In Determining John Cage

2012
Shonni Enelow, Michael Garofalo, Josh Hoglund
In Determining John Cage Image

In Determining John Cage Image. Artwork by Sayaka Nagata. (Sep 01, 2012)

Write the artists, "In his performance-lecture “Indeterminacy,” Cage recounts a series of one-minute stories drawn from his life or the lives of his friends. The lecture is presented simultaneously with a performance of a Cage musical composition. We are interested in the questions that “Indeterminacy” raises about divisions between the personal and impersonal, subjective and objective, historical and transcendent.

Our project, In Determining John Cage, will pair 10 one-minute stories with an equal number of original one-minute musical pieces. The stories will be drawn from our experiences as well as direct quotations from Cage’s writings and radio interviews. In on-air performance, the stories and music will be presented simultaneously in random pairings. The artists will not determine the juxtaposition of the stories, nor the pairing of story and music.

“Indeterminacy” is not directly one of Cage’s radio works, but its formal elements -- a single voice speaking to an audience, a musical performance -- are quintessential formats (talk and music) of American radio, and make the piece ideal for broadcast-performance."