Cage: the music of chance
The I Ching as a composition engine (1951)
Toss the coins six times, pick a sonority from the demonstration chart and chain a phrase, as Cage did.
We document the compositional method, not Cage's work: the demo uses a demonstrative card of our own and reproduces none of his charts, scores or fragments (copyright). The connection is historical (Pritchett, 1993), not a claim about the oracle.
In late 1950, John Cage received a copy of the I Ching. He built charts of 64 values (sonorities, durations, dynamics) indexed by the 64 hexagrams and used coin tosses to choose from them. Music of Changes (1951) is the founding work of chance composition. Here you can try the method with a card of our own: each toss of six coins chooses, with probability 1/64, one of the 64 sonorities.
toss the coins to select a sonority from the card and chain a phrase
64 cells indexed by hexagram, each with a sonority of our own (not Cage's charts)
In late 1950 Cage received the I Ching, built charts of 64 values indexed by the hexagrams and selected from them with coin tosses; Music of Changes (1951) is the founding work of composition by chance.
The method is documented, not the work: the demonstration uses a chart of our own and the coin engine of experiment 21, without reproducing any score or fragment by Cage.
The selection method (six coin tosses, P(yang) = 1/2 per line) chooses uniformly one of the 64 hexagrams, each with probability 1/64; our demonstration chart assigns a value to each hexagram, as Cage did with his charts.
verificar_cageThe types of claim and the full bibliography (APA) are in Foundations.