"Searching for Silence: John Cage's art of noise" by Alex Ross 2010

John Cage

John Cage's music is playfully constant invention.  His works utilize silence as well as sounds that aren't normally perceived to be music.  Cage was one of the people instrumental in opening music up as an art form and broke away from its significant tradition.  Employing performance art-type techniques in many of his compositions and pieces, he had a unique view of and appreciation for noise/music.  Cage's father was an inventor, and in a way Cage himself followed exactly in his father's footsteps.  Always wondering what would happen if he tried to make music in a new and different way, Cage constantly experimented.  He would incorporate voices and speaking as well as mechanical noises in his work.  One of his most famous pieces, "4'33," was one of musical "silence."  Rather than playing anything, the pianist would sit at the piano, silent, for 4 minutes and 33 seconds and allow people to listen to anything and everything, all the random background noises and sounds that we never pay attention to.