performances of 4'33'' where there is very specific/noticeable/load background noise taking place?

i'd imagine most people's experience of seeing it performed live involve a fair bit of coughing and rustling tbh

that's what I mean though, when people talk about 4'33'' they tend to mention stuff like and start to consciously become aware of the sound of traffic outside or the central heating or your own and other people's bodies etc like that's what you're expected to hear, would it make sense to perform it somewhere were you'd hear something else?

TS: "4'33" (coughing and rustling remix)" vs "4'33" (traffic noise remix)"

I've seen it twice, the first time the pianist made a point of turning the pages of the score and there was muted laughter, in a place like The Royal Festival Hall the only real ambient noise is people fidgeting, it felt kinda tense iirc.

Justice for Sonatas and Interludes imo

4'33" in an anechoic chamber, like you've never heard it befora!

Why is linguist John McWhorter is teaching a music class in the first place?

Because at some point he stopped teaching about linguistics (which he knows about) and started teaching "culture" (which he know some things about but is somehow profoundly ignorant about at the same time)

there's a war on baby, and i guess your man has enlisted

I fear that he just saw the way the wind was blowing for media-facing professors and just went with it.