His I Ching is as integral to him as a baton is to an orchestra conductor. To help in his rejection of all the fundamental precepts of musical composition, Cage is an impassioned advocate of the importance of chance and disorder. Some of his most infamous compositions include a recital on a drawer of knives and forks, a piece made up entirely of two electronic notes played over and over at varying speeds and a symphony featuring twelve randomly tuned radios, all playing at once. Derided by many as a sham and hailed by others as a deconstructuralist genius, Cage studied under the father of modern classicism, Arnold Schoenberg, and has devoted his life to breaking down the barriers between music and the impositions (as he sees them) placed on it by formalities such as harmony and metre. Now in his late seventies, John Cage is one of America s most controversial avant-garde composers. The man s name is John Cage and he s doing what he does before he embarks on most of his orchestrations he s throwing the I Ching. I am proceeding by chance operations, he replies in his genteel but high-pitched San Francisco accent. Dressed in a crisply creased white suit, this rather eccentric-looking old gent is lying down on the floor, flicking through some sort of oddly-shaped book. None of this, however, seems to impinge in any way on the man at the centre of the whole thing. Everywhere, a TV crew s undergrowth of cables and wires adds to the general atmosphere of clutter while the half dozen musicians who ve been invited here shake their heads in bafflement and indignation. On one side, a couple of computer terminals hum contentedly, while on the other, a giant multi-track sound desk is pumping out a strange cacophony of chaos: beeps, squawks, whooshes, creaks, thumps, moans, all sorts of aural junk. Banks of speakers, about sixty in all, are located in carefully chosen positions throughout the auditorium. Those closing scenes when the aliens and earthlings finally make contact and open up a dialogue with each other by means of primitive blasts of light and melody.The setting is a concert hall in Huddersfield in November 1989. It s like something out of the last half-hour of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. Here, Liam Fay previews the programmes, talks to Philip King who originated and nurtured the project and hears many of the participants explain how they discovered the importance and influence of Irish music. U2, Elvis Costello, The Pogues, The Waterboys, Emmylou Harris, Hothouse Flowers, The Everly Brothers, Christy Moore just some of the dozens of artists who contribute to an adventurous new five part TV series which traces the extraordinary return journey that Irish traditional music has made to America and beyond.
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