The most tiring performances of Fluxus pieces take an “anything goes” approach, they most elucidating reinvent our understanding of the text score’s constraints. As they pass through a threshold of adoption, protocols have a tendency to harden: in the early 1700s, Raoul Auger Feuillet devised a system of notation for French court dances in an attempt to describe and preserve them, but within a decade, his notations became prescriptive.
In taken from the perspective of hard protocol, John Cage’s 4’33” may be seen to be tired, out of date, or failing to push “the field” of musical experimentalism forward. Hard protocol imposes a rigid historicity on what constitutes novelty. From the perspective of soft protocol, 4’33”, miraculously, continues to give, in spite of hard protocol. It is a positioning in the middle, to observe the codings of hard protocol and their effects on our capacity to think and feel.