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View submission: John Cage 4’33
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.
There's nothing here!