John Cage’s Rock Music: Ryoanji and the Art of Graphic Notation

This lecture-performance introduces audiences to the visual art of graphic musical notation, environmental listening, and participatory music-making through a collaborative performance of John Cage’s Ryoanji (1983) for oboe and percussion obbligato. The event begins with a brief presentation on graphic notation, showing how twentieth-century composers transformed the musical score into a visual field that invites interpretation and heightened awareness of sound.

Building on this context, the talk turns to Ryoanji, Cage’s work inspired by the rock garden at the Ryōan-ji temple in Kyoto. In the piece, the oboe line is created by tracing the contours of fifteen stones (mirroring the garden’s fifteen rocks) while a percussion obbligato of unmetered quarter notes and rests evokes the surrounding field of raked pebbles. The resulting soundscape reflects Cage’s broader interest in acoustic ecology and the relationship between music and environment.

Drawing on Cage’s correspondence and performance practice, the lecture culminates in a participatory realization of the…