ABSTRACT
My first contact with experimental music began, as it does for many, with the music of John Cage. Seeing his published scores for the first time, I encountered the work of a hand, and only later, because of the curiosity this created, that of a mind and ear. Looking at Winter Music (1957), the first score of his I saw – a page was printed on the back of George Flynn’s magnificent 1974 recording of the piece1 – I recognized an unfamiliar visual sensibility. It was simultaneously clean and clear, oddly formal and hard to decipher, as if it was inventing a new kind of formality based on a different kind of logic than what I had encountered. Everything, it seemed, was designed for the particular piece and was there to indicate a definite style of performance, but the beauty of the object was also striking, perhaps because it seemed like such an odd place to find beauty.
