Culture November 17, 2014

John Cage’s avant-garde compositional procedures, which value chance and avoid deliberate meaning-making, have had nearly universal application in the arts—in painting, poetry, and, especially, dance. In Story/Time, a collection of performance texts and lectures that reckon with the composer’s influence, the renowned choreographer Bill T. Jones describes a 1972 encounter in tones of awe. More than the music itself—“the sounds were of nature in constant interactive flux with electronic drones, whirring, whines, tweets, and scraping metallic noise”—what impressed the young drama student was Cage’s air of “sophisticated ‘remove.’” It suggested a “world of ideas,” inhabited by unassailable people who had