Larry Austin, born in 1930 in Duncan, Oklahoma, USA, has composed more than seventy works incorporating electroacoustic and computer music media, receiving numerous commissions, grants, and awards, his works widely performed and recorded. He studied with Canadian composer Violet Archer, French composer Darius Milhaud, and American composer Andrew Imbrie, also enjoying extended associations in the 'sixties with Cage, Tudor, and Stockhausen. Austin's complete realization of Charles Ives's transcendental Universe Symphony (1911-51) was premiered and recorded in 1994 by the Cincinnati Philharmonia, that performance followed at the 1995 Warsaw Autumn Festival by the National Philharmonic of Warsaw, and in May, 1998, a festival performance in Germany by the Rundfunksinfonie

Orchester Saarbrucken. In 1996, Austin was awarded the prestigious Magistere de Bourges prize/title for his work BluesAx (1995-96), for saxophonist and tape/electronics, and for his work and influential leadership in electroacoustic/computer music genres through the past thirty-five years. Austin was the first US composer to receive the Magistere.

The score for art is self-alteration is Cage is...was composed between December, 1982, and January, 1983,

and "dedicated to my friend and mentor, John Cage, in his seventieth year." The title of the work was inspired by John's definition of art: "art is self-alteration." In receipt of my birthday present, John sent me a note saying, "Thank you. I feel changed already." Our three-decade friendship began in the early 1960's. Our longest and closest bonding came during John's four-month tenure, fall, 1969, as artist-in-residence at the University of California, Davis, where I was then teaching.

Inspired by John's name-mesostics, the score for art is self-alteration is Cage is...is what I call a uni-word omniostic; that is, all possible arrangements of the letters of one word--here, C A G E--appear adjacently, allowing one to spell the word, continually in sequence, following appropriate horizontal, vertical, and diagonal paths through the array of the word's letters. The performer–in this case, Robert Black, the contrabassist, heard on tape playing through the score 16 times simultaneously–traces a path through the omniostic score, playing each note associated with a letter without expression--but not mechanically--quietly changing to the next note when "...self-alteration is Cage is art is...". Each of the sixty-four block letters--sixteen iterations of C A G E–contains a combination of four pitches and/or silences derived by my own 1/f chance-operation algorithm.

In the version for contrabass soloist and tape, four contrabass quartets are heard on tape. Notated pitches

are limited to the open strings and the first three natural harmonics on each string, the resultant gamut of pitches totaling sixteen. The four strings of each of the four instruments are tuned, scordatura, to the pitches c, a, g, and e, each instrument tuned to a different combination of the letters, beginning with the lowest string (IV) upward to the highest string (I), as follows : c, a, e, g; e, a, c, g; c, g, e, a; and e, g, c, a. The open strings and their first three adjacent partials yield the just-intoned durus (hard) hexachord, including g, a, b, c, d, e, sounding over nearly four octaves from Contra-C (C1) to middle-a (A4).

The 16-track tape mix, recorded by Robert Black for the piece, was realized on a NeXTstation computer with Lansky's rt program in my studio, gaLarry, in Denton, Texas. The piece is recorded on compact disc double-cd on Koch International Classics, "The John Cage Tribute."