Suing the sounds of silence

June 29, 2002

Big noises at odds over the sound of silence

Mike Batt, the man behind the Wombles and Vanessa Mae, has put a silent 60-second track on the album of his latest classical chart-topping protŽgŽs, the Planets. This has enraged representatives of the avant-garde, experimentalist composer John Cage, who died in 1992. The silence on his group's album clearly sounds uncannily like 4'33", the silence composed by Cage in his prime.

I'd like to hear these two pieces in concert, back to back, before I could make a decision about originality.