John Cage

John Milton Cage was a writer, visual artist and American experimental music composer – undeniably one of the most important contemporary composers of the twentieth century. He used instruments in some very unusual ways, and was later one of the earliest composers of aleatoric music – music where some elements are left up to chance. The piece that he is perhaps most widely known for is the notorious 4'33", in which the musician makes no deliberate sound for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, with the only “pauses” in the silence being in between movements; the performer may then choose to relax his stance, or to close and reopen the piano lid. The idea of this piece is that the music is composed of the sounds from the audience; the piece itself provides rooms for those sounds to fill. Cage believed that “there is no such thing as empty space or empty time…try as we might to make a silence, we cannot…one need not fear about the future of music.” Music as avant-garde as this is... full article at wikipedia