Nothing in music

John Cage (1912-1992), seminal figure of the American avant-garde, composed in 1952, a work (4'33") that consists of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence.

Is silence “music”? Certainly not according to Victor Hugo, whose opinion was that “music expresses that which cannot be spoken and cannot be kept silent.” Yet Cage's idea was not to produce silence, but the making of sounds coming from the audience themselves, who were suddenly aware of sounds from within themselves and from around them. It was, in today's terms, an early form of interactive art.

Can silent music be art? Is it music? Or is it, in fact, nothing?