Composers on Mathematical Music
Subtext 5141772


. . . I was in Paris for an extended period of time, and I went to those collections at the Conservatoire. I did everything I could to find pieces of Satie that I was unfamiliar with, and I came across at the Conservatoire notebooks in which there were just numbers written by Satie; and I myself write such lists of numbers—or did at the time—in relation to my own musical compositions. So I immediately saw these as rhythmic structures for pieces that he had either written or was about to write. I was very excited about them because they gave me confirmation to a rhythmic analysis of Satie’s works that I had been making which I’ve written about in Silence—you may have seen that article—and they have to do with symmetry, either, as I expressed it, horizontally conceived or vertically conceived. . . .

John Cage



Composers on Mathematical Music: A Subtext Poem

Other Work by John Greschak

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