Stanislaus, I do wish to address you a post in a more serious tone.
I completely understand the intention.
I also completely understand the concept of performance art. Once you have stood in the Cat Club and watched Karen Finlay jam Caribbean food into various bodily orifices, well, performance art make sense to me.
March me into an art gallery in Williamsburg and standing in front of a canvas14 feet square. Just off of center down to the left is a small red circle. It is filled with red, it is not just a circle.
The presumption of interpretation created by the artist allows me to decide what that circle is.
To me the staggering gift of music, just about any kind of music, is that to some extent I get to interpret the sound and feeling.
Don’t tell me that what I’m going to experience music when what I am really going to experience is Karen Finlay.
I’m not sure I fully agree with the idea that the point’s been made. It’s in the nature of music and art that knowing about it is very different from experiencing it. I’m assuming that, for example, **LHOD **has once or twice been to an art gallery and looked at modern art (I think I remember a very similar thread about Rothko a few months ago?). To suggest that there’s no need for *you *to look at it because when it came out lots of other people looked at it would, in the case of modern art, be obvious nonsense. (Or any art - I mean, yeah, perspective, anatomy, whatever Leo, it’s been done. Don’t waste my time.)
It was performed 62 years ago, as mentioned. I had heard about it, and intellectually understood the point it was trying to make. Then I heard it. I wouldn’t repeat it but I don’t regret it - and I grasped the point in a completely different way.
At the risk of of arguing myself into pants-wetting insanity, I’d suggest that in any other context, people on the SDMB dismissing a work of art without hearing/reading/seeing it themselves would be laughed out of court.
If you listened to it, would you recognize it?
If you listened to another rendition of it, could you critically compare it to the original?
Stanislaus, that was a beautifully written and thought provoking description of your experience. Thanks. (And I’m glad Cartooniverse at least tried to take it seriously).
I just listened to the death metal cover version linked to above, and it added another dimension: the ambient sounds on that drummer’s room, recorded maybe a year ago, being released into the air in MY room by this little phone, blended with the sounds on my room now – the ticking clock, the whooshing AC, the ABSENCE of sound from the other end if the house which I know will be filled with my 4 year old’s laughing and crying and running around in just a few minutes… It made me think about how the invention of recorded music adds a dimension of time, space, and sound (what’s going on where/when the recording is made, PLUS where/when it is played back), not present in experiencing a performance firsthand.
Then there’s the added dimension of RECALLING a musical work…
Anyway, it gives me a new appreciation for death metal. 
(That last sentence was a little joke, but the rest of my post was serious).
I am having trouble figuring out why a four and a half minute piece of 62 year old performance art that you have never seen and never will see is bothering you so much. Would you like a cookie for your uncanny ability to call out the pretentious bullshit that is six decades old? I am sure someone’s grandma will be happy to give one to you.
It may not be music, but it’s a performance. I wouldn’t specifically go to see it performed, but if it ended up on the program for a concert I wanted to hear the rest of, I’d try to take out of it what I could, one of the main points being, “what the hell are they thinking?” I’ve heard stories of other Cage pieces that were performed back in the day, and they’r enot for everybody.
I would like to say that I am shocked that it took 44 replies before anybody did this.
Then again, maybe people have been replying silently all along and we have all been too busy reading and typing and posting to notice the performance.
If you liked 4’33", your going to love the sermons at the Quaker meetings.
“Ah, but what is music?”
No, actually, this isn’t music. But agreeing, for the space of just undre 5 minutes, to treat silence as music gives a different context to actual music. And if your expectations are being confounded, is that really so bad?
Yes. In fact it would be very hard to mistake it for any other composition.
Absolutely. I can’t stress enough that what I saw was a performance, to an audience, and that the way the piece was performed had a particular effect on the audience. Different musicians, with a different audience, would create a discernibly different performance.
I quite like it, but the three-minute edit they did for Top 40 radio was a complete travesty.
Not go to a live concert.
Listen to it.
If I started playing a rendition of it on your stereo would you recognize it?
Could you critically compare recordings by listening to them?
I don’t know folks … the dramatic climax at 3’05" was exciting to say the least … had me on the edge of my chair.
I’d like to hear it done in the key of D minor and 3/4 time … see it giving the piece a bit of impending dread will increase it’s popularity.
What other piece of music has brought about as strong as emotional response in you?
Beats the shit out of Coldplay.
My favorite version is the one where Andy Kaufman mimed performing it while a record player actually played the music.
Syrup of Ipecac brings about a strong gastronomic reaction when taken. That doesn’t make it delicious.
I’m on board with this pitting, except that I feel it can be expanded to “Fuck John Cage,” and, perhaps more broadly, “fuck all self-professed avant garde art, the artists who make it, and the horse they all rode in on.”
Tl;dr version - fuck stuff you don’t understand.
Why are you ruling out a live concert? I’ve been explicit that my experience of it was entirely shaped by the fact that it was performed live. If you strip that aspect out, you strip out most of what (I feel) the piece is about. In fact, I can’t stress enough that what I saw was a performance, to coin a phrase. (You will also have noted that I said above that I don’t consider 4’33" to be music.) That said:
Of course. I’m hardly likely to mistake it for Dies Irae.
I don’t see how I could. On the other hand, I could critically compare the experience of listening to the same - or different! - recordings at different times. For example, if you were to play a rendition on my stereo as suggested, my emotional response would likely be confusion and fear, as the context of the rendition led me to ask myself: “Who is this man, and why has he broken in to my house to play avant-garde compositions on my stereo?” On the other hand, if my wife were to insist we listen to it in the first minutes after putting the kids to bed, my reaction would be one of blissful peace, and gratitude that she’d led me into appreciating the moment.