Old thing, you labour under a misapprehension (albeit one abetted by lazy journalists)…

“Although commonly perceived as “four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence”, the piece actually consists of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed.”

“Cage’s musical equivalent to the Rauschenberg paintings uses the “silence” of the piece as an aural “blank canvas” to reflect the dynamic flux of ambient sounds surrounding each performance; the music of the piece is natural sounds of the players, the audience, the building, and the outside environment.”

Before Cage wrote it.

Personally, I say he’s taking composer credit for a cover version.

That’s not very Zen.

Going outside for a smoke, will have another listen, see how much ‘Cage’ I can hear in it.

The fact that all these ‘credible’ (read: less popular) artists are still able to record, and that all their recordings are still available and didn’t immediately cease to function when The X Factor first started shows that what Cowell and his chums get up to *just doesn’t matter*.

You know, if you want to run some sort of counter-contest or selection process where you all get behind one artist that conforms to whatever arbitrarily-selected measure of quality you’ve got in your head in the run up to Christmas, then that’s fine. But let’s get behind something for what it is- good music- rather than what it isn’t, purely to annoy someone it’s trendy not to like.

Also recommended from this year: Kenneth Silverman’s sizable new Cage biography, titled Begin Again (Knopf).