Adams on Cage
I don’t agree with those who consider Cage the most important composer after Stravinsky. I think much of his later work is fundamentally, even tediously, didactic. A work like ‘4′33″’ is a demonstration, a lesson in how to listen, so to speak. But to equate its artistic value, as some have, with a work like ‘The Rite of Spring’ is to confuse art with philosophy.
[John Adams, quoted in "John Adams : Up Front", New York Times, 19 November 2010; the occasion was John Adams' review of a new biography of John Cage, Begin Again, in "The Zen of Silence", New York Times, 19 November 2010.]