Empty Duration and the Generosity of John Cage

Like some ancient rune, a yellowed page of ordinary unlined paper, flat and mute, sat inside a glass case in the exhibition Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2017. This odd artifact, which comes from the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, bore seven short lines in John Cage's handwriting. MoMA's label identified this object as a "time score" for Theater Piece No. 1, which Cage created at Black Mountain College in August 1952. I propose that the deepest meaning of this Cageian rune turns on that repeated phrase: "Play freely."