Self-Similar Melodies

Abstract

John Cage insinuates Nature, understood broadly, into music. Unlike late nineteenth-century composers, for example, Cage never merely depicts Nature with his music, but rather unfolds music in many ways from nature. Cage's Nature extends far beyond the wild, the savage or the pristine, beyond any mere antithesis to the urban or civilized; it embraces the whole of contingent experience, the world as what happens. The multiple radios of Imaginary Landspaces make audible the complexity of our radio-wave environment, including the various human productions transmitted thereby; Child of Tree uses sounds made by amplified plant materials. In Cheap Imitation, Empty Words and elsewhere, Cage makes new works by processing the works of other artists much as he processes star charts to make the notes of Etudes Australes.

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