4'33"

The Contemporary Classical composer John Cage intended the break convention throughout his compositional career starting in the 1930's. Much like the other composers of this time including Karlheinz Stockhausen, Terry Riley and even earlier Erik Satie he often chose to combine tones and rhythms that are not always aesthetically pleasing to the human ear but were overall intricate and interesting to listen to.

Terry Riley's most famous piece entitled In C, which was composed in 1964, takes an extremely minimalist approach to music. The piece consists of 53 short segments of music that are to be looped infinitely until each musician feels it is okay to move on to the next. The piece can be played by anywhere from 30 to 120 and can go for hours. Each short segment was created intentionally to fit with the others on any instrument. Instrumental enunciation is left to the individual, like how loud or soft to play.

When Riley's piece first came onto the scene it was taken as blasphemy. The head of the California University in which it was first performed said he would quit if the piece was played. He ultimately quit. Cage's 4'33" is infamous in the music world for its raw minimalism. Cage called it his most important piece on numerous occasions because of its heavy influence from his studies of Zen Buddhism.

The pieces premiere in Woodstock, NY in 1952 brought the whole classical music world crashing. David Tudor performed the piece and much to the audiences surprise, he did not play a single note. Instead, he opened and closed the piano on three occasions while watching a stopwatch intently.

The piece, to this day, stands as a monument to the idea that everything can be music. One's thoughts, the scuffling of feet and the collective anxiety felt in moments of forced silence. Although this was not a universally accepted idea for the times, we as contemporary persons can intellectually appreciate this level of art.



Do you agree with Cage's statements about unconventional music?