Cage note in Friedrich's Bio

[Jim Morrison <jim_morrison@sprynet.com>]

Here's a great note from page 320 of the paperback edition of Friedrich's
bio.

It concerns an invitation Gould received to celebrate his 50th birthday.

"Another invitation that Gould scorned came from Jack Dehrens, dean of the
faculty of music at the University of Western Ontario, who had the marvelous
idea of asking Gould to come on the day after his birthday and perform John
Cage's 4'33'', that celebrated oddity in which a pianist sits motionless
before a piano throughout three silent movements of 33 seconds, 2 minutes 40
seconds, and 1 minute 20 seconds.  The world's most famous nonperformer was
not amused."

Oh how I hope that story is true.

and, of course, if any of you read the article on 4'33'' then you'll know
that Cage does not instruct the pianist to sit motionless, that there's an
actually score (perhaps more than one) that needs to be turned during the
performance,and  that performers take a stopwatch with them to the piano to
time the movements, just to name a few of the movements that the performers
make.