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mcc
@dryad.technology

The point of John Cage's 4'33" was not that the music is silence but that the experienced sound of the piece will naturally be filled in by random sounds in the natural environment, pages turning on the piano, people shifting in their seats; the first public performance of 4'33" was held in a forest

mcc@dryad.technology

What I listened to today: "Nagra SN demo with Modern Sounds Pluto v3", troy mckaskle A musician records every meticulous step of making a short 40-second retro-synth motif, running a modern aleatoric unit into a 1970s vintage portable tape unit to saturate the waves www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX6a...

youtube.comNagra SN demo with Modern Sounds Pluto v3YouTube video by troy mckaskle

18 reposts93 likes

Laurel Ann M
@laurelannm.bsky.social

I have been to a live performance of 4’33” and it was truly revelatory. I had completely failed to anticipate how much of the sound of the performance would be due to audience members reacting to the sounds created by other audience members.

aoanla
@aoanla.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy

@dryad.technology Yeah, I am annoyed by people missing the point of 4'33" so they can sound cool. (More pretentiously, it's that all performances are different, partially because of all the ambient noise that isn't part of the performance proper - 4'33" is *entirely* that ambient noise.)

Mary Branscombe
@marypcbuk.bsky.social

the New Statesman used to run a competition; one month it was imagine alternative careers for famous people based on their real interests and the winner reviewed a performance of 4'33" by pianist Margaret Hilda Roberts who was unable to not stand up and shout about the miners for that long

loren schmidt
@lorenschmidt.bsky.social

i can't find it! i don't know where it's from, it's apocryphal. my dad used to say that an interviewer asked him "how would you feel if a huge truck drove by outside during the performance?" to which Cage replied "wouldn't that be nice!"

mcc
@dryad.technology

Cage has written about this but there's a very interesting explication of the idea at the start of "Indeterminacy 3"; I highly recommend Indeterminacy