links for 2009-02-12

4′33″ (Four minutes, thirty-three seconds) is a three-movement composition[1][2] by American avant-garde composer John Cage (1912–1992). It was composed in 1952 for any instrument (or combination of instruments), and the score instructs the performer not to play the instrument during the entire duration of the piece. Although commonly perceived as "four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence",[3][4] the piece actually consists of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed.[5] In defining noise music and its value, Paul Hegarty in Noise/Music: A History (2007) contends that it is John Cage's composition 4'33" that represents the beginning of noise music proper. For Hegarty, noise music, as with 4'33", is that music made up of incidental sounds that represent perfectly the tension between "desirable" sound (properly played musical notes) and undesirable "noise" that make up all noise music.[6] Over the years, 4′33″ became Cage's most famous and most…