Reading Response #2

One thing that especially stood out to me in Alex Ross's article is how John Cage changes how music is supposed to be, like we learned in class, he subverts it. Before the lecture on him and this reading I probably would have thought of 4'33" as four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence, nothing. But Cage's whole point was that theres actually no such thing as complete silence as during the original performance, people could hear wind, movement, rain and other people in the audience making noise. When you think about that it no longer feels like nothing and starts to feel like maybe he is asking us to listen to things we don't usually hear.

The way Cage experimented with different instruments and even unconventional ones was thought provoking aswell. He created the prepared piano by adding objects in between the piano strings and used seemingly random objects in his performances to give a new meaning to what music is. When watching 4'33" in class I was expecting him to start playing after every time he started his stopwatch which is what most people likely expepct. We expect instruments, melody, rythm and someone preforming infront of us but he seems to make us think about what makes music, music.