Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[David Bellows <>]

Hi Lê Quan Ninh,

> In the series « c ¢omposed improvisation » but also for «  Child of Tree »  
> and «  Branches » , it’s requested to use the I Ching in order to realize 
> versions of the pieces. To be precise, for « c ¢omposed improvisation », 
> the Instructions say to « Specify by means  of chance operations… » not 
> especially mentioning the I Ching.

Thanks for this! The "cComposed Improvisation" definitely seems to be
an example of what I was looking for. I don't have the scores for
"Child of Tree" and "Branches" but after the instrumentation and maybe
time slots are chosen at random, it appears that the music is
improvised from there? In any case, Cage providing instructions to the
performer telling them to generate random numbers and plug that into
his instructions is the exact sort of thing I was looking for. I need
to pick up a copy of "cComposed Improvisation"  to get a good feel for
the extent of his "algorithmic" approach.

Thanks again!
Dave
www.platonicmusicengine.com

On Wed, Mar 18, 2020 at 12:40 AM Lê Quan Ninh <> wrote:
>
> In the series « c ¢omposed improvisation » but also for «  Child of Tree »  
> and «  Branches » , it’s requested to use the I Ching in order to realize 
> versions of the pieces. To be precise, for « c ¢omposed improvisation », 
> the Instructions say to « Specify by means  of chance operations… » not 
> especially mentioning the I Ching.
>
> Ninh
>
> did he ever consider
> releasing the process to let other people create, for example, their
> own Music of Changes?
>
>