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By Nick Shave<\/em><\/p> On 29 August 1952, David Tudor sat down at the piano at the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock, New York, set a stopwatch running and quietly lifted the lid. He then performed nothing for precisely four minutes and 33 seconds. <\/p> Or rather, he made no sound, only lifting and lowering the lid so as to signal the beginning and end of each movement. What the audience heard, then, was not the piano but the ambient sounds in the hall \u2013 of people shuffling, breathing, whispering \u2013 and the wind and the rain outside. Far from being silent, the premiere of John Cage\u2019s 4\u201933\u201d<\/em><\/a><\/strong> was full of noises, to be appreciated by anyone who cared to listen.<\/p> The beauty of 4’33”<\/em> \u2013 the work for which Cage is best known and from which he continued to draw inspiration throughout his life \u2013 is that it can be interpreted on so many different levels: anarchic, democratic, playful, profound, absurd and, yes, ultimately beautiful, it challenges the very notion of what we perceive as \u2018music\u2019. <\/p>