in ‘For the birds’ John Cage says in conversation:

JC: It’s possible that at the present time America is preparing a music worthy of the Fuller dome of the future! In the immense geodesic domes that Fuller as architect foresees covering large cities, the acoustic situations will be very different from those to which we are accustomed, and which have been forced on us by the necessarily small scale of our urban concert halls. But in a Fuller dome, you have a hard time making yourself heard. So, the old idea of art as communication will be thrown out the window; but there won’t even be windows any more.

DC: (…) but even in these gigantic domes, wouldn’t you still feel imprisoned? Some of Charles Ives’ works could be played not only on a mountain, but also echoed from one mountain to another…

(…)

DC: All of this is consistent with your insistence on the necessity of freeing time, as towards the end of your lecture on Indeterminacy. When you call for the superimposition or simultaneous performance of different works, it intensifies the feeling of space.

JC: Yes, then there is the confluence of several musics, as with Ives’ notion of different orchestras meeting at a cross-roads. Wandering around an orchestra which was playing in the square of a New England village, Ives was dumbfounded by the effect of spatial change on what he heard. I performed a similar experiment in Seville when I was seventeen. I found myself at an intersection and I felt a sudden joy upon realizing that I could hear different musics at the same time. In the lecture you were quoting, I also spoke of the need for separating the performers from each other as much as possible, in order to avoid ending up with a single work, as a result of not enough space between musicians. Crowded together, they can only play one thing at a time, which ultimately means that even in the most complex polyphony they play the same thing.”

Cage, John, 1976. For the birds. Marion Boyars, London.

Isn’t this insanely beautiful, this notion of sound/composition in relation to space?

a shame they don’t sell it around where i live!