In 1952, the pianist David Tudor premiered John Cage's 4’33”, a work that would challenge not only the boundaries of music and silence but also the conditions of performance and temporality. The piece has been understood variously as a provocation, a philosophical inquiry, and a durational experience. In its original context, 4’33” required live presence: a performer, an audience, a shared space, and the contingent sounds of the environment.
Seventy years later, this work circulates widely on YouTube, no longer about a live interaction with the audience, but enhanced by new layers of mediation, commentary, and asynchronous interaction. In this essay, I explore the temporal dissonance between embodied performance and digital spectatorship through the lens of 4’33” as it appears—and reappears—in the online ecosystem. I argue that these uploaded silences act as markers for a new kind of durational consciousness: fractured, paused, replayed, but surprisingly capable of anchoring attention in an age defined by its absence. This exploration arises in response to the curatorial prompt that interrogates the shift from event time to exhibition time. Perhaps this shift is one toward platform time, wherein attention is commodified, interaction is quantified, and time is no longer merely experienced but measured, managed, and optimized. Within this context, performances of 4’33” on YouTube operate way outside the norms. Paradoxically, they inhabit a system designed for distraction, yet ask the viewer for patience and stillness. They invite action through inaction.
Silence, in this instance, becomes both a temporal bracket and a performative act, unfolding within a digital frame that resists its very premise.
This essay draws on analyses of YouTube recordings of 4’33”, examining their waveforms, techniques of playing and non-playing, and methods of framing silence while chronicling time. Can a viewer’s choice to “sit through” four minutes and thirty-three seconds of ambient online nothingness be understood as a form of performance itself? In these gestures, we glimpse a tension between embodied time and the abstract temporality of the platform, between the durational discipline of Cage’s silence and the algorithmic rhythms of digital consumption. In its online incarnation, 4’33” becomes not only a piece of music but also a kind of temporal mirror. The comment sections reflect the conditions under which we now experience duration: ambiently, distractedly, or intermittently. In a time of TikTok, when videos are ever shorter and try to be more and more captivating, these performances are slower than slow. They exist in a hybrid state, hovering between presence and absence, intention and non-playing.
In this essay, I will compare performances of John Cage’s 4’33” found online, ranging from a professional film by Cage specialist David Tudor to quirky experiments by amateurs. Considerable curation is involved - I watched over 80 versions of the performance online, and analyzed ten of them. Here I have selected eight versions to show and annotate. Not because they are similar, but because they are different. Yet I will remark the commonalities as well: framing, bookends, three distinct movements, a certain frontality, and a shared and studied un-awareness of the camera.
I will present alternative ways of marking time through silence; new attitudes for silence; confluences of time, listening, and silence; and contemporary relationships between performer and audience. It is my suggestion that new YouTube interpretations might encourage the openness Cage championed while also affording new situations of time and (silence) that he would never have imagined.
4’33” is not silent; neither does it consist of silence. Cage often said it was about listening but also about what he called “interpenetrability,” the way art and real life intertwine (Cage, 1961, p. 102). So, this composition is less about silence than about listening to the sounds that are already there. Yet, it is a compelling example for exploring silence because of the challenge it seems to represent for many younger musicians and the overlaps it affords between the Western Classical tradition and popular modes of performing.
Just as Cage was influenced by diverse and non-musical sources from Zen to Thoreau (Gann, 2011; Silverman, 2010), so did his creation of 4’33” have effects far beyond the world of classical music. It gained instant status as a seminal artwork of the 20th century, an iconic masterpiece of conceptual art (Adolphs & Berg, 2021; Gann, 2013). But 4’33” eventually also came to be seen as a work of kitsch, a faulty paradox, and a symbolic failure of the avant-garde (Kahn, 2015, pp. 165–166). Indeed, Kahn argued that Cage achieved an almost deliberate silencing of the performer and the audience.
Yet in the past decade, the work has gained new life: teenagers, pranksters, heavy-metal bands, architects, and queer activists have embraced it on social media, each finding their group or cultural meaning. And worldwide lockdowns brought a new wave of video interpretations, a rich source in my research. Some aspects of these videos are distinctly classical, employing framing and conventional instruments; other elements are uniquely contemporary. By looking critically at the videos, I discovered a multiplicity of gestures for performative silence. To create the experience of silence on YouTube, performers often embody that silence in novel attitudes.
Many of the videos engage deliberately with the porous boundary between the performative frame and the ambient realities surrounding it. In some cases, the performers foreground real time—allowing environmental sounds, interruptions, or ambient noise to co-constitute the performance, drawing attention to the shared temporality of viewer and performer, even across digital space. Others shift focus toward performativity itself, emphasizing gesture, presence, and the mediated persona of the performer as temporal anchors within the screen. These recordings offer diverse strategies for navigating silence, stillness, and duration. Some performers attend deeply to listening, inviting the viewer into a co-experienced temporality of attention, while others appear to decenter listening altogether, shifting instead toward explorations of time as stasis, tension, or conceptual frame. The friction between noise and silence, agency and control, classical reverence and vernacular irreverence, creates a multiplicity of temporal modes: some stretched, some suspended, some actively resisting the algorithmic compression of platform time. In these varied interpretations, 4’33” becomes not a fixed object but a temporal site—an unstable performance of duration unfolding within the otherwise rapid rhythms of online viewing.
Even though 4’33” is often considered a work of absence art, not every example involves absence. Walsh writes: “Generally speaking, absence can be registered only when the expectation of something is thwarted or deferred” (Walsh, 1992, p. 80). I find that the most successful examples I will reflect upon below generate a strong expectation (via markers for tradition, loudness, or extremes of some sort) and then an equally strong thwarting or deferment (created by non-doing, non-playing, being-silent, attentiveness, or boredom).
The majority of YouTube videos featuring performances of 4’33” exhibit a consistent framing approach, characterized by a (preparatory) prelude and a (concluding) postlude, despite the unnecessary and un-notated nature of these bookends, which were certainly not specified by the composer.
This framing has become ingrained in the performance practice of the piece.
This graphic shows six randomly chosen videos of 4’33”. Despite variations in length, there are similarities in framing and structure. Although it may be unclear when watching exactly when the “music” starts and ends, looking at the waveforms gives clarity. By shading the “music” area, the bookends preceding and following the silence are made clearer.
After examining many videos of Cage’s composition, I observed that only a few were four minutes and thirty-three seconds long; durations did not seem important. As far as the framing was concerned, some musicians opted to silence the video in post-production—very clearly visible as flat horizontal lines (waveforms 2 and 6 above). Most included all the background noise or created their own noise with shuffling, caressing of instruments, feedback, natural sounds, or fidgeting. In a few cases, the “silence” was louder than the audio before and after the performance (waveform 5, for example). This is not unique to the internet; it could also happen in live performance.
In most of these videos, 4’33” is bookended by a prelude and a postlude that are usually louder than (or, in a few rare cases, softer than) the performance that follows or precedes: left-frame and right-frame. This is reminiscent of Cone and Littlefield’s point that (classical) music is framed by a silence in the beginning and at the end. It also corresponds with Jankélévitch’s ideas about the anticipation of avant-silence and the remembrance of après-silence (Jankélévitch, 1961). Jankélévitch spoke of the avant-silence as a silence preceding the start of a piece (think of the expectant pause before a Mozart second movement). Après-silence is the silence after an emotional event (e.g., the hush after a mass in church). These two kinds of silence are exterior to the notated composition but not to the experience. Most of the YouTubers deliberately include footage before and after 4’33”. Is this a deliberate search for context or framing? The pre- and post- filmed elements shape the time and the silence between them.
A further temporal complexity emerges in the internal structuring of many performances: most YouTube renditions of 4’33” preserve the tripartite form of the original 1952 performance, with visible or audible gestures marking the transitions between movements. These inter-movement pauses often seem more intentional than the “playing” and introduce a recursive layering of time: silence framed by action, and action framed by further silence. This segmentation, inherited from traditional concert practice, becomes a kind of temporal choreography, separating the ostensibly undifferentiated duration into discernible intervals. (Unverifiable impressions are created as our brains fill in missing information: The first movement is not the same feeling as the second. The third movement seems slower.) On YouTube, this framing takes on added significance. In a context where time is hyper-visible (counted down to the second, parsed by algorithms, and experienced through buffering, skipping, and pausing), these deliberate divisions assert a rhythm of attention that resists seamless flow. Performers innovate subtle yet meaningful cues—closing eyes, bowing heads, shifting posture, clicking a stopwatch, hair-tossing, or “relaxing”—to mark silence within silence, duration within duration. These gestures do not simply replicate historical performance norms; they reconfigure them for a medium in which silence must be signaled by markers to be legible. In doing so, they reveal the deep entanglement between structure, embodiment, and platform time, where even the most minimal action becomes a negotiation with the temporality of viewing.
SIDENOTE: Markers for silence are also often markers for time.
There seems to be a close connection between the experience of time and the marking of silence:
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A marker that imposes silence can represent discreet points in time in the form of signals (turning the glass, overtly shouting “Ruhe,” or more implicit cultural codes);
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A marker that summons silence is often more continuously present, as in aspects of ambiance, architecture, nature sounds, or immobility;
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A marker that describes silence can arise from markers that are changing over time, such as gestures, movements, sounds, or facial expressions that shape the experience of silence.
However, these correspondences are not one-to-one and should not be seen as prescriptive. They can describe many situations. In the performance of silences, multiple markers are usually present and acting at any given time, confusing the temporalities involved.
Terminology
Markers for silence are visible or audible signals used to shift attention and thus impose silence, summon silence, or shape the perception of silence. They can also have a ritual characteristic, or they can arise from cultural norms.
I have drawn from conversational theory (Goodman, Ephratt) to suggest the term eloquent silence based on its rhetorical component and its potential for communication. Eloquent silence, which is usually thought of as a purely acoustic experience, is more often indicated to us by performed gestures and visual markers than by actual silence.
The performances of Cage’s 4’33” highlighted the complexity and interest of visual attitudes and postures for silence. But the sounds created by the performers, and the sounds around the performance are audible markers for silence, which help the audience parse and comprehend the artwork.
Visual markers refer to an important suggestion—that silence in live performance is often reliant on the visual. They seem to play an outsize role, often taking precedence over the other senses, a multimodality of perception. In live performance, the performative aspect of silence is often more seen than heard, reinforcing the theory that the visual experience is integral to the emotional and interpretative depth of eloquent silence.
Silence and time are intricately related. The pauses or spaces afforded by rests help performers feel and process the present. Some silences let the audience listen backward to the past (the silence at the end of Anton Bruckner’s Te Deum) or forward to the future (the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony). Still others (Morton Feldman’s Intermission 6) seem to be without reference to time or duration. Gestures and embodiments of silence can be rapid or slow, overlapping or discontinuous, or any combination. The silences of 4’33” might be assumed to be timeless, but many of the videos here demonstrate a strong dialogue between silence and time. The members of the band Dead Territory beat time quietly with their heads. Pianist David Tudor marks multiple time scales: a slow one of turning pages (a visual marker for time) and a fast one of a clicking stopwatch (an audible marker for time).
Pianist and composer Paul Craenen has written a description of a fictional silence concert. One of the ideas Craenen introduces to describe this intriguing performative situation is that of the non-playing performer, who is acting against audience expectations: “The pianist makes herself and the public present through her non-playing” (Craenen, 2014, p. 51).
Is non-playing a definition of performed silence? I wonder if the non-playing body exists—is it possible that the body is always playing? Non-musicians might have non-playing bodies, but a performer always has a playing body, certainly onstage. This said, I think that Craenen is suggesting a “non-” that refers to an expectation of the audience that is not fulfilled. But one could also describe the non-playing as a “not-filling,” thus leaving space for the audience to experience the performance of silence. The non-playing abstract/political silences of Dieter Schnebel or Mauricio Kagel are in stark contrast to the dramatic and rhetorical silences in the music of Beethoven, in which the player is communicating emotions, sculpting time, and in intense communication with the audience.
SILENCE: visible markers: page-turns, darkness, concentrated attitude, waiting posture; audible markers: clock ticking, camera clicking
TIME: fully and visibly chronological due to the page-turns, and hyper-present due to the clock ticking; plus the performance is being photographed, chronicaling time, but also freezing time.
I was eager to observe David Tudor performing because he gave the first performance and is closely associated with Cage and the piece. Tudor’s style is sober, restrained, and self-effacing. There is no audience sound at all.
What is remarkable is that there are two very strong and unexpected markers in this performance: a highly audible stopwatch and highly visible page turns. The frantic ticking of the stopwatch is both mesmerizing and distracting—emphasizing duration and creating speed and rhythm where it is not called for. The ticking leaves less room for silence or listening. Maybe this sound was only audible to the performer and the camera and would not have been audible to an audience.
Tudor’s style and demeanor defined the world premiere. He set the tone for an accepted performance practice of 4’33”, which continues to this day: The pianist is central, and there is no reference here to “real life,” which seems entirely excluded from the film. The pianist projects an attitude of authoritative stillness emphasized by the darkness around him. And yet this recording has what could be considered as major audible and visible distractions: a clock ticking and enigmatic page turns. Tudor’s interpretation seems neither about silence nor about listening. The ticking clock and the punctual sequentiality of the page turns could summon but also impose silence, yet they are most understandable as markers for chronicling time.
Tudor’s use of page turns at apparently random moments surprises me. Non-playing page-turning might be a tacet maneuver. Or the page turns might be markers for time. Or they could be markers to indicate that performing is still going on. But page turns are not indicated in Cage’s score. For that matter, most versions of the score are only one page long. The numerical and durational precision of the title–4’33”–might well suggest that it is (also) about time.
Cage’s suggestion that silence is heard in terms of duration contrasts with George Antheil’s idea for the silences of Ballet mécanique: “Here I had time moving without touching it” (Antheil, in Whitesitt, 1989, p. 105). Tudor is figuratively and literally touching time (the page-turning is a tangible gesture with his fingers). Confirming Barthes’ theory about captions giving silence meaning, Tudor has achieved a depiction of “silence as time” via page-turning.
SILENCE: contextual markers: tradition, positioning at the instrument; visible markers: Steinway & Sons logo, hairstyle, tuxedo, stopwatch (also a marker for time); audible markers: stopwatch click, continuous hum from the recording apparatus, incidental noise from the audience
TIME: a relaxed approach, but very classical notion of successive actions marking time, ritually prepared and thoughtfully, intentionally acted.
With over 7 million views on YouTube, this video is astoundingly popular. Marx embodies a traditional classical authority with his nimbus of white hair and his impeccable tuxedo, which he wields as markers for silence. Yet the film is also funny. I think the secret of his success lies in a Dadaist absurdity; he takes the piece to its classical extremes (Steinway grand piano, tuxedo, Roman profile, black and white filming). His performing body is held with brio, with majesty. Marx is unquestionably playing to the crowd, enacting “exceptionality” for the audience. His performance is both pedagogical (“this is what the piece is about”) and entertaining (“enjoy it”).
He holds the stopwatch up in his hand while he performs, sending a strong signal to the audience to pay attention. He shows the watch clearly, in a palpable expression of time’s passing and his control over it. But there is a major difference to Tudor’s stopwatch: Marx’s stopwatch is silent; it is more visible than audible. He is using the object as a marker to impose silence. Despite its gentle irony, this type of performance may be exactly that which aggravates Kahn, for silence is imposed by employing all the cultural markers of classical music. Kahn rebels against the “site of centralized and privileged utterance,” which in this case is very clearly marked by a tuxedo-clad, white-haired Aquiline-profiled classical pianist. Marx embodies centralized privilege. His strong embodiments and charismatic gestures are quite the opposite of Cage’s self-effacing demeanor (see below). However, Marx exposes the implicit codes of imposing silence so theatrically that they can hardly be taken seriously anymore. The markers lose their summoning power and become descriptions of a silence vocabulary that can even evoke laughter, which is definitely part of the appeal of this performance.
SILENCE: visible markers: table, empty glass (also a symbolic marker), motionless posture, piece of paper, stopwatch;
TIME: audible slow breathing, the glass marks time, and also suggests another time (future or past?) in which the glass would have been full of water; the performer looks fatigued, suggesting prior stress, elapsed time.
This video is one of the rare performances on film of 4’33” by the composer himself. The performance is not a smooth one. Cage re-starts the piece after someone yells, “Ruhe!” and there is a noticeable crescendo of the audience talking. Cage barely conceals his annoyance with the situation, and towards the end, he loses track of the timing. The violence of the text behind him may or may not have escaped his notice, but the audience’s inattention must have given him the impression that he was not being taken seriously. Probably, he hopes to summon silence, but his markers (embodied stillness and an empty glass) do not succeed. Cage is performing for himself but hopes that the audience will come to a knowledge of listening, silence, or attention. Audience inattention (or possibly “real life”?) seems to have intruded hopelessly into the performance.
The shouting of “Ruhe!” is an instructional audio marker that tries to impose silence (and fails). It is a signal that points in time. It is hard to tell if Cage is more annoyed by the shout, which goes strongly against his ideas about 4’33”, or annoyed by the audience noise, which obviously and audibly marks their inattention. He is trying to connect the movements and the passing time of the artwork via his body, his downcast eyes, and his hands resting flat, in repose, on the table. The work seems a connective knot to him and a background not to the audience.
Cage uses the turning of the glass to mark the space between movements. His score (see the list of timings below) indicates that the pauses between the movements total 10 seconds each. After the first movement, he does indeed take 10 seconds, including the gestures of turning the glass down and then up. After the second movement, he pauses for 9 seconds, then loses track of the timing. His score suggests that the pauses between the movements are not part of the piece. But that may be a moot point, as they have become part of the work through performance practice and tradition. And except for Sis Leyin, all the performers in this study indicate three movements.
SIDE NOTE: His use of a glass is not just a reference to conventional lectures, in which the speaker is provided with a glass of water. Cage often referred to silence as a glass, as for example in his “Lecture on Nothing”: “It is like an empty glass into which, at any moment, anything may be poured” (Cage, 2012, p. 110). The glass suggests one role of silence in Cage’s world, as a container for “anything,” as well as an indicator of passing time.
The preceding three videos are performances onstage or in public venues filmed from one point of view: an audience member’s front-row center seat. The solo performer is centered on a stage, or as if on a stage; statically at a piano or a table. The video experience attempts to duplicate the experience of being there in the actual venue. But in the examples that follow, the performer-stage-audience roles are abandoned in favor of more flexible models.
SILENCE: contextual: nature, water, rocks, sky; visible markers: immobility; audible (in-audible) non-speaking while the two people are talking to one another;
TIME: the abrupt transitions defy chronological time, almost suggesting a simultaneity for the three movements. Everything is going on all at once. The barely visible flashes of different poses might be a method of encouraging the viewer to watch attentively, not to skip ahead in time, but to be there, with the performer. His poses of resigned boredom suggest slowly moving time for him.
The scene is a park by the sea. There is no concert hall, no instrument. The relationship of the performers to each other and the camera is strained and awkward. The three movements are quite different audibly and visibly. The second movement is most intriguing because American performance artist J Kim (the performer in the yellow hoodie) is silent and focused on the performance while two people sit next to him on the same bench, ignoring the camera and having their own conversation. We hear them talking and see them gesturing, but the wind obscures their words. As with the audience in the previous video, these two people are apparently ignoring the performer. This audible/visible marker of noise for silence highlights the contrast between the main performer and the two others, making Kim’s actions seem “more silent.” The fact that the conversation appears to be ongoing and unrelated to Kim also reinforces a sense of ongoing time, a continuous present. Is Kim sending a message that he is experiencing silence despite the “real-life” sounds around him? Or is he looking at us, trying to impose silence upon us in the context of our “real world,” not his?
I like the suggestion that silence can reference presence in such strong ways. Kim is staring directly at the audience. Nonetheless, he is firmly anchored in the landscape, on the rocks, focused on his present here-ness. He has an attitude of watching, looking directly at the viewer, potentially connecting to the YouTube audience, which will watch later after he has uploaded it. But in this Zen here-ness is also a “hear”-ness, an attitude of listening, a connective knot between the performer, his friends, and the viewer.
Sis Leyin’s performance is representative of the many quarantine versions of 4’33”. The tiling deliberately recalls endless Zoom meetings during lockdown. A quote from Leyin: “The world isolates us […] so I lost my temper and didn’t create or play any music.” By not creating, she was engaging in a type of self-silencing. And the experience of lockdown was often one of being silenced (by the authorities, by the threat of illness). For Leyin and countless other artists, maintaining a creative voice under these circumstances was painful and isolating.
Her primary emotive quality seems to be an attitude of resignation. The claustrophobic cinematography, consistently framed against the same drapery and under dim, bluish lighting, encapsulates the essence and eternity of lockdown. Meanwhile, her yawns, her drooping, sleepy eyelids, the sound of the space (an oppressive room tone sounding like a fan or air-conditioner with maybe some traffic sounds in the distance), and an incongruous bird chirping (does she have a pet bird in the room?) signal for silence. These contrasting visual and audible markers form an apt representation of a not-being, a not-hereness, a “not” that represents the removal of outside stimuli, and also a type of boredom, an imitation of “real life,” that parallels Cage’s aesthetic of listening closely.
Staying silenced for a prolonged period of time is difficult, and a certain amount of potential noisy energy seems to build up in the muscles. Think of the fidgety energy and coughs released in the interlude between the movements of a symphony. Think of the anxiety of a prolonged theatrical pause. To remain still in a fidgety world is a tensile performance; an effort. (Mock & Counsell, 2009, p. 215)
Leyin has chosen to enact four different characters, each with their own fidgety world, each visibly (performing) an effort to remain still, each with a different shirt, makeup, hairstyle, and persona. Common to all four is a range of vague facial expressions, distracted smiles, rolling eyes, and biting her lip; these facial expressions invite a reflectiveness, perhaps summoning silence, in an endless, continuous present. Her gaze (even more than in the Kim example) is very present. More than the other performers, she seems to be directly connecting with the YouTube viewer, not so much listening as reaching out to evoke or summon listening and possibly silence.
Lito Levenbach is the performer in this multi-instrumental montage. The editing and the mise-en-scène are very clever. There are three movements, each exactly 91 seconds long and hardly distinguishable except as blips on the waveform. It took me several viewings to realize that his hands perform a two-second strumming motion (in all 12 videos) to mark the changes between movements. He makes creative use of tiny changes in clothing and sunglasses, but his expression is serious, neutral, and respectful, as if he were following a conductor. There is very little sensation of connecting with an audience—he appears to be performing for himself.
He chooses to remain motionless. His intro and outro are minimal and, at first, too subtle to distinguish from the actual performance. But a closer analysis reveals that it visibly and audibly starts at 5 seconds and ends 4 minutes and 33 seconds later. He is rigorous about the overall timing, more so than any other performer I studied, although he does not follow Cage’s 1952 timings for the movements. And he plays the piece very quietly. It is entirely without irony, a refreshing change compared to Kim’s or Leyin’s hyper self-consciousness.
SILENCE: the fridge has its own hum; there are ambient sounds and a room tone.
TIME: Fridge door opening and closing marks time and movement breaks; the cat marks time as well, at a different tempo than the performer.
This is a deliberately eccentric performance, perhaps inspired (including the costume) by Laurie Anderson’s performances. There is a cat, supposedly unexpected, named Nimbu. The performer (Gen Ken Montgomery) is dressed up for the occasion, including a tie wrapped in plastic. It is a performance notable for its Dadaist humor, and the entertaining aspect of combining everyday life (kitchen, refrigerator, cat, messy pots and pans) with “sophisticated” music.
We seem to have entered another realm here, in which the visual takes complete precedence over the audible. The inclusion of the cat seems to add an element of narrative to the video, creating the semblance of a storyline.
The contrast in embodiments between the cat and the human is remarkable and provides considerable interest. The human is stiff and controlled, the cat is supple and fluid. Together, they form a good partnership, referencing issues of control and letting go, which are central to Cage's work.
SILENCE: contextual: (thwarted) loudness expectation; visible markers: big amplifiers, hair-tossing; audible markers: (potential) noise, warmup riff, amplifier hum;
TIME: many conflicting markers for time, as the performers seem to each have their own internal beat.
EXPERIMENTATION: A remix video by the author, using the Dead Territory comment section on YouTube as source. Voices are generated using the generic Apple speech application.
A typical reaction from the commentary: “The best part is that it comes from a metal band. It adds more tension. We know you’re all wound up inside. We know you’re itching to pound out sound.” And that, for me, is the genius of this performance: it is all about control; it is about holding a ticking bomb that does not explode. The thwarted threat of violent catastrophe respects the score but also updates Cage’s artwork for our time, for summoning silence can also arise from suppressing sound.
One of my favorite versions of 4’33” is a video by the band Dead Territory, an Austrian group known for their heavy metal style. As I engaged more and more with covers of 4’33”, I was struck that metal bands seem to make more powerful, insightful interpretations of 4’33” than classically-trained pianists. Could being educated in the classical tradition be a handicap in performing Cage?
There are different approaches from each performer. From left to right, performer one mostly freezes. Performer two marks the beat. Performer three (the lead vocalist) embodies listening most effectively: his stance, his attitude, his hair gestures, and his crossed hands all communicate embodiments of attentiveness or attention. Performer four looks a little lost, unsure of his role, but mostly imitates performer two, nodding his head to an internal or imaginary beat (the fact that their beats are not in sync is only somewhat noticeable).
There is a controlled wildness to the buildup: The hair tossing, the guitar tuning, the intro riff, the insertion of earplugs—all these are done with absolute integrity and seriousness. And these performative rock-n-roll gestures abruptly cut off at the moment that the performance begins. There is something leftover of the classical setting of Cage’s piece, yet re-interpreted in a stylized language of noisy rebellion. The musicians treat silence as the absence of sounds, but they also allow the non-musical or non-intended sounds of real life to enter the frame. We hear the humming of the amplifier, small shuffling of clothes and hair and feet, and extraneous or accidental guitar sounds, all superimposed on a very quiet room tone.
During the performance, the musicians keep an intense bodily pose with their instruments and a rapt but relaxed focus on their faces, ending at precisely 4:33. They nod to some kind of internalized beat, a hidden metronome, or a remembered song. In the online context, where time is both hyper-measured and fragmented, such embodied markers for time become ambiguous: do they resist temporal collapse by insisting on presence, or do they re-inscribe a literal musical time onto a piece meant to augment the perception of performed time? These musicians, intentionally or not, are mapping out a choreography of duration—one that oscillates between listening as presence, and performance as simulation of time’s passage.
Is this open listening, as Cage desired? Or is their embodiment of an internal beat creating a confused image of continued musical intentionality? They seem to be listening to their own music, which is not exactly Cage’s idea of listening to the world around them.
One intriguing ambiguity about the performance comes from the framing. It is not so much the absence of sounds that frames the music here; it is “non-musical” music that frames the “musical” silence. There is a frame of quiet (getting ready to perform) followed by a typically loud rock-style prelude (shouting “1,2,3,4!” and playing a drum roll), both of which precede the actual performance and put the “real life” component into the framing elements rather than the artwork itself.
Postlude
The proliferation of 4’33” performances on YouTube reveals the futility of attempting to fix or codify the work within a single interpretative frame. What emerges is a dispersion of meaning—each rendition negotiating its relationship to silence, embodiment, and platform temporality.
Cage’s composition, once a radical gesture at the fringes of the avant-garde, has cycled through phases of meme-ification, parody, reverence, and rediscovery, and now occupies a flexible position both within and against the digital mainstream. Rather than diluting its impact, this instability underscores the artwork’s generative potential. 4’33” has proven resilient and durationally adaptive—able to absorb, reflect, and critique the conditions of time in which it is repeatedly re-watched online. In the compressed, impatient temporality of online culture, these performances enact a quiet antagonism: they stretch, suspend, or fracture platform time, asking viewers to linger, to attend, to dwell. They might not. Indeed, some viewers may only come for the novelty and quickly leave out of boredom. But the commentary suggests that many stay and engage. Some engagements are negative, critiquing the composer and performers for wasting time. But others are strongly engaging with the questions of the work: what is time, what is listening?
Indeed, why are audiences drawn to these videos? Firstly, because they are novel, silly, a joke, or quirky. Secondly, because they are looking for a new experience… of music, of listening, or of time. Yet, is the experience of watching it the same as the experience of playing it? Of course not.
The embodied experience of doing it, making it, playing it is a meditative, sometimes mystical one. Concentration is imperative. However, the experience of watching it is rarely that. You are not there, you are only viewing it through a small screen: there is a distance, a separation. And yet, I’m suggesting that audiences can discover something new about time even if they don’t watch all of these videos in full. Maybe just watching a short excerpt of “non-playing” and “non-doing” is enough to already give us a new sensation of time. Even when it isn’t fully explored to the fullest, that novelty can translate into new understandings of time and duration.
My research suggests that 4’33” remains an open and potent affordance for temporal experimentation: its “silence” is filled with the resonances of context, embodiment, listening, and attention. In this light, the work is future-facing, offering a subtle but enduring challenge to the conditions of boredom, activity, and immediacy that govern our digital present. Its impact, like its duration, continues to unfold — resisting closure, restraining impatience, and rephrasing duration.
