The need for more silence in our lives was the theme of The Daily Telegraph's Weekend front page article by Olivia Parker on Saturday, inspired by a new film In Pursuit of Silence - "We're so used to ubiquitous sound that even a couple of minutes of quiet feels unnatural. To spell this out, director Patrick Shen deliberately opened his film with near-silence: four minutes and 33 seconds of it, to be precise, in honour of John Cage's experimental composition 4' 33'' in which performers sit in silence for that length of time."
But pianist Stephen Hough, in his interview for BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs broadcast on Sunday morning, told Kirsty Young, when asked about his favourite places to perform spoke about the particular quality of silence in the Royal Albert Hall, with thousands of people waiting to hear him play - let's open our ears, Cage is saying, and we discover it's not silence at all.
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