If that's the case then shouldn't you shift the focus to the things making sounds? If they are just making sounds without the intention of making music than how is it music? Music is deliberate, right?

You mean the basic idea of having a performance where the performers don't perform (or however you want to describe it). Regardless, the unnecessary nature of the physical composition still points me toward the whole thing being an intellectual endeavor about music, rather than an actual musical one.

What separates 4'33 from being performance art about music, and being music?

^ding ding ding ding. It's both. Why must there be separation?

That is where the focus is. With the instruments being silent, it works as an ampifier of sorts for us to be able to pick out those sounds.

As far as music being deliberate, that's just another arbitrary boundary that you're creating. On the song Master of Puppets, Kirk Hammet's string slipped off of the neck of his guitar and pressed against one of his pickups, making a note higher than he would be able to accomplish by just playing on the fretboard. Was this sound deliberate? No. Does this happy accident mean that the song (or at least that guitar solo) is no longer music during that moment of unintentional sound? No.

The audience's intention is not to make music. That is Cage's intention (via recording musical sounds outside of the performers sounds), and since the audience is the focus of the piece and they are the one's making the musical sounds to be interpreted as music then they should be intentionally participating or attempting to make music, which they are not.

._. You just totally danced around the question. If you're going to say it's both, then you still have to show that it's one and the other, without just being either or.

Steely Dan chose to become strictly a studio band for a number of years but they toured both before then and have off and on since 1993 after a decade long retirement.

Irrelevant to the point. Unless you'd agree that Steely Dan weren't music if they didn't tour.

Bringing Steely Dan into the conversation was what was irrelevant.

His point was about performing. If he'd said late-era Beatles or Darkthrone then it would have been the same point.

But my point was about the necessity of an audience for the performance which Steely Dan apparently did not need, so consider that point dead and buried, and let's get back to picking apart Frownlogic.