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Jay S. Harrison’s review describes humor and spectacle as the accessible aspects of John Cage’s work, and he insists that their true significance lies in their formal characteristics (“it is all about sonority and silence and rhythm and color”). From here, Harrison follows the other reviewers in praising Cage’s earlier works of the 1930s and ’40s, at the expense of Cage’s more recent, chance-determined atonality. He describes the recent work as “trying the patience with the length of his pieces or the aggressiveness without which they mark time or stand still.”