Music and Time Annotation << Back Inke Arns. On the Dark Side of Silence A.N. Lipov In 2012, the musical world celebrated the 100th anniversary of John Cage’s birth and the 60th anniversary of the August 29, 1952 premiere of the composer’s "Mute Piece" "4’33" (four minutes, thirty-three seconds). To this day, this three-part composition with no deliberate sounds is Cage’s most outstanding piece. Described by the author himself as "art without a work," it updates and redefines innovative early twentieth-century avant-garde concepts, such as the notion of the finished work, which Duchamp called "works without art. The title of this article, which is a scholarly translation from German, is. "How Silence Sounds" is clearly ambiguous. On the one hand, silence effectively "sounds," or, as Cage put it, – "There is no such thing as silence." On the other hand, sound needs silence in order to be heard. Cage’s musical piece, "4′33," was for him the embodiment of the idea that any sounds can represent and constitute music. The composer developed the idea of expanding the performance space of academic concerts by using natural sounds as elements of music, which changed not only the concept of music itself, but also the concept of musical material, which gave music theorists a basis for evaluating the piece "4’33'" by sound material both as an example of silence music and as an example of noise music and as an aleatoric work, because its text forms random elements of noise environment. Keywords: Philosophy of music, composer John Cage, musical piece "4′33", silence, music of silence. Pp. 03-07.