[silence] Cage and Oulipo?

[Chris Piuma]

There are comments by Oulipians against Cage's chance techniques. The basic idea seems to be that chance techniques lead to "nonsense" and the whole trick with Oulipo is to squeeze some sense out when you're in a straightjacket. But there is an almost raving quality to the criticism I've read by them -- rejecting chance to completely that they probably missed some interesting opportunities! Certainly they missed the entire point of Cage, but even within their framework there are some interesting things that could be done with chance (and there are some post-Oulipians who have tried to synthesize the two ideas -- or at last, *I* have ;-)

I'd have to hunt down the specific refernce I'm thinking of -- I think it's in Motte's anthology?

I imagine young Cage (maybe up to Sonatas & Interludes?) would have been intersted in Oulipo, but by the time they started up his esthetic aims seem to be completely different.

Yrs,

Chris.


Just before being eaten by wolves, Guy De Bievre <guy@guydebievre.org> said:
> 
> 
> I have never encountered references from one to the other and am not
> surprised about this. I would think that Cage's extensive use of chance
> would not agree with Oulipo's strict use of systems. The only meeting
> grounds could have been the mesostics.
> Guy
> At 06:10 PM 2/19/2007, Marjorie Perloff wrote:
> I am trying
> to determine whether Cage ever had contact with his Oulipo contemporaries
> in Paris­e.g. Jacques Roubaud, George Perec, Harry Matthews?&nbsp; Since
> they like him use very complex constraints, it seems to be a reasonable
> affiliation but I can?t find anything in the literature about this and
> Cage never talked about Oulipo when I knew him.
> Best wishes,
> Marjorie Perloff 
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