Deryk Barker wrote:

>You could try reading Cage himself on the subject.  His aim in 4:33 was to
>make people listen to the sounds around them; his thesis was that music is
>all around us, but we don't listen to it.

Don't be ingenuous.  music around us...?!  That's noise!!!  Cars, trains,
TV's, neibourhood, screams, rock'n roll, children...  You must be
kidding...

Music (I mean the good one, not his one) is - among other things - a way to
get far, or to compensate that noise; and that, by the way, I never needed
Cage to hear to it (if I did, I could never hear it: I don't hear his
"music" anymore).

Well, maybe it would be better if he had applied this philosophy of Tibet
to ALL his music...

Samuel Becket was a great artist.  He never wrote "4 paragraphs and 33
lines" to show us the silence of our outside he used to.

I think he had no thesis at all.  He just wanted to be polemical...  to
have an actitude of a "genius personality" (vanity, self-promotion, of
course).  to turn a famous "Celebrity" with just one shot.

The great irony is that his Silence made of him a Celeb - not his Music.

As composer, a Master on the art of Fugue.

Renato Vinicius