And that's my favourite comment on KZfaq. Thank you

Don't stop there! Create your own pieces! No boundaries! (Just mind that old Andersen tale about certain new clothes...)

87.372 % of supposedly accurate figures quoted on here are simply plucked out of the air.

Nasro Subari Don’t know where you got that figure from. It’s 3.304 to 3 decimal places. 4’33” is 4.55 minutes. 15’02” is 15.03333... One divided by the other is 3.304

Did the performance ever start or end?

I don't think that's it Diogo.

That's ridiculous. Whoever put you there is an absurd, tyrannical Luddite. You should get damages for unlawful detention. Poor you.

I think it's the right decision, because it is a total waste of everyone's time. You can't "play" (if you wanna call it that) this to an audience that is not expecting to hear the room's noise, and in a talent's show where you actually have to show talent.

Honestly, I think that this piece can only work if the audience is unaware. Because, if an audience is aware of the intent of the piece, they could bring their 'own' performance into it. For example one can expect that the piece is to call attention to the current sound in the room, and that person can begin to sing. Possibly this also could be the intent, since the piece only dictates that the performer makes no sound. So even an aware audience could be a valid performance. But since in the description and Cage's explanation of the work, the idea was to have the audience focus on the ambience, and a person creating their own performance could possibly not be considered ambience. Ack, but then again, you can say, a car driving by blaring a song loudly on the car stereo, is ambience.

And then why can't it be all those things? Or none of them? I hate arguments based on definitions, they tend to be mostly useless and a waste of time. :(

Cosmo Guerini My point is not about this definition in particular, but about definitions in general: a definition isn't so useful if people can't agree whether it applies.

smalin I know, and I agree with you. :)

However, definitions are essential when having a philosophical discussions. But you're right: a good definition is that on which all can agree. Dodd argues that music is "sound that is produced by a composer's instructions." Even in common vernacular, the term "music" is used beyond this definition. While sitting in a field, nature has a certain music. Language has music. Life in a city has a certain "music". What then do we mean? Can we have music sans composer? Does that mean that 4 instrumentalists playing together, but without a pre-determined plan fail to be music? Can we have music without instructions? Does a piece that fails to follow the composer's instructions (say when the Tuba player holds a note for an extra measure) suddenly cease to be music? I would argue that Dodd's definition is too narrow. We will have to broaden our definition until it encompasses a more general consensus. Any broadening of Dodd's definition that could include spontaneous sounds in nature or a musician's failure to follow a score, must encapsulate Cage's 4'33". Music is art of a sonic quality. Which challenges not the definition of Music but that of Art. Dodd's argument would be stronger if he argued that the definition of art must include intentionality (I would still disagree, however). Then Cage's piece would not only fail to be music, but it would fail to be art. But, as Dodd argues that 4'33" IS art, one must conclude that it is music.

Ivan Wohner An airplane makes a sound; does the designer of an airplane therefore qualify as "a composer" and the sound of an airplane as "music"? Who is to say whether a particular sound is "art"? How about art works (e.g. kinetic sculptures) that make sounds?

+Daren Wilson well said sir

Nothing is black. Its just not in visible range. Even black holes have hawking radiation and thus a color xray range no doubt. Atheism is an absence in belief of religion. 0 F is actually a positive temperature in absolute temp [Kelvin] 0 is value and F is the measure of temperature. Its the property of substance that always exists. Every paramagnetic has small magnet in it doesn't make it magnet as they are not in order. Its like serving raw ingredients and asking people to it is as that makes the food. Its the arrangement. That's difference between chaos and order. & music is reproduce-able.

+Zubin Darbari i agree with the science about black ... there are 2 types of atheism by the way, implicit atheism (dont hold belief in divine beings) and explicit atheism (denies that any such being exists), they are different ... if i play something wellplanned out and written but can never be played back correctly does that mean it is not music? ofcoarse not .. any great work may neer be perfectly reproduced either yet we still consider it music .. on the other hand something random can be reproduced ... you can let ur cat scramble across the piano and you may not call it music but if i were to video tape that event and then map out the notes correctly and place it in a music sheet in function with my own perceived tactus (beat/pulse) then let one of those incredible pianists perform it correctly then you would have to say its music .. therefore in reality any sounds or absence there-off can be perceived as music

Renaldo Ramai​ Music is composed in the mind first. The composition is given to an instrument player who performs according to it. Your cat might make best music repeatedly, it will not be a composition just a skilled performer not that it is bad but this one is composed or not composed which I think is a better way of saying. Difference between sound and music is smooth flow.

music does not need to be composed or require a performer .. if i were to stand outside a room and i hear a thumping sound coming from inside, if i comprehend it to have rhythm, timbre and some sort of pitch then it is music regardless if i look inside and see a man reading sheet music striking a percussive instrument or water dripping from the the roof .. knowing what caused it had nothing to do with it being music or not ... its about how you percieve sound

you meant 10 minutes 30 seconds more, right?

@@_S._S._ the author doesnt need more than 2 seconds to think about 4 minutes and 33 seconds "silence".

@@monkklein8282 well said!

It's funny because John Cage spent 4 years on his piece

+Nick Sibicky It isn't communication. Music is a combination of melody, rhythm, and harmonic progression. None of those elements are present here.

+dgk stl I DO hear melody, harmony, and progression in a performance of 4'33". I'm a little sad when people tell me that they don't.

+Nick Sibicky If you then then can hear these musical elements then can you enlighten me? For example: What is the chord progression.? List the Major, minor, 7th chords etc. OR, list them numerically such as I, IV, V, I. Use letters (C Maj, a min) or roman numerals, your choice I'll accept either. If you hear rhythm is the piece in 3 beats to a measure? Or is it 4 beats to a measure? (3/4 or 4/4)? Or something different such as 6 beats per measure (6/8) with 8th note getting a full beat. Melody? Can you write it down? Even just several measures and I'll be satisfied. What is the first note of the melody? That would be a, b, c, d, or a flat, b flat, c sharp etc. up to g. Very simple, what is the fist note and beyond? Just give me the first few. If you will spend 10 minutes doing this I will be grateful and enlightened. If you can't then I don't believe you actually hear this combination of musical elements. You just pretend.

+dgk stl That is an extremely limited definition of music, but it is yours, so it is correct. Definitions of man-made concepts like music and art are entirely subjective. There is no right answer, it's all opinions. But an opinion I'd offer to you is this: music is organized sound. Take a babbling brook, for instance. It's music is the sound of water and stones organized by the slope of the surface over which it runs, and by the force of gravity, and by the wind, and by countless other factors. All sound is organized in this way, by the flow of time. 4'33'' is an invitation to hear the music being composed and performed in simultaneity all around you. There is no such thing as silence. If there is nothing else to hear, you will hear your own nervous system and blood circulation. That's just one possible perspective. I cannot and will not say that you are wrong.

+William Downing Its not my definition. Its a standard definition to clarify the difference between music and other sounds that occur whether naturally or other. You can say "All sound is organized in this way, by the flow of time" but music is more defined. It has meter. Meter is a more specific term and this nonsense of 4'33" has no meter. "Time" yes. "Meter" no. Nor does it have melody or harmonic progression. It lacks all three elements that make up "music". "Music" has a more precise definition than the load of crap you enlightened, zen, intellectual wanabees pretend that is has. Yes, its limited just like you suggest. We do that. We make specific definitions in an effort for precise communication. A table and a chair are similar but each one has a specific, although limited, definition. If you are asked to get a chair don't come back with a table and claim that in the metaphysical world they are the same. My window fan makes a pleasant sound that I like. But it isn't music, it is white noise (as we call it). So my window fan is not a MP3 player, a radio, a CD player ect. just because it can make sound. Do you get it yet? Not all sound is music even though all music is sound. Quit pretending.

Why does music need to be pleasant to listen to? And who's to say that screaming or silence aren't pleasant to listen to anyway? I fail to see how your argument applies.

@@kingnerri Not for Yoko Ono

at this point, yeah basically

You totally forgot that punk and extreme metal exists

Let me introduce you to a genre named "danger music".

I love the way you've put it, whilst disagreeing completely :)

**me in the audience** toot toot I'm an instrument

Tigranis Music is the organisation of the notes. You can't organise humans to play the exact sounds you want.

And children are pretty effective at breaking those illusion.

Fortunately, it's free

But the audience members are the instruments. The piece was written intentionally for this purpose, therefore it is music.

No. If it were, then the audience would be included and mentioned in the score. Rather, I'd consider it anti-music.

@@ArgentAlapin What about music that is scoreless? A piece of music is not required to have a score to be music.

@@MrCooIz Any piece of music needs guidelines to be composed.

@@ArgentAlapin You're right, and 4"33's guidelines were that mere noise and ambient sounds become the forefront of the piece. Guidelines do not necessarily equal to having a score either.

This is perhaps one of the most intelligent and well informed comments I have ever seen on KZfaq. Thank You.

"The definition of music that most scholars agree upon is the one provided by Blacking and Varese, and supported through Cage; namely, that music is organized sound" But ambient noise is not organized by anyone. "Renaissance paintings that contain scores with actual readable music notation on them? Is that music? Of course it is! I can read music, I can hear it in my head" It is "music" in metonimical sense, but in fact it's visual representation of music. It's shadow on the cave wall :)) You couldn't experience it as music if you'd never before experienced music in its audible form (and thus were able to "hear it in your head" as you say). So it can't be the music itself, because you need to have a prior idea of music in your mind (to have something you can translate the score back into). A caveman could listen to a song and "get it" without ever having heard a piece before I can describe some taste to you and if this description is accurate and detailed, you'll be able to imagine this taste pretty well, as long as you have some points of reference. But if you never tasted anything sweet, I can't successfully explain to you what sweet tastes like. And this shows that verbal description of taste is NOT taste (it can only help to revoke it). "And what about improvisation? Improvisation (an its rich philosophies from Bailey and beyond) show the ephemeral nature of music and what it does to a rigid definition of a "work of music"" Improvised doesn't mean unorganized, only that it's organized ad hoc

Or a simple thought experiment. Let's say all music ever created was totally wiped off (all the transcriptions, all memories from every human brain) except for only one work, say Minuet in G Major. Then Minuet in G Major is certainly still music. In the sense that the idea of music as existed before the cataclysm could be recreated based on that piece alone. Now what if the only piece not "deleted" from the world was 4'33". Is 4'33" still music??

It's really nice to know that youtube comment threads like these exist.

vibovitold Thanks for taking the time to engage with my lengthy comment. 1. "But ambient noise is not organized by anyone." What we learn from Cage is that the act of listening itself is 'music,' or, as Cage writes (in Credo, I believe), "If this word 'music' is sacred and reserved for eighteenth-and nineteenth-century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound." For some (you perhaps), music is too sacred. For Dodd it is not that 'music' is too sacred, it is that he confuses 'music' with a 'work of music.' I have not read Dodd's book, but I noticed that in it there was only one page with references to Lydia Goehr, who makes very clear the distinction. That says to me that he probably did not take it very seriously, though I'll reserve judgment on that until I read that page. What Cage and others claim is that listening is (or can be) music. The music begins when I decide to listen to something as music, and it ends when I stop. Therefore ambient noise is organized by the listener when they choose to listen to it as music. Now we can argue what counts as starting and what counts as stopping. Keep in mind that Cage, Kaprow, and other artists were interested in collapsing art and everyday life (and even Nietzsche wanted to live his life as art). 2. "So it [paintings with music notation] can't be the music itself, because you need to have a prior idea of music in your mind." You are correct that the musically illiterate may not have access to aurality through music notation, but I do. I can hear it in my head. This kind of music is not metonymical, as you say, it is metasonic. Imagining a beautiful sunset, or a strange juxtaposition of colors, is a visual experience in the mind. Unfortunately we do not have a word for 'aural imagination' or hearing music (or speech) in your mind. If you say that hearing 'music' in your head is not music, then reading this comment is not language. Furthermore, your argument on cavemen not being able to read music doesn't fly either. Cavemen (or even most people today) probably wouldn't recognize Duchamp's Fountain as (a work of) art either. [Dodd does not make your argument here.] 2A. Your 'taste' comment is not the same as 'music,' because music has a broader definition that incorporates the imagination of music. By your definition, no music score can be called music, and perhaps no recording could be called music, since the recording of a symphony is not a symphony, but a bad sonic representation (or description) of one. Then many examples of so-called 'electronic music' meant to be listened to as a recording only would perhaps need a new term to describe its medium for those who think the term 'music' is too sacred (unless, perhaps, the composer specifies an operator to press PLAY, and then the operator would be the performer (and I'm perfectly fine with that)). 3. "Improvised doesn't mean unorganized, only that it's organized ad hoc." You either missed the point, or you should use that point to figure out Objection 1 (on ambient noise). Dodd is clear that he believe a work or music MUST have instructions. Dodd's powerpoint says: "A work is a work of music only if it is made up of sounds organized by the composer. "It is a necessary condition of a work's being a work of music that its performances can only comprise sounds produced by performers of the work as a result of their following the composer's instructions." (see 8:11 in the video above) I am unsure where he gets this definition Derek Bailey and other Free Jazz and Free Improvisation practitioners were improvising without scores and many times without instructions. Sounds were not organized before the improvisation (since organizED is past tense). These sounds are not "composed," they are performed in real time. "Organized ad hoc" makes no sense: these works are in the process of being performed. (We can argue about the merits of idiomatic and non-idiomatic improvisation another time.) Now, if Dodd had understood Goehr, then he might have come to the conclusion that the case of free improvisation is NOT a WORK OF MUSIC, but it is still MUSIC. Dodd uses the terms 'music' and work of music' interchangeably. What is the difference? I don't have my Goehr in front of me, so I'll do my best: A "WORK OF MUSIC" attempts to crystalize, Platonize, reify, make a 'thing' out of music that can be understood ahistorically and therefore universally. These mythic attempts take place in a sacred temple, the concert hall: the imaginary museum of musical works. Such developments were born out of German 19th century transcendental philosophy to explain a history of Great artists, writers, composers and Great works of art, literature, and music. "MUSIC," on the other hand, is the organization of sound. But it is not merely the organization of sound, it is also the process of making it, performing it, rehearsing it, listening to it, thinking about it: music is always its musicking. See my essay, "Aural Reification and Gerunding: Thing and -ing." 4'33" pisses a lot of people off because it works to dispel the mythologies of Western music and the musical work (and yet it fails because it has erected its own mythology!). If music is about listening and not about piano lessons, then what? (Or as Cage says, "Are sounds just sounds or are they Beethoven?"). Dodd's point is that Cage did not organize the particular sounds that occur within the parameters of the length of the piece. But I don't know anyone who abides by his definition of a "work of music" nor do I know anyone who agrees that the definition of "music" is synonymous with his definition of a "work of music." I am highly interested and invested in these questions. I study noise(/)music. Thanks to those who reply and engage. I hope Dodd will reply, and I regret the antagonistic tone I took at the end of my first response. I was annoyed that he felt the need to remind his audience that he is a philosopher; I found that to be a way of imparting extra authority to a thesis he is wrong about. 4'33" is not Pluto.

Are you saying that any sound is music if you think it is? If, using that definition, you asked me what I'd been doing today and I told you I'd been listening to music, I would be telling you about my state of mind, my interpretation of what I'd been hearing, as opposed to telling you anything about the sounds in my environment (since they could have been anything). Is it "narrowminded" to think that such a definition would less useful than the conventional one?

smalin you sound like you would be a drag at a noise show

whitewiddoww You sound like you wouldn't do very well in a philosophy class.

smalin sorry i misread i was agreeing with you

whitewiddoww Exactly my point.

that would make him a cool dude which he isn't

"I did not attempt to prove that 4'33" is or is not a work of art/music", well you should, because the fact is that the expert talking about music here, is not a musician by himself, nor does he love music in any way. He is just ignorant. Art critics should be eliminated from our civilization, because they claim expertise they don't possess and they impose opinions on the unsuspected and "ignorant" masses. And you spent all this time trying to persuade someone that he contradicts himself. Of course he does, what he says has nothing to do with knowledge. In fact by the title I could tell that he is ignorant, because if he had any relationship with music or art at all, he would never spend 15 minutes talking about something that really is not worth even thinking about.

I am a upcoming musician/producer/arranger & from watching this video I've come to realized how uneducated some people can sound at time. He does contradict himself. I completely disagree with his 'suppose' argument or whatever it may be & would hastily suggest that he goes & do a talk on something he's better at because right now he just seems to be picking around. People seem to see or think of music as one thing: which seems to be when an instrument is playing or someone is singing, other that than they claim it to be 'ambient noise' as he say. But Music...or anything in the Art is abstract & can be anything. It has no limit but it would seem that people have limit there thinking scope & only think within a small box & anything outside of that is wrong or NOT MUSIC!!!! He really needs to stop. What he's saying is soooooo opinionated, that's all I'm getting right now. Don't care who agrees or disagrees, if he can voice his opinion, then why can't I!

That is exactly what I thought. It is the same thing with the radio example he gives in the talk actually. The sounds are intended to be random and the world itself becomes the performer.

If "everything in the environment" is a performer then everyone is a performer. Which means no one is. A bit like giving every first grader a Blue Ribbon for their project to signify they were the best. If everyone gets a Blue Ribbon then Blue Ribbons are meaningless. As are "performers". The word becomes vague because everyone is a performer. Then we have to invent a new word for people who spend thousands of hours learning how to perform a musical instrument.

Jonas Gleitz If it's intended to be random, it's still not music. Music isn't random noises.

+Emerald Apple Actually, music is inclusive of random noises, if that's what the composer intended. Sure, it may not be interesting, but it's technically music, because it's organized sound, random or not.

No, because the environment was not instructed by the composer. At least not according to what he means by a performer.

+Kevin Shaabi I’m similarly confused, Kevin. The lack of creativity, in this talk, towards approaching definitions of music is surprising, especially from someone who (from the description) is supposed to be a researcher on “the ontology of jazz”!

+Kevin Shaabi To me it all depends on intent someone playing the piano when hitting the wrong Note is still intending to make music the issue with 4'33 is that there is no intent the people in the audience are not intending to make music so therefore it is not music.

+Kevin Shaabi absolutely brilliant kevin, i agree fully

+tvo770 you need to research chance music more thoroughly and understand how that relates to what kevin said about a mistake or not ... if i play 4 notes on an instrument a listener can hear that as music, but what if 4 water droplets fall at the same rhythm .. lets say the listener doesnt know what produced either sound .. are they both not equally valid? the answer is that they are both music with or without intent or control

+Renaldo Ramai No. They aren't the same. Music is a language. Random noise that sounds "musical" in some way, is not an intentional attempt to communicate and is therefore, not music. It's the same as the occasional noise one hears that sounds like a word: it isn't the wind attempting to talk to you through the hollow of a tree...Or water attempting to sing by falling on rocks.... It's just a coincidence of sound.

Actually, I think you clinch the argument for it being a piece of music in an objective way. Music is the organization of sounds and silence in time. Whether or not those sounds and silences-or just sounds or just a sound or just a silence-are satisfying for the audience is another matter. I mean, I don't care for 4'33", but I don't see that denying it's music makes any sense. (FWIW, I love Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano.)

ChannelNameIntentionallyLeftBlank I would disagree on the condition that 4'33" isn't an organization of sound and silence, but instead a disorganized jumble of *unintentional* sound and silence, not necessarily even needing to be influenced by people at all. The importance of this is that if any sound (or lack thereof), regardless of its source or its intent (or lack thereof) can be considered music, then music has no meaning or value as a concept, being merely a synonym for "sound" or "noise".

Zachs Mind He has specified that it is what he feels and that it is "his claim"

Zachs Mind The reason this piece stands out among nearly all other works, is that it seems, for all the world, like something that isn't really music. Such a response aligns more or less with general intuition. I think this speaker did a remarkable job of determining the artistic value of such a work as opposed to merely dismissing it, while also including, and in fact, providing some kind of logical framework for this intuitive reaction. I do believe that if one is to define a concept, one needs to take into account the general usage of the term, since words are social artifacts, not private property. If this speaker has no right to decide what music is, then Cage does not either. I do think the speaker intelligently engages with Cage's question, making us the richer for it. My view is that Cage was less interested in defining, or arriving at closure with respect to the subject, than he was with suggesting, or opening up the subject. In so doing, he invites some things which endanger the subject a bit. Cage places the art in a precarious place: making music that is at times barely audible, barely listenable, naively simple, or too complex to follow.

Three words are important. Sound - Composition - Meaning. Music is composed sound with meaning. Therefore composed silence (written on a score with a time limit of 4:33) is music. The meaning is created by the composer and the listener.

Music = Dynamics (tension/release) + Timbre Everything else is conditioned to style

He still seems really angry, and I don't really like his way of working out the problem. It's slow and overbearing in my opinion---he could find a more eloquent way of conveying his ideas, without making the audience feel like he's about to whip out an uzi and start spraying.

Angry like how you sound writing your comments, 'right'? lmao

This is great

yes, this piece when performed in a concert context is inherently theatrical

Your logic is flawed: "Does a greater being exist?" More questions arise from this than the 4'33" debate yet more people continue to have completely different answers one way or the other. The answer is not necessarily yes nor no, it's not something that can be a fact based on a strict set of aesthetic judgements. It can't be. Just because the piece takes place using the idea of sound not necessarily used in musical creation, not performed specifically for the purpose of creating music or with any set restrictions on the 'instruments' available does not mean it cannot be music if listened to in a musical context. If somebody listens to 'whale song' which is merely communication and considers it music, who are you to tell them otherwise?

Andrew Ellis It's not a piece, it's a blank sheet that he calls a piece. The problem with this extreme deconstructionism is that anything can be music. And if anything can be music, then everything is music. And if everything is music, the word loses all meaning. If all sound is music, and the absence of sound is music, then what is music? It becomes a meaningless term.

To be fair, the point of the piece was, I think, pretty much to stir things up and get people thinking about sound being created by non-traditional instrumentation, I don't think anybody here literally thinks all random sounds can should be construed as a piece of work. This I guess is more of a thought exercise, a philosophical gesture to get people to think outside the box. It's a one off to get people to think differently and I think that's what's to be applauded, not as a format by which other people can do the same thing and think they're clever.

I've heard this argument before, but I don't find it compelling. If his objective was to get people to think outside the box, he could have done it with a T-shirt that says "think outside the box". So you're supposed to just infer that the whole point of the exercise comes down to thinking outside the box? In what way? How? What's he trying to point out? There is nothing here. There is LITERALLY nothing here. To say that this is art of any kind or that it makes some kind of statement is pretentious in my opinion.

devourerofbabies You're welcome to your opinion. I think myself and many others have read to much into it and it's become overly academic both through Cage's explanation and through subsequent interpretations of the 'work' which doesn't help. I did, however, through having debates and conversations with peers start thinking more widely about sound using 4'33" as a gateway to do so in a way that talking about a slogan t-shirt wouldn't do. Maybe that wasn't the intention but it's had that effect on me and many others, it's a very polarising debate and that helps with exploring lots of avenues on the subject, the more we explore the more we learn. Surely if anything you can see the positive effects of that even if it were not the original intention?

@GN Since he cannot control what the audience does, he did not compose it, did he? He cannot claim ownership of random noise. It's tantamount to an artist putting up a white canvas, naming it 24" by 36", and when asked, "What does it mean?" they respond, "What do YOU think it means?" The artist put nothing into it and expect you to get something out of it. That makes it not art. 4'33" is not music.

No, wrong. This isn't about art. It's about music.

@@SpontaneityJD I can't exactly remember the context as I have watched this video 3 years ago, but I suppose that music is art. At least in my eyes it is.

@@Zeanutjam thank you!

@@JoaoPedroVCFerreira Happy 3 years. blast from the past

It's a frame for something music bigger than "music"

Agreed

music is arrangement of noise or lack thereof. ambience is still music

Cameron Hall I think it is a performance of some kind, and therefore art of some kind. I performed this piece this week with a drummer. I confessed it was unrehearsed. Half way through a couple of guys walked in and started chatting. At the end of it, the audience applauded. I think they accepted it as a performance, even if it wasn't music. In fact, I think the fact that it's NOT music is where most of the entertainment cane from. Do I think it's art, but yes, not music, that in fact is probably the whole point.

+Logan Griffin Music is a language and like all languages, it has minimum requirements of operation that cannot be fulfilled by random noise. The most fundamental of which is meter. We recognize nothing as music that does not convey meter. The halfway point between music and speech demonstrates this: things we describe as "sing-songy". They have meter but lack tone so we tend to find ourselves annoyed by them because our minds are being jerked in two different directions. Being musically incompetent, Cage didn't understand the difference between silence - which is random - and musical silence - which requires meter. The silence you hear in the rests of a composition by an actual musician like Beethoven or Paul Simon, isn't truly silent: you carry the beat on from the music before the rest, in your head and if the rest goes on for too long you will lose track of the beat and the music will feel disjointed when it starts back in. Had Cage known what he was doing he would have put a performance note in the score explaining that the meter had to be somehow conveyed to the audience. Silently tapping a foot or finger would have been enough. Then, 4'33 would have conveyed musical silence and the ambient noise between the first and last beats could be considered musical.

You're confusing cause and effect. If we call something music, it's because we think it has the qualities that "being music" implies. It doesn't gain those qualities because we call it music. If I start calling lemons "music," it doesn't turn lemons into music. If everyone starts calling lemons "music," the meaning of the word "music" has changed. But it doesn't mean that lemons have become music.

smalin Your comment was music to my ears.

smalin you're completely right. but i don't think that is the point Vibrating Dolphin was saying :))

Adooviklet What is the point you think Vibrating Dolphin is making? "silence can be music if we say it is" seems to suggest that anything can be music if we say it is. I think that the meaning of words is a little more constrained than that. See: definitionsinsemantics.blogspot.com/2012/03/humpty-dumpty-principle-in-definitions.html

Cage kept saying that music was beyond the boundaries of instruments. Listen to Water Walk. Because really, sound OVERALL is music if you hear it as music ;p

John Appleseed wants to know how to order it.

Kris Christenson The way he worded it wasn't so great, but I think it's fair to say that in that situation the performers themselves are simply composing on the spot; the difference with 4'33" is that no one is composing anything, with all sounds happening more or less by accident.

Taurelion In Philosophy wording is incredibly important. He discounted 4'33'" on a technicality, so the same technicality must disqualify anything else that fails its test. When someone improvises, they are not following the instructions of a composer, therefore by the criterion he gave improvisation is not music. He also indicates that a performer must be creating the sounds that are a part of the piece. What about in the case of a recording? When I listen to recordings in my living room am I listening to something other than music? Is it for some reason just a facsimile of music reproduced in digital form? Or if I listen to a score that was realized entirely electronically in the first place? Is that for some reason not music because no performer was involved in creating the sounds? No, that's a ridiculous notion, so his criteria fail again. What's more, music is a subjective art form created entirely by humans. Therefore, there are no natural laws governing it. Since subjectivity is a slave to opinion and all human beings have the ability to create unique opinions about subjective material. It then follows that no one person's opinion on subjective matters has any more merit than another person's. Therefore, no one can decide what is or is not music. Therefore, if John Cage says his piece is music, no human being can say he is wrong and have it hold any weight.

Kris Christenson I don't have any issue with your second paragraph, aside from the fact that it's not entirely consistent with your original comment; by the same logic, this professor's definition, even taken at face value, is still perfectly valid. As for the first, a recording of a performance or music created on a computer could still be considered a "performance" depending on how you choose to define that, though at this point either side of that argument would be nitpicking too much for my taste. If we're going to really go all the way with this, though, I'd propose that the actual music isn't a mix of sounds and silence at all, but instead that it is the experience itself. Cage's own definition falls short in that it doesn't account for the possibility that the sensations we identify as "music" can occur without the associated sounds ever occurring. For instance, when you "hear" a song in your head, it is a purely mental phenomenon. This could become all the more relevant in the future if we start augmenting our brains with computers and gain the ability to simply download a song into our brains, especially if that song was itself only ever created via electronics. Music would then be created and experienced without physical sound or silence being involved at all.

That's an interesting point, and I think it falls in line with Cage's definition of music perfectly. He defined music as all sound, which I think he would say includes the sounds "in your head." But back to the point of an electronically produced score. There is a difference between a performance and a performer. By the definition given by the presenter, music has to be performed by performers. It would certainly be a stretch to say that a computer is a performer in the same way that a human might be a performer, because the computer doesn't make decisions in reaction to the instructions given them. So it seems quite plain to me that by his definition this would be discounted as music, which is counter-intuitive. I know this is nitpicking, but I must reiterate that it was nitpicking that lead him to disqualify 4'33" in the first place, and this argument is against his point, not yours so the nitpicking is necessary.

Kris Christenson Great point. However, if the speaker asked instead if 4'33" were a musical composition, as opposed to whether a performance of 4'33" is music, he could explore such nuances better maybe.

He's not. His definition of art is incredibly flexible, but his definition of music is precise and limited

Indeed. Furthermore, aleatoric music is also disqualified. There are a number of problems with the assertions made in this presentation.

Exactly

There IS no absence of sound in 4'33. Absolute silence doesn't exist. Try it.

"it's not music, because music is sound" Riiiight, and the rests in a piece of music where no instrument plays (e.g., the first half of the beat in the 6th bar of Beethoven's Op. 67, any tutti rest in orchestral music, rests in solo piano music, etc.) aren't really part of that piece of music. Please, think a little bit before writing such nonsense.

4'33 doesn't have traditional musicians play any notes, but 4'33 is not a silent piece, the audience and ambient noise is the sound of the piece. so if music is sound, then 4'33 is music.

I think TED talks aim to widen and open debate and from the comments section hear it seems to have done that, even if the talk in question may have not been the most open.

Please do that :D