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This review of the Cologne premiere of the Concert for Piano and Orchestra contains portions of John Cage’s own writings on his compositional philosophy and an extended description of the Concert. The reviewer’s overall impression is negative, claiming that the experimentation is arbitrary, capricious, and unserious. The reviewer also casts doubt on Cage’s credentials as a former student of composer Arnold Schoenberg and on his knowledge of Asian philosophy. They add, with a nationalist chauvinism that was typical of the period, that the festival will not suffer reputational damage from Cage’s performance. Though the performers of the orchestral parts were German, the reviewer notes that they left the stage during the raucous applause in a way that they may have imagined approximated an “American hillbilly village band” (amerikanische Hillbilly-Dorfkapelle).