China's "book Of Changes" By Chance Music Of John Cage

John Cage, as a banner of the avant garde music, exerted significant influence on the music of twentieth century. The writer takes Cage's chance music as researching target and discusses it through five chapters. In chapter one, with John Cage's different compositional stages as clue, the writer gives a brief presentation on him; in chapter two, the writer makes some discussions on how Cage gained access to the oriental culture and further, had an insight into it; in chapter three, on the basis of literatures both in Chinese and English, the writer makes some necessary clean-up in terms of what Book of Changes is like and how it was spread to the West; in chapter four, the writer analyzes the conditions, objective and subjective, on which Cage created chance music; and finally, in the chapter five, the writer takes two articles included in Cage's works Silence for specific examples:Composition: To Describe the Process of Composition Used in Music of Changes and Imaginary Landscape No.4 and Composition: To Describe the Process of Composition Used in Music for Piano to make detailed analysis and in-depth studies on Cage's thoughts used in creating chance music. In doing so, the writer offers some evidences as to how both thoughts and augury rules of Book of Changes influence John Cage's chance music composition. In appendices, the writer translated three concerning documents in English into Chinese. Working on the Catalog of Cage's Works, the writer found some mistakes in the domestic literatures, including The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music, Chinese Edition and corrected them.