His studies on Zen Buddhism during the late 1940s about chance music led him to acknowledge the value of silence in providing an opportunity to reflect on one's surroundings and psyche.

Recent developments in contemporary art also bolstered Cage's understanding on silence, which he increasingly began to perceive as impossible after Rauschenberg's White Painting was first displayed.

4′33″ premiered in 1952 and was met with shock and widespread controversy; many musicologists revisited the very definition of music and questioned whether Cage's work qualified as such.

Although 4′33″ is labelled as four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, Cage maintains that the ambient noises heard during the performance contribute to the composition.

4′33″ also embodies the idea of musical indeterminacy, as the silence is subject to the individual's interpretation; thereby, one is encouraged to explore their surroundings and themselves, as stipulated by Lacanianism.

Furthermore, in his songs The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1942) and A Flower (1950) Cage directs the pianist to play a closed instrument, which may be understood as a metaphor of silence.

[12] However, at the time of its conception, Cage felt that a fully silent piece would be incomprehensible, and was reluctant to write it down: "I didn't wish it to appear, even to me, as something easy to do or as a joke.

"[13] Painter Alfred Leslie recalls Cage presenting a "one-minute-of-silence talk" in front of a window during the late 1940s, while visiting Studio 35 at New York University.

For instance, Harold Acton's prose fable Cornelian (1928) mentions a musician conducting "performances consisting largely of silence".

[22] Since the late 1940s, Cage had been studying Zen Buddhism, especially through Japanese scholar Daisetz Suzuki, who introduced the field to the Western World.

The prevalence of silence in a composition also allowed the opportunity for contemplation on one's psyche and surroundings, reflecting the Zen emphasis on meditation music as means to soothe the mind.

"[32] In an introduction to an article "On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Works", John Cage writes: "To Whom It May Concern: The white paintings came first; my silent piece came later.

The premiere of the three-movement 4′33″ was given by David Tudor on August 29, 1952, in Maverick Concert Hall, Woodstock, New York, as part of a recital of contemporary piano music.

[37][38][further explanation needed] 4′33″ challenges, or rather exploits to a radical extent, the social regiments of the modern concert life etiquette, experimenting on unsuspecting concert-goers to prove an important point.

In the spirit of his teacher Schoenberg, Cage managed to emancipate the silence and the noise to make it an acceptable or, perhaps, even an integral part of his music composition.

4′33″ serves as a radical and extreme illustration of this concept, asking that if the time buckets are the only necessary parts of the musical composition, then what stops the composer from filling them with no intentional sounds?

Since the piece consists of exclusively ambient noise, the audience's behavior, their whispers and movements, are essential elements that fill the above-mentioned time buckets.

[48] French musicologist Daniel Charles proposes a related theory; 4′33″ is—resulting from the composer's lack of interference in the piece—a 'happening', since, during the performance, the musician is more of an actor than a 'musician', per se.

[50][51] In fact, Cage's composition draws parallels to the Dadaist movement due to the involvement of 'anti-art' objects into art (music), its apparent nonsensical nature, and blatant defiance of the status quo.

[8] To him, any auditory experience containing some degree of sound, and hence can be considered music,[54] countering its frequent label as "four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence".

[57] In a 2013 TED talk, psychologist Paul Bloom put forward 4′33″ as one example to show that knowing about the origin of something influences how one formulates an opinion on it.

Since the Romantic Era composers have been striving to produce music that could be separated from any social connections, transcending the boundaries of time and space.

Their shared quality is the composition's duration of four minutes and thirty-three seconds—reflected in the title 4′33″—[62] but there is some discrepancy between the lengths of individual movements, specified in different versions of the score.

It is currently lost, but Tudor did attempt to recreate the original score, reproduced in William Fetterman's book John Cage's Theatre Pieces: Notations and Performances.

Regarding tempo, it includes a treble clef staff with a 4/4 time signature, and the beginning of each sentence is identified with Roman numerals and a scale indication: '60 [quarter] = 1/2-inch'.

[71][72] Conversely to the initial two manuscripts, Cage notes that the premiere organized the movements into the following durations: 33", 2'40" and 1'20", and adds that their length "must be found by chance" performance.

To support his crossover ensemble The Planets, he inserted a one-minute pause in their February 2002 album "Classical Graffiti" under the authorship 'Batt/Cage'—[79] supposedly to honor the composer.

[80] He eventually reached an out-of-court settlement with the composer's heirs in September 2002 and paid what was described at the time as a "six-figure sum" in compensation.

[60][81] However, in December 2010, Batt admitted that the alleged legal dispute had been a publicity stunt and that he had actually only made a donation of £1,000 to the John Cage Foundation.

[85][86] The creators of the Facebook page hoped that reaching number one would promote Cage's composition and "make December 25 'a silent night'.