Avant Garde composition from mid 20th Century New Yorker Earle Brown. Performed by Dustin Donahue

Earle Brown - Four Systems (Clip)

Available on Bandcamp and simpleharmonicmotion.org
0’00” (4′ 33″ No. 2) – Cage’s brief instruction for this piece is: In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action. It was meant to be a follow-up to his “silent” work – 4’33”. Like Duchamp’s placing a bicycle wheel inside a museum, we hear an everyday action divorced from its usual location, and our listening is heightened. This recording of Cage’s 0’00” amplifies the sounds of a homeowner working in his backyard. Besides the sounds of tools, the recording captures ambient sounds that are natural to living in a large metropolitan city. They become part of a sustained listening experience.

As Cage explained in an interview in 1965, the piece tries to say that everything we do is music or can become music through the use of microphones.

0′ 00″… is nothing but the continuation of one’s daily work, whatever it is, providing it’s not selfish, but is the fulfillment of an obligation to other people, done with contact microphones, without any notion of concert or theater or the public, but simply continuing one’s daily work, now coming out through loudspeakers.

John Bickerton created this realization for the album Atlas Eclipticalis, released in 2024 on Simple Harmonic Motion Records.

0' 0" (4'33 No. 2) John Cage

Earle Brown - December 1952 [Kammerensemble AdHoc]

Percussionist Dustin Donahue talks about his love for John Cage, Earle Brown and more. Performance with Donahue and flutist Rachel Beetz at Mengi on January 22nd 2016. 

0' 0" (4'33 No. 2) John Cage

John Bickerton

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