ABSTRACT
The history of Western music theory, including both its speculative and practical branches, is deeply rooted in the conviction. Since most early-twentieth-century composers preferred to disguise the discontinuity of the historical situation by constructing new musical systems that preserved analogies with tonality, the pitch repertory of traditional twelve-tone tempered tuning was almost universally preserved. Two characteristic features of Cage's work are especially revealing in the connection between the sounds chosen and the structures devised. One is a shift from an essentially subjective conception of musical composition to an essentially objective one. The second characteristic is Cage's notion of music as pure process rather than a collection of musical compositions. New musical configurations are even more apparent in the mass media. The essential canonic idea in Western music, whether textually or orally transmitted, was thus the belief in a communal musical language, prevailing underneath a wealth of superficial, time-bound stylistic transformations.
