John Cage Wrote a Piece of Silence and Picked Its Length From Absolute Zero

John Cage's 4'33" premiered on August 29, 1952, at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York. The pianist David Tudor walked onstage, sat at the piano, lowered the keyboard lid to mark the beginning of the first movement, and remained still. He raised the lid 33 seconds later to end the first movement, lowered it again, and continued. The piece consists of three movements lasting 30 seconds, 2 minutes 23 seconds, and 1 minute 40 seconds. The piano is never played. Tudor turned the pages of an empty score on cue. The audience, by most accounts, didn't know what to do. "They missed the point," Cage said later. "There's no such thing as silence."

What the audience did hear, of course, was the rustle of programs, wind through the open back of the hall, the distant rain on the roof of Maverick. That was the point. In 1951, Cage had visited Harvard's anechoic chamber, expecting to experience perfect silence; instead he heard two distinct sounds and was told they were his nervous system and his blood circulation. Real silence didn't exist. He resolved to write a piece that made an audience listen for that.

The duration looks arbitrary at first glance and is not. 4 minutes 33 seconds equals 273 seconds. Absolute zero is -273.15°C. Cage, who studied I Ching numerology with the same seriousness he studied Schoenberg, chose the time to mean exactly that — a temperature where all motion stops, set against music in which no instrument plays. A precursor existed: Alphonse Allais's 1897 Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man, 24 blank measures. Cage said he hadn't heard of it.