In a sense, he belongs to one of the mainstreams of music in the United States, rather than what more conventional minds regard as the lunatic fringe. While he is not an out-and-out dadaist like Cage, his work opens its doors to the dadaist gesture. He belongs to a defin- able tradition, one that can be traced back to Charles Ives. In fact the work which had the greatest formative influence upon him early in his career was Ives' The Unanswered Question.