“I now think that after all these years I’m finally writing beautiful music”, John Cage confessed in 1990. In that same year he had met the shō player Mayumi Miyata, who asked for a piece for the ancient Japanese mouth organ. Cage was deeply impressed by the sound of this instrument and the possibilities offered by its 17 pipes, up to six of which can be blown into simultaneously to produce single pitches as well as complex chords. However, it was not only the sound that fascinated Cage. His interest in the shō – which has a place in traditional Japanese gagaku court music – completed a circle which had begun at the end of the 1940s, when Cage first became involved with Zen Buddhism and Asian philosophy.
