A highlight is his list of silent pieces that came before and after John Cage's 4' 33" (1952). I'd heard about (but didn't entirely believe in) the suit against Mike Batt for copying Cage's silence, and I'd recently seen a silent piece being staged on TV, a tired and unoriginal musical joke that the studio audience nevertheless found hilarious. I didn't realise, though, that it can be traced back to 1884 and Alphonse Allais's Funeral March for an Illustrious Deaf Man, and there was a further pre-Cage example in 1919 by dadaist Erwin Schulhoff.
Lachie's main source is A Better Silence, a great article at Tux Deluxe that goes into the history of the silent work, including details of Mike Batt's (real) trouble with Cage's people.
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