In 1989, I bought a CD in Paris of the early piano music of André Jolivet. Like many non-French musicians, I had read the name of Jolivet but heard little of his music. Jolivet's reputation as Varèse's leading pupil and the extreme avant-gardist of the pre-World War II group La Jeune France seemed completely at odds with his conventional post-War music occasionally broadcast on Radio 3, such as the Concertos for Trumpet, Piano or Ondes Martenot–music which suggested not fully assimilated influences of Honegger or Hindemith, with little obviously adventurous about it in its rhythmically conservative phrasing and standard formal shapes.

Since November 2004 Simon Emmerson has been Professor of Music, Technology and Innovation at De Montfort University, Leicester, following 28 years as Director of the Electroacoustic Music studios at City University, London. As a composer he works mostly with live electronics; he has also completed purely electroacoustic commissions from the IMEB (Bourges) and the GRM (Paris). In addition to extensive writings on the subject, he was founder Secretary of EMAS (The Electroacoustic Music Association of Great Britain) in 1979, and served on the Board of Sonic Arts Network from its inception until 2004. He is a Trustee of its successor organisation ‘Sound and Music’. This interview took place in July 2008.

John Cage’s stated opinion regarding the original version of CheapImitation – for solo piano – was that it constituted a breach with what heconsidered the proper role of the composer to be. Despite the fact thatthe actual pitch content of Cheap Imitation was derived through consultationswith the I Ching, and that the rhythmic and metric structureswere appropriated from Satie, Cage reserved for himself a great deal ofcomposerly control dictated only by his personal taste: the particularkind of control which, in 1970, ran counter to what he had been doingand writing about for years. In this sense, Cheap Imitation represents awatershed point in Cage’s career, away from the radical indeterminacyof the 1960s and back toward more traditional ideas of notation andcomposition, containing a balance between elements that are systematized,appropriated, and randomly generated. The work as a wholedoes not simply re-embrace determinate notation, though Cage’s composedchoices are strikingly reminiscent of similar processes from hismuch earlier works. As William Brooks notes, ‘Cheap Imitation looksand sounds far more like pieces from the early 1940s than like any of itsimmediate predecessors.’

This article is, in many ways, a direct response to the more or less simultaneous publication of Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise and the release of Hilary Hahn's recording of the Schoenberg Violin Concerto.

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