The Warsaw Autumn Festival was for many years Eastern Europe’s only access to music from the West. It was a crack in the Iron Curtain through which composers in the communist countries could obtain information of vital significance for their work.

For me, it offered a unique opportunity to meet composers such as John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, or Jean Barraqué and performers such as Cathy Berberian. In my luggage, I always had a tape recorder with me, just in case.

In 1972, Merce Cunningham and his ballet company were guests of the festival; they danced to Cage’s Cheap Imitation played on the piano by the composer himself. Before the performance, I set out in the backstage labyrinth of the Drama Theater, in search of Cage. I opened a door at random—and there he was sitting at a table, a prophet-like apparition with his full beard, tousled hair, and a weary, lifeless look in his eyes. He agreed to meet me after the show, stood up, and disappeared.

The interview we recorded in Warsaw appeared in Hungarian in a collection of interviews in 1979. When I conceived of the three-questions book around 1978, Cage was one of the first composers I approached. He answered under the “message” rather than “reply” heading of his printed “note-o-gram” in what appeared to me to be a tantalizingly terse fashion (see fig. 3).

Twelve years later in his New York apartment, he struck me as an altogether different person, easy to talk to, less of a seer but still anxious to express his thoughts in the most lucid manner. (You will find our interview appended to the conversation with Morton Feldman.)

We met a third time in 1989 at London’s Almeida Theatre, scene of one of the portrait concerts devoted to György Kurtág’s music. He sat in the first row and I asked him what he had made of Kurtág’s compositions. Cage hesitated for a second and said: “I am glad to have heard them.” An incomparably noncommittal reply; I did not press him further.

I.

The white paintings (not painted white, just unpainted canvasses) of Robert Rauschenberg gave me the courage to make 4'33'', my silent piece, which I had thought of 4 years earlier but had not actually composed.