ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY.

Staff

By Hyacinth at the English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/, via Wikimedia Commons


On this day in 1952, John Cage’s 4′33″ was first performed at Woodstock, New York. Until a week before the performance, Cage had been referring to the work as 3′52″, but pianist David Tudor found it impossible to execute some of the more technical passages at the marked tempo, and Cage consented to slow it down a bit.

You can listen to “a computer-generated performance of 4′33″here.