Cage I

I have put 'Cage I', because the music of John Cage is one of my favourite subjects, and this will no doubt be only the first in a series of ramblings on the great man)
I admire Cage. For his innovation and for his courage. How did he manage to make it? Sheer guts and determination. And from what I've read, he was also very charismatic. Some of my pieces take Cage's ideas and mutate them, or extend them to areas where Cage might not have used them (for various reasons). I have one piece for instance, which uses chance to determine how many parts of a piece I wrote are to be distributed to a number of musicians, the number itself determined by chance.
Another piece I have leaves it to a pianist, who when he has finished playing his part in the piece, is in charge of stopping the piece by taking the music away from each musician, one by one. It is akin to an agonist in a tragedy who kills off all the remaining characters after giving a grand speech, thus bringing an inevitable end to the play.
I read this recently in an interview with Tom Darter in 1982, about Cage's time with Schoenberg:


'Schoenberg had impressed upon me the importance of tonality and harmony as a structural means to divide a whole into parts, and when I decided to make a music that would include noises, I couldn't have recourse to tonality, because the noises aren't part of it. I made a rhythmic structure which was as open to noises as it was to pitched tones'.

I found this an interesting motive for the reason to move away from tonality. But I thought of a compromise between Cage and ol' Tonality: I wondered if, using tonality, you could construct a piece where it was rhythmically proportion a la Cage, but still following classical rules of harmony - which extensions/alterations and so forth being permissible. I also thought, how about juxtaposing noise alongside the tonal music itself simultaneously - like Russoloesque sirens or White Noise itself, a 'purer' noise. It would be interesting to hear the results.