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On Thursday, April 18th, John McWhorter, associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University, met his class in “music humanities”: a class, one presumes, about what various pieces of music mean. He was slated to discuss John Cage’s famous 4′33″, which, writes McWhorter, “directs us to listen in silence to surrounding noise for exactly that amount of time.”

“I had to tell the students we could not listen to that piece that afternoon,” the column continues, “because the surrounding noise would have been not birds or people walking by in the hallway but infuriated chanting from protesters outside the building.” The only chant he mentions is “from the river to the sea,” a phrase often interpreted as a call for Israel’s destruction. “Two students in my class are Israeli; three others, to my knowledge, are American Jews. I couldn’t see making them sit and listen to this as if it were background music.” [No Such Thing As Silence]

Always consider the effect the future will have on your work. The article is correct in predicting what Cage would have thought of it because the piece itself is essentially a frame, with your experience being what gets framed. If Cage (or perhaps Rauschenberg or Johns) made a frame as a readymade, it would have been placed on the wall, and the viewer would assume that the content would be whatever you were thinking or feeling. In the case of 4'33" it was what you were hearing.