Ikigai Daily
Menu
StillnessMusic idea

John Cage's 4′33″ (1952) is a piece of music in which the performers play nothing for four minutes and 33 seconds, so the audience hears the sounds of the room instead.

MoMA

ArtPhilosophyMusic

The story behind the card

Pianist David Tudor gave the premiere on 29 August 1952 at the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock, New York. He sat at the piano and closed the lid to begin each of the three movements, opening it to end them. Cage recalled that wind stirred the trees outside during the first movement, rain pattered on the roof in the second, and in the third the audience muttered and some walked out. Two things led him to the piece: Robert Rauschenberg's all-white paintings, and a 1951 visit to an anechoic chamber at Harvard, a room built to absorb almost all sound. There he still heard two sounds, which he was told were his nervous system and his blood. He concluded that true silence does not exist.

Türkçe oku
John Cage'in 1952 tarihli 4′33″ adlı eserinde müzisyenler dört dakika otuz üç saniye boyunca hiçbir şey çalmaz; dinleyiciler bu sürede salonun kendi seslerini duyar.

Eserin ilk seslendirmesini piyanist David Tudor, 29 Ağustos 1952'de New York eyaletinde, Woodstock yakınlarındaki Maverick Konser Salonu'nda yaptı. Tudor piyanonun başına oturdu; üç bölümün her birine piyanonun kapağını kapatarak başladı, kapağı açarak bitirdi. Cage'in anlattığına göre birinci bölümde dışarıda rüzgâr ağaçları hışırdattı, ikinci bölümde çatıya yağmur damladı, üçüncüsünde ise seyirciler homurdandı, bazıları salonu terk etti. Cage'i bu esere iki şey götürmüştü: Robert Rauschenberg'in bembeyaz tabloları ve 1951'de Harvard'da, sesi neredeyse tamamen yutan yankısız bir odaya yaptığı ziyaret. Orada bile iki ses duymuş, bunların sinir sistemiyle kan dolaşımı olduğunu öğrenmişti. Buradan gerçek sessizliğin var olmadığı sonucuna vardı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: 4′33″
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderHistory

A griot is a West African storyteller, musician and oral historian who carries memory through performance.

In Manding languages a griot is called a jeli or jali, and in Wolof a gewel. The tradition is tied to the Mali Empire, founded in the 13th century by Sundiata Keita: in the Epic of Sundiata, the griot Balla Fasséké advises the young king, and the Kouyaté family of griots, who trace their line back to him, still perform today. The role usually passes down within griot families. A griot learns genealogies, histories and praise songs by heart, often performing them with the kora, a 21-string harp-lute, the balafon, a wooden xylophone, or the ngoni, a small lute. Griots have also served as advisers to rulers, go-betweens in disputes and keepers of a community's memory of who is related to whom.

The Metropolitan Museum of ArtRead card
StillnessArt

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with lacquer dusted with gold, silver or platinum, so the repaired cracks shine instead of being hidden and become part of the object's history.

The lacquer is urushi, the sap of the Japanese lacquer tree, which hardens slowly in humid conditions; a single repair can take weeks of gluing, filling and polishing before the metal powder is applied. An often-told but unproven story traces the craft to the late fifteenth century, when the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa sent a cracked Chinese tea bowl to China for repair and it came back held together with plain metal staples, prompting Japanese craftsmen to find a more beautiful method. Kintsugi grew up alongside the tea ceremony and wabi-sabi, an aesthetic that values simplicity, age and imperfection. Some repaired bowls came to be prized more than unbroken ones.

Smithsonian Institution / New Orleans Museum of ArtRead card
StillnessArt

Tibetan Buddhist monks build sand mandalas, intricate circular pictures of a deity's palace, grain by grain over days or weeks. Then they ceremonially sweep them away and pour the sand into flowing water.

The coloured sand is poured through narrow, ridged metal funnels called chak-pur: rubbing a rod along the ridges makes the sand trickle out a few grains at a time. Each mandala is a flat plan of a three-dimensional sacred palace; the Kalachakra mandala alone contains 722 deities. When it is finished, the monks hold a dissolution ceremony. They sweep the design into a heap, collect the sand in a jar wrapped in silk and carry it to a river or other moving water, so that its blessing spreads out into the world. The whole ritual is a lesson in impermanence, the Buddhist teaching that nothing material lasts.

Tibetan Buddhist art (sand mandala)Read card
StillnessMusic

John Cage's 4′33″, first performed in 1952, asks the performers to play nothing for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The coughs, rustling and rain the audience hears instead become the music.

The pianist David Tudor gave the premiere on 29 August 1952 at the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock, New York, a wooden hall open to the woods. He marked the three sections by closing the keyboard lid at the start of each and opening it at the end, without playing a note. Cage later recalled hearing wind in the first part, rain on the roof in the second and people talking or walking out in the third. The idea grew partly from a visit to an anechoic chamber at Harvard, a room built to absorb all sound, where he still heard two sounds: his own nervous system and his blood circulating. True silence, he concluded, does not exist; there is only sound we did not intend.

John CageRead card
WonderMusic

The mbira is a musical instrument of the Shona people of Zimbabwe: a row of metal keys fixed to a wooden board, plucked with the thumbs and a forefinger. Players repeat short interlocking patterns, and listeners hear new melodies emerge from within them.

A typical mbira dzavadzimu, “mbira of the ancestral spirits”, has 22 to 28 keys. For performance it is often placed inside a large hollow gourd called a deze, which makes it louder, and bottle caps or shells fixed to it add a buzzing sound. Among the Shona the mbira is played at all-night gatherings called bira, where families call on the spirits of their ancestors, as well as at celebrations and concerts. In the late 1950s the English music researcher Hugh Tracey began making a simplified version, the kalimba, which carried the sound around the world. In 2020 UNESCO listed the art of making and playing the mbira in Zimbabwe and Malawi as intangible cultural heritage.

MbiraRead card
Next card in the archiveIn Toyota's car factories, any worker who spots a fault can pull a cord to call for help and, if it cannot be fixed quickly, stop the whole production line.Read next →