THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

I don’t have any favorite mushrooms – I just like the one I have.  I love mushrooms, that’s all.  When you love something you don’t ask what draws you to it.  You remember that you decided to love it, and the rest is just life experience.

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Ideas are to be found in the same way that you find wild mushrooms in the forest, by just looking.  Instead of having them come at you clearly, they come to you as things hidden, like Easter eggs.

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I have spent many pleasant hours in the woods conducting performances of my silence piece, transcriptions, that is, for an audience of myself, since they were much longer than the popular length which I have had published.  At one performance, I passed the first movement by attempting the identification of a mushroom which remained successfully unidentified.  The second movement was extremely dramatic, beginning with the sounds of a buck and a doe leaping up to within ten feet of my rocky podium.

John Cage in Cage/Mycological