The concept of John Cage’s “4’33” is very interesting to me because I think that at first it makes people uncomfortable, but if you push through that discomfort you can find that the music is all around us. We are constantly hearing sounds throughout our day, and if you stop thinking of it as just noise, there’s an opportunity to find beauty in the simplest things. I also like what they said about gallery settings being more comfortable because you can walk away from something that you don’t want to confront, while in a concert hall you are forced to sit there and contemplate. The “Lecture on Nothing” was notable as well because it really focused on the unease that people in the room were feeling. That’s the point of art, to make people feel something and question what they know. My favorite part of this article was what Gita Sarabhai said about the purpose of music, “to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences”. Music can take us to all different places, within our mind or outside it. With this thinking, perhaps music could be the key to enlightenment as it opens the mind. It’s also interesting that a lot of people mentioned in this article like John Cage and Morton Feldman are sensitive to sounds themselves. That could be the reason they are able to create these incredible “soundscapes” because they have a keen ear.
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