John Cage’s most famous musical composition is called 4′33″.It consists of the pianist going to the piano, and not hitting any keys for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. (He uses a stopwatch to time this.) In other words, the entire piece consists of silences — silences of different lengths, they say.
On the one hand, as a musical piece, 4′33″ leaves almost no room for the pianist’s interpretation: as long as he watches the stopwatch, he can’t play it too fast or too slow; he can’t hit the wrong keys; he can’t play it too loud, or too melodramatically, or too subduedly.
On the other hand, what you hear when you listen to 4′33″ is more a matter of chance than with any other piece of music — nothing of what you hear is anything the composer wrote.”
http://interglacial.com/~sburke/stuff/cage_433.html
