Steve Schwartz wrote: >Hmm. So therefore a note isn't music either, but merely a component. >How about a group of notes? Is that music? If so, why not a group of rests? >Ian goes on to point out that it's the organization of these components >that gives rise to music. I agree. I would, however, contend that Cage >organizes the rests - etremely loosely, I admit, but it's there. There >are movements and timings, etc. (although not much of an etc.). I don't see how you can organize silence without putting sounds in between. That's like drawing with white ink on white paper. Of course there's an organizing 'frame' - the concert-hall surroundings, the person at the piano, the fixed no. of seconds - but is that enough? I've already made the comparison with a picture gallery in which one of the 'paintings' is a window inside a picture frame. I'd no longer say, as I did a couple of days ago, that this isn't 'art' of some sort - probably the only objective criterion you can set down for something to be 'art' is that it must involve the communication of consciously expressed ideas from one person to another - but I'd prefer to call it conceptual art or a 'Gesamtkunstwerk' or whatever the terms are, rather than music or a painting. Why? Because the conscious expression of ideas isn't taking place on the level of the sounds or images themselves - only on the level of the frame that surrounds them. It might be a different story if, in a piece like 4'33", the concert environment has been chosen to create a limited 'palette' of sounds (shuffling, programme-flapping etc), or if the window is deliberately situated by the artist to focus on a particular view. That should get rid of the bird-song (and of Don Satz's car-engine) - there's no doubt that birds organize sounds, but to the best of my knowledge they do this instinctively, as mating-calls etc - and to my mind that's not conscious enough to be 'art' as opposed to 'nature'. Ditto for imitative birds. Of course we are talking about a continuum, and it's probably impossible to say definitively where imitation or craft or instinctive ritual end and art begins - but again, the key element would seem to be a certain level of (self)consciousness. Felix Delbruck [log in to unmask]