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And they will continue following my death. 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 in circulation." Cage had gone to a place where he expected total silence, and yet heard sound. Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but he wrote later, "I heard two sounds, one high and one low. Such a chamber is also externally sound-proofed. 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. In 1951, Cage visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. I wanted to mean it utterly and be able to live with it." 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 at New York University. Īt 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. The ending will approach imperceptibility. It will open with a single idea which I will attempt to make as seductive as the color and shape and fragrance of a flower. It will be three or four-and-a-half minutes long-those being the standard lengths of "canned" music and its title will be Silent Prayer. To compose a piece of uninterrupted silence and sell it to Muzak Co. Cage told the audience that he had "several new desires", one of which was The first time Cage mentioned the idea of a piece composed entirely of silence was during a 1947 (or 1948) lecture at Vassar College, A Composer's Confessions. Furthermore, in his songs The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1942) and A Flower (1950) Cage directs the pianist to play a closed instrument, which may be understood as a metaphor of silence. The Concerto for prepared piano and orchestra (1951) closes with an extended silence, and Waiting (1952), a piano piece composed just a few months before 4′33″, consists of long silences framing a single, short ostinato pattern. The Duet for Two Flutes (1934), composed when Cage was 22, opens with silence, and silence was an important structural element in some of the Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48), Music of Changes (1951) and Two Pastorales (1951). Silence played a major role in several of Cage's works composed before 4′33″.
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History of composition Background and influences 3 2010 UK Christmas Number One campaign.The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians describes 4′33″ as Cage's "most famous and controversial creation". In a 1982 interview, and on numerous other occasions, Cage stated that 4′33″ was, in his opinion, his most important work. It was also a reflection of the influence of Zen Buddhism, which Cage had studied since the late 1940s. Ĭonceived around 1947–48, while the composer was working on Sonatas and Interludes, 4′33″ became for Cage the epitome of his idea that any sounds may constitute music. 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. The piece consists of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed, although it is commonly perceived as "four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence". It was composed in 1952, for any instrument or combination of instruments, and the score instructs performers not to play their instruments during the entire duration of the piece throughout the three movements. 4′33″ (pronounced "four minutes, thirty-three seconds" or just "four thirty-three" ) is a three- movement composition by American experimental composer John Cage.