Uncaged
A BBC report, on an outrageously pretentious 639 year-long performance of John Cage's composition, As Slow As Possible, which began in 2001 and will end in 2640, led me to an older article about a scam
legal row between Cage and fellow composer Mike Batt. Batt had allegedly
included a snippet of Cage's meisterwerk 4′33″ in his own, less obscurely entitled, A One Minute Silence.
The Wombles song creator reputedly paid a six-figure sum to American composer John Cage after including a section of his silent track, 4'33", on an album. The pair were interviewed on the steps of the High Court in 2002 apparently after agreeing a settlement.
Which is remarkable only for the fact that John Cage died ten years earlier, in 1992. (confused)
It has since come to my attention that John Cage did not specify a duration for As Slow As Possible. Indeed, its first performance was an insanely sprightly 29 minutes, although I could find no record of its BPM score.
The duration of the current performance was chosen by a committee of philosophers and musicians, who obviously took the title of the piece to extraordinary lengths. Intellectuals, eh? Tsk!
OMFG, does the BBC editorial team read this site?* The article that I quoted was published 09.12.2010, ten years prior. But it's since been amended. Stealthily, of course!
The Wombles song creator reputedly paid a six-figure sum to American composer John Cage after including a section of his silent track, 4'33", on an album. He was interviewed at the High Court in 2002 with Cage's representatives apparently after agreeing a settlement.
According to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, this change occurred sometime between 07.09.2020—the day after my post—and 27.09.2020, but is otherwise unnoted in the article itself. Proof, if ever it were needed, that you can't really trust the world's most trusted international news broadcaster
™. (SMH)
And, consequently, this entry into the pit of despair is further tagged accordingly.
* Probably not. More likely, one of the BBC's revisionists did the same sleuthing, and came to the same conclusion as I did. Unlike me, though, they didn't publish their findings.