I No Longer Cultivate My Memory
A story about John Cage, a car ride, and what openness actually costs
I was sixteen and had won a ticket to a concert of John Cage’s music at Ramapo State College in New Jersey. Or I thought I had. When I arrived — two buses from Manhattan, a steep walk up a hill on a cold March day in 1983 — the box office had no record of a free ticket. The regular price was five dollars. After bus fare, I didn’t have it.
I walked around to the back of the building. The campus was empty. I waited near a metal door, the way I had learned to wait near stage doors in New York — the trick was to look like you belonged, to embed yourself among the musicians going in, to move with enough purpose that no one stopped you. In all my experiences doing this in the city I don’t recall ever being stopped.
Except here, on a rainy afternoon in rural New Jersey. The door opened from inside and an elderly man poked his head out. I pulled the door wider, smiled, and told him I was part of the performance. “You are?” he said. “Yes,” I responded, and mumbled something about turning pages for one of the pieces. “Which one?” he asked.
The questioning threw me. Rather than trying to lie my way in I decided to simply tell him the truth — apologetically, all of it: the ticket, the bus, the five dollars I didn’t have. His face lit up. He propped the door open, told me where to go, and as I raced inward he said, “Art and money are an awkward pair, no?”
I grabbed a seat for the first half. I don’t remember the first piece, but as the second piece began I recognized it as Cage’s Third Construction in Metal — a piece I loved. At intermission I found a program and discovered that there would be a panel discussion, and Cage himself was participating!
The intermission ended. The stage was rearranged. The unique set of instruments for the constructions in metal (the group would play another one during the second half) had been setup to the side of the stage - and remained in position, becoming a pop-up sculptural exhibit. The man who had let me in was wandering around the stage, moving chairs. I remember looking at him with a kind of grateful puzzlement, thinking how strange this music must sound to someone on the maintenance staff, how odd these devotees of Cage must seem to a man whose experience of art came from a lifetime of setting up and breaking down events —earning him a kind of osmotic degree in culture.
My knowledge of Cage came mostly from a Folkways boxed set of his Indeterminacy album with David Tudor, found in pristine used condition at Max Hall’s record shop on East 7th Street. I had spent months with it — Cage’s stories unfolding in their one-minute frames, Tudor’s electronic sounds happening simultaneously without connection, the intended “non-relationship” between voice and music that felt liberating and full of promise. The booklet, the careful packaging, the LP I handled with such care. The album was from 1959. That image of Cage — the voice on the recording, in his mid-40s, precise, playful — was all I really knew. It had never occurred to me that Cage would age, and that the seventy-year-old Cage would look very much like a member of the maintenance staff of Ramapo State College.
The panel discussion began and I understood.
What I remember most clearly is a moment during the Q&A. The director of the percussion ensemble, describing the seriousness of their preparation, said he felt the ensemble “owned this piece.” Cage looked up, paused, smiled, and said something about how he wasn’t sure anyone could be said to own any work of art — even one they composed. He told a brief story about visiting someone who played him a recording, after which Cage asked who the composer was. It was Cage. He hadn’t recognized his “own” music.
The performances were excellent. I waited in line afterward to apologize for mistaking him for a janitor. When it was my turn, he caught my eye and said loudly, “Well! As you can see, we didn’t need any page turners after all!” His laugh was deep and drew attention. “What is your name?” he asked, followed quickly by “So, are you a composer?”
No one had ever asked me that directly. I had been exploring sound privately for most of my life — at the piano before dawn, playing so quietly that the notes barely sounded, fascinated by what listening was like at the threshold of audibility. I remember the first time I pressed a key slowly enough to feel the vibration arrive in my fingers before I heard it in the room. I held the note and listened until it evaporated — the tone thinning, the overtones separating, the sound dissolving into the silence it had come from. It felt like discovering a dimension of experience that was haptic and audible at the same time.
I grew up in a musical household. My mother loved music, played records, took us to concerts. But what I was making at the piano wasn’t necessarily music — and I knew it. What fascinated me was the interplay of tones at very low amplitude: a kind of highly chromatic, slow counterpoint where the envelope of each note, its physical presence in the instrument and in the room, was as much a part of the moment as the pitch. The wood of the piano, the felt of the hammers, the way the sustain pedal opened a space that the dampers then closed — these were not accompaniments to the sound. They were the sound, as much as any frequency.
My mother had told me that if I was going to play like that I had to do it quietly, and the constraint became the practice. What I produced probably sounded like a hybridization of Morton Feldman’s and Webern’s most sparse music, though I wouldn’t hear either for years.
My mother had been a trained pianist as a child. I knew there was sheet music in the piano bench — Chopin, Prokofiev, Debussy — but I assumed it had arrived with the instrument. It was only later I realized it was hers, that she still played, but only when she was alone in the apartment. No one in the family ever heard her. She had strong opinions about what music should be, but, like her piano playing, kept them mostly to herself. However she did let me know, repeatedly, that what I was doing at the piano, often at dawn, was not it.
All of this was in my head when Cage asked his question. I think he could see it. Finally I said, “I’m deeply interested in sound. I’m not sure if what I do is composition. Maybe it’s a kind of inquiring.”
“That’s marvelous!” he said. “I wish you a life of inquiry.”
He asked how I was getting back to the city. I told him I wasn’t sure — the bus, probably. He said someone from the school was giving him a ride after dinner, and if I wanted to wait I could come along.
I waited in the performance space. For two hours I had the room to myself — the instruments from the concert still arranged on stage, the scores still open on the stands. I played the percussion instruments. I looked at the scores. These were golden hours.
Cage returned with the driver, a graduate student who seemed extremely annoyed that I was joining them. He suggested dropping me at the bus stop at the bottom of the hill. Cage intervened. We got into the car and headed east toward New York.
It was dark. The roads were empty. The driver began asking Cage questions and I listened from the back seat. Gradually I realized that Cage’s answers were drifting into the cadence of Indeterminacy — the stories I had memorized from the Folkways recording, the pauses, the timing, the way each response seemed to float independently of the question that prompted it. The driver’s questions became the ambient material — the equivalent of David Tudor’s electronic sounds on the album — and Cage was performing against them, not with them. The non-relationship I had heard on the record was happening live, in a car, on a highway in New Jersey, for an audience of one in the back seat. The driver had no idea.
I watched New Jersey fly past the window and felt encapsulated in a private performance — a kind of ambient chamber music, the highway sounds and the car’s vibration and the driver’s earnest questions and Cage’s oblique, musical responses all coexisting without coordination. It was the most extraordinary thing I had witnessed.
We arrived on Sixth Avenue near Eighteenth Street, close to Academy Books, a shop I frequented. Cage lived nearby. The driver exchanged pleasantries with Cage, continued to ignore me, and left. I remained.
“That was amazing,” I told Cage.
“What was?” he asked.
I explained — how I recognized the Indeterminacy cadence, how the driver’s questions were functioning as the co-present sound, how the performance had been happening and the driver was blind to it.
Cage looked at me. Then he looked away. A thought was forming. I couldn’t wait to hear it.
But he said very little. Instead, he asked me questions — about what I had been listening to, what I had been reading, what I was interested in. I answered eagerly. After a while he said, “It’s been a pleasure and I hope we run into each other again.” He turned and walked down Eighteenth Street. I floated home.
Over the next days I told everyone. The story divided my friends along ideological lines. Those with more conventional musical commitments were dismissive — Cage was a charlatan at best, a nihilistic destroyer at worst. Friends inclined toward literature and visual art loved it and encouraged me to find a way to stay in contact with him. Each group was certain it knew what Cage was, and each used that certainty to predict what his work meant and where it led. The sorting happened instantly — the same operation the museum performs when it places a work in its room and the label arrives before the encounter.
My mother’s response was complicated. She had her own certainties about music, forged in private and guarded fiercely. Whatever Cage was doing, it was not what music was for. And yet she herself had hidden her playing from the family — the Chopin practiced in solitude, the apartment empty, the door closed. Her relationship to music was as private as mine, and as unrecognizable to the other.
Through a series of unlikely coincidences — a girlfriend’s father finding Cage’s number in the local musicians’ union book — I called him. He remembered me and was friendly. Over the next eighteen months I saw him perhaps half a dozen times, mostly at performances and openings. I never had the courage to ask him to teach me, but I managed several private conversations. He remained interested in my interpretation of the car ride, and I began to notice, as I spent more time around him, that his public presence had a specific quality — warm, open, skillfully deflecting every question away from closure, never allowing a conversation to harden into a position. It was impressive. It was also, I began to sense, a performance.
Through other connections I encountered people from Cage’s wider orbit — his former wife Xenia, the mythologist Joseph Campbell and his wife Jean Erdman, the theoretical architect Arakawa. What I noticed, at first dimly and then with increasing clarity, was that these figures maintained a careful distance from Cage’s public presence. Not hostility — something more like a boundary. Arakawa told me directly: “I respect him, but his public persona has gotten in the way.” Campbell’s lectures carried a quality of genuine improvisation — the co-presence of a given moment with a vast body of knowledge, unfolding in real time — that made Cage’s openness feel, by comparison, rehearsed. Jean Erdman suggested I meet Merce Cunningham. “It would be fascinating for you to get to know Merce,” she said, as if Cunningham had found something that the people closest to Cage understood him to have missed.
I was seventeen and at the beginning of my inquiry. I didn’t have the vocabulary for what I was sensing. But I could feel it: the difference between performing openness and inhabiting it. Between a method of staying open and the condition of actually being open. Between knowing what your stance is — even if that stance is the refusal of all stances — and not knowing, genuinely, and staying with the not-knowing.
And then something else happened — something that had nothing to do with Cage.
I had plans with friends on a Saturday night that fell through at the last minute. My parents and siblings were all out. I was alone in the quiet apartment — we had moved a few times since my first encounters with our piano, but we had taken it with us. There I stood in another living room, in another neighborhood yet near the same instrument where I had spent years exploring sound at the threshold of audibility. I turned on the television and heard a mysterious music that grabbed my attention. It was a live performance of an orchestra, that I soon realized was an opera. I was fascinated. I had tuned in to the interlude prior to Scene 2 of Act 1 of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera.
I watched and listened to the entire work. At one point my friends called, and I told them I couldn’t leave because I was watching an opera. They thought I was joking. The music was unlike anything I had encountered — dense, chromatic, formally rigorous, and yet suffused with an emotional depth that felt dangerous, as if the structure existed precisely to contain something that would otherwise be unbearable. This was the other end of the tradition Schoenberg had extended — not Cage’s escape from harmony but Berg’s embrace of it at its most extreme, its most compressed, its most human. The twelve-tone method here was not a system for eliminating expression. It was a vessel for concentrating it.
The experience changed me in a way that paralleled but complicated my encounter with Cage. I began to study formal composition seriously — counterpoint, harmony, orchestration — not as a return to convention but as a deepening. I wanted the rigor Berg had. I wanted the structural precision that could hold that kind of emotional weight without collapsing into sentimentality or dissolving into indeterminacy. I was drawn, in other words, toward exactly the wall that Schoenberg had told Cage he would always be banging his head against — except that for me, the wall was not an obstacle. It was the material I wanted to build with.
Two years after Ramapo, I was no longer the same person who had sat in the back seat of that car. I was studying at Juilliard, working closely with Charles Jones — a rigorous, generous teacher who taught me counterpoint, harmony, and orchestration, and with whom I would study privately for nearly a decade. I had stopped calling Cage. I had drifted away from his orbit — not from hostility, but because my own direction had clarified, and it was leading me toward the formal tradition that Cage’s work had deliberately left behind. I carried what Jean Erdman and Joseph Campbell and Arakawa had said, gently, behind the scenes. I carried my own growing sense that Cage’s performed openness, however brilliant, was not the only way to remain open — that the rigor of Berg and Webern and the Second Viennese School was itself a form of openness, one that held the tension between structure and expression rather than dissolving it.
Some tickets had been made available to Juilliard students for a Conclon Nancarrow concert at Lincoln Center. I got one. Miraculously, I entered the hall without incident.
At intermission I saw Cage standing near the stage. He was one of the organizers of the performance. A small line of admirers waited to greet him. I joined the queue — nervous, carrying more than I could have explained. When it was my turn, I smiled and said, “Hi John!”
“Hi!” he said, very warmly.
Silence.
“Wonderful concert!” I said.
“Yes!” He said, and then the conversation stopped. I was the last person in line. It was just the two of us. It felt awkward. I began to feel he didn’t know who I was.
I reminded him — Ramapo, the concert, the stage door, the drive to New York, the car ride that had changed the direction of my life.
“Oh,” he said. “I no longer cultivate my memory.”
We stood in Alice Tully Hall, a hundred yards from the Metropolitan Opera House where I had heard Wozzeck alone in my living room a year earlier — a broadcast that had sent me toward the formal tradition Cage had abandoned. A hundred yards between the two encounters that had shaped me: the car ride and the Interlude before Scene 2. And the man who had wished me a life of inquiry did not remember that he had done so.
I have carried this sentence for over forty years. I have never been sure what it means.
It is possible that it was true — that Cage had genuinely released the encounter, that the car ride meant nothing to him because he had trained himself to let experiences pass through without accumulation, that the memory of a sixteen-year-old experimentalist had simply not been retained because retention was a form of possession he had renounced.
It is possible that it was a performance — the kind of thing John Cage would say, elegant and deflecting, a way of managing the awkwardness of not remembering someone who remembered you so intensely. Another line in the ongoing composition that was his public life.
It is possible that both are true at once. That the renunciation was real and the performance was real and the difference between them had dissolved, over the years, into a single practiced gesture that could no longer distinguish between what it chose not to hold and what it had genuinely let go.
I don’t know. I have thought about it for decades and I don’t know.
What I do know is that the encounter in the car was real. Whatever Cage intended — whether he was performing Indeterminacy or simply talking, whether my interpretation was accurate or a sixteen-year-old’s projection — what happened to my attention that night was not a projection. The quality of listening changed. The relationship between sound and silence shifted. The highway, the questions, the pauses, the dark — all of it coexisted without being organized into a unified experience, and in that coexistence something appeared that I had no name for and that I have spent the rest of my life trying to stay near.
Cage didn’t give me that. The encounter gave me that. And the encounter didn’t need Cage to remember it in order to have been real.
Maybe that’s what he meant.
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