Cage's Music of Changes was a further indication that the arts in general were beginning to consciously deal with the given material and, to varying degrees, liberating them from the inherited, functional concepts of control.

All those animals that were in the cages, I would spend a lot of time in those cages with the animals in-between shots, just hanging out, because I prefer animals to humans. If I get an opportunity to be with them, I'll usually take it.

I grew up mostly in Champaign, Illinois. My dad was at the University of East Illinois, so I was always around the music. One of my dad's buddies was the avant-garde composer John Cage, so I picked up on that weird classical and eclectic music.

The generation of composers that are just preceded me, people like [Karlheinz] Stockhausen, [Pierre] Boulez, and, well, [John] Cage for that matter,[Morton] Feldman ... That was a kind of experimental music that was very isolated. It had no real public.

I look at the bird in the cage and see the air, not only the air that is around the bird when it flies, but I see and feel the formative tendency of air in its form. When I do all this, then what lives in the forms becomes enlivened and spiritualized for me.

Jesus is bigger than any one religion. He didn't come to start a new religion, and he continually disrupted whatever conventions or systems or establishments that existed in his day. He will always transcend whatever cages and labels are created to contain and name him, especially the one called "Christianity.

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