4:33 from Paddington

I'm looking forward to seeing BBC Symphony Orchestra perform John Cage's piece 4'33" tonight. It's often talked about, but rarely heard 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence, in three parts. Cage's reasoning for composing (or naming) this piece was that he wanted to demonstrate that wherever we are what we hear mostly is noise - but I think I'm mostly interested to see this piece performed, how the conductor, the orchestra and audience will behave.

I was listening to the conductor Lawrence Foster's interview on the radio couple of days ago, and he was talking about rehearsing the piece with the orchestra - apparently he is going to have a clock next to him so he can time different parts. He wasn't quite sure what exactly he was going to do, but he said he was probably going to indicate to the orchestra start and end of every part... how the orchestra is going to behave, we'll see tonight. When the interviewer asked if he had listened to the recorded performance of this piece as preparation, Foster replied "Don't be silly!" - good to see that he has some kind of sense of humour.

It's difficult to react to 4'33" - while I think Cage's point about noise is actually quite valid, I find it difficult to take this piece seriously. Foster seems to be taking it seriously, and the orchestra probably will - but how about the audience? I would be surprised if there was no laughter, and how is the audience going to evaluate the performance and applaud appropriately?

From one absurd performance to another. Apparently Network Rail has found a solution for trains being late - they have decided to change timetables so that the trains will be on time. (While I appreciate the effort to give customers accurate information, isn't it the journey time that should count more?) And the reason given for the trains being late is even more absurd - apparently it's because the new trains are - get this - slower than the old ones. That's progress for you.