And now, 4'33" by John Cage..........

[SussexSpur]

 

[Robot Chicken]

John Cage's most famous musical composition is called 4'33".
It consists of the pianist going to the piano, and not hitting any keys for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. (He uses a stopwatch to time this.) In other words, the entire piece consists of silences -- silences of different lengths, they say.

On the one hand, as a musical piece, 4'33" leaves almost no room for the pianist's interpretation: as long as he watches the stopwatch, he can't play it too fast or too slow; he can't hit the wrong keys; he can't play it too loud, or too melodramatically, or too subduedly.

On the other hand, what you hear when you listen to 4'33" is more a matter of chance than with any other piece of music -- nothing of what you hear is anything the composer wrote.

 

[Ned]

Pretentious crap if you ask me

 

[Frutos]

Pretentious crap if you ask me

What he said.

 

[Pevenseagull]

I've got the 12"

 

[Trufflehound]

I preferred the Marcel Marceau remix.

 

[Grunty]

Mike Batt [ Wombles producer amongst others].
Had a silent track on one of his albums- he was successfully sued by Mr Cage's estate....
!

 

[Lord Bracknell]

I congratulate Downloaded Penguin for waiting 1 hour and 4 minutes before responding to Sussex Spur's original message.

And then having nothing of his own to say.







Sublime.

 

[medicine man]

On the cd single of Orbital's "Are We Here?" there is a mix of the track called "Criminal Justice Bill?"- which is 4mins of silence...
...they (as far as I know) haven't been sued by the John Cage estate.

 

[The Clown of Pevensey Bay]

.

 

[Robot Chicken]

I congratulate Downloaded Penguin for waiting 1 hour and 4 minutes before responding to Sussex Spur's original message.

And then having nothing of his own to say.







Sublime.

Sussex Spur seemed to be enquiring as to exactly what was this song so I replied quoting information about the piece.

It appears that neither of us knew what it was, although in cases like this Google is your friend.

 

[Bluejuice]

It's better than anything else Cage ever composed.

 

[Robot Chicken]

I'll try and download it later

 

[Trufflehound]

When played live the object is to show that silence is never silent, because by the end the audience are squirming and trying not to make any noise, which only results in a cacophony of stifled coughing and squeaking chairs.

That can actually be very amusing.

Listening to it on record however, is pretentious bollocks I would agree.

 

[Icy Gull]

Musical equivalent of quite a few pieces of modern art I've seen then..pretentious bollocks covers it perfectly

 

[tedebear]

I rather listen to 4'33'' of farting frankly...

 

[Storer68]

Can you shut up, I'm trying to listen to the music