Cage takes in the world of sounds and noises and declares them, without distinction, to be music. No longer should the system of harmony in its various forms and extensions, culminating in Schoenberg and then the serial composers, be the form that reigns over and organizes the material of uniquely defined, pitched tones. The paradigmatic piece here would be Imaginary Landscape , a composition for twelve radios, in which what is playing on the radio at various frequencies at the time of the performance is allowed to become part of a piece of music heard by an audience. Many of Cage's later pieces are set free for superimposition with other works, thus introducing indeterminacy in the performance of them. The work of art, especially in Imaginary Landscape , becomes a net for catching contingent aural events.
Music becomes coincidence.
In such a composition, all that is put together is the radios, the frequencies and the volumes in a temporal frame together with some instructions for using them. There is no melody, rhythm or harmony, but there is something to listen to. Music is thus redrafted as listening to what happens in a timespace frame. This redrafting goes far beyond the redefinition of an artform or the proposal of a new aesthetics. In line with Cage's dictum redrafting art as a form of life, the redefinition of music implies a redefinition of life, i.e. ultimately a redrafting of who we are in everyday life.