I played the flute yesterday morning for the first time in ages � once again for reasons of exercise rather than practice. I played some harmonics � comparing for example the fifth harmonic on a Db with the third on a Bb and the normal fingering for F. There are not many forms of exercise these days which appeal to me Vita and Yvonne swam a terrifying number of lengths in the local pool

We saw the Coen Bros film, Intolerable Cruelty which was very very funny indeed.

I have said it before but I will probably say it a few times more � Cage is such a complicated figure.While his achievements span 50 years, his fame or notoriety is centred in the 60s, helped by the publication of his book, Silence. . A couple of his adventurous works were issued on LP at the end of the 50s. This happened to coincide with the production of the most outrageous and perplexing �compositions�. Apparently he opted for less onerous methods of composing when he became famous � when he must have been in his 50s � compared with the laborious methods he used in the previous decade. He homed in on the idea of �performing under instruction� � pretty much in tune with Fluxus ideas.

On Ubu I found an article looking at Cage and the transition from modernism to postmodernism by Nancy Perloff. Here�s some extracts;

�Did Cage tend more toward "modernism" or "postmodernism"? How is his radical contribution best understood? Cage moves between the seemingly oppositional contexts of postmodernism in the 1970s and 80s, and European modernism in the early twentieth century, with reference especially to the art of Erik Satie (whom Cage championed), Italian Futurism, and German Dada. Cage�s friendship and intellectual exchange with the French composer, Pierre Boulez, during the early 1950s offers a third vantage point. Although the three contexts are quite separate, stylistically and chronologically, each is integral to the evolving Cage oeuvre. Yet none entirely accounts for his radicality. Through a discussion of these comparative settings, Cage emerges as an experimentalist and an avant-garde figure who believed in his responsibility to change the world through new music�����..

In Barthes�s view, a sharp line had to be drawn between classical music, with its requirements that listeners decipher the construction of the piece from a code, and what he called the "new music as exemplified by Cage", which offered listeners a "shimmering of signifiers". This heterogeneity of codes with their shifting meanings and referents affected the listening process, which Barthes compared to the experience of reading a modern text: "Just as the reading of the modern text�does not consist in receiving, in knowing or in feeling this text, but in writing it anew", there is a kind of composition that requires us "to perform" it, "to operate" its music, "to lure it (as it lends itself) into an unknown praxis.� Here Barthes implicitly concurred with Sayre�s view that the performative requirements of Cage�s music define its novelty and hence its postmodernism��������������������.. Cage paved the way for the production of works that were not fully notated or fixed. In the 1960s and 70s, Fluxus musicians went on to explore this idea of the "open work", which anticipated conceptual art. The Cagian tension between the written score and the variable performance, the resulting paradox that the score is autonomous, without fixed referent, the treatment of composition as process, the expansion of the possibility for multiple signifiers and critical receptions � such ideas propelled the avant-garde to new terrain. Explored in their own right, they distinguish Cage as a startlingly provocative voice whose originality made room for a new freedom for the contemporary audience.

I found a Lamont Young recording on Ubu today - very very simple � a drift piece.

Also a very good new music site at www.NewMusicBox.org with an excellent series of articles about minimalism and what followed esp the rock-style variants. Lots l to follow up there.

The NewMusicBox article has led me to another brilliant resource at

http://homepage.mac.com/javiruiz/English/booksenglish.html#thevoiceofnewmusic

This is a collection of music reviews from the Village Voice between 1971 and 1982 � full of gems � like the first ever review of a Meredith Monk musical performance.

Paul Bell came over and we went across the road to the Slug and Lettuce for a couple of glasses of red wine. He said that Cathy is getting some good opera parts in Cambridge.

I saw Peter Chatterton who said he had started to practice the clarinet.