Word: cage
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...John Cage was in his element-chaos. The audience of 7,000 wandered to and fro in the University of Illinois Assembly Hall. Wandering happily right along with them, Cage drank in the beeps, doinks and sputterings coming from loudspeakers spaced along the walls. He gazed serenely at the color-crazy patterns sprayed by rotating slide projectors on the walls and the temporary translucent ceiling. He stared at the NASA space films and the clips from the silent era that flickered on the movie screens...
...student stepped up, handed Cage a book and asked him to autograph it: "In view of what's going on here tonight, I thought it would be an appropriate place for your signature." It was a Donald Duck comic book. This random happening was something that only the father of chance music could appreciate fully. Cage smiled and signed...
...went last week at the premiere of Cage's latest musical production, Hpschd. Scored for one electronic harpsichord, six conventional harpsichords, eight movie projectors, 52 tape recorders and 64 slide projectors, Hpschd is an eye-and ear-boggling kinetic phantasmagoria that turned out, in one sense at least, to be Cage's most durable work - 41 hours durable, to be exact. As usual, his operating premise is that art is more of a manifestation of nature than an expression of man. This means, to Cage, that a work ideally should be as based on random chance...
...Experience of Things. Cage patterned six of the harpsichord solos after a 200-year-old romp known as Dice Music. Attributed to Mozart, who liked a joke as much as anyone else, Dice Music consists of a waltz theme and a set of variations that are determined in a Cage-like manner, by rolling dice. In Hpschd, Cage embroidered the variations with snippets from works by Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Gottschalk, Busoni-even Cage. Each player had seven 20-minute chunks of music to choose from. Once having played, he was free to chat for a while with the listeners...
That it certainly did. An idea of the din can be obtained from a new Nonesuch LP, for which Cage and Hiller prepared a special 21-minute version of Hpschd. To Cage's credit, he makes no claims for beauty in his compositions. In fact, he regards notions like beauty as mere value judgments that have no place in art. "When I produce a happening," he says, "I try my best to remove intention in order that what is done will not oblige the listener in any one way. I don't think we're really interested...