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. . . Schoenberg had impressed on
me the importance
of tonality and harmony as a structural means to divide a whole into parts,
and when I decided to make a music that would include noises, I couldn’t
have recourse to tonality, because the noises aren’t part of it;
so I needed
a different kind of structure. And I made a rhythmic structure (generally
a structure having a total number of measures that had a square root; this
enabled me to give the same proportions to the large parts within a whole
that I gave to the phrases within a unit of the whole) which was as
open to noises as it was to the pitched tones. . . .
John Cage
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