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musicians, from Frank Zappa to Sonic Youth, to alter their instruments as well.
    Mark De Gli Antoni, Soul Coughing:
    The psychological influence of “every sound around you is potentially a musical sound” was exactly the kind of thinking I needed for getting into the sampler. Take a song like [Soul Coughing’s] “Is Chicago?”: There was a building with great door squeaks, so I recorded them. And the question was: How do I take what I think are really musical sounds and fit them in a piece of music so they become not just random noise, but a real melodic, important element?
    By the 1950s, Cage had embarked on a new exploration that further employed Eastern and Buddhist ideas: aleatory, or chance, music. Instead of composing, Cage set up situations where chance determined the sounds created. The score of one well-known orchestral piece, Atlas Eclipticalis , is created by transposing astrological charts onto a musical staff.
    One of Cage’s greatest creations – and certainly his most notorious “composition” – combines elements of chance with nontraditional musical sounds. Cage’s 4’33” calls for a performer to sit at his instrument for 4 minutes and 33 seconds without playing. The silence enables the audience to focus on the “chance music” around them: the hum of the lights, the car horns on the street, the squeaking of chairs. The piece also illustrates as concisely as possible Cage’s contention that, more than sound or structure, the only true determining element in music is time.
    While Cage’s chance operations have had little impact on popular music, the environment in which they were performed has. By the early ‘50s, Cage began to organize “intermedia events,” where he held some of his more outrageous chance operations. Theatre Piece , for example, included a nude cellist smoking a cigar, balloons that were released and popped, and a man slung upside down with a watermelon. Events like these became the inspiration for the Fluxus art movement of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, which included experimental composers LaMonte Young and Yoko Ono, and artist Al Hansen (a student of Cage, who is also the grandfather of pop star Beck). Cage’s intermedia events were also precursors to “happenings” such as the Velvet Underground’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and later, ‘80s performance art.
    Joe Henry:
    John Cage taught everybody a new way to look at art. And he was a big influence on John Lennon and David Bowie, people like that. He’s still this tremendous figure. I wrote on my shaving mirror, in my wife’s mascara, a quote from Cage: “Everything we come across is to the point.” Cage talked constantly about getting your vanity out of the way. His idea of looking outward, I’ve tried so hard to work that way. For me, writing songs has less to do with self-expression than discovery. And I know a lot of my sensibility is informed by Cage.
    A last element of Cage’s exploration with new sounds is his electronic and tape music. As early as 1939, his Imaginary Landscape No. 1 used two turntables (today’s basic DJ tools). Later, with Cartridge Music , Cage amplified various materials (wire, pipe cleaners, feathers) by attaching them to a phonograph cartridge and running them across a variety of surfaces. The piece, recognized as the first electronic work designed for live performance, illustrated the potential for generating sound from even the most ordinary objects.

    DJ Spooky:
    Pieces like Imaginary Landscape are supremely transitional moments in music. The piece uses radio signals, and if you think about it, radio acts as a network of frequencies just as instruments access a range of frequencies or tones. Playing with both of those he created this weird social piece. He was really advanced conceptually. For me, sampling acts as a theater of memory, and memory is its own network of frequencies – certain things trigger different memories. By putting them together in different