Music and Time Annotation << Back Ina Blom From Signal to Noise: John Cage and the Anarchy of Silence A.N. Lipov Working during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, John Cage honed his skills among the growing American avant-garde. While not a painter or sculptor, the composer is known for revolutionizing modern music through his use of unconventional instruments and the idea of ambient music arising by chance. Cage discovered that chance a is as important a force governing musical composition as the will of the artist, and allowed it to play a key role in all of his works. Although each performance of a piece had a basic, composed structure, the overall effect varied from performance to performance, as various variables such as location and audience directly affected the sounds produced. Cage created “4'33,” a three-part composition containing not a single musical note. Instead, the composer wrote detailed instructions for one musician to go on stage, prepare his instrument, and then sit in absolute silence for the entire duration of the piece, 4 minutes and 33 seconds. The silence of the performance of the piece allowed the sounds of the environment in the audience to become the music itself, clearly defi ning Cage's interest in music in which chance determines the outcome and any sound can become musical. Despite initial negative reactions from audiophiles and critics, “4'33” was embraced by progressive composers as an important expansion in the incorporation of ambient sound into musical performance. In the translation of the scholarly article, the author, reflecting on a certain aesthetic pattern in the composer's work that assumes a random, impersonal and unrestricted distribution of sonic and visual phenomena, argues that his work, which breaks down the hierarchy between musical sound in particular and sound in general, may have had the most decisive influence on our current preoccupation with the sonic environment as a vital aspect of the social world, according to which sounds are given the status of entities. Keywords: composer John Cage, “4'33”, John Cage on TV, Nam June Paik. DOI: 10.25791/music.12.2025.1387 Pp. 16-21.