Left of the Dial

John Cage, one of the most celebrated, ridiculed, and altogether uncomprising composers of our lifetime, has been in the news a bit lately.

Two Sundays ago, we learned of the death at age 90 of Merce Cunningham. Cunningham garnered much more respect as a choreographer (even receiving the National Medal of Arts at the White House in 1990) than Cage ever did as a composer, but until Cage's 1992 death, the two were inseparable. Cunningham was a loyal accomplice to his own end: his last public appearance of note was a wheelchair-bound performance in 2007 of a "dance" he had conceived to accompany Cage's infamous 1952 work "4'33," in which the performers make no intentional sounds for four minutes, thirty-three seconds.

And this weekend saw a rare performance of a Cage work in England: 1951's Imaginary Landscape No. 4. (Read more about it in the Guardian, here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/aug/06/john-cage-symphony-for-radios.)
The score comprises no predetermined melody or harmony: it requires performers to be placed in front of 12 portable radios, moving among stations, adjusting volume.

Cage believed we should accept as a premise that the single most important thing in art was the frame -- the thing that formally separates an artistic expression from everyday life -- and that any subsequent judgments of value belonged solely to the individual. He was insistent upon removing all imposition from composition, upon erasing ego from the equation. Many times, beginning in the '40s, he made a buzz, and still occasionally does. But did he make important music? What do you think?