JOHN CAGE STILL LEAVES EVERYTHING TO CHANCE

Scene: A Santa Monica radio station. John Cage, guru of musical modernists and self-styled composer/author/artist, sits at a microphone opposite his host.

He opens a black briefcase and extracts a thick pile of sheets--this in response to the host’s bidding Cage to “make a music circus . . . do whatever thing it is that defines John Cage.”

The guest, utterly compliant, open and trusting, seems more like a gentle child than a 74-year-old oracle. He smiles at an ad-hoc crew assembled to man turntables and assist him. He glances at a stack of records--58 in all--but doesn’t ask what they are. And then he softly announces:

“Each of you will have 10 records and 10 minutes to play them. Choose any amount of time for each, including silence if you like, but sample them all within 10 minutes.”

Next, he turns to the sheets of paper, which are computer printouts of I Ching tables--an 11th-Century system of binary mathematics with a text that divines natural events and human existence through its symbols and hexagrams.

Going through the sheets, Cage calls out numbers and the three-member crew finds the records that correspond to them.

Finally, the audio alert, the countdown and the happening: On cue, fragments of Thelonious Monk and Mahler intermingle wondrously with James Brown and Satie and aborigines and Vivaldi and nuevo tango. The world reduces to an aural splotch. Everyone who was and is comes together in simultaneous sonic citizenship.

What could be more John Cage? What better illustrates the quiet anarchist’s credo of chance operations?

The whole thing is very much to Cage’s liking.

“Not just the sound of it,” he explains later, having moved on to a downtown theater where his music is being rehearsed by a CalArts ensemble.

“But the vision as well. We look through glass walls into the adjacent studios, where other people see us and vice versa. We catch our own reflection in them and they catch theirs. There is an interrelationship. And that becomes the essence. Music is a model of society.”

Cage, ever the impish enigma when it comes to his music, looks the part. Slight and agile (not unlike his long-time collaborator Merce Cunningham), he walks with a light bounce, and his ruddy face radiates kindness that is wholly ingenuous and disarming. His uniform consists of soft, faded denim trousers and jacket and black Nikes. Part flower-child (he tends to 200 plants at his Manhattan home, a converted department store on Sixth Avenue) and part social-revolutionary, he lives by a Zen Existentialist code: “Want nothing and accept everything.”

Yet, over the course of last weekend’s visit in which the CalArts Contemporary Music Festival celebrated his coming 75th birthday as part of the New Music Los Angeles 1987 Festival, Cage hardly promotes a reclusive image.

In a few days, he has managed to oversee an exhibition of his lithographs, give one of his famous readings to benefit the work of 93-year-old musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky, take a van tour around his native city and hunt for wild, fleshy mushrooms--as any communing naturalist who reads and re-reads Thoreau might do.

He does all these things with elan, thoroughly enjoying the instant camaraderie of fans and assorted kindred souls. While some of his peers strive and sweat at their accomplishments, Cage seems to glide into them.

Even back when the world either laughed at his deconstructionist efforts in music or booed him off the stage, he kept his equanimity, his almost saintly demeanor. For the Bicentennial in 1976, the Los Angeles Philharmonic had commissioned (with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York and Philadelphia) a work from Cage. After all, as the spiritual descendant of Charles Ives and the musical e.e. cummings of America, he was a likely composer to represent this country’s creative individualism.

But the conservative audience thought otherwise. So did some of the players, who openly showed their contempt while doing his compositional bidding.

The piece, “Renga With Apartment House 1776,” reveled in Cagean serendipity; four ensembles within the orchestra picked and chose at random from 64 parts what they felt like playing--while four vocalists representing Protestants, Sephardim, American Indians and Negro slaves sang their own uncomposed songs.

What the audience perceived as chaos or cacophony it duplicated in jeers and whistles and shouted invectives throughout the half-hour performance. Many exited within a few minutes. But at the end there were also bravos. In New York hundreds fled the hall.

How could someone as benign and selfless as Cage have provoked this behavior?

“I liked the cheers better than the jeers,” he recalls, pushing a hand through his long, loose, steel-gray hair.

“But the experience didn’t cause me to swear off the Establishment or to stay outside its pale. Not at all. I have many works for full orchestra. But I don’t think the Philharmonic has played any since ‘Renga.’ It would be good for (Andre) Previn and (Ernest) Fleischmann to ask me for one of them.”

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Meanwhile, Cage is still more readily accepted in avant-garde havens than chandeliered palaces. Whether because of his non-doctrinaire stance or his adherence to musical anarchy, American orchestras have not overwhelmed him with invitations--especially in these days of compositional conservatism. At any rate, he goes on championing freedom as an ideal, casting off traditional restraints and rejecting dogma.

Many believe that his notions about music will have a more lasting place, in fact, than his music itself. He likes to think that is not true.

“The books I’ve written have importance,” he says. “But my pieces are more valuable to me than my thoughts. What distinguishes my music is that it gives up intentionality. I’m not saying anything with it. Other music rests with discourse; mine strives always to be non-discursive.”

What Cage subscribes to is the idea that sounds are worthy entities in themselves and do not need to be meddled with or arranged. One composition, “Inlets” (1977) consists of the amplified sound of water being sloshed around in a conch shell, together with a tape of pine cones burning and the faint but ominous noise of an airplane passing overhead.

His most revolutionary work, “4’ 33” “ stipulates in its title the length of time of “performance”--during which no notes are to be struck. The premiere, given by David Tudor in 1952, consisted of the pianist sitting at his instrument in silence.

“I wanted audiences to listen to everything else they might hear, the natural state of the universe,” he says. “It seemed a reasonable way to get them to do that.”

Thus Cage came to terms with what he perceived as “the viable alternatives to harmony, rhythm, melody.” Prior to that he was already embarked on the practice of indeterminacy or chance operations.

But if composing for him is a process of ego eclipse, is there such a thing as his own creative development? Can he think of improving on the original while moving toward mortality?

“Of course,” Cage says, a beatific smile lighting his face. “It may seem contradictory until you look at it this way: I am constantly trying to free sound from the meaning some ascribe to it and from its connection to me. Hmm?

“To the extent that I can do that with greater and greater success can I speak of development, hmm? After I wrote ‘Music for Piano’--84 isolated varieties of plucked sounds, muted sounds, etc.--my reaction was to cancel what was me in that piece by turning next to chords, the basis of ‘Winter Music.’ ”

These are not ideas that endeared Cage to Arnold Schoenberg, a UCLA faculty member in the 1930s after arriving here as a fugitive

from Hitler’s Europe. The young Angeleno studied with the father of atonal music, but was dismissed by him. Sometime later Schoenberg referred to Cage as “a genius . . . as an inventor,” not a composer.

“I regard those words as my diploma,” says the one-time formal student. “Since Schoenberg never graduated me--we just separated--I am grateful for his remark. Besides, I never really wanted to be a composer so much as to make a discovery.”

But Cage says he is not troubled by his desire for achievement, as most serious subscribers to Eastern philosophy might be. His eyes twinkle when he confesses: “I am basically an American Protestant, not a Zen purist. So I want to do things, to move closer to a cherished goal. It’s human nature to do that, hmm? But the goals must be beneficial.

“We must make a new music, one that doesn’t need a conductor because it does not need another’s control, and a new society that doesn’t need a poor president whose interest is in power and fighting with other governments.”

He admits to having no political clout. If he did, however, he says he would promote giving up ownership and pursue a path of “user ethics,” the kind we see in personal computer access or in an expanded version of the credit card.

“Our government, such as it is, doesn’t prevent chaos. The rich need protection from the poor because of the system’s inequities.” With a note of whimsy, he ponders: “Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone had a credit card and simply bought what he needed and didn’t have to worry about paying the bill?”

In the musical realm, however, Cage’s notions are not idle. On Nov. 15, the Frankfurt Opera will see the premiere of his “Europera, Part I and II,” a work that has taken him two years to complete. The most difficult problem, he says, came in persuading the technical director to try what appeared to be impossible.

“Rather than incorporate everything,” explains Cage, “I distinguish the singing from the instrumental playing from the lighting from the decor from the costumes. None of these is connected. Each will happen separately and simultaneously.

“The arias, which I’ve taken from the literature, will all be sung at once. And yes, that could mean, ‘Vissi d’arte’ along with the ‘Liebestod.’ ” The singers, company people, will also perform undanced choreography. None of the action will relate to the arias. We will have an opera based on chance operations.

“What I would like,” says Cage, leaning a hand against his temple as if to will it so, “is for each listener to do his own listening, hmm?, rather than mine. I want to free him from the fear of not understanding, so that he can have an experience.”