Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[Rod Stasick <>]

The only people who appear shocked yet seemingly proud of 

finding what they'd consider an inconsistency in Cage's thought - 

a "bias" - clearly didn't understand the crux of his approach - 

to his work and to life. We can't expect perfection either. 

The people who feel that he was an "anything goes" composer

couldn't be further from the truth. Parameters always need to be set - 

or sometimes simply appear - when working with chance operations.

The idea is to work within these frameworks (small and large)

to produce an outcome that is not only a self-altering situation,

but also one of use - meaning that, for example, if Merce's "DanceForms"

program suggested that a dancer put an elbow in her ear and this just wasn't

possible, then it surely would've become a scrapped idea - a useless outcome.

So it is with chance operations - an operation performed within a pre-conceived set.

But, when an "impossible" operation arises, sometimes one discovers later - 

sometimes years - that it wasn't as impossible as you had first thought

(Freeman Etudes). Thankfully, I've kept some "impossible" chance-derived 

ideas of mine from the early 70's that can now be performed using electronics.

Stefano talks about this idea of chance vs randomness:

Randomness can be seen as the pool of activity (or inactivity as the case may be) 

of which chance avails itself. So, the questioner asking whether time-bracket info

came from "random-based" decisions translates more as a spur-of-the-moment

personal decision than as a constructed chance-based method and John immediately

recognized that clear distinction in his reply. 

Rod

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