Cage Radio

For me, the class where we performed the Cage piece with the AM (and FM!) radio stations was one of the most interesting and dynamic of all the things we've done so far. The idea of a piece that did have structure and rules, but also left it quite open to chance and the whims of the performers was what it made it for me. The sounds and overlapping were often chaotic or nothing but barely audible static, but then every so often things would come together in an unexpected way. I definitely think moving on to the FM band added another dimension, seeing as how there were more stations that played music rather than just talk radio. With this and other examples of pieces like this from Cage or possibly others came the idea of putting more power in the performer and random chance. There would be no way to ever truly duplicate the performance of a piece like this, which is in many ways a thrilling idea, even if you take into account that any performance no matter how similar won't be an exact duplication. This also kind of ties into my last post, but to an even higher degree, where many seperate sounds or music every so often come together to create a third type of sound.