Ian Crisp wrote:

>Be somewhere else doing something more interesting.

What could be more interesting than hearing the world around you, than
enjoying a few minutes of suspended silence, peace, listening to time
pass?

>4'33" is not, in my view, music -

Wow.  And what constitutes music? Notes in a diatonic scale played by
serious-looking people in tuxedos? Is that all? How can any aware person
in this century say a work by a composer is "not music?" That's what
people said two centuries ago about Beethoven's string quartets.  Music,
in my view, is organized sound.  4'33" is nothing more, nothing less than
organized sound.  What sets it apart is that the musicians don't actually
play notes, the sound is the sound of silence, the sound of humans and
nature, the small quiet voice of God.

>It is a rather shallow theatrical trick

Well then, we'd have to eliminate a whole lot of works from the repetoire
if that is our criteria for "music." Paganinni Caprices, for example.
Cheap theatrical tricks designed to show off how much a musician has
practiced.  Certainly not music.

>designed to make the audience think

This is a bad thing? For this it is not music? Beethoven's Grosse Fugue
doesn't make you think about what "music" is?

>Nothing is gained by repeat performances, even if performed by different
>instrumental groups, and the full meaning of the piece can be derived
>from reading about it as easily as by going to a performance.

Again, not true, and you miss the whole point of the work.  Everything
is to be gained by repeat performances, because each performance is
different and unique.  I played a concert last night with my trio
(http://serafinotrio.com/ ...shameless plug) in a spectacularly beautiful
country mansion in the mountains of Mallorca.  There are sheep in the
fields surrounding the house, and the sound of the sheepbells lent a
wonderful atmosphere to the the slow movement of the Brahms.  I kept
thinking of how Brahms loved nature and how perhaps there were sheepbells
tinkling in the background as he composed this music.  It would have been
a perfect setting for the Cage.  The music of the place was so lovely and
peaceful, the sea moving in the background, the parrot squawking, I could
have easily listened just to the beauty of that "silence" for, oh, about
4 and a half minutes, and if it had been "organized" as such, let's just
enjoy these sheepbells and that wind in the trees, it would have been a
concrete musical experience that would stay with me.

As for Wes "Captn Puka" going off to the bathroom or to buy potato chips,
I would certainly listen to the magic of those sheepbells before sitting
through some commercial pablum written only to be accessible, only for
people to like it.

David Runnion
www.serafinotrio.com