On 29 August 1952, David Tudor sat down at the piano at the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock, New York, set a stopwatch running and quietly lifted the lid. He then performed nothing for precisely four minutes and 33 seconds. Or rather, he made no sound, only lifting and lowering the lid so as to signal the beginning and end of each movement. What the audience heard, then, was not the piano but the ambient sounds in the hall – of people shuffling, breathing, whispering – and the wind and the rain outside: far from being silent, the premiere of Cage’s 4’33” was full of noises, to be appreciated by anyone who cared to listen.
The beauty of – the work for which Cage is best known and from which he continued to draw inspiration throughout his life – is thatcomposers such as La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Philip Glass.
