A Celebratory 216 Hours of John Cage Across Ace Hotels!

John Cage's 105th birthday was celebrated this year with "Untouchable Numbers," a 24-hour listening event taking place in the lobbies and other public spaces of Ace Hotels in Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, New York, Palm Springs, Portland, and Seattle. The playlist was a randomized sampling of works drawn from CDs from the John Cage Edition on the Mode Records label, created by none other than Mode's founder, Brian Brandt: 75 works performed by five dozen or so individual musicians and ensembles, including John Cage himself!

Ben Sisto, mastermind of the project, prefaced the announcement of the event from his position at the New York Ace Hotel as follows:

In 1952 a composer called John Cage told us there was music in silence, and the world hasn't been the same since. Today, the gradual wearing away of stone by water, the echoes of gravitational waves, and the caloric metamorphosis of food into energy may all be understood as musical works, a privilege for which we are indebted to Cage.

So, beginning at 12 am on Sept. 5, 2017, lasting until the stroke of midnight, the sounds and silences of our favorite "sonic philosopher" were heard non-stop at Ace Hotels, comprising voices and strings and orchestras and pianos and organs and rain sticks and radios and bass guitars and snare drums and flutes and gramophones and bottles and zoomoozophones and percussion and recordings and oboes and bass trombones and handclaps and...

The press coverage was generous and fun:

BlackBook
Limelight
LA Downtowner
Artsjournal
Pelican Bomb
Off Beat Magazine
The Violin Channel
Instant Encore
Slipped Disc*

*This last contained Sisto's favorite quote: "No, it's not the Hilton or the Marriott."

The image at the top, by the way, was created by plotting all of the Ace Hotel locations onto a world map.

Laura Kuhn