For hundreds of years, classical music composers strove to make music that you wanted to listen to. Whether it was the interweaving fugues of Baroque music, the simple compositions of the Classic, the dramatic and powerful tunes of the Romantic, or even the delightfully complex Impressionist era, there were certain expectations to be made when you composed music.
For some odd reason, in the 20th century, all of that went out the window. All of a sudden, the rage among highbrow music composers was to be as experimental and as bizarre as humanly possible. It didn't need to even sound right-- in fact, the more of an affront it was to the senses, the better. Deconstruction became the norm: anything that could be changed from perceived norms, from instrumentation, to tuning, to timing, became fair game. The result was a lot of crap.
Today's entry in the Jukebox from Hell is perhaps one of the most notorious pieces to come out of contemporary classical music. It was composed by the late John Cage. In a move sure to have made Jerry Seinfeld proud many years later, this composition is composed entirely of... nothing. Well, not precisely nothing, but as little sound as humanly possible. You see, Cage composed it solely to prove a point: we are surrounded by sound, and the piece is designed to bring attention to that background noise.
It's also quite possibly the laziest composition imaginable, which is why I feature it here. In yet another one of those bizarre Christmas number-one campaigns, this piece finished at #21 on the UK Singles Chart back in 2011, a position much lower than originally anticipated. So, ladies and gentlemen, here is John Cage with 4'33".
http://youtube.com/watch?v=gN2zcLBr_VM
