Music or Not Music

This is John Cage's "4'33". 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. I hope you didn't watch the entire video like I did. Each second waiting for the orchestra to break into song. I eventually got anxious and skipped ahead at 30 second intervals and was surprised to hear nothing.

Cage says "Music is 2 parts, sound and silence", and this embraces only 1 element of that. Thus it isn't music.

I wouldn't consider myself clever if I wrote 10 pages of rests.

This kind of insanity is on par with Atonal Music, which is music with no key center. For instance, I could bang my head on a piano randomly and it would be Atonal music. And High School Music Theory teachers everywhere would praise me and give a senile grimace.

This piece shows me nothing about John Cage's abilities or talents as a writer. A blind, deaf, mute, quadriplegic Sea Otter in a coma could write this. I'll take it a step farther. This Musical Sea Otter could be dead and write this.

So by the transitive property of life, John Cage is a dead Sea Otter.