4'33''

I'm reading Kyle Gann's book about John Cage's 4'33''.  I guess you gotta credit someone who can write a 200-page book about a piece of music in which nothing happens, but nonetheless some of it seems like padding to me—there's a lot of pages devoted to a potted biography of Cage and short sketches of some of the people who influenced him and his famous silent piece, from Luigi Russolo to Daisetz Suzuki and Robert Rauschenberg.  But I'm learning a lot too—like the fact that Cage literally spent several years thinking about this piece, occasionally mentioning it in lectures, before he actually wrote it.  Or that the Korm Plastics record label released a CD containing nine different versions of it.  Here's a performance by David Tudor, who gave the premiere in Woodstock, NY in 1952:

I especially liked Gann's succinct comparison between 4'33'' and Erik Satie's famous "Vexations" (a short piano piece to be played 840 times in a row) and "furniture music": "instead of playing nothing and asking people to listen to environmental sounds [as Cage did], Satie played music as environmental sound, and begged people—in vain!—not to listen to it!"  And, although Gann wasn't the one to discover it, it was intriguing to find that 4'33'' was anticipated in a 1932 strip cartoon drawn by someone named "Hy Cage."

It's a pity the "Cage against the machine" campaign failed...