The intelligent chaos of John Cage.

After a 1981 performance of electro-acoustic music pioneer Larry Austin's Canadian Coastlines: Canonic Fractals for Musicians and Computer Band, John Cage's comment to the composer was, "I think it's beautiful, Larry. I don't understand it." At this point, Austin had befuddled one of the great musical minds of the 20th century, but to Cage that didn't matter. He praised it anyway. And that was just like him. He had sought throughout his career to create music that, as he put it, was "free of individual taste and memory (psychology) and also of the literature and 'traditions' of the art." He desperately wanted to drop the weighty emotional baggage of music's saccharine past to reveal the transcendent esthetic goal of sonic purity.

So while Arnold Schoenberg and his disciples abolished the tonic through advancing serial techniques, Cage and the other members of the "New York School" (Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, Earle Brown) opted to free themselves through randomness, surrendering complete control over their compositions. When Wolff, then just a teenager, presented Cage with his first copy of the I Ching, Cage's archetypical "chance music" took shape.

In many ways, Cage's Williams Mix, composed from 1951-1953, represents a major milestone in the quest to liberate sound from the constraints of cultural memory. Williams Mix was originally created for eight reel-to-reel magnetic tapes. Sounds used in its creation were gathered from 600 sources and placed into one of six categories: A (city sounds), B (country sounds), C (electronic sounds), D (manually produced sounds), E (wind-produced sounds) and F ("small" sounds, which need to be amplified). Dice rolls, Cage's personal take on the stick casting advocated in the I Ching, were then used to organize the rhythm, pitch, timbre and volume of the sounds. Cage described the 192-page score as a "dressmaker's pattern," in which one could substitute separate sounds and simply lay them on the score and splice them according to the markings on the page.

But it took almost 50 years for Austin's second attempt at the Mix, and technology has certainly relegated tape splicing, an activity that took Cage months to accomplish, an archaic concept. In 1997, Larry Austin, a major figure in both electro-acoustic and computer music and an old friend of Cage's, took several steps to revitalize the project. With the assistance of the John Cage Trust, Austin began the process of digitizing all of Cage's original tracks and recreating the piece for computer. All the while, Austin had been collecting his own 600 sounds (maintaining Cage's original categories) to plug into the Mix, generating his own unique soundscape.

But Austin didn't stop there. With the help of Bowling Green State University programmer Michael Thompson, Austin created an interactive music program that he calls the Williams [re]Mix[er]. Once the sounds are input, the program does the necessary calculations to create the piece in a matter of minutes. Last weekend, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the premiere of the original, Tribeca's Engine 27, a nonprofit art space devoted to multichannel sound works (i.e. the perfect place for an octophonic adventure), debuted what they call the Williams [re]Mix[...stallation]. As a part of this installation, Engine 27 had put out a call to the public to upload sounds that fit into any of Cage's categories. More than 80 individuals posted submissions via their website, and these sounds will be integrated with Austin's to create the ultimate tribute (or really post-mortem collaboration) with Cage.

Larry Austin's Williams [re]Mix[...stallation], Sat., March 29 & Sun., March 30, 2 to 8 p.m., at Engine 27. 173 Franklin St. (betw. Hudson and Greenwich Sts.), 212-431-7466