LO-6

Hello! For this weeks looking outward I wrote on John Cage’s Fontana Mix. Fontana Mix is a musical composition Cage composed based on dictation from randomly generated drawings. The sheet music is a combination of traditional sheet music and transparencies with randomly generated points, grids, and lines. Stacking these transparencies allows the player to create an image that can be algorithmically turned into a piece of playable music. This is done by noting the intersections between the lines and the grid, and connecting points in and out of the grid. These intersections are associated with instructions telling the player how to play the piece. The outcome is note only an uneasy and fascinating piece of music, but a beautiful image associated with the music. The viewer will have a hard time relating the image to what they hear, but both share the property of being seemingly random while simultaneously beautiful and reasonable.