"I have nothing to say and I am saying it"

4'33" is perhaps the most radical music composition I have ever encountered. It's John Cage's most famous piece and the most controversial. It sounds to me like an art, which music pretty much is to begin with. Perhaps using your environment to create music makes the most perfect sense of all. It is a canvas and a mirror. The center piece is not the object we think it is, it is us.

One funny thing is in the interlude, all sorts of cough sounds from the audience suddenly came up, it's like they're suppressing it for the effect of the composition.



From Wiki:

4′33″ (Four minutes, thirty-three seconds) is a three-movement composition by American avant-garde composer John Cage (1912–1992). It was composed in 1952 for any instrument (or combination of instruments), and the score instructs the performer not to play the instrument during the entire duration of the piece. Although commonly perceived as "four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence", the piece actually consists of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed. Over the years, 4′33″ became Cage's most famous and most controversial composition.

Conceived in 1948, while Cage was working on Sonatas and Interludes, 4′33″ was for Cage the epitome of aleatoric music and of his idea that any sounds constitute, or may constitute, music. It was also a reflection of the influence of Zen Buddhism[citation needed], which Cage studied since the late 1940s. In a 1982 interview, and on numerous other occasions, Cage has stated that 4′33″ is, in his opinion, his most important work.