‘Mureau’: the texts are letter-syllable-word-phrase-sentence mixes obtained by subjecting all remarks by Henry David Thoreau about music, silence and the sounds he heard that are indexed in the Dover Publication of The Journal, edited by Bradford Torrey and Frances H. Allen (New York, 1962) to a series of I Ching chance operations. Personal pronouns were varied according to such operations. The title is the first syllable of the word music together with the second syllable of the name Thoreau » - that’s what Cage said in 1970 about this work. Released in 1972.
»I have a very good and close friend William Anastasi, whose work I enjoy, and we play chess a great deal together, but we haven’t collaborated on any actual work though we might. And his friend Bradshaw, I like her work. I remain devoted to Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and I loved the work of Mark Tobey and Maurice Graves, though I rarely see Maurice. Did you know there’s going to be a large retrospective of his work? I think it opens, in fact, tonight in Washington DC at the Phillips Gallery and it will come to the Whitney Museum here. I think it will be a blessing to see his work at the present time in the century. I mean a blessing in relation to, say, the exhibition of Schnabel and other such things, which suggest the negation of art. I don’t like it, I don’t accept it. I suppose Wittgenstein would say I should take a clicker out of my pocket and click it, in order to transform it into the beautiful, but I think that it’s full of intention on the part of Schnabel, and I think the intentions are wrong intentions. I think it’s intentional work and I do not like it, and I don’t even think the intentions are good, and I don’t even think the promotion of his work by the galleries is good either. I have no further confidence in Leo Castelli or Mary Boone. I work, as you know, using chance operations, and all of my work since the fifties can be said to be non-intentional. I have tried to get—as Thoreau tried a hundred years ago—to get myself out of the way of the sounds, and that’s exactly what Tobey did with his white writing, and that is not apolitical it’s anarchic. It turns out, politically speaking, to be stronger than any statements such as Schnabel’s. I would say, for instance, that the work of Thoreau, which is anarchic and which changed India which changed Martin Luther King, which helped the Danes in their resistance to Hitler—I would say that these ideas are very strong socially even though they are non-intentional. »
—John Cage