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. . . i called [morton feldman]
up and with excitement went to him and explained how i was going to write the
music of changes
which takes its name from the i ching the
book of changes
in which the making of choices is not principal to the work but rather
the asking of questions and the questions are arranged in such a way that
numbers from one to sixty-four answer those questions originally i used
the coin oracle i never used the yarrow stick oracle which takes about
half-an-hour to get one or two numbers between one and sixty-four by tossing
three coins six times you can more quickly have such numbers i used to
make tables relating sixty-four to numbers other than sixty-four so that
if there were eleven answers to a question that i might ask i needed a
table relating eleven to sixty-four a principle i used to use and it’s
a long time since i’ve done it and i may tell you incorrectly is dividing
eleven into sixty-four there would be a remainder and that number would
be groups of twelve and then i would arrange those groups of eleven and
twelve in some symmetrical way to show that i was not biased one way or
the other . . .
John Cage
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