Collections John Cage Philadelphia festival to celebrate Cage's centennial October 22, 2012 | By Dav

Collections John Cage Philadelphia festival to celebrate Cage's centennial October 22, 2012 | By David Patrick Stearns, Inquirer Music Critic Image 1 of 3 View Gallery Performing in a John Cage concert at fidgetspace are (from left) Mauri Walton, Chris (MEGAN BRIDGE )
The eager group of young musicians seems poised to begin playing. Expectation is in the air. But no sound or motion is coming from anybody. Is it a joke? Mass catatonia? Four minutes later, there's still no sound, and then . . . .
You can guess the rest. It's the greatest hit by maverick musical folk hero John Cage, whose 1952 piece 4'33" calls for four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. It's typical Cage: maddeningly simple performance directions with open-ended results. Even silence, in his world, has infinite varieties. But such elusiveness hasn't deterred a number priceline airline tickets of Philadelphia cultural institutions from celebrating his centennial.
The 21-event festival, "Beyond Silence: The Music of John Cage," runs from Friday through Jan. 20 in and around the Philadelphia Museum of Art, produced by the new-music organization Bowerbird and in conjunction with the Art Museum's "Dancing Around the Bride" (opening Oct. 30), which uses the art of Marcel Duchamp as a jumping-off point to explore the New York avant-garde.
Visual artists such as Duchamp have something concrete to contemplate. Cage (1912-1992) often refused to impose himself on his own pieces, and similarly urged performers to transcend their own personalities in order to tap into the hum of the universe, in which randomness is embraced, not contained.
"With Cage, guidelines are more open," says pianist Margaret Leng Tan, who worked with Cage in his later years and is a key participant in the "Beyond Silence" festival. "He asks you to be very much a part of the creative process, which, as a classical pianist, you're not trained to be."
Even the jazz community doesn't always sit well with Cage. As liberating as the composer wanted to be, his brand of freedom was anything but complete. With anarchy comes greater personal responsibility.
"The mandate of the performer was not to be free but to produce or express freedom. It's a subtle difference, but it's key," says Philadelphia composer/performer Bhob Rainey, who was in a recent Cage concert at the loft venue fidgetspace.
That doesn't mean any Cage performance, if done in the right spirit, is successful. Tan had many trial-and-error performances under the composer's guidance. In the end, she says, "You have to produce music worth hearing."