It is a quartet for unspecified instruments, all of which may be found in a living room of a typical house, hence the title (Pritchett, 1993, 20).
Living Room Music is dedicated to Cage's then-wife Xenia.
The work consists of four movements: "To Begin", "Story", "Melody", and "End".
Cage instructs the performers to use any household objects or architectural elements as instruments and gives examples: magazines, cardboard, "largish books", floor, the wooden frame of a window, etc.
In the second movement, the performers transform into a speech quartet: the music consists entirely of pieces of Gertrude Stein's short poem "The World Is Round" (1938) spoken or sung.