for two performers
April 2012; variable duration
Premiere: Kate Boyd and James Whittle, York Spring Festival of New Music, May 2012.
This score consists of a list of instructions for the performance of 17 actions setting 15 words (DISCIPLINE is repeated twice). Each word is ‘an aspect of my [Cage’s] composition’, which Cage used to compose mesostics collected in his Composition in Retrospect (1981-8, published in 1992).
The title is an anagram of ‘Cage in Retrospect’.
‘The situation is not linear’ wrote Cage. ‘It is as though I am in a forest hunting for ideas.’ His first mesostic in this book is:
My
mEmory
of whaT
Happened
is nOt
what happeneD