Among stones and places. Translation, cartography, figuration and abstraction

Abstract

John Cage devised in 1983 an open musical composition called Ryoanji, as the Zen garden in the ancient temple of Kyoto. The experience of those scores had begun before with a large number of drawings in whose generation had used as a guideline fifteen different stones, as many as in the garden, around which was drawing random circular paths with seventeen pencils graphites of different hardnesses. There is in the process of execution of the drawings, and of the scores insofar involved in part of the same rules and enjoying the added transversality of its musical value besides graphic, a beautiful sense of remembrance of the construction process of that garden. Fifteen stones on paper are a rock garden on sand. A rock garden on sand is the transcript of nature elsewhere. This is the same route round the architectural project passes at every step.