Indeterminacy

Description

Indeterminacy
(Ninety Stories by John Cage, with Music by David Tudor)

Originally issued in 1959 as Folkways FT 3704.

“The idea behind Indeterminacy was, like many Cagean ideas, essentially simple and audaciously original. Cage read 90 stories, his speed determined by the story’s length. In another room, beyond earshot of Cage, David Tudor, pianist and veteran Cage collaborator, performed miscellaneous selections from Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra and played pre-recorded tape from Cage’s Fontana Mix.”

Late in September in 1958 I was in Stockholm in a hotel. I set about writing the present lecture which I was obliged to give a week later at the Brussels Fair. I recalled a remark made years before by David Tudor that I should make a talk that was nothing but stories. The idea was appealing when he gave it to me but I had never acted on it. A few weeks before, in Darmstadt, Karlheinz Stockhausen had said, “I’ll publish your Brussels talk in Die Reihe.” I replied, “You’d better wait and see what it is I write.” He said, “No matter what it is, I’ll publish it.” My intention in putting 90 stories together in an unplanned way is to suggest that all things, sounds, stories (and, by extension, beings) are related, and that this complexity is more evident when it is not over-simplified by an idea of relationship in one person’s mind. Most of the stories are things that happened that stuck in my mind. Others I read in books and remembered, those for instance, from Kwang-Tse and Sri Ramakrishna. The 2nd, 15th, 16th, 46th, and 75th stories are to be found somewhere in the literature surrounding Zen. David Tudor: piano, whistles, tape machines, and amplified slinky.

David Tudor plays material from his part of the Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957-58), using tracks from the Fontana Mix (1958-59) as noise elements.