Radio stations dread dead air, yet recently BBC's Radio 3 deliberately switched off its emergency backup systems designed to deal with unwanted silences. The BBC took this unprecedented step to broadcast a performance of John Cage's 4' 33', a work in which the audience listens not to music but to random sounds such as a cough or footsteps. Cage's piece demonstrates his view that all sound is music and that, 'Wherever we are what we hear mostly is noise. When we ignore noise, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.'
So how did the audience at London's Barbican respond to this chance to make as much random noise as they liked? Only last month cellist Steven Isserles, after playing a Dvorak early cello concerto with the Scottish Symphony Orchestra, threw the bouquet presented to him at a man in the front row who had slept noisily throughout the entire concerto. After being lampooned for this in the satirical magazine Private Eye, Isserles came up with a charter for audiences and performers to regulate behaviour at concerts. In the preamble to this charter he says: 'I am convinced that some people come to concerts purely to try out their hacks and splutters.' He goes on to confess, tongue in cheek, that he has written to the European Parliament requesting the death penalty for anyone whose mobile phone rings during a concert.
The most infamous recent example of disruptive mobile phones took place last summer at the Royal Albert Hall when Sir Simon Rattle aborted the mighty Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in the opening bars of Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring, after someone's mobile rang out loud and clear. But sitting in the audience at the Barbican for Cage's four-and-a-half minutes of silence not one single mobile phone went off, no one snored and the odd cough or splutter that did erupt was suppressed with more zeal than if it had occurred during an actual performance.
4' 33' was part of a weekend celebration of the music of experimental American composer John Cage titled Cage Uncaged. This was the eighth consecutive year in which London's Guildhall School of Music had collaborated with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a retrospective of a modern composer who has shaped the course of classical music - previous years have featured the works of John Adams, Alfred Schnittke and Mark-Anthony Turnage. Cage Uncaged packed in nine concerts, three films, four talks and multiple events.
One of these events took place in a rather unexpected venue. I have become used to being greeted in a public toilet by a sweet old man in a white jacket who turns the tap on and hands me a towel and smiles when I give him a tip, but to walk into a public toilet and hear trombone music coming from one of the stalls was something new - a little lesson from a master of the avant-garde in how environment shapes the way we hear.