I’ve been fortunate enough to hear this piece many times, by a wide variety of performers. Why, just last night, as I was getting ready for bed, the entire London Philharmonic Orchestra didn’t come to Bozeman and didn’t make a single sound. Three days before that, nary a peep was heard here from the original cast of Broadway’s Cats. And a month ago, all four of the Beetles didn’t get together, and played nary a note.
wolf_meister, I don’t see why Mr. Cage’s passing should be any obstacle. Why, he performs his masterpiece on a regular basis, every day!
Interesting how much smaller the OGG file is than MP3, guess that demonstrates well how efficient it is. Anyway, both of those formats lose information. Anyone want to try compressing silence with lossless audio codec ?
Both. 3’44" is whatever happens to be sounding at the time. The recordings contain whatever sounds happened to chance upon the microphone when they were made. The piece is whatever you experience in the time you listen.
Incidently John Cage loathed recordings; he didn’t even own a stereo system. He saw value in them as historical documents but never as a substitute for live performance. Records lead us to think that a musical piece is something fixed, whereas in fact, it’s an experience that’s different everytime. Even if the bits on a CD are exactly the same and they’re being played back on exactly the same hardware, the experience changes because the sonic environment, and more importantly, the listener changes with each listening. What he meant to do with 4’33" is say: okay, this time let’s pay attention to what really matters: ourselves and the world around us.
The length, 4’33" had nothing to do with absolute zero, as a matter of fact, it would be completely wrong to think it’s a piece made of “nothing”. Quote the man himself:
It’s not clear where the length came from but it was, at least in part, the result of chance operations, probably using tarot cards. Those who are curious can read more about it here.
BBC Radio 4 in the UK broadcast a performance of 4’ 33’’ this January. The BBC have an emergency system that cuts in whenever a long period of silence is broadcast (to prevent “dead air”). This system had to be disabled to allow the broadcast to take place.
I saw a great documentary on Cage called I have nothing to say and I’m saying it featuring many interviews with the composer himself. In reference to the length of 4’33", IIRC he said something to the effect of “…actually, I simply composed a series of silences which happened to add up to 4’33”.
(Here’s one library’s catalogue listing of it. You probably won’t find it anyplace but a library)
He is a fascinating figure of 20th century music and his influence cannot be overstated, but I must admit he does come off a bit flaky at times in the film.
Or possibly forgot that computer prefixes deal with base 2 rather than base 10. So kilo = 2^10 rather than 10^3. Which is why hard drive salesman are basically always lying to you when they tell you the number of gigabytes a hard disk has. They take the number of bytes and divide by 10^9 rather than 2^30. When you get to large amounts, the difference between the two divisors becomes significant.
On topic, though, I want to hear an orchestra play LaMonte Young’s Composition 1960 No. 7 someday. Sure it was written for a piano, but imagine how much better it would sound with a whole orchestra.
I have participated in a choral performance of 4’33’’.
I have also used the piece in beginning music classes.
I think it harks back to what Karlheinz Stockhausen said about how the music should match the performance space. I don’t see the point in listening to a recording of 4’33". It’s meant to be performed, in that what you do is get people into a place where they expect sound, set up a situation where they concentrate on listening for sound, and lo and behold, even if you don’t provide them with any yourself, sound is still there, and when you actually listen for it, it’s as complex and rich as any composition.
In college, I attended (might even have been in, it was at least 15 years ago) a concert with one of the big “Third Stream” music guys from New England Conservatory. He was playing a jazz number with a small combo. They reached a part of the piece where, alternately, the ensemble would play a couple of bars, then the he would solo on piano for a couple of bars. The first two times through the alternation, he played your typical, modern, angular sort of riff. The third time, he played nothing at all. Yet all of us in attendance found that we each had our own angular jazz riff in our heads. There was spontaneous applause from the entire audience.
Help_me_please - rather than going by a rather naff commentary of a performance, you can replicate one yourself. Just sit down, where you’d normally listen to music, and listen. For nearly five minutes. (But don’t time it.)
The piece (as described via Interrobang!?) is not 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence in an anechoic chamber, or a recording with the mike input dead ended, it’s an open air concert piece in front of an audience and contains a lot of low level ambient background sounds a (which is sort of the point). If a mike was capable of picking these sounds up in a recording is it really going to be that much more compressible than music or conversation?
Yes, because it’s got far less dynamic range. Any sounds you do hear will most likely to be of a low, steady rumble with very little of the high frequencies.
First, that’s not an issue with mp3, as has been mentioned before it’s constant rate encoding.
Second, IME doing field recording, “background noise” covers the audible spectrum pretty evenly. You wouldn’t get a low rumble unless something was making one (motor, etc.) or if the wind was blowing in your mic.
Since most of what happens to get recorded in such a situation will tend to have complex spectra - “noises”, hiss, background rumour, your recording is likely to be less compressible than, say, a guitar piece. The low dynamic range will only offset the amount of information to an extent.
Slightly on-topic: I recorded a variety of cicada sounds when brood x invaded - individual bugs and large groups. The individual calls sounded OK after being converted to MP3, but the group call sounded terrible. A nice humming drone was turned into plain old noise. It surprised me, because it seemed to me that the drone had a tonal quality to it and I don’t understand why the MP3 conversion program discarded that.
