Mike Batt, a former member of British pop group The Wombles, has
paid an undisclosed six-figure sum to the John Cage Trust following
a dispute over Batt’s use of a John Cage composition called 4’33
which consisted of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence.
The John Cage Trust accused Batt of plagiarism after he included
a track called “A Minute’s Silence” on his latest album – which
also consisted only of silence. Apparently as a joke, Batt had
credited the piece in dispute to “Batt/Cage.” Cage’s publishers
said they were defending the silent track because it was “a
valuable artistic concept.“
Batt claims that Cage’s Trustees subsequently “caved in” in the
dispute, but according to Associated Press and Reuters, he made the
payment in recognition of “his own personal respect for John Cage”
and for Cage’s “sometimes outrageous approach to artistic
experimentation in music.”
