John cage nick shave explores the nuts and bolts of an avant gardist whose creative genius goes well beyond his famous 4'33" of not-quite-silence

On 29 August 1952, David Tudor sat down at the piano at the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock, New York, set a stopwatch running and quietly lifted the lid. He then performed nothing for precisely four minutes and 33 seconds. Or rather, he made no sound, only lifting and lowering the lid so as to signal the beginning and end of each movement. What the audience heard, then, was not the piano but the ambient sounds in the hall – of people shuffling, breathing, whispering – and the wind and the rain outside: far from being silent, the premiere of Cage’s 4’33” was full of noises, to be appreciated by anyone who cared to listen. composers such as La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Philip Glass.

What Cage shared with these American composers was an appreciation of non-western ways of listening, though his oeuvre is too varied to group him in with the minimalists. Rather, in the history of music he follows in the footsteps of pioneers Henry Cowell (with whom Cage and his early collaborator Lou Harrison studied) and Charles Ives. As one of the great American experimentalists, he paved the way for Fluxus – a revolutionary artistic movement that thrived in downtown New York in the 1960s, where artists gathered in galleries for events, or The beauty of 4'33" – the work for which Cage is best known and from which he continued to draw inspiration throughout his life – is that it can be interpreted on so many different levels: anarchic, democratic, playful, profound, absurd and, yes, ultimately beautiful, it challenges the very notion of what we perceive as ‘music’. Conceived at a time when, in Europe, influential composers such as Pierre Boulez were composing complex, tightly controlled musical structures, Cage’s silence smacks of a chaotic rebellion: it strips music back to nothingness in a way that opens the door to an appreciation of the infinite variety of sounds around us. As such, it is one of the earliest, and purest, examples of minimal music – by which the smallest means give rise to the maximal effects – that would soon find its various outgrowths in the works of so-called ‘happenings’, that broke down the boundaries between life and art. Cage’s 1952 Black Mountain piece – an untitled event involving dance, poetry, music and the ‘White Paintings’ of Robert Rauschenberg that took place in the dining hall of Black Mountain College in North Carolina – is often ref