I Ching

I Ching is an early Chinese texts. While we do not know the exact date it was written, we do know it was created before Christ. It contains a lot of mathematical information using trigrams and hexagrams. Information from the I Ching is still used today. For example, four trigrams from the I Ching are used in the South Korean flag to represent heaven, earth, fire and water.

I Ching was used by the composer John Cage for composing twentieth century music. John Cage is best known for being a composer of aleatoric music; a style of music created when some elements are left to chance. When he was introduced to the I Ching in 1951 he became fascinated with its ability to create order out of chance. He used the coin method to compose “Music of Changes,” a piece for solo piano. He composed by creating a sound chart made of 64 squares. He would reference the I Ching as to which sound to use from the sound chart and then for determining other details such as the dynamics, duration and silence of the sounds. Silence was frequently employed in Cage’s compositions, as he was very interested in the “interchangeability of sound and silence.”

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