re- them seven diatonics a

[MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu]

WillL concludes:

>But Cage's silence?  Seems to me that's the awful sound after our LA 
>movie-house
>has had its map erased.  If I'm still around, I'll stick with "Parker's Mood,"
>thanks.
>
I never thought of 4' 37" (thanks, ed.) as--silence--I always thought that what 
happened in the piece was the creation of a frame (call it a title, call it a gesture) 
within which whatever ambient sound occurred (in the room, in your nervous 
system or your circulatory or digestive systems)  became the music of the piece.  
That's why it seems to work out Cage's (democratic) idea that any sound can 
become music in a 	musical context.  The Duchampian play  (cf. the readymade and 
reversed readymade) on the gesture of the artist as a sufficient condition for the 
making of--Art--up to and including its own self-subverting irony, is, for me, part 
of the conceptual richness of the piece, and the idea, and another democratizing 
gesture.

Sorry to delay so long in responding.

john m