Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[Eric Theise <>]

Hello again, Silencers,

My restoration & cleanup of A John Cage Compendium is basically complete. There is an unexpected opacity issue with the navigation bar but it's cosmetic and I'll leave it for a day when I'm tackling miscellaneous small chores. I've validated all the html but I'd still like to run it through a linter such as prettier; a second small chore.

I am gratified by your messages of thanks and by seeing traffic flow to the site, and I'm surprised that Google is already aware of it (if you search for "cage compendium" it turns up second, behind the decommissioned xs4all.nl site). Thanks again to Rob for flagging its disappearance and to Ed for having the foresight to snapshot the pages.

The new site is hosted using GitHub Pages; as a developer I'll probably have a GitHub account until the day I or it dies so the marginal cost of hosting in its present state (static pages, no underlying database) is zero. .orgs are relatively cheap to register and renew. That said, if the site remaining available is valuable to you, you're more than welcome to send me some coffee (or Michelin ☆☆☆) money towards the ~15 hours spent on the restoration work. Zelle and Venmo know me by my email address and I also have a Wise account that should accept funds in €, £, and other currencies.

I have an art practice but my income derives primarily from contract programming: webwork using _javascript_, Python, and/or ruby, typically paired with PostgreSQL or MySQL. If a project has a spatial dimension (maps or other use of geodata), so much the better. I've also been known to rescue neglected WordPress sites. If you need anything like that, please reach out.

Cheers, Eric

On Tue, Jul 28, 2026 at 7:19 AM Eric Theise <> wrote:

When I fixed people's sites back in the early days I'd charge 3x more if the original site had been authored in a Microsoft program called Front Page. This wasn't much better. Turns out the default language for the entire site was set to NL, requiring every page to have hundreds if not thousands of span tags setting things to EN-US. That's all been stripped out, along with a bunch of inline CSS. The art, music, and text pages have been restructured and styled with a sans-serif font. I'll do something similar with the other pages when I have time, and I'll wrap the whole thing in a responsive framework which'll improve the look and make it easier to add navigational widgets.

Eric

On Mon, Jul 27, 2026 at 3:21 PM Eric Theise <> wrote:

Hi all,

I registered CageCompendium.org and posted the pages that Ed archived just prior to the site shutting down; those pages had updates not seen in the Wayback Machine/Internet Archive version. I modernized the urls, added a chronology page for 1992 and later (chronology_1972-1992.html contained entries as late as 2018), and put a short disclaimer on the home page about this site being a fork of the original.

I plan to add some simple navigational footers and to rip out and replace a ton of bloated Microsoft Word-generated CSS.

Do any of you know of any efforts to get this bibliography into Zotero?

Eric

On Sun, Jul 19, 2026 at 9:27 AM Ed Crooks <> wrote:

Hi Rob,

I don't know any background to the decision, but in the weeks before it was taken down there was a message on the front page that said "PLEASE NOTE: this website will be discontinued from 1 July 2026. Perhaps it will reappear at some point in the future."

As far as I know it isn't available at another location other than archived copies of the site, e.g. http://web.archive.org/web/20250809174321/https://cagecomp.home.xs4all.nl/.

I made copies of the HTML of the final version of all pages shortly before it was taken down, which I can send you if useful.

all the best,

Ed

Dr Edward Crooks

Managing Editor, Orpheus Instituut, Ghent

On Sun, 19 Jul 2026 at 17:01, Rob Haskins <> wrote:

Does anyone know what happened to the John Cage compendium? When I go there now I get a 404 message. If someone announced a change of the website address and I missed it, I apologize. Can someone help?

Thanks.

--

Rob Haskins, DMA., PhD

Professor, Department of Music

(he • him • his)

603-862-3987 (voicemail only)

603-862-3155 (fax)

"How high the highest candle lights the dark."—Wallace Stevens

College of Liberal Arts

University of New Hampshire
M-214, Paul Creative Arts Center
30 Academic Way
Durham, NH 03824
<https://cola.unh.edu/person/rob-haskins>
<http://robhaskins.net>