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Excuse us our little joke. It goes like this: In the early 1950s, John Cage heard about a "silent" room, a so-called anechoic chamber at Bell Labs or some such place. It was a room so insulated that a decibel meter in the room would register zero. Silence. Since, as a composer, Cage was concerned about silence, and since he had never experienced complete silence, he asked to sit in this room. After some minutes he emerged and announced to the scientists that their room was broken. In the "silence" he had heard two noises, one high-pitched, one low-pitched. The scientists replied that the room was not broken. Everybody who sat in the room heard those noises. The low-pitched noise was that of Cage's blood circulating in his body, while the high-pitched noise was the static from the electricity in his nervous system. In other words, Cage realized, human beings cannot experience silence. Which means that "music" as we know it is a game that we agree to play. We go to a concert, the noisy audience becomes quiet and unconsciously agrees to pretend that everything is silent. The musicians come out and play music and then stop. The audience applauds and goes home, content in its experience of such a rewarding, structured interruption of "silence." But, of course, Cage understood, it's all an illusion if there is no silence. His compositions came more and more to rely on chance, and playful interaction with the environment as he tried to teach listeners to learn to be aware of and appreciate the non-silence in which they-- and we-- all live all the time. His 1952 piece for piano, s4'33", is one of the landmark creations in the history of human art. The pianist walks onto the stage carrying a stop watch, sits down, opens the piano, starts the watch, sits for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, stops the watch, gets up, and leaves. That's it. We are pleased on this page to present the first Internet performance of 4'33". It is obviously up to you, dear reader, to time your own experience of the composition. (Added Editor's Note: Months passed after we published this page. Readers around the world responded with, well, silence. Then out of the ether, an emeritus musicologist took us to task. You can read his opinion of our version of 4'33" by clicking here.
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