The captain's signature as proof.

Indeterminancy, New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music

A while back, Matt Brownlee recommended that I spend 4 Emusic downloads on Indeterminacy by John Cage and David Tudor (Disc 1 & Disc 2).  On these two discs  (each disc is two downloads on Emusic),  the legendary avant garde composer tells 100 small autobiographical stories or vignettes/jokes, each one about a minute long. He's accompanied by David Tudor, who makes a bunch of racket on a heavily altered piano. It sounds like it would be offputting and annoying, but in fact the opposite is true. It's funny and charming and thoroughly entertaining.

The best of the recordings is track 4 on disc 2. It contains Cage's familiar recitation of the Zen koan on boredom:

In Zen they say:

If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight,

sixteen,

thirty-two,

and so on.

Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting.

My personal favorite is story number 85 on the same track, which made me laugh out loud on my dog walk this morning. Since I found a transcript of all 100 vignettes, I can share the entire text for you.

I was on an English boat going from Siracusa in Sicily to Tunis in North Africa. I had taken the
cheapest passage and it was a voyage of two nights and one day. We were no sooner out of the
harbor than I found that in my class no food was served. I sent a note to the captain saying I’d
like to change to another class.

He sent a note back saying I could not change and, further, asking whether I had been vaccinated. I wrote back that I had not been vaccinated and that I didn’t intend to be. He wrote back that unless I was vaccinated I would not be permitted to disembark at Tunis.

We had meanwhile gotten into a terrific storm. The waves were higher than the boat. It was impossible to walk on the deck. The correspondence between the captain and myself continued in deadlock. In my last note to him, I stated my firm intention to get off his boat at the earliest opportunity and without being vaccinated. He then wrote back that I had been vaccinated, and to prove it he sent along a certificate with his signature.