# Woodduck's response to Someguy on 4'33"



## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

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Originally Posted by *some guy* 
*Funny.*

We've gone over this ground before, numerous times, but it's as if no one has ever said anything about 4'33" before this thread, because *all the usual canards come rushing in*, fresh as daisies, as if no one had ever said anything about what the piece really is.

*Of course, I know why.*

*4'33" was something John had been thinking about for around ten years before he finally wrote it.* ... It is not a piece with no sounds; it is a piece that *consists entirely of sounds that the composer did not intend... in 4'33", the sounds are not under the control of the composer. That's called indeterminacy*, and there are lots of pieces, by lots of different composers, both before and after 4'33", that are indeterminate.

And *it is a musical piece*. It has three movements, with precise timings. It is a piece for performers. *It has **musical instructions*.

It can be seen as *the musical equivalent of the framing one does when taking a picture.* *Funny that no one seems to mind if people take photos or if some of those photos are displayed on museum walls as art. But so many people get really bent out of shape if Cage frames some environmental sounds and calls the result music.*

This is a piece where both *composer and performer step aside and invite you to make this into music. *

You may not like it. You may not like what it says or seems to be saying. But *claiming that it is not a piece of music is kinda silly.* And *all this talk about it's being only conceptual is so much special pleading. Name me a piece of music by anyone from any age that is not conceptual.*

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Where to begin? Well, being no fan of indeterminacy, I'll begin at the beginning.

"Funny" is the right word. 4'33" is, to many people, funny. It makes us laugh. It tickles our funny bones. We realize that it was not intended to be amusing. That makes it funnier. People to whom it is a very serious matter are often offended by the fact that we are amused by it. We understand, we even sympathize - and we still find it funny! In saying this, I am _not trying to be funny. I mean it sincerely. I find 4'33" irresistibly amusing. I can't even think of it without smiling.

You say that you know why people are still saying the things they're saying about 4'33." But you don't tell us what it is that you know. That's all right. Some of us already know why we think what we think, without your telling us.

When you inform us that Cage had been contemplating the idea of 4'33" for ten years before he "finally wrote it" - excuse me, the word "wrote" is making my face crack a little - I recall that Wagner conceived the idea for Tristan und Isolde around 1854 and completed that most intense and astonishing opera in 1859 - the whole musical revolution embodied in that work took him only five years - while taking a little break from composing his epic Der Ring des Nibelungen. Just a brief hiatus, a little I-think-I'll-alter-the-course-of-Western-civilization-while-taking-a-sitz-bath sort of thing...

Well, I'm sure Cage had other important things on his mind during that decade besides 4'33" of silence.

I understand, of course, that we're not talking about actual silence here. We're talking about sounds, sounds that have not been composed by anyone. But wait a minute...There's something funny about that, isn't there? If Cage didn't compose the sounds, how can he be called the "composer"? Isn't that sort of, well, contradictory? Isn't that like someone who's called an artist inviting you to his gallery and showing you a blank wall? Or someone calling himself an author publishing a book with blank pages? (It didn't take me ten years to come up with those examples - though I admit I had Cage to inspire me, while he was working from scratch.)

Now, you use the example of a framed photograph. But that is not a good example. A photograph may be an image of things in the environment - but those things are chosen by the photographer, and the image is made by him through a controlled process. A photograph really is a composition, and the photographer really is a composer. A better analogy would be a frame with no photograph in it. But a frame with nothing in it is - well, we're back to that blank wall. A frame containing nothing contains... Nothing.

If I may get down to brass tacks here: I do not think that saying that 4'33" is "only conceptual" is "special pleading." I think it is true. I do not think that a list of instructions for a "performer" to behave in a certain way, for a certain period of time divided into "movements," while playing nothing, constitutes a piece of music. I do not think, either, that instructing musicians to choose what it is that they're going to play, so that no one knows what sounds will occur, and giving it a pompous artsy name like "indeterminacy," constitutes musical composition. These things are certainly "conceptual" - and, yes, all music is "conceptual." But what does that mean? It certainly does not mean that a composition of sounds, composed by an actual composer, and played by musicians, is the same thing as a directive issued to someone in a tuxedo to sit at a piano with his hands folded in his lap while hundreds of people watch him and simultaneously listen to distant traffic and cockroaches scurrying beneath their seats. Whether these people find this an interesting or rewarding experience does not alter the fact that it is a distinctly different experience.

Admirers of Cage's experiment in awareness are certainly free, as we all are, to define music in any way they want. But those who decline to go along with them are not " kinda silly" to do so. What I find silly is the stern solemnity and condescension with which some of those admirers, who cannot find humor in Cage's subversion of ordinary meanings, react when confronted with the amusement of those of us who are not tempted to discard our concept of what music is just because a sweetly smiling fellow with a feather and a cactus and a book of Chinese hexagrams plays a little trick on us.

We fans of ponderous Wagnerian epics are a notoriously serious bunch, yet we laugh harder than anyone when Anna Russell points out that Gutrune, "Die Gotterdammerung Gibich," is the first woman Siegfried has ever seen who isn't his aunt. I can only wish an equal measure of self-deprecating humor on the fans of John Cage when they hear about people singing 4'33'' in the shower.

I can do it with variations._


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

I was surprised to learn from someone who pays attention to these things that my little essay from several years back has been republished in someone's blog. 

It's basically pleasant to rediscover it - it reads well, and I might not change a word of it today - but the pleasure would be greater had I been paid the elementary courtesy of being told by the blogger of his intention to incorporate it into a context of his choosing.

No one likes to feel used, and it isn't merely for monetary reasons that disposing freely of others' work is frowned on by right-thinking people.


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