Music and Time Annotation << Back Eric De Visscher Silence as a Musical Sculpture. John Cage and the Instruments in «4'33» A.N. Lipov The theories of the American avant-garde composer John Cage (1912–1992) about music, sound, and silence are no less interesting than his musical compositions. Music, in Cage's view, is a sequence of sounds, and the composer is the "organizer of sounds. Thus, music is not only the sound of a musical instrument, but also the sound of other man-made objects and, ultimately, the sounds of nature. And silence, silence was perhaps a key aspect of the composer's musical theory. Cage's famous composition "4'33," consisting of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence, revolutionized modern music and was intended to accommodate both sounds – all sounds and "no sounds," as well as silence and point to the surrounding sounds around him, when performed, which then became part of the musical work, on the border between sound and music. In the translation of the scholarly article, the author attempts to explore Cage's silence as a kind of musical construct in which sounds continue and disappear to form a sound sculpture, and asks about the signifi cance today of this composer's work and its relationship to contemporary musical instrumentation and technology. Keywords: philosophy of music, American musical experimentalism, the work of composer Cage, the play «4'33», musical sculpture DOI: 10.25791/music.1.2024.1272 Pp. 17-22.