Music and Time Annotation << Back Jael Kraut John Cage and a hoax of musical silence. From silence to silence. Music and philosophy in the twentieth century. Amsterdam. 2010. Volume V. З. 102–117 A.N. Lipov This publication, which is a translation of a scientific article, analyzes the works of an American avant-garde composer of the early twentieth century. John Milton Cage (1912-1992), who used silence with a kind of reference mysticism, as a means of religious expansion of opportunities for uniting mankind with the cosmos and nature. Cage was fascinated by Indian aesthetics and Zen Buddhism, in which the Buddhist ideal of "denial of will" prompted him to develop aesthetic and spiritual silence both in his life and in his musical work. The consequence of the realization of these spiritual and artistic attitudes of the composer was his desire and attempts to silence the music step by step, and the culmination of the very idea of silence was achieved in his "quiet" work "4’33". Keywords: composer John Cage, musical silence, «4’33», religious initiation, Space, nature, music, «prepared piano», denial of will, aesthetics, mysticism. Pp. 13-18.