Can you link me a version of 433 without the audience participation?

The only way to do that is if you were the performer since if anybody else performed it, you would become a part of the audience.

Anyone part of the performance is not the audience.

which is why

Which is why 433 isn't music. If you can't perform the piece without an audience than it is essentially nothing.

I'm just playing devil's advocate here as I really don't care, and this is the most logical counter-argument I could think of.

That seems like a very arbitrary way to define music. We have to rule out Steely Dan as music if these are the parameters.

It is also very possible to perform it without the audience. The audience isn't the only thing making sounds in the world. Stop and listen for thirty seconds and I assure you that you'll hear something.

That goes against the nature of the intention behind the piece, and since according to you intention is all you need for it to be music, that argument doesn't hold up. I don't think, it's arbitrary silence is only music when it's part of a larger piece, unless you also believe that nothing is something (which I do not).

Idk Steely Dan, sorry.

Edit: Unless I misunderstood (I never really got involved in this discussion), isn't the intention behind 433 for the audience to create it's own music via ambient sounds like pamphlet folding, coughing, readjusting in their seat?

My point is rather easy to grasp: it doesn't matter that 4'33 is a composition, because the composition isn't even required to exist in order to perform it. My greater point being that if it is still music, then the presence of a composition is irrelevant and you should stop bringing it up, otherwise you run the risk of looking like you don't really know what your argument even is.

^I'm quite aware of what I'm saying. The fact that it is a composition is simply that: a fact, it doesn't make a point in either direction.

The idea of the piece is that musical sounds exist beyond the performers' instruments. The original example was the audience in an orchestral hall, but it could also be anything else in the material world. The piece doesn't call for an audience, and if it did, I wouldn't put it past Cage to actually write that on the composition.

Steely Dan were a group who made (kind of) complex tunes that were too much for them to perform live. So they didn't.

EDIT: Bat, whenever I talk about the compositional process of 4'33", it refers to the conceptualization of the piece, not just writing it down on paper. That might be where some of the confusion comes from.

If you can't recognize 4'33" as musical composition, then you're missing the entire point of the piece.

All music is performance art to me, OP.