The copyright on silence

Francotirador publishes a recent Juanelo strip, along with a reference to a news story from 2002 about a lawsuit brought against the English composer Mike Batt for including a piece of 1 minute of silence on his album.

Batt was accused of plagiarizing John Cage’s work 4´33´´.

The lawsuit wasn’t filed by John Cage, of course, but by the lawyers in charge of the John Cage Trust, since the American composer had died in 1992.

An interesting character, this John Cage, quite a controversial composer in his day, a man who experimented with aleatoric music, electronic music and the non-standard use of musical instruments. Besides being a composer, he was a painter, poet, philosopher and mycologist. That last one is probably where he sampled more than one hallucinogenic specimen, which would explain the trips he went on musically ;)

In 1948 Cage visits a university and enters an anechoic chamber, a room designed to absorb all sound. According to Wikipedia:

Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but he later wrote: “I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation.”

Cage had gone to a place where he expected no sound, and even so a sound could still be made out. Faced with this astonishing fact he wrote: “Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music”.

(How I wish the people who alarm us about the supposed death of music would read what John Cage said)

This incident, which made him realize the impossibility of silence (and therefore that it is impossible to kill music), was what inspired his most notorious “composition”, 4′33″, four minutes and thirty-three seconds of “silence”.

I’ve seen references to this work in movies, and you can watch this video of the piece being performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London.

It’s controversial, and it challenges the definition of what music is. Even so, someone was accused of plagiarizing it, and had to pay a six-figure sum to make the little problem go away.

So now you know: even silence is protected by copyright, although I suspect John Cage wouldn’t much agree with that.