John Cage's 4'33" is available to stream on Spotify, which may strike you as immediately hilarious, but is nonetheless ironic for reasons I'll get into shortly. While the piece is ostensibly just four and a half minutes of silence (a standard length for canned Muzak tracks), its true content is all the other sounds that listeners hear in their surrounding environment during the performance, which demonstrate Cage's point that silence is impossible: "The piece is not actually silent...it is full of sound, but sounds which I did not think of beforehand." The "version" of
#81: 4:33 'til Infinity
#81: 4:33 'til Infinity
#81: 4:33 'til Infinity
John Cage's 4'33" is available to stream on Spotify, which may strike you as immediately hilarious, but is nonetheless ironic for reasons I'll get into shortly. While the piece is ostensibly just four and a half minutes of silence (a standard length for canned Muzak tracks), its true content is all the other sounds that listeners hear in their surrounding environment during the performance, which demonstrate Cage's point that silence is impossible: "The piece is not actually silent...it is full of sound, but sounds which I did not think of beforehand." The "version" of