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If you're thinking of the Baba O'Riley intro, that was inspired by another great minimalist composer, Terry Riley (hence the title).

Exact performance of the score is not a goal of the piece. The way it varies from performance to performance, and performer to performer, is a political aspect of the piece. A "canonical" performance on MIDI (or anywhere) is contrary to its spirit.

@@talastra nah. It should be midi because the piece does not express an emotional story or feelings. It’s just an experimental piece and should be played as so

It doesn't express an emotional story or feelings that you recognize. You call something that's not an emotional story or feelings not a piece--sure. That's one way to imagine music. You say it's "just" an experimental piece and should be played as such; that's exactly what it's doing and is happening in this recording (or any other of it). A MIDI would, at best, be one more example. It's absolutely clear that you cannot hear the difference between this piece and a lot of post-WWII experimental music. I suggest you listen more negligently. You might start to hear it then. The piece is neither random nor precious.@@LisztAddict

@@talastra Okay, I guess I should

The compositional approach "permitted the writing of a music which was not based on harmony, but it permitted harmonies to enter into such a nonharmonic music. How could you express that in political terms? It would permit that attitude expressed socially. It would permit institutions or organizations, groups of people, to join together in a world which was not nationally divided"

Honestly, dude. Peak ignorance. One can always question the methods of a composer, but there are few people in the history of "western" musical composition to so articulately and capaciously ask questions of Music and then identify adequate forms for expressing and answering those questions (all the more so in an era when everything was being tested in Music). No one. I'm not sure a single Romantic composer ever comes close to this mark. Yes, Bach rarely invented a new form, but he filled it in with a precision and detail of composition that is still astonishing; the Classical era folks give us empty forms. All Schoenberg could do was polemically shit on Music (in frustration), and while people like Glass and Reich bought into it (in modified form) (and later epigones even more grotesquely), the Russians at least were wise to that shit, and realized serialism could be applied as a resource in music, but not comprises a basis for it. Some of Shostakovich's symphonies are a case in point, along with Gubaidulina, Ustvolkaya, Schnittke, and perhaps no one more in detail than Shchedrin. Just put the music on and go about your day. That's how one listens to this, not sitting at your computer (or in a concert hall) piously paying attention, hoping that the stuff your ego demands as music should hit your ears. It's completely daft to complain that a banana is not a taco. And then, as you become attuned to listening to your listening, you may begin to notice the "music of the spheres" in the air around you, even when the Etudes Australes aren't playing.

Actually, besides that he is a composer in the truest sense of the word, it is the people who imitate the appearance of his works, and not the intention, that are the trolls and mockers.

@@talastra you are coping so hard, going from posts to posts to defend the fuck out of this shit. Hilarious actually

@@KinkyLettuce Says the person following me.

Here we are, 71 years later, and you people are still trolling. Clearly, you've not listened to 4'33" if you think it is the one "where nothing happens." It is entirely "what happens."

@@talastra nah. im a music graduate, sat through a couple lectures about 4'33'', read a few scholarly papers on that, sat through at least 10 concerts of the piece. I can conclude it being only a philosophical statement. Music wise, nothing happens and certainly not a musical composition. What you gonna do? say im trolling because I am not like one of you plebs?

@@KinkyLettuce You certainly do sound like someone who went through the gratuitous fire of a music education. But an education is never a guarantee of insight. The most baseless thing you say is that 4'33" is not a composition. Provide your definition of a composition. As a (in this case including setting a context for stochastic aspects), , , (most often for music, the effect is labelled as "emotion" but that's certainly not the only possibility; sometimes the effect is political, self-promoting, in the interest of the piece itself, or as an answer to the set of questions the piece asks), and , 4'33" most assuredly is a composition. "Music wise, nothing happens." You trolling here, as your education certainly informed you (whether you retained the information for the final or not) that music is (under the notion of art as "the gratuitous addition of an aesthetic element"). It is clear you want music to be something less, and it bothers you when it's not. Lastly, when you call it a "philosophical statement," (1) I wonder how you would distinguish any composition from a "philosophical statement" [Art of Fugue is not a philosophical statement? the majority of the vast dreary repertoire of the Romantics are not philosophical statements] and (2) would ask how much of the empirical experimentation into the parameters of music, especially in the 20th century, you would throw under the bus "philosophical statement" where "music wise, nothing happens." I'm pretty sure you don't listen to only one song over and over and over, utterly disinterested in whatever else music might be capable of. What is usually violently rejected by the startlingly conservative prudes of musical academia as "not music" (whether a half-step key modulation, a musical use of parallel fifths, things derided as "dissonance") is often gradually enshrined as musical orthodoxy. Experimentation and novelty in the parameters of the music of Christendom has been continuous, no matter how much the pundits get their panties in a twist about it. In the twentieth century, partly from exhaustion, partly from the atrocities of Christendom in two world wars and the Holocaust, it became necessary to widen the parameters of experimentation. Like all experimentation, the interesting failures are more informative than the predictable successes. So, unless you are opposed to all change in music, requiring it only to repeat itself endlessly in the same mood, then your denunciation of 4'33" is not only wrong-headed but contrary to what you otherwise claim to want. Nobody says you have to like the piece. Maybe you're just a homophobe. But of all the people who often sound like a stochastic Cage composition, there is a compositional deliberation that never stops being musical, and that's not something you can say about Sorabji, Nancarrow, Fernyhough, serialism, Reich, Glass (just to throw out a tendentious semi-list). The basic problem is that you have forgotten how to listen. And when 4'33" reminds you what that means, you apparently become supercilious and peevish. Now, go sit in a corner and listen to the piece again.

@@talastra nah. Not a musical composition. You are buying into the "concept over substance" bs like every single one of those plebs

Are you saying you can't give a definition of "composition" even after being a graduate student? @@KinkyLettuce

You're very welcome!

Yes its really good. I even dance to it. Like an allegory explaining the universe My pet hamster plays it

🤣😂 I love sarcasm!

Trouvez-vous que l'esthétique musicale, dans sa globalité complexe, soit meilleure aujourd'hui ? Permettez-moi d'émettre quelques doutes légitimes.

^^@@anastasiavinogradova_composer

Na kotalela bankombo mpe minoko oyo basaleli awa, ezali mpenza koyebisa ete Lifalanse eyokani na jaded mpe Russe ayebi ete crise oyo ezali kosalema lelo ezali somo mingi.

1989

If only it were this concise and to the point.