I'm a serious composer, and John Cages approach is monumentally important to me and others. 1) his words to the effect, " I want the music to come from the sound itself, so I'm just a listener too." That's very prescient. JS Bach, his music is so much from the craftsmanship laws of counterpoint and tonality, that it seems to originate closer to the sound itself, than the "artist'. I've always been intrigued by that connection. You could say that with atonality and 12 tone, that classical music got even farther away from the raw sound source, since it on longer used scales and chords which, in their harmonic series simplicity, seem closer to the raw sound.. 1b) acoustics and hearing are described similarly. There is a vibration, the source of the sound, which then travels through some medium, usually air, as a pressure vs. time wave (it's still not music); the ear then transducer the mechanical energy to sound waves, where an elastic basilar membrane will then register frequency. The brain then processes the sound further. ....2) Cage also made a great quote about hugely relevant to computer music. I need to look it up, but it was to the effect that, whereas in earlier times, musical ideas, and the tools and resources of composition, were much rarer, whereas now, in computer aided composition, there is so much generated, that there is waste. it's like 'data' where you have to pick out the results.
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