I first learned about 4’33’’ some time in high school. I was a teen with an identity tightly wrapped up in the arts, music especially, and I didn’t just hate this piece. I hated the idea of it.

It’s a piece you might have heard of, especially if you’ve studied music history, because it’s as influential as it is controversial. 4’33’’, or “4 minutes, 33 seconds” is a 1952 composition by John Cage in which any musician or group of musicians sit still, playing no music at all, for 3 movements, totaling the duration noted in the title.

As you can imagine, it was not an especially popular piece when it debuted, and teen me hated it for, it turns out, all the same reasons that people in the 1950s did: First, it’s no fun to listen to, because there are no notes or chords or anything. Second, it doesn’t take any musical skill to perform, because the musicians literally play nothing. And third, it feels more like a gimmick than a composition, more like a joke on the audience than a musical experience shared with them. Pretending to acknowledge it as a proper, whole musical composition like any other felt like a concession that sacrificed the integrity of music as an art form… or something like that. That was roughly my line of thinking, and it mirrored that of the piece’s first audiences in the 50s.

It wasn’t until much later, in a college music history course, that the groundwork was laid for me to change my mind. We spent a lot of time in that course studying various types of “non-traditional” classical music of the 20th century, including aleatoric, indeterminate, 12-tone, and more broadly serial music—all of which I was similarly suspicious of at first. None of it sounds at all how classical music is “supposed” to sound like, and much of it is downright grating, at least on first listen.

But this is a deliberate feature of the music, not an unintended consequence of trying too hard to be avante-garde. Some of the greatest composers of the 20th century—names you might’ve heard of, like Dmitri Shostakovich, Arnold Shoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, even Aaron Copland—struggled in their time with immense pressure from fascist state powers to stop writing music that was experimental and atonal and start writing music that was normal and palatable. Their compositions were subversive specifically because they eschewed the most dominant definitions of what was good, constructive, or even “culturally appropriate” art.

So I started to warm up to these types of composers, and to their music. And yet, I was still stuck on 4’33’’. Compared to, say, this Shoenberg suite, which consists of a tone row meticulously arranged many times over, 4’33’’ still felt like it didn’t consist of anything at all.

Then I watched this video essay by Jacob Geller, and something finally clicked. The essay talks about, among other things, a series of paintings by Barnett Newman called Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue, which depict the three primary colors in simple arrangements of a few vertical lines.

(pictured: Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III)

Like 4’33’’, these paintings evoked an extremely frustrated reaction in the public, so much so that they were violently vandalized—literally attacked with a knife—on two separate occasions.

And in both cases, the underlying reason people reacted to the art so negatively is the same one I had already learned about in music history: it is art that defies its own conventions, that refuses to be held down by the norms in that medium, and therefore rejects the notion that there is such a thing as “culturally appropriate” art.

The same thing was just as true of the compositions of people like Shostakovich, Shoenberg, Stravinsky, and Copland—the composers I had come to deeply respect for their subversive work already. But I couldn’t see the connection, because I felt as though 4’33’’ didn’t have the qualifications to stand alongside those other pieces. It didn’t have enough notes in it… or something like that. In other words, I was only halfway towards actually understanding which artistic boundaries needed to be enforced. That is, none of them.

And that’s why this piece is the way it is. To be clear: I don’t think that the the post calvin formula is stale, or that the conventions here have a particular need to be challenged. In fact, my experience has been that the few guidelines for the post calvin, like many self-imposed restrictions in art, actually bolster creativity rather than hinder it. Plus, my own experiences overshooting the word count (see: this piece) prove to me that they are, indeed, just guidelines.

But reflecting on my teenage misconceptions about art—that it has to exist a certain way, and that it must fit a number of categorical requirements to even be considered for my liking—has led me now, in light of these other comparisons, to essentially the opposite conclusion, one which I imagine John Cage would more closely align with: that all artistic conventions, especially the ones that make the most sense, are worth being challenged, once in a while.

In honor of that epiphany, this piece has been made invisible.

Philip Rienstra

Philip Rienstra (‘21) majored in writing and music and has plans to pursue a career in publishing. They are a recovering music snob, a fruit juice enthusiast, and a big fan of the enneagram. They’re currently living in St. Paul with their spouse, Heidi.