Tacet

Jody reminds me of influential 20th-century composer John Cage’s wonderful 4’33”, a composition made only of silence. Wikipedia has a decent article on the piece:

Another cited influence for this piece came from the field of the visual arts. Cage’s friend and sometime colleague Robert Rauschenberg had produced a series of ‘white’ paintings, apparently ‘blank’ canvases that in fact change according to varying light conditions in the rooms in which they were hung, the shadows of people in the room and so on. This inspired Cage to use a similar idea, using the ‘silence’ of the piece as an ‘aural blank canvas’ to reflect the dynamic flux of ambient sounds surrounding each performance.

I saw a performance of this once, as part of an experimental theatre piece at UVic (which, as one of the creators, my friend Matthew would agree was a bit of a wankfest). In that piece, the quartet of musicians actually raised their instruments, as if to play, and held them there. In this BBC amusing recording (MOV file) with a full orchestra, the musicians and conductor generally don’t move, though they do pause and turn pages at the end of each of the three movements.