Cage Delivers I Ching Talk At Third Norton Lecture

Experimental composer and Norton Eliot Lecturer John Cage confused a Sanders Theater audience of more than 150 people yesterday when he delivered a speech written according to the "I Ching" principle.

The third of six speeches of its kind to be given this year, the lecture was written with the help of a computer program that allows Cage to discover meaning in random word pairings.

The program is based on an ancient Chinese text called I Ching, a work that explored mechanisms of chance.

Cage has described himself as a "mushroom hunter" seeking valuable ideas in the arbitrary combinations spit out by the IC computer program.

The title of yesterday's lecture, "Method Structure Intention Discipline-Notation Indeterminacy Interpenetration Imitation Devotion Circumstance-Variable-Structure Nonunderstanding-Contingeny Performance," was taken from Cage's 1981 text Composition in Retrospect.

Cage created each Norton lecture by choosing entries from each of the fifteen sections of the book. He then selected passages from the writings of Wittgenstien, Fuller, McLuhan, Thoreau, Emerson, L.C. Beckett's Neti Neti and sentences from major newspapers.

"I gave up making choices," Cage wrote in the printed introduction to the lecture series. "In their place I put the asking of questions."

Cage said at the first lecture that he hoped that his randomly-composed works will suggest ideas to his audience.

"In the nature of the use of chance operation is the belief that all answers answer all questions."

As the Norton Eliot Professor of Poetry for 1988-89, Cage joins the company of T.S. Eliot '10 and Leonard Bernstein. Last year, the post was given to literary critic Harold Bloom.