New music is the name of a discipline of contemporary music composition that often pursues innovative, experimental and avant-garde approaches in terms of sound, structure and instrumentation and also transfers them to performance practice.
One of the most important exponents of New Music, which also aims to push the boundaries of traditional musical conventions and explore new creative avenues of expression, is the American composer and conceptual artist John Cage (1912-1992). Many who have never heard of him know the revolutionary piece “4’33”.
Composed in 1952, the controversially received work consists of three movements totaling 4 minutes and 33 seconds, hence the title ‘4’33’ (or ‘Four minutes and thirty-three seconds’). What is special about the piece is that no conventional musical sounds are produced during the entire performance.
Throat and rustle
This means that musicians sit on the stage and prepare their instruments, but do not play any notes for the entire duration of the performance. Instead, the ambient loudness and noises that occur during the performance are considered part of the piece.
The aim is for the audience to pay close attention to these noises, i.e. the clearing of audience members’ throats, the rustling of programs, the hum of lights or even noises that do not even come from the hall.
And why this kind of anti-music? With 4’33, John Cage wanted to draw attention to the idea that silence, even when consciously perceived, is still sound. He made it clear that there is no such thing as absolute silence (for humans) and that noise is still present even in an apparently quiet environment. The piece is therefore intended to encourage listeners to question and rethink their ideas about music and silence. To put it another way and put it simply: everything is music!
As you can imagine, “4’33” not only aroused admiration when it was written in the 1950s. Many music critics called Cage – who rose to become one of the key figures in the happening movement – as enfant terriblewhich deliberately thwarts the tradition and expectations of classical music in order to achieve a subversive effect (which of course, so the argument goes, fizzles out in terms of aesthetics).
Nevertheless, over the decades, more and more admirers were found for Cage’s work, who before his breakthrough with a large audience with “4’33” had already attracted attention with the so-called Imaginary Landscapes and before his death made a film about the relationship between light and music ( “One”). “4’33” is considered a key work of experimental music that also deeply influenced popular culture and other arts. The electronic music of the 1970s and also krautrock are perhaps inconceivable without Cage.
The piece is the subject of a number of films, such as the John Hughes cult classic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. A box set was released in 2019, for which bands such as Depeche Mode and Einsturzende Neubauten imagined their version of the piece. But there are also numerous other, often unusual-looking covers. Admittedly, it is sometimes difficult not to understand such interpretations as parody, but the unconditional coupling of sound and image, which is basically disturbed, also shows how closely the production of music is also connected to how we present it on stage or in videos – and that this is always a staging of sound.