This essay appeared in 2000 in the Open Space Magazine. Benjamin Boretz, the main editor and founder of the journal, asked that I write something to be published in Volume 2. I had written a piece about the ways in which we might divide “musicking”—into music, talking about music, and talking about talking about music. I showed Ben a draft, and he said he liked it all right, but I could tell he didn’t think it was my best work. A few days later, a week before I left on a trip to India, I found myself spontaneously writing about John Cage. I had been lecturing in class on Cage since my days at Yale, and over the years had become aware that he and his musical and literary work remained largely misunderstood, despite his eminence. Cage’s take on Zen thought was idiosyncratic and certainly not well-documented by objective scholarship, but was nevertheless received from D. T. Suzuki, one of the first Japanese scholars to popularize Zen in the West. I had always believed that Cage’s perspective had much to offer musical thought and action, even though—and perhaps because—so much glamour and controversy still surrounded Cage’s name.

I had two unforgettable encounters with Cage’s work when I was a composition student at Eastman, or I should say at the University of Rochester—since Cage’s music was too radical to be taken seriously by the composition faculty at Eastman in the early 1960s, he was obliged to visit Rochester on the University campus, where he was invited by the dance and art departments to present lectures and performances. The first of my experiences with Cage involved his public reading of his “Lecture on Nothing,” a talk that is also a musical composition. It is composed exactly like one of Cage’s pieces, consisting of a series of sections whose durations are determined by a set of proportions such that lengths of the subsections are in the same relation to the sections as the sections are to the whole. In the lecture, Cage refers to this method of temporal division, which is often misleadingly referred to as his “square-root form.” Hearing Cage’s delivery, with its long stretches of mantralike repetitions and lengthy silences in addition to text, made a deep impression on me, even though I had already read the text in Cage’s first book, Silence.