4′33″(pronounced “Four minutes, thirty-three seconds” or just “Four thirty-three“)^[1]is a three-movement composition^[2][3]by American experimental composer John Cage (1912–1992). It was composed in 1952, for any instrument or combination of instruments, and the score instructs the performer(s) not to play their instrument(s) during the entire duration of the piece throughout the three movements. The piece consists of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed,^[4]although it is commonly perceived as “four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence”.^[5][6]The title of the piece refers to the total length in minutes and seconds of a given performance,4′33″being the total length of the first public performance.^[7]

Conceived around 1947–48, while the composer was working onSonatas and Interludes,^[2]4′33″became for Cage the epitome of his idea that any sounds may constitute music.^[8]It was also a reflection of the influence of Zen Buddhism, which Cage had studied since the late 1940s. In a 1982 interview, and on numerous other occasions, Cage stated that4′33″was, in his opinion, his most important work.^[9]The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musiciansdescribes4′33″as Cage’s “most famous and controversial creation”.^[2]

Silence played a major role in several of Cage’s works composed before4′33″. TheDuet for Two Flutes(1934), composed when Cage was 22, opens with silence, and silence was an important structural element in some of theSonatas and Interludes(1946–48),Music of Changes(1951) andTwo Pastorales(1951). TheConcerto for prepared piano and orchestra(1951) closes with an extended silence, andWaiting(1952), a piano piece composed just a few months before4′33″, consists of long silences framing a single, shortostinatopattern. Furthermore, in his songsThe Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs(1942) andA Flower(1950) Cage directs the pianist to play a closed instrument, which may be understood as a metaphor of silence.^[10]

The first time Cage mentioned the idea of a piece composed entirely of silence was during a 1947 (or 1948) lecture atVassar College,A Composer’s Confessions. Cage told the audience that he had “several new desires”, one of which was

At the time, however, Cage felt that such a piece would be “incomprehensible in the Western context,” and was reluctant to write it down: “I didn’t wish it to appear, even to me, as something easy to do or as a joke. I wanted to mean it utterly and be able to live with it.”^[12]Painter Alfred Leslie recalls Cage presenting a “one-minute-of-silence talk” in front of a window during the late 1940s, while visiting Studio 35 atNew York University.^[13]

In 1951, Cage visited the anechoic chamber atHarvard University. An anechoic chamber is a room designed in such a way that the walls, ceiling and floor absorb all sounds made in the room, rather than reflecting them as echoes. Such a chamber is also externally sound-proofed. Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but he wrote later, “I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood incirculation.”^[14]Cage had gone to a place where he expected total silence, and yet heard sound. “Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.”^[15]The realization as he saw it of the impossibility of silence led to the composition of4′33″.

Another cited influence^[12]for this piece came from the field of the visual arts. Cage’s friend and sometimes colleague Robert Rauschenberg had produced, in 1951, a series of white paintings, seemingly “blank” canvases (though painted with white house paint) that in fact change according to varying light conditions in the rooms in which they were hung, the shadows of people in the room and so on. This inspired Cage to use a similar idea, as he later stated, “Actually what pushed me into it was not guts but the example of Robert Rauschenberg. His white paintings […] when I saw those, I said, ‘Oh yes, I must. Otherwise I’m lagging, otherwise music is lagging’.”^[16]In an introduction to an article called On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Works, John Cage writes “To Whom It May Concern: The white paintings came first; my silent piece came later.”^[17]

Compositions that, like4′33″, include no sounds produced by the performer, were conceived by a number of composers and writers before Cage. Examples include the following:

The musicologist Richard Taruskin has argued that4′33″is an example of automatism. Since the Romantic Era composers have been striving to produce music that could be separated from any social connections, transcending the boundaries of time and space. In automatism, composers wish to completely remove both the composers and the artist from the process of creation. This is motivated by the belief that what we think of as “self-expression” is really just an infusion of the art with the social standards that we have been subjected to since birth. Therefore, the only way to achieve truth is to remove the artist from the process of creation. Cage achieves that by employing chance (e.g., use of theI Ching, or tossing coins) to make compositional decisions. In4′33″, neither artist nor composer has any impact on the piece, so that Cage has no way of controlling what ambient sounds will be heard by the audience.^[25]

The premiere of the three-movement4′33″was given by David Tudor on August 29, 1952, in Maverick Concert Hall, Woodstock, New York, as part of a recital of contemporary piano music. The audience saw him sit at the piano and, to mark the beginning of the piece, close the keyboard lid. Some time later he opened it briefly, to mark the end of the first movement. This process was repeated for the second and third movements.^[26]

In defining noise music and its value, Paul Hegarty inNoise/Music: A History(2007) contends that Cage’s4′33″represents the beginning of noise music proper. For Hegarty, noise music, as with4′33″, is that music made up of incidental sounds that represent perfectly the tension between “desirable” sound (properly played musical notes) and undesirable “noise” that make up all noise music.^[27]

4′33″challenges, or rather exploits to a radical extent, the social regiments of the modern concert life etiquette, experimenting on unsuspecting concert-goers to prove an important point. First, the choice of a prestigious venue and the social status of the composer and the performers automatically heightens audience’s expectations for the piece. As a result, the listener is more focused, giving Cage’s4′33″the same amount of attention (or perhaps even more) as if it were Beethoven’s Ninth.^[28]Thus, even before the performance, the reception of the work is already predetermined by the social setup of the concert. Furthermore, the audience’s behavior is limited by the rules and regulation of the concert hall; they will quietly sit and listen to 4′33” of ambient noise. It is not easy to get a large group of people to listen to ambient noise for nearly five minutes, unless they are regulated by the concert hall etiquette.

The second point made by4′33″concerns duration. According to Cage, duration is the essential building block of all of music. This distinction is motivated by the fact that duration is the only element shared by both silence and sound. As a result, the underlying structure of any musical piece consists of an organized sequence of “time buckets”.^[29]They could be filled with either sounds, silence or noise; where neither of these elements is absolutely necessary for completeness. In the spirit of his teacher Schoenberg, Cage managed to emancipate the silence and the noise to make it an acceptable or perhaps even integral part of his music composition.4′33″serves as a radical and extreme illustration of this concept, asking that if the time buckets are the only necessary parts of the musical composition, then what stops the composer from filling them with no intentional sounds?

The third point is that the work of music is defined not only by its content but also by the behavior it elicits from the audience.^[28]In the case of Stravinsky’sRite of Spring, this would consist of widespread dissatisfaction leading up to violent riots. In Cage’s4′33″, the audience felt cheated by having to listen to no composed sounds from the performer. Nevertheless, in4′33″the audience contributed the bulk of the musical material of the piece. Since the piece consists of exclusively ambient noise, the audience’s behavior, their whispers and movements, are essential elements that fill the above-mentioned time buckets.

In a 2013 TED Talk, philosophy professor Julian Dodd argued that4′33″is witty conceptual art, but does not meet the criteria for it to count as music, instead challenging the listener to question what the nature of music is.^[30]In a 2013 TED Talk, psychologist Paul Bloom put forward4′33″as one example to show that knowing about the origin of something influences our opinion about it as “that silence is different from other forms of silence”.^[31]

Several versions of the score exist:^[32]There are four known later versions, one of which is in the New York Public Library.^[33]

There is some discrepancy between the lengths of individual movements of the premiere performance, specified in different versions of the score. The Woodstock printed program specifies the lengths 30″, 2′23″ and 1′40″, as does the Kremen manuscript, and presumably the original manuscript had the same indications. However, in theFirst Tacet EditionCage writes that at the premiere the timings were 33″, 2′40″ and 1′20″. In theSecond Tacet Editionhe adds that after the premiere a copy has been made for Irwin Kremen, in which the lengths of the movements were 30″, 2′23″ and 1′40″. The causes of this discrepancy are not currently understood, the original manuscript being still lost.^[1]

In 1962, Cage wrote0′00″, which is also referred to as4′33″ No. 2. The directions originally consisted of one sentence: “In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action.” At the first performance Cage had to write that sentence.

The second performance added four new qualifications to the directions: “the performer should allow any interruptions of the action, the action should fulfill an obligation to others, the same action should not be used in more than one performance, and should not be the performance of a musical composition.”^[11]

In late 1989, three years before his death, Cage revisited the idea of4′33″one last time. He composedOne3, the full title of which isOne3 = 4′33″ (0′00″) + [[INLINE_IMAGE|//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/ff/GClef.svg/9px-GClef.svg.png|//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/ff/GClef.svg/14px-GClef.svg.png 1.5x, //upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/ff/GClef.svg/18px-GClef.svg.png 2x|GClef.svg|h25|w9]]. As in all number pieces, “One” refers to the number of performers required. The score instructs the performer to build a sound system in the concert hall, so that “the whole hall is on the edge of feedback, without actually feeding back.” The content of the piece is the electronically amplified sound of the hall and the audience.^[35]

4′33″has been recorded on several occasions: Frank Zappa recorded it as part ofA Chance Operation: The John Cage Tribute, on the Koch label, 1993; in 2002, James Tenney performed4′33″at Rudolf Schindler’s historic Kings Road House in celebration of the work’s 50th anniversary.^[36]

Several performances of4′33″including a “techno remix” by New Waver were broadcast on Australian radio station ABC Classic FM, as part of a program exploring “sonic responses” to Cage’s work.^[37][38]The Swedish electronic band Covenant concluded their 2000 albumUnited States of Mindwith a rendition of4′33″entitled “You Can Make Your Own Music”.^[39]

On January 16, 2004, at the Barbican Centre in London, the BBC Symphony Orchestra gave the UK’s first orchestral performance of this work. The performance was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, and one of the main challenges was that the station’s emergency backup systems are designed to switch on and play music whenever apparent silence (dead air) lasting longer than a preset duration is detected. They had to be switched off for this performance.^[40]BBC Four broadcast the recording one hour later. On the same day, a tongue-in-cheek version was recorded by the staff of the UKGuardiannewspaper.^[41]

In 2004, the work was voted to be number 40 in the ABC radio’s Classic 100 piano countdown.^[42]

A silence of four minutes and thirty-three seconds appears as the penultimate track of the 2009 Living Colour albumThe Chair in the Doorway.^[43]

On December 5, 2010, an international simultaneous performance of Cage’s4′33″took place involving over 200 performers, amateur and professional musicians, and artists. The global orchestra, conducted live by Bob Dickinson, former member of post-punk group Magazine, via video link, performed the piece in support of the Cage Against The Machine campaign to bring4′33″to Christmas number 1 in 2010. A second performance took place on December 12, 2010.^[44]

On November 17, 2015,The Late Show with Stephen Colbertuploaded a video of this piece being performed by a cat, showing that its performer isn’t required to be human.^[45]

In May 2019, Mute Records released a compilation box set entitledSTUMM433featuring interpretations of4′33″by more than 50 current and alumni Mute artists including Laibach, Depeche Mode, Cabaret Voltaire, Einstürzende Neubauten, Goldfrapp, Moby, Erasure and others.^[46]

In the week leading up to Christmas 2010, a Facebook page was created to encourage people in the UK to buy a new rendition of4′33″^[47]in the hope that it would prevent the winner of the seventh series ofThe X Factorfrom topping theUK Singles Chartand achieving the Christmas number one.^[48]The page was inspired by an earlier campaign in which a Facebook page set up by Jon and Tracey Morter prompted people to buy “Killing in the Name” by American rap metal protest group Rage Against the Machine in the week before Christmas 2009,^[49]and has therefore been dubbed “Cage Against the Machine”.^[50][51]The creators of the Facebook page hoped that reaching number one would help to promote the piece and “make December 25 ‘a silent night’.”^[52]As of September 2017, the Facebook page has over 65,000 likes.^[53]

The campaign received support from several celebrities. It first came into prominence after it was mentioned by science writer Ben Goldacre on hisTwitterprofile.^[54]Within two weeks, British newspaperThe Sunreported that the Facebook page had been backed by more than 3,000 members.^[55]One of several similar campaigns, the Facebook page was called “the only effort this year with a hope of [reaching Number One]” byThe Guardianjournalist Tom Ewing in September.^[56]XFM DJ Eddy Temple-Morris also voiced his support on hisblog,^[57]as did Luke Bainbridge.^[58]This version of Cage’s work failed to make number 1, but charted at number 21 on theUK Singles Chart.^[59]