A hilariously appropriate incident of this was just brought to my attention via the always awesome reddit:

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is a “recording” of John Cage’s 4’33″. If you try to play this video you will see that:

NOTICE: This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by WMG. The audio has been disabled.

Hah! The joke’s on you, Warner Music Group!

Of course, this wasn’t the first time that 4’33″ has been the subject of copyright dispute. You can read about how Mike Batt was sued for infringing on the same copyright here.

Things to watch out for: the conductor mopping his brow between movements, the audience holding off on coughing until the intervals, the blond chick on the edge of her seat.

One of my most surprising musical learning moments was when I realized that 4’33″ wasn’t a load of bullshit. It forces people to clarify and consider what their definition of music is, without strictly being a composition itself. It is sort of meta-music. I think it is quite fascinating how much of a conversation (internal or external) you can produce by simply questioning if the piece is music, and if not, why not?

But then I feel all pretentious and artsy-fartsy and have to go play Mario Kart.

Yeah, that 4’33″. The silent one.

It started when Batt and his band The Planets released a Crossover-Classical (Eugh. I hate that term) album called Classical Graffiti. Batt wanted to explicitly separate the tracks at the end from those at the beginning, because they were done in a different style. He thought it would be fun to do this with a track called “One Minute Silence (after Cage)”. This was credited to Batt/Cage.

Shortly after the album was released (and went to number one in the UK classical charts) Mike was contacted by Peters Edition, the publisher of Cage’s work, demanding one-quarter of the royalties from the sale of the song.

They argued over this for a while – interestingly provoking the kind of discussion which Cage had originally intended when he first performed the piece: does it truly qualify as a work? If not, why not? There was even a side-by-side concert performance of the two pieces in London, so that the, errr, differences could be illustrated.

Batt eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed six-figure sum. However, he pointed out that Peters had acknowledged they didn’t have much of a case, and that he was donating the money out of respect for John Cage — to the John Cage Trust.

I suppose the real issue wasn’t so much the copying of silence (otherwise there’d be a hell of a lot more lawsuits…) but the fact that Batt credited Cage as a writer.

Incidentally, Batt ended up re-registering the track using his pseudonym “Clint Cage”. Also incidentally, Batt was the guy who came up with the theme tune to the Wombles, as well as the music for the famous Art Garfunkel “Bright Eyes” track in Watership Down.

Well, anyway, the point was that I didn’t have any music. I had Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 2 running through my head all through the conference. I was tip-tapping the timpani at the end of the first movement through all the inappropriate lectures on k this and c that and DNA, RNA and what-have-you. There were glimpses of the late Beethoven string quartets flittering around the freshly daylit room when my eyes opened, but no satisfaction – nothing more tangible than in-head echoing.

And when I got back it seemed more distant, instead of drawing me directly back in. The music was disappointed with my absence and won’t give me attention until I give it some. Seriously though, despite the painful faffing around with words there’s truth in them there sentencing. It’s hard to get back sometimes. There are off patches, weeks where I want to listen to the birds and the kids and the wind while I am walking into work, instead of Beethoven.

John Cage was onto something, I think…

I have spent many pleasant hours in the woods conducting performances of my silent piece… for an audience of myself, since they were much longer than the popular length which I have published. At one performance… the second movement was extremely dramatic, beginning with the sounds of a buck and a doe leaping up to within ten feet of my rocky podium.

No matter how engaging, how beautiful nor how directly music speaks to you, the outside world is always stronger. The balance of both is the ideal.