Skip wrote: Cage's comments were often designed to either cause some sort of debate or establish his place in a polemic. The remarks he made in the aforementioned article seem largely ill-founded, overly general, and smack of a feeling of superiority. All true. Equally true is the fact that in different interviews and discussions from various periods Cage said wildly contradictory things. In some later interviews Cage spoke highly of at least some kinds of improvisations &, for what it's worth, much of his argument against the work of Glenn Branca (well-known in some circles, not least, because Branca likes to position himself as the new music guy that Cage didn't like) seems to be rooted at least in part on Cage not liking fairly standard rock band gestures. So I'd take this quote with a lot of grains of salt. In general, for all the reasons that Skip states, I'm not sure it's worth a lot of time to defend or counter statements of Cage's opinions such as these. I am a bit more concerned with Patrice's closing paragraph: Anyway, what makes people feel that Cage has something relevant to say about music at large (as opposed to lab homeworks) since practically nobody seems to care listening to his music after more than fifty years. In many domains, this would be acknowledged as a total failure since the wrapping (the glose) ended up more important than the content (the music). Will Cage end up as another symptom of intellectual infatuation in the 20th century? I can understand Patrice not liking Cage's music. Based on your comments from the past eight years or so, I'd be surprised if there were many pieces by Cage that ever interested you. But, for better or for worse, since Cage's death, there's actually been a tremendous growth in the number of performances and recordings of Cage's music. I get press releases and flyers from new music presenters and ensembles from all over the States and a smattering of such from other countries & his music is being performed a LOT right now. It's even true here in Fort Worth, which is entirely NOT a hotbed of new music activity. If there were more than 2 concerts of music entirely composed after 1945 in any given year, it'd be a miracle. (& there's virtually no improvised music here at all.) But among the scattered 20th century works that have been performed by the Symphony and various resident and touring ensembles in the 3-4 years I've lived here, Cage is the second most performed composer (after Copland) with 7 performances that I know of. There are very few prolific composers who were primarily active after WWII who have as high a percentage of works for which there are more than one recording in print. Even labels dedicated to producing new music have to be concerned about sales, so someone's buying these things. -- Herb Levy P O Box 9369 Fort Worth, TX 76147 herb@eskimo.com