My guess is this thread's going to get deleted, but here goes anyway. I had to write a paper on 4'33" for music history class a couple years ago. I read a bunch of interviews with John Cage and descriptions of his earlier work than it, and it really does fit logically with his oeuvre. It isn't about the silence, as everyone says, his idea was that the piece would be the reaction of the audience. Since typically they will get more and more restless as the time elapses, the "piece" then has form and structure. Cage was always about atypical "music" and pieces that would never be performed the same way twice, so 4'33" is hardly any less music than many of his other works. A strange guy, and it's interesting conceptually (more interesting than I've stated here, there's more to it that I can't remember), but obviously it isn't something I enjoy "hearing" performances of.
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