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Louis Biancolli interprets John Cage’s three-hour marathon as a sign of the times. Writing just seven months following the launch of Sputnik, he says that Cage’s music, in all its desires to channel natural forces rather than human intentions, was akin to a cosmic form of alien communication “based in a revised Morse Code.” Instead of discussing the principles of indeterminacy found in Cage’s program notes, Biancolli focuses on the visual spectacle of an unconventional stage filled with midcentury high technology, and, with reference to Cage’s earlier works of the 1930s and ’40s, he emphasizes the materiality of the percussion (“pure metal, wood and drum skin”). He empathetically describes Cage’s “foolish” performers as simply untrained for experimental music and devotes the final third of his review to questions of ontology (“Is it music?”). Ironically, it is the seriousness of Cage’s intentions that, for Biancolli, make his non-intentional music worth attending to. It is an avant-garde echo of Immanuel Kant’s Enlightenment formula for the work of art: “purposiveness without purpose.”