"The answers differ from one reading to another," Cage says. "Instead of making decisions, I ask questions and get answers, which frees my mind from likes and dislikes."

Cage says that this freedom enables him to approach a more pure form of music.

The Sound of Silence

One of Cage's most famous compositions uses the principle of chance to explore durations of time and movements. When he composed "4:33" in 1951, Cage used the I Ching stick method to determine how long each of the piece's silence movements would be.

"The work is a piece in three movements," he says. "I was using the chance operations and dealing with durations. There are no sounds except those of the audience and the environment."

The composer says that the first presentation of the work met with a combination of surprise and unrest from the piece's audience in Woodstock, NY.

"It was first played at Woodstock--in three movements, and each was completed in four minutes," Cage says. "The performer closed the piano at the beginning of each movement and after the proper amount of time had gone by, opened it to signal the end of the part."

Cage says that because of the "silence," the "music" changes each time.

"The performance was outside, so at the beginning we heard the breeze, then we heard raindrops in the second movement and by the third movement the audience had figured out what was going on and had begun talking," Cage says.

Cage has worked on other compositions in which randomness guides the musical program. In his most recent operas, "Europeras 1 and 2," he says, "the story exists only in the program. It is a collage of all operas, which makes it funny. It covers many different areas, like a circus-opera, a Hellzapoppin."

"My music is not really saying anything," Cage says. "It's more of an activity of sounds. It could either be seen as an activity of melody or as sound for pure sound."

Norton Lectures

But most recently Cage has been composing his Norton lectures. He says that he has incorporated the principles of I Ching into a computer program that simulates the "binary probability function" produced by tossing the sticks. Computers can perform the random operations and interpret the results much faster than humans, Cage says. "It is the most ancient and very modern mechanism and is in relation to all numbers," he says.

When composing the lectures, six of which are delivered by a scholar in either the arts, literature or music each year, Cage enters passages from famous literary works into a computer. The machine then outputs randomly juggled words and phrases which Cage melds into a speech.

"I come up with a large body of material with the computer that results in a non-syntactical group of words," he says. "Then I go through and hunt for the words I want to use together. But the hunting is actually for ideas. The words come from ideas, and they also produce ideas."