https://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/1ifukea/john_cage_433/
created by Alive-Monk1142 on 02/02/2025 at 10:35 UTC
79 upvotes, 55 top-level comments (showing 25)
A few nights ago I was watching Colbert and he had Nicole Kidman on. They played a game and one of the questions was what was her favorite song. She answered with this song. I looked it up and I was completely surprised. Was taking the dogs on a walk and I thought for sure the music would start any moment.. I waited quite awhile. I’ll just be honest cause I’m a little high rn. I find it a little pretentious and silly. I mean I think I get it. But… really.. just utter silence for four minutes and thirty three seconds? Where the ambient noise is the instrument…I don’t know. Maybe I’m not appreciating it the right way.
Comment by Arvot at 02/02/2025 at 11:06 UTC
264 upvotes, 7 direct replies
The initial idea was about how there is no such thing as silence. So the song is everything that is happening in the room, and even if the room was completely silent you'd still hear the sounds of your own body. It's definitely gimmicky and pretentious but it's also quite beautiful and the point it's making is an interesting one.
Comment by Revolvlover at 02/02/2025 at 11:33 UTC
32 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Cage's experience that absolute silence never really occurs led him to define silence in terms of attention, i.e. the sounds that we aren't attending to is the silence. Corollary thought is that the natural soundscape is constant music.
I don't know about Nicole Kidman's depth, but it's a nice nod to Cage. His idea seems utterly simple and even stupid but it's as deep as the ocean, like any koan sort of ephiphany.
Comment by Hym3n at 02/02/2025 at 10:55 UTC
21 upvotes, 1 direct replies
In college I took a "20th Century American Music" class for an elective and was fully expecting a fun class full of rock and blues and jazz. Instead, the course was an "Art Music" class and this was one of the pieces we were introduced to. Our professor had the entire ~120-person class listen to it in its entirety with no speaking during. Novel. I appreciate it. I introduce it to others who I think need to chill out for a minute (or four and a half).
Comment by framsanon at 02/02/2025 at 10:59 UTC
16 upvotes, 1 direct replies
The best version is the metal cover by Dead Territory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voqCQSDAcn8[1][2]
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voqCQSDAcn8
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voqCQSDAcn8
Comment by Excellent_Theory1602 at 02/02/2025 at 10:39 UTC
23 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Yep. It's a great introduction to mindfulness.. close your eyes and listen.
Comment by TFFPrisoner at 02/02/2025 at 11:34 UTC
6 upvotes, 0 direct replies
If you can't get enough of the composition, here's a five LP box set of various artists performing it: Various - STUMM433
Url: https://www.discogs.com/release/14330717-Various-STUMM433
Shared from the Discogs App
Comment by DaveMTIYF at 02/02/2025 at 11:05 UTC
17 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Maybe you need to study the score https://www.musicroom.com/john-cage-4-33-original-version-any-instrument-ep6777a[1][2] :)
1: https://www.musicroom.com/john-cage-4-33-original-version-any-instrument-ep6777a
2: https://www.musicroom.com/john-cage-4-33-original-version-any-instrument-ep6777a
Comment by GT45 at 02/02/2025 at 13:47 UTC
5 upvotes, 0 direct replies
This is my favorite instance of musical criticism—Stravinsky throwing shade at John Cage, regarding 4’33!
Comment by MrJingleJangle at 02/02/2025 at 11:57 UTC
12 upvotes, 0 direct replies
You need to experience this piece in a live situation, with actual musicians on stage. It’s a piece needing to be, well, experienced.
Comment by Appropriate_Mine at 02/02/2025 at 11:03 UTC
4 upvotes, 0 direct replies
You're just not high enough
Comment by 8igg7e5 at 02/02/2025 at 10:43 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Did she prefer it arranged for Piano? Or for another instrument?
Comment by JeebsFat at 02/02/2025 at 11:58 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Cage is trying to open our minds to what music is and can be and can not be. Try to imagine a world where these ideas don't exist and then this piece drops to make everyone think and listen.
Comment by justor-gone at 02/02/2025 at 12:28 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
But not just the silence as a concept, or the impossibility of silence as the concept, Cage was also trying to get you to regard other noises, in a concert hall, coughs and rustles, in you home police sirens or dogs barking, etc. as sounds that could be appreciated in the same way you might appreciate a D minor 7, as having an intrinsic worth of music. He spent some time in the 50s and 60s using material like water and feathers and staplers as sound sources, i'm pretty sure there's a youtube video of him on the TV show What's My Line that you might watch.
Cage was a Buddhist, so silence is important as a concept, but he was also an avant-garde musician and the years of the late 40s to mid-50s was a time when western avant-gardists wanted to strip things down to the essentials. I am sure that Cage didn't expect people to sit down and groove to 4 minutes 33 seconds, mostly experience it once, think about it a little, and go on with your life.
Comment by MonsieurReynard at 02/02/2025 at 13:07 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
It’s supposed to make you listen to everything else you aren’t noticing.
And wow, Ms. Kidman surprises me every time. I love that she said this.
Comment by edgelordjones at 02/02/2025 at 14:03 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Ah yes, John fucking Cafe,the Diogenes of classical composition. Love that guy.
Comment by SoliPsik at 02/02/2025 at 10:46 UTC
4 upvotes, 1 direct replies
The man makes you think or you don't.
Comment by orlock at 02/02/2025 at 12:00 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
It works for me in the same way that negative space does in graphic design. You need all the trappings of a concert hall and an orchestra to create this void that your mind fills in.
Comment by 408wij at 02/02/2025 at 13:54 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
As one critic said, "I look forward to more pieces like this from the composer."
Comment by johnp299 at 02/02/2025 at 15:07 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
It gets people to think and discuss about what they assume music is.
Comment by UnfortunateSyzygy at 02/02/2025 at 15:34 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
She has 4 children. I thought the joke was "id love almost 5 minutes of goddamn quiet."
Comment by UbeeMac at 02/02/2025 at 16:02 UTC*
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I played it on the radio once. There was a Facebook campaign to make it Christmas no.1, the year after Rage Against the Machine got it (Cage against the Machine)
Spoke about it for 5 minutes, about the track, the history, and the impossibility of silence - even in an anechoic chamber (totally soundproof) you can hear your own heartbeat. Then I hit the play button. 20 seconds of dead air later I came back to apologise because the CD player wasn’t working. Played something else.
Comment by Icaros083 at 02/02/2025 at 18:50 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Best part is, there was a company sending out DMCA notices on YouTube videos citing 4'33 as the original work.
Comment by bookmarkjedi at 02/02/2025 at 18:52 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Cage was a very highly regarded composer and music theorist - one of the most influential of the 20th century. The piece would not have gotten the recognition it did had it not been written by someone of his stature.
It's also very interesting in historical context. It was written in 1952. Just a few years earlier, Samuel Beckett had written Waiting for Godot, which is often billed as a play where nothing happens (just two guys waiting for someone who never comes). About three decades earlier, Luigi Pirandello, another Nobel laureate, wrote Six Characters in Search of an Author, which is a play about six characters who are lost, unable to do anything because they don't have an author - maybe sort of like humans suffering from anomie because they are untethered from God, social cohesion, etc. following the two terribly destructive world wars.
Likewise, there are plenty of interesting paintings that likewise reflect variations on these minimalist ideas. I don't think they're necessarily connected, at least not directly, but they are interesting to think about because they force us to think about ourselves and our relation to art - just as it was more than a simple joke when Marcel Duchamp, one of the most influential artists of his era, drew a mustache on Mona Lisa and exhibited a ceramic toilet as a work of art.
Just to be clear, I don't think it's wrong to think about all of this as being pretentious, or mind-blowingly insightful, or whatever. What it shows to me is that art/music (etc.) is in the eyes of the beholder, and the works themselves are essentially metaphorical "mirrors" for us to reflect on.
Comment by hellomondays at 02/02/2025 at 22:52 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
A big spiritual orientation and part of Cage's artistic process is what's sometimes called Chance Operations: Intentional acts to add randomized variables to a piece of art. He use the *i-ching* frequently in his compositions, leaving elements of the music up to chance.
As others said, he was inspired by an attempt to experience pure silence, realizing that it isn't achievable. So you end up with a composition to be performed-thus have your attention- that opens your focus to all the sounds of the room you're in, completely governed by chance, out of the control of the composer but still within the parameters of the pianist's 'performance'.
Comment by Gongoloromorollo at 02/02/2025 at 12:21 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
It’s the first piece of work in a very curated playlist I did, where i selected ten tracks per decade from the 50s to the 10s.
It’s the perfect way to describe the beginning of the fifties, after two atom bombs.
