4'33"

4'33" by John Cage

When I first heard about John Cage's 4'33", I must admit, I was not impressed. Cage (1912 – 1992) was a famous American composer of the twentieth century who was interested in exploring things like musical indeterminacy, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments. This piece, one of his most renowned and (perhaps) most notorious, was originally composed for solo piano, and has three movements, which are a total of four minutes and thirty-three seconds in duration. The catch: during each of the three movements, the piano is not played. The movements are marked only by an opening and closing of the piano lid. In other words, the pianist sits at the keys and does practically nothing for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. And then the audience applauds. In theory. I think some audiences might throw tomatoes instead.

I myself might have considered throwing tomatoes at first, except I believe in nonviolent resistance. Rather than arm myself with rotten fruit and sit in some elite concert hall to watch a pretentious intellectual snob sit there and not play the piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, I decided I would give John Cage a chance and listen through a complete recording of the piece just once without judgment. It couldn't hurt. Afterward, I would have a good laugh at the whole enterprise and go on my way.

I was wrong.

When I actually made myself sit through a recording of this piece for the first time... something unexpected happened. I got it. A light went on inside my head, and suddenly, I knew why Cage might have composed this piece. There could be other reasons, of course, but this is the one that came to me.

Cage wants us to experience silence. And within that silence, we encounter a different level of sound.

Listening to 4'33" all the way through is hard. Most people get bored and give up within thirty seconds. But if you require yourself to stick it out, you may experience what I experienced: a heightened awareness of ambient sound. After all, nothing is truly silence. All silence is sound. But there are so many sounds that we completely filter out, because we have made certain sounds important and others of no account.

I love music, meaning in this case traditional music that actually has a discernible structure and tune and so on. But after experiencing John Cage's 4'33", I think about it differently. I can't help but feel a little sad when I see people running out of a meeting, their hands already scrambling to wrap headphones around their skulls. We all need a music boost sometimes, and I'm one hundred percent for it, but is there a chance we have become so addicted to the music in our headphones that we can no longer hear the music of the world around us?

Everything is music. Everything is art. And that is what John Cage's 4'33" forces us to acknowledge. When a concert hall full of people is made to sit in silence, we are faced with the reality of our addiction to specialized noise, our inability to appreciate the mere act of being.