A pianist and two tin-can players beat rapid-fire rhythms . . .

The irreverent American composer John Cage, whose music substitutes seemingly random and accidental sound for tone and harmony, came to Valencia last week to meet an adoring audience and attend a live performance of his work.

The town of Valencia may not be a notable stop for touring avant-gardists, especially a composer like Cage. His music can require a performer to pour a bag of pinto beans over a drum or play a cello with a carrot.

As Cage himself observed Sunday, speaking of why he left his native Los Angeles as a young artist, “Any number of tours in Montana and Idaho won’t have any effect at all in New York.”

But atop a hill in Valencia stands the California Institute of the Arts, the center of higher learning that Walt Disney built for painters, dancers, dramatists and musicians.

The faculty and students of CalArts are not shy about exploring ideas that might strain the limit of acceptability in the village down the hill.

Some of that temerity they undoubtedly owe to Cage, the musical iconoclast who was battling conventional form long before CalArts was born.

Cage will be 75 this year. CalArts, which will only be 27, dedicated its 1987 Contemporary Music Festival to him with the tribute: “The freest spirit of this age, who has opened jaded ears to the meaning of sound and silence--simply, elegantly, wondrously.”

The four-day festival had performances of some old favorites and some brand-new modern pieces by the CalArts 20th Century Players and Dance Ensemble, the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States and a group called the California EAR Unit.

Sunday afternoon, several dozen people, most apparently students and faculty, drifted in and out during an oboe and percussion concert, usually filling only a few of the metal chairs in the campus’ Main Gallery. The rest reclined on the hardwood floors or listened standing.

They displayed wonderful diversity, women wearing everything from Fifth Avenue classics to pink pullovers and sweat pants, men in pompadours and tweed jackets, like European intellectuals, or ponytails and white cotton tunics, suggesting something vaguely East Indian, Asian or Hippie.

“This is the last holdover of the 1960s,” my friend Stan Kurnik observed with a trace of irritation.

I invited Kurnik along for backup. He’s a bit of a Marxist and was close to the intellectual ferment of the ‘30s and ‘40s. He reads prodigiously and is a composer himself. Though I suspect he is slightly biased against anything later than Tchaikovsky, I knew I could count on his knowledge of Cage’s world.

He recognized the composer on sight when he ambled into the gallery about 5:30, wearing a drab blue French mechanic’s jacket and limping slightly.

Cage stood a moment to listen to a bit of “Six Pianos in Search of a Player,” a series of compositions by CalArts faculty for six Yamaha Clavinova CLP-50 digitally sampled pianos.

The pieces were composed and played in code on a MacIntosh computer. The pianos, keyboards still, played from a store of digital memory.

It sounded like six pianos playing atonally at a humanly impossible speed and coordination.

Cage looked pleased.

Next, 150 people squeezed into the Roy O. Disney Theatre to hear Cage being interviewed for 90 minutes by Frans van Rossum, dean of the School of Music.

Cage toyed at being turgid and intellectual.

At one point he gave a theory-laden explanation of how he used mathematical rules to find out what it was about harmony that he didn’t like. He found out he didn’t like its theory.

At heart, though, Cage was just a charmer. He would tell an amusing anecdote, then smile with infectious pleasure.

He was best when talking about life, especially his own.

He said he had been unable to raise his hand, years ago, when his teacher, Arnold Schonberg, asked which students intended to be professional musicians.

“But when he asked if I could dedicate my life unhesitatingly to music, I said, ‘Yes,’ ” Cage remembered. “I really didn’t make any money at music until I was 50.”

Now, he said, he makes more than he can afford.

After the interview, the 250-seat Modular Theatre quickly filled for a performance of three Cage pieces.

In “Credo in Us” a pianist and two tin-can players beat rapid-fire rhythms while a fourth person turned a scratchy recording of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony on and off.

In “Theatre Piece” half a dozen actors made noises by doing things like blowing into a funnel, vacuuming a podium, stepping on pinto beans after pouring them over the drum and grinding carrots in a food processor after drawing them over the cello strings.

For the vacuum number, a tall woman who had played the tin cans removed her flowing white dress and strutted in red satin and black lace underwear. She slapped a bust of Johann Sebastian Bach several times, evidently because it was looking at her.

My friend Kurnik liked it.

“It’s a great spoof,” he said.

We dedided to skip “Etcetera,” thinking it might be just that.

Later, Kurnik offered a thought he said he had picked up from an unattributed graffito in the CalArts men’s room wall.

It was Andy Warhol: “Art is whatever you can get away with.”