Deryk Barker, about Cage's 4'33":

>I'm not even going to mention the abysmal electric version that Emerson
>Lake and Palmer did in the 70s, or the Yanni/John Tesh collaboration which
>occupies the second half of the "Live at the Red Rock Acropolis/Dead from
>the Neck Up" concert so beloved of PBS......

Unfortunately, there are also some muzak versions going around.  Some
people say that if you play 4'33" backwards, you can hear satanic messages.

>Has anyone thought about completions of Cage's unfinished score, though?
>Such as the various efforts of Eybler, Suessmayr, and Robert Levin?

Some scholars suspects that the score is apocryphal, and that
Cage "borrowed" the work from a talented colleague which he poisoned
with mushroom soup.  The poor man died poor as a rat and completely
unrecognized.  They are trying to find out his name, in order to know
the title of the respective film.

>Or Deryck Cooke's "performing edition"? Let's face it, Cage left the
>work thoroughly sketched out, with only the instrumentation left to be
>completed.

Cooke never understood the work:  Cage did just as Bach at the Art of
Fugue.

>There can be no more excuse for playing Cage's incomplete score, than
>for playing only the first two movements of Schubert's 8th symphony,
>or truncating the final fugue of Bach's Art of Fugue.

You see?.  The work was a tribute to Bach, after all.

Pablo Massa
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