Composed Silence. John Cage' s Indeterminacy

Unknown source

10 Stones, 1989

Ensemble Garage Kolumba Museum,
 John Cage: number-pieces  March 30,  2012

Andreas Pohlmann

We      have      the      impression      that

we’re      learning      nothing,

                   but      as      the      years

 pass                    we      recognize      more

    and      more      mushrooms                    and

     we      find                    that      the

 names      that      go      with      them

          begin      to      stick      in      our

   heads.

                                                      

Furthermore,                                        we’re

     still      alive.

            However,      we      must      be      

cautious.

        Guy      Nearing      sometimes       says

    that       all       mushroom       experts

 die       from       mushroom       poisoning.

                                                  Donald

      Malcomb       finds                     the

 dangers       of       lion       hunting

         largely       imaginary,

                     those       of       mushroom

   hunting                      perfectly       real.

  A Year from Monday: new lectures and writings by John Cage.

 Wesleyan University Press, Hanover, 1967.

Ray johnson A Shoe
(John Cage Shoes) 1977

It is all about time and indeterminacy. It was wrongly understood as chaos or confusion but it is quite the contrary. John Cage's work in any field he explored is obsessively composed and organised. He turned to the I ching, one of the oldest chinese classic texts of  cosmology and philosophy  to devise random laws of composition. A structured method for creating music or prose through chance operations. I have just discovered Eddie Kohler's website Indeterminacy. He is  a professor of computer science at Harvard and  his site archives 190 of  John Cage's paragraph-long stories. Each story was devised by the musician so that they can  be read  aloud  at a rate of one a minute.  Beware  it’s addictive to click and get a new story, then to click again, and again, and again. 
Matthew Rose's article and The Rand Corporation, John Cage and the I Ching