Reading

=== Introduction ===
This passage is adapted from the essay 'Introduction' by Charlotte Noruzi (©2008 by Charlotte Noruzi). About 12 years ago, my mother visited Iran and brought back with her another set of children’s books. These happened to be illustrated by an important figure from my childhood: Gholamali Maktabi, someone I hadn’t thought of in years. I never until now got the message of the giving of all these books, first by my father and again by my mother. I had tucked Maktabi’s wonderful books away in my memory all of these years and not until the idea for this essay presented itself, did I bring them out into the light. And he came out along with them.

=== Passage A by Alex Ross ===
On August 29, 1952, David Tudor walked onto the stage of the Maverick Concert Hall, near Woodstock, New York, sat down at the piano, and, for four and a half minutes, made no sound. He was performing “4′33″,” a conceptual work by John Cage. It has been called the 'silent piece,' but its purpose is to make people listen. “There’s no such thing as silence,” Cage said, recalling the première. “You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.” What do the music of Bach and John Cage fundamentally have in common? On the most basic level, what distinguishes Busta Rhymes’s “What’s It Gonna Be?!” or Beethoven’s “Pathétique” Sonata from, say, the collection of sounds you’d hear standing in the middle of Times Square or those you’d hear deep in a rainforest? As the composer Edgard Varèse famously defined it, “Music is organized sound.” It is helpful to examine what music is made of. That last thought ruled Cage’s life: he wanted to discard inherited structures, open doors to the exterior world, 'let sounds be just sounds.' Gann writes, “It begged for a new approach to listening, perhaps even a new understanding of music itself, a blurring of the conventional boundaries between art and life.” On a simpler level, Cage had an itch to try new things. What would happen if you sat at a piano and did nothing? If you chose among an array of musical possibilities by flipping a coin and consulting the I Ching? If you made music from junkyard percussion, squads of radios, the scratching of pens, an amplified cactus? Each attribute can be varied without altering the others. The difference between music and a random or disordered set of sounds has to do with the way these fundamental attributes combine, and the relations that form between them. Many people, of course, won’t hear of it. Nearly six decades after the work came into the world, “4′33″” is still dismissed as “absolutely ridiculous,” “stupid,” and “a gimmick.” Such judgments are especially common within classical music where Cage, who died in 1992, remains an object of widespread scorn. Morton Feldman, another avant-garde musician, once said, “John Cage was the first composer in the history of music who raised the question by implication that maybe music could be an art form rather than a musical form.” Feldman meant that, since the Middle Ages, even the most adventurous composers had labored within a craftsmanlike tradition. Cage held that an artist can work as freely with sound as with paint: he changed what it meant to be a composer, and every kid manipulating music on a laptop is in his debt. Not everything he did was laudable, or even tolerable. Yet the work remains inescapable, mesmerizing, and often unexpectedly touching. It encompasses some of the most violent sounds of the twentieth century, as well as some of the most gently beguiling. It confronts us with the elemental question of what music is, and confounds all easy answers. “4′33″” premiered.

=== Passage B ===
Many avant-garde composers, including Edgard Varèse and John Cage, use unconventional instruments like jackhammers, trains, and waterfalls in their music. Composer and scholar Kyle Gann defines Cage’s '4′33″' as 'an act of framing, of enclosing environmental and unintended sounds in a moment of attention in order to open the mind to the fact that all sounds are music.' The basic elements of any sound are loudness, pitch, contour, duration (or rhythm), tempo, timbre, spatial location, and reverberation. Our brains organize these fundamental perceptual attributes into higher-level concepts—just as a painter arranges lines into forms. But what happens when a sound is not organized? Can it be music? Cage believes silence is an illusion. He encourages us to listen to the world around us.