Peanut Butter Sandwiches at 3am

"I have nothing to say / and I am saying it / and that is poetry / as I needed it" --John Cage

It's not every day that you wake up from a dream about the composer John Cage. It's definately not every day that you feel compelled enough to drag yourself out of bed and read more about the man in question. So here's the four in the morning, painkiller-laden peanut butter sandwich eating rundown.

There's a lot of fascinating things the man did, but I guess the most famous is the conception and performance of 4'33", which back in those tragic University music lecture days took me ages to figure out as being the shorthand for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Dumbarse. Apparently there's a few versions of the score getting around, but the most famous one is the Tacet edition. Tacet is the traditional musical term for when a musician does not play for a movement - basically it says Hey mate, just sit this one out. We don't need you for it. So the famous score for 4'33" goes something like this:

Movement I
TACET (30")

Movement II
TACET (2'23")

Movement III
TACET (1'40")

That's a score of the first performance of the piece, performed on piano. The performer signifies the start of the first movement by closing the lid over the keys of the piano, and then lifting it at the end of the allotted time. This occurs for all three movements, with pauses in between. The piece has traditionally been stuck with the title 4'33", even though it can be performed for any instrument, by any any number of performers, for any length of time. You're probably performing it now. Cage himself refers to it as his "silent piece" and writes:

"I have spent many pleasant hours in the woods conducting performances of my silent piece... for an audience of myself, since they were much longer than the popular length which I have published. At one performance... the second movement was extremely dramatic, beginning with the sounds of a buck and a doe leaping up to within ten feet of my rocky podium."

So why is this such a significant piece of music? On the surface it looks more like a theatrical stunt than a serious work. How many university composition students have come to studying Cage, with a composition folio due at the end of the week and thought Asshole! Wish I'd have thought of that! I know I have.

In a way it is making the statement that silence within music is just as important as sound, but there's more. It's about listening. While the performer is silent, the surrounding environment goes on making sound, often going unnoticed.

It challenges the definition of what music actually is. If it isn't pleasing to the ear, is it still music? Where does the definition stop? If you look at a painting and don't like it, is it still art? If the artist intends it to be art, do you challenge it's definition as that?