“At some point, John Cage must have decided he was not going to be one of the world’s great composers so he invented a fallback career for himself. Perhaps it was after Arnold Schoenberg, his teacher, said he was ‘not a composer, but an inventor – of genius.’ Mr. Cage became, instead, one of the leading philosophers and wits in 20thcentury music, a man whose influence went on expanding even while his composing pretensions seemed to shrink. … These are not the titles of musical works but of books in which Mr. Cage has verbalized, with his private blend of high seriousness and sly humor, the ideas that have unchained the imaginations of so many musicians and nonmusicians in our time. There is no question but that he was a welcome and liberating influence in a time dominated by Serialism and other forms of musical strait-jacketing. I must confess that…