# Talk4'33"



## Dodecaplex (Oct 14, 2011)

Use this thread to discuss any and all matters that pertain to the most glorious and most famous theme from Monsieur John Cage's world-renowned opera 4'33". A fruitful discussion this will be, I am sure.


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## violadude (May 2, 2011)

please...not this again -.-


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## Dodecaplex (Oct 14, 2011)

But . . . why?


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## violadude (May 2, 2011)

Dodecaplex said:


> But . . . why?


These kinds of threads always start annoying bickering. Just my opinion though


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## Dodecaplex (Oct 14, 2011)

But I was looking forward to making brilliant fart jokes with good ol' HC or something.

Bummer . . .


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

But before it goes down in flames like Vanhala of old...










:tiphat:


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)




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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

Your time has expired.


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## rojo (May 26, 2006)

Hmm, I wonder how he came up with the numbers for the duration of the piece. Did he roll the dice, or....?


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## jhar26 (Jul 6, 2008)

rojo said:


> Hmm, I wonder how he came up with the numbers for the duration of the piece. Did he roll the dice, or....?


Martha can do 4'33" in 3'33".


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## TresPicos (Mar 21, 2009)

violadude said:


> These kinds of threads always start annoying bickering.


No, they don't.


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

Considering the preoccupation with this piece, I consider it to be a great success. It beautifully exposes the impatience, intolerance, and conditioning of much of the listening audience. If anything else, it gives one close to 5 minutes to make a run to the restroom while others cough and fidget in their seats.


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## LordBlackudder (Nov 13, 2010)

i don't really like it. it's boring.

i can enjoy 3 minutes of silence in much better ways.

i'll probably sit through a total of 20 minutes silence throughout the concert anyway.


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## Jeremy Marchant (Mar 11, 2010)

rojo said:


> Hmm, I wonder how he came up with the numbers for the duration of the piece. Did he roll the dice, or....?


Well, 4 minutes 33 seconds is 273 seconds and -273 C is absolute zero (almost)


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## rojo (May 26, 2006)

Oh. K, I wondered what Art Rock's post had to do with the topic. :lol: 

Thanks Art Rock and Jeremy.

Now, why did he pick the temperature scale?


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## Crudblud (Dec 29, 2011)

I think Cage was brilliant at coming up with interesting ideas and concepts, most of the time they don't translate in to what I'd call great music, but as an "inventor" I think he deserves a lot of respect.


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## quack (Oct 13, 2011)

Is John Cage the most aptly named composer, it's a trap!


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## Philip (Mar 22, 2011)

edit: well... i don't think anyone got it... *433 pounds*!

this thread could be amazing if everyone posted pictures somehow related to 433


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## Dodecaplex (Oct 14, 2011)

Or we could turn this into a guessing game. Let's start with a fairly easy one.

How is this related to 433?


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## Guest (Dec 30, 2011)

rojo, if by "he" you mean Cage, then Cage did not pick the temperature scale. The correlation to absolute zero is more along the lines of a joke, or of those elaborate measurements of the pyramids that were so popular a while back, and that were supposed to predict all sorts of world events or some such.

blud, Cage was a brilliant composer. That he was also an intelligent man and a talented poet and painter shouldn't count against him! (Imagine someone saying of Berlioz that he was an excellent prose stylist--which he certainly was--but not so excellent as a composer. People can be good at several things, jealousy-inducing as that might be. And Berlioz and Cage were certainly two notable polymaths for sure.)


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Crudblud said:


> I think Cage was brilliant at coming up with interesting ideas and concepts, most of the time they don't translate in to what I'd call great music, but as an "inventor" I think he deserves a lot of respect.





some guy said:


> ...
> blud, Cage was a brilliant composer...


I can agree with both in a way. John Cage kind of reinvented the rule book of what it means to be "composer." Which is basically anything you want. His influence on his contemporaries & on future generations right up till today is considerable. He was a kind of maverick but by now he's really indispensable to understanding what happened in music after 1945...


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## Jeremy Marchant (Mar 11, 2010)

rojo said:


> Now, why did he pick the temperature scale?


It might be a coincidence. Chance, even.


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## Philip (Mar 22, 2011)

Dodecaplex said:


> Or we could turn this into a guessing game. Let's start with a fairly easy one.
> 
> How is this related to 433?


HOTLINKING IS NOT NOICE. years


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## Dodecaplex (Oct 14, 2011)

Philip said:


> HOTLINKING IS NOT NOICE. years


Beats me . . . milliliters of blood?

Edit: I still have no clue. Care to enlighten us?


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## Crudblud (Dec 29, 2011)

some guy said:


> blud, Cage was a brilliant composer.


I appreciate Cage's ideas and as I've already said I believe he deserves a lot of respect as a thinker, but I don't find much of his music enjoyable. Does that mean I think he's a bad composer? No. I don't enjoy much of Berlioz' music, but I certainly don't think he's a bad composer either. Both of them simply do things in a way that, most of the time, does not appeal to my ear.


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## Guest (Dec 30, 2011)

Sid James said:


> Which is basically anything you want.


I can say with some confidence that this is not so.

I once told Cage about an idea I'd had for a piece, and he said "Why would you do that?"

The easiest way to express his philosophy is by paradox. He was not interested in control, but he was very disciplined. And expected performances of his pieces to be disciplined. "I don't believe that a bad, thoughtless, undevoted performance of one of my works is a performance of it." (Duckworth, William, 1995. Talking Music, New York: Schirmer, 15, cited in http://solomonsmusic.net/4min33se.htm)

And, speaking of Solomon, here's from the conclusion to Larry's essay:

"_4'33"_ continues to baffle and confound people today. It has become an icon of the modern era, at once synonymous with Cage in the popular imagination, and Cage with it. This probably would have pleased him. It is music that is completely free of intentional sounds, and, in this sense, it is like a tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which the world of unintended sounds writes its music. *But, it is a tabula rasa in which not everything is permitted. Intentional sounds and egocentric actions have no place here.* 4'33" requires a serious, reverent, focused, and open mind that is willing to put aside preconceptions and embrace the universe of sound as music.

It is easy to fall victim to the error that anything goes in this piece. Cage was clear that this is not the case. He was quite critical of "bad performances" of his music, and 4'33" was no exception. Ego and guile have no place here." (Emphasis mine.)

This is quote probably identifies an important reason why so many people dislike Cage, no place for ego and guile.

[Too serious a post for a joke thread? *Too bad!*]


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## Couchie (Dec 9, 2010)

4'33 is short enough to not overly tempt the audience to leave or use the piece as an intermission, but still long enough to be seriously annoying and not mistaken for an orchestral break.


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## rojo (May 26, 2006)

some guy said:


> rojo, if by "he" you mean Cage, then Cage did not pick the temperature scale. The correlation to absolute zero is more along the lines of a joke, or of those elaborate measurements of the pyramids that were so popular a while back, and that were supposed to predict all sorts of world events or some such.


Hi some guy 

So the temperature scale relation is an 'urban legend' kind of thing? Is there any significance for the numbers intended by Cage then? (By the way, those measurements of the pyramids do predict events, imo. )

Also btw, there's a present for you in the 'give a gift' thread, here:

http://www.talkclassical.com/17047-give-xmas-gift-fellow-2.html#post250914 



Jeremy Marchant said:


> It might be a coincidence. Chance, even.


I don't believe in coincidence. Actually, I call coincidences 'synchronicity'.

For example, 4+3+3=10. As I was reading this thread earlier, the clock on my wall stopped at 10:01. 01 is the mirror image (sorry to mention that lol) of 10. I've been wading through synchronicity all over the place these days. I'm not the only one either.


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## Guest (Dec 31, 2011)

Best Christmas present, ever. Virtually!!

Thanks Rojo.

As for the significance of the numbers (and the timings of each section), Larry Solomon's essay has a lot of information and speculation about all that, too. Just click on that link there, and you're on your way.

(Can I give you your present on this thread? It's that you be in a concert with the pianist of your choice, playing the repertoire of your choice. And that afterwards, the audience, going crazy, asks you to play Rzewski's _The People United_ for an encore, which you find you have the energy to do, and all the critics go wild. And that I get to come to your concert, too!)


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## Jeremy Marchant (Mar 11, 2010)

rojo said:


> I don't believe in coincidence. Actually, I call coincidences 'synchronicity'.


You can call coincidences bananas if you like. Doesn't make them bananas.


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## Guest (Dec 31, 2011)

Jeremy, your civility! (I know you've got some. Use it!)

Anyway, if you consider the similarity of "coincide" and "coincidence" you'll notice how close they are to "synchronicity." So rojo seems perfectly within reasonable limits of diction to see things called coincidence as really being synchronous, that is, as coinciding. Not a stretch. Certainly not the same as calling coincidences bananas.

Well, I gotta go. Gonna cut up some yummy coincidences on some nice cereal before I hit the sack.

Wait, am I saying I sleep in a bag?


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## Dodecaplex (Oct 14, 2011)

Nice. So this goes from a joke thread to a discussion about John Cage's intentions to a short-lived guessing game to an argument about semantics.

Amazing! :clap:


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## rojo (May 26, 2006)

Dode, you're forgetting to include that there is a lovely exchange of gifts in the thread, too. 

Thank you very much, some guy. I must revisit that Rzewski work, _The People United Will Never Be Defeated._ I'd forgotten about this significant piece. Will check out the link about Cage too.

I guess everyone's just trying to have a bit of fun here, n'est-ce-pas?


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## Zanralotta (Jan 31, 2009)

I performed 4`33 with my orchestra once as an encore...


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## Philip (Mar 22, 2011)

Zanralotta said:


> I performed 4`33 with my orchestra once as an encore...


oh that's good... probably the best way to perform it. unexpectedly.


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## Zanralotta (Jan 31, 2009)

Philip said:


> oh that's good... probably the best way to perform it. unexpectedly.


 Yes, I was actually quite nice and a very special experience.

Not something to talk about, though.


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## HarpsichordConcerto (Jan 1, 2010)

Dodecaplex said:


> But I was looking forward to making brilliant fart jokes with good ol' HC or something.
> 
> Bummer . . .


I'm here (for a short while). I had spicy curry a few nights ago. While the food was very delicious (we all had a great time in the restaurant, and such delightful hospitality with the locals, too), my bowel movement the next day was not so pleasant. I recall I dumped it all out in less than four minutes thirty-three seconds flat the next day. The toilet was very, very quiet for my performance.


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## pluhagr (Jan 2, 2012)

I view 4'33" as the type of music that is more conceptual than anything. Cage wanted to give the audience the awareness of sound. I don't see how it is not music. The music comes from the sounds of the audience members. There is no silence. Even when we think there is silence there is the ringing in our ears, the thudding of our hearts. Is that not music?
I, someday, hope to be fortunate enough to see a performance of the piece being performed. Now what is a bit ridiculous to me is that iTunes sells the song 4'33". Even worse, it's not separated into the appropriate three movements.


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

some guy said:


> I can say with some confidence that this is not so.
> 
> I once told Cage about an idea I'd had for a piece, and he said "Why would you do that?"
> 
> ...


no ego aside the gigantic ego of John Cage. Are you joking? I can think few composer so exhibitionists like him. He's even in the guinness world record for the shortest and the longest piece of music ever, if this is not pure exhibitionism i don't know what exhibitionism is. 4'33 is pure "epater le bourgeois": take a moment of silence, call it music because of unintentional sounds and wait for scandalized reactions. And it's even not original, there are two pieces of Schulhoff and Alphonse Allais that predate it. What it REALLY invented?


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

pluhagr said:


> I view 4'33" as the type of music that is more conceptual than anything. Cage wanted to give the audience the awareness of sound.


Cage wanted ATTENTION. Everybody before Cage has ever had the awareness of sound. Animals too have awareness of sound, and we're pretendig that it was necessary his idea?


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

Frank Zappa on John Cage:

On John Cage:" Once upon a time, when I was an impressionable young composer, somebody gave me a John Cage record and I listened to it, and went 'What the **** is this?' But since I didn't know what the **** anything was, I thought 'Maybe this is really good.' A short time after that, John Cage came to Claremont College and he was giving one of his ... he does these performances with a throat microphone. He'd put this thing on his throat and drink a quart of carrot juice, or read something to you while he was drinking the carrot juice. In a way, this ties in with my over-all feeling towards colleges. In this instance, there was a college audience watching John Cage drink the carrot juice and do these things, and they were pondering it like it had this large significance. It occurred to me that if he could do that, then certainly, SURELY there were other things equally ridiculous that a person such as myself could do in the music business. And so I decided that I would try, not necessarily to gargle with the carrot juice, but that I'd do other things that come awfully close."


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)




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## pluhagr (Jan 2, 2012)

norman bates said:


> Cage wanted ATTENTION. Everybody before Cage has ever had the awareness of sound. Animals too have awareness of sound, and we're pretendig that it was necessary his idea?


He wanted attention, as in self indulging attention? I think you are wrong there. Yes we have awareness of sound, obviously. But we don't have it shoved in our faces like Cage does. It's a different type of awareness.


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## Guest (Jan 5, 2012)

norman bates said:


> no ego aside the gigantic ego of John Cage. Are you joking? I can think few composer so exhibitionists like him. He's even in the guinness world record for the shortest and the longest piece of music ever, if this is not pure exhibitionism i don't know what exhibitionism is.


Couple of things here, norman. Did Cage write those pieces in order to get into the book? Which pieces are in the Guiness book of records? If they are 0'00" and ASLSP, then the editors were careless. 0'00" does have an indeterminate length. The title refers not to duration but to Cage's attempt to make a piece in which duration is not a factor. The piece is actually about performing a disciplined action.



norman bates said:


> 4'33 is pure "epater le bourgeois": take a moment of silence, call it music because of unintentional sounds and wait for scandalized reactions. And it's even not original, there are two pieces of Schulhoff and Alphonse Allais that predate it. What it REALLY invented?


Épater la bourgeoisie is exactly what 4'33" is not. Cage thought about this piece for five years, worried that people would react just like you and HC and so many others have reacted. And decided to go forward with it after all, spurred on by Rauschenberg's White Paintings and by his 1951 visit to an anechoic chamber.

Your prejudices of course seem very strong and very real and very valid to you, but they match neither the historical record nor first hand acquaintance with Cage himself.

As for original, an audience member at a q & a start his question by praising Cage for being the most original and influencial composer of the century. I didn't have any problem with that assessment, but Cage's response was to simply say, "These things were in the air at the time."

He was the most humble and self-effacing person I ever met, I can tell you that. And I've met dozens of composers, and very few of them are anything other than humble and self-effacing. They are certainly, not in their persons, the radically destructive forces of corruption and ugliness that some people perceive them to be by hearing a second or two of some music that, like cooked carrots, they're sure they won't like.

Not that I'm thinking any of this will convince anyone. I know people who still insist that the French are rude and arrogant. I go to France all the time, two or three times a year. Lived there for awhile, too, in Paris. Haven't run across a rude or arrogant person there yet. Maybe that one store clerk that one time.... I've seen a lot of rude Americans there, and Swiss and Germans and Russians. That is, I've seen a lot of rude _tourists_ there.


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## HarpsichordConcerto (Jan 1, 2010)

some guy said:


> .... I've seen a lot of rude Americans there, and Swiss and Germans and Russians. That is, I've seen a lot of rude _tourists_ there.


No rude Australians? That's excellent.


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## Philip (Mar 22, 2011)

don't forget the French


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

some guy said:


> Couple of things here, norman. Did Cage write those pieces in order to get into the book?


I don't know, but even the fact that one attempt to make the shortest and the longest piece of music is just exhibitionism. 0'00 is not an indeterminated lenght, is a precise lenght at least any other lenght.



some guy said:


> Épater la bourgeoisie is exactly what 4'33" is not. Cage thought about this piece for five years, worried that people would react just like you and HC and so many others have reacted. And decided to go forward with it after all, spurred on by Rauschenberg's White Paintings and by his 1951 visit to an anechoic chamber.
> 
> Your prejudices of course seem very strong and very real and very valid to you, but they match neither the historical record nor first hand acquaintance with Cage himself.


Wait, mine is not a prejuice. I've even "listened" to it many times 
The justification of unintentional sounds is just preposterous, it's not a deep philosophycal intuition, it's the most obvious think, a musical version of the emperor's new clothes (there was a wise moral in that little tale). I like more the ironic intention of Schulhoff in the vein of a Duchamp than a serious explanation of the unintentional sounds like it was an incredible conceptual discovery. "Hey, look at the sky, it's blue".



some guy said:


> As for original, an audience member at a q & a start his question by praising Cage for being the most original and influencial composer of the century. I didn't have any problem with that assessment, but Cage's response was to simply say, "These things were in the air at the time."
> 
> He was the most humble and self-effacing person I ever met, I can tell you that. And I've met dozens of composers, and very few of them are anything other than humble and self-effacing. They are certainly, not in their persons, the radically destructive forces of corruption and ugliness that some people perceive them to be by hearing a second or two of some music that, like cooked carrots, they're sure they won't like.


i was talking only of 4'33'', i like his (a lot less "conceptual") pieces for prepared piano.


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## An Die Freude (Apr 23, 2011)

norman bates said:


> I don't know, but even the fact that one attempt to make the shortest and the longest piece of music is just exhibitionism. 0'00 is not an indeterminated lenght, is a precise lenght at least any other lenght.


It is an indetermined length. The instructructions are "In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action." Now that could be writing a sentence taking 5 seconds, or writing a sentence taking ten seconds, or any other length in fact.


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

An Die Freude said:


> It is an indetermined length. The instructructions are "In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action." Now that could be writing a sentence taking 5 seconds, or writing a sentence taking ten seconds, or any other length in fact.


5 seconds is actually a indetermined length too. 5.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001000000002 seconds. So where's the difference?


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## DavidMahler (Dec 28, 2009)

Unlike most composers, John Cage knew just the right amount of time a rest should last. Not 4'32", not 4'33. I myself have tried to recreate this magnificent work, but I always fall short a few seconds.

Genius cannot be argued


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## An Die Freude (Apr 23, 2011)

norman bates said:


> 5 seconds is actually a indetermined length too. 5.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001000000002 seconds. So where's the difference?


What I mean is that Cage didn't specify a certain length of time. So it could go on for ages, or it could take a few seconds.


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

*I'M NOT WITH HIM ON THIS ONE*


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