JOHN CAGE - 4'33" (1952)

Sitting at a keyboard for exactly 4 minutes and 33 seconds, doing nothing much except occasionally opening and shutting the piano lid to suggest the breaks between movements of composition upset the standard of a serious musical performance involving a player actively making sounds before a captive audience. He turned the event into a happening at which ambient sounds became the defacto scoren and listeners became the work's defacto performers. Although commonly perceived as "four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence",[3][4] the piece actually consists of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed. As Scott Burton had said, the difference between art an life became sheer consciousness and semantic.