Via The Rambler via Alex Ross (and sired by Seattle Slew), here’s the video of the BBC Symphony Orchestra playing Cage’s 4’33” at the Barbican in 2004. For inscrutable reasons that I imagine would have perplexed Cage, the audience suppresses their coughing until between movements (I mean, they don’t often hold back much during normal symphonic works, now, do they?). Swelled to such proportions, the piece really does become an enormous joke, but one that the polite British seem eager to appreciate.