Multi-Agential Situations: A View Through John Cage’s Works for Plant Materials

Where does agency lie in musical performance? How is it expressed? Recent music scholarship has highlighted an increasingly prominent tendency to conceive of agency as not confined to any one individual or type of individual, instead being distributed across diverse individuals that can be found occupying performance situations.. This article uses two ‘percussion’ works from the 1970s by the composer John Cage, Child of Tree (1975) and its multi-performer elaboration Branches (1976), as a foil for engaging with these practical and theoretical musical concerns, and for suggesting some heretofore underappreciated distinctions within the ongoing work on multi-agential performance.