John Cage
«Imaginary Landscape No. 4»

In the composition for 12 radios, 24 performers, and director, two performers each operate radios whose kilocycle, amplitude, and timbre changes are notated. The score was conceived using the same methods as those used for the composition «The Music of Changes,» namely the factors of chance adapted from the Chinese «Book of Changes.» According to Cage, this complex and time-consuming compositional process has the following goal:

»It is thus possible to make a musical composition the continuity of which is free of individual taste and memory (psychology) and also of the literature and ›traditions‹ of the art. The sounds enter the time-space centered within themselves, unimpeded by the service to any abstraction, their 360 degrees of cricumference free for an infinite play of interpenetration. Value judgments are not in the nature of this work as regards either composition, performance, or listening. The idea of relation being absent, anything may happen. A ›mistake‹ is beside the point,, for once anything happens it authentically is.«
(Quelle: John Cage 1952, zit. nach: ders. , Silence, 1967, Cambridge Mass. S. 59.)

DD