Word: caged
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...writings that spanned the most important creative years of his life -- his books include Silence, M, Empty Words and X -- Cage extended his compositional processes to include other media. To satisfy his love of words, he invented "mesostics," in which a given piece of writing (Finnegans Wake was a favorite) serves as the raw material for a poem derived by finding and capitalizing the letters of the subject's name (James Joyce) according to strict rules, arranging the results and reading down. Thus...
...arbitrary randomness, programmed chance operations and a nearly value-free definition of what constitutes music a satisfactory basis for an aesthetic? Was Cage the great artist his admirers proclaim, or was he merely an ersatz Dadaist, proudly parading around in his emperor's new clothes as he pursued a whole-grain, crackpot anarchism? "Rolywholyover A Circus," on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles through Nov. 28 and due to travel to Houston, New York City, Japan and Philadelphia over the next two years, provides some answers...
Finally there is the not at all negligible matter of how the music sounds. A common, philistine criticism of avant-garde art used to be that small children banging on pots and pans or flinging paint at a canvas could have produced exactly the same effect. In Cage's case, at least, this is very probably true (and he probably would have delighted in it). A concert of Cage's noises is, by and large, as much of a room emptier as it was when the work was new; Cage may be the first important artist whose work one wants...
Popular acceptance, or the lack thereof, does not prove or disprove an artist's worth. Surely, though, the irony has not escaped his vocal band of adherents that for all its devotion to "chance," to musique trouve, to the music of the streets and the spheres, Cage's compositions sound as tightly / scripted and totalitarian as anything by Pierre Boulez or Luigi Nono. It is chance music in which nothing is left to chance -- as Cage eventually realized. In Peter Greenaway's 1983 television documentary on him, Cage complains that he has had trouble getting performers to take him seriously...
...Cage's failure was occasioned by his own audacity and the intractability of human nature. Confucius, who analyzed and annotated the I Ching more than two millenniums ago, summed it up in the book's appendix: "Change has an absolute limit." Cage's fate was that, by chance, he found...