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