A Page for Cage

The gazillions of worldwide followers of this blog have been asking: "Where is it?" "What is not happening?"

We have answers.  Choose the one you like:

* The PD team was rehearsing the chair for Clint Eastwood

* The PD team was showing the BC Lions offensive line how to become really offensive

* The Internet rejected our blogs on the grounds of incomprehensibility

Okay, now that we've cleared that up, let us turn to the birthday of John Cage, who, were he still with us, would have turned 100 September 5. Cage, perhaps the most striking of the US  avant-garde post-World War Two composers, was a proponent of the prepared piano, in which all sorts of objects--paper clips, bobby pins, rubber bands--are attached to the piano strings or hampers or dampers. It produces an unusual but not unattractive sound. Patrick Wedd, in Vancouver in the 1970s, experimented with a prepared piano.

Cage wrote some quite lovely works, but what everyone remembers are his more audacious presentations, including several radios all tuned to different stations at the same time, and especially "Four Minutes and 33 Seconds," a work of total silence.

One critic said, "We look forward to longer works in this style by Mr. Cage."

Cage was into "The Sounds of Silence" decades before Paul Simon.

Okay, gotta go--Bill Clinton is calling.