[silence] silence Digest, Vol 81, Issue 11

[Daniel Wolf]

On Thu, 12 Feb 2009 18:04:52 +0100,  
<silence-request@list.mail.virginia.edu> wrote:

> I am surprised the
> First Church of Cage
>  hasn't been built.

As an undergraduate, N.O. Brown warned me that young people tended to make  
disciples of themselves around Cage and that Cage — "like that other J.C."  
as Brown put it — was not exactly discouraging.  Brown also recounted that  
moment in the '50s at Richard Winslow's house, near Wesleyan, in which,  
surrounded by young undergraduate me, Cage launched into the Sermon on the  
Mount.

On the other hand, Cage could be outright dismissive of attempts to  
needlessly mystify or talk about matters in religious terms.   For  
example, when Heinz Klaus Metzger asserted that the Etudes Australes would  
"last forever" because they were made with star charts and God had made  
the stars, Cage responded that there was no God and he had made the pieces.

And then this: the project of dedicating the Burchardikirche in  
Halberstadt to a 639-year long "performance" of ORGANf/ASLSP is quite  
literally along the lines of a First Church of Cage, with real controversy  
among the disciples (the first schism, if you will) as to whether this  
project is actually something Cage would have recognized and supported as  
his own or not and whether or not the realization is really accurate in  
terms of the spirit and letter of the score.

Daniel Wolf