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A Dinner Party for John Cage. Music theatre composition for 12 singers in formal dress. Commissioned by English National Opera as part of the 'Musicircus, a Centennial Celebration of John Cage' festival (2012). Premiere: 3rd March 2012, English National Opera, London. Subsequent performance at The Sage, Gateshead, 6th September 2012. URL evidences the ENO performance. Score Only. Published by United Music Publishers Ltd.

A Dinner Party for John Cage is an hour to two-hour music theatre event for twelve singers, set as a formal dinner party, and commissioned by English National Opera. It was commissioned to celebrate John Cage’s 100th anniversary as part of the 'Musicircus' festival (Stephen Montague, Artistic Director), which utilized over 180 performers spread throughout the 5 levels of London's Coliseum theatre. The work takes as a starting point John Cage’s philosophy and practice of using chance methods, which he developed during the 1950s. However, rather than use one of Cage’s preferred methods such as well known 'I Ching', I decided to explore other means of dictating unpredictable outcomes. I developed a programme that on the one hand creates random numbers/timings that are used as signals for events, but further refined it to provide various results of a more predictable nature when consonance and synchronicity might add appropriate drama to the event. What was novel about this approach was the commensurability with both Cage’s own philosophy, and my idea of creating within the action occasional but also predictable dramatic surprises of complete synchronicity. The inspiration and precedent for this novel approach was a Musicircus I did with Cage himself in Venice in 1978. In the first performance a dramatic general pause surprisingly appeared about half way though the duration. Cage liked the effect so much he manipulated future performance material to try and recreate this same dramatic effect. My Dinner Party was performed over 30 times worldwide in 2012, Cage’s centennial year, with performances at the Royal Festival Hall, The Sage (Gateshead), Krakow Academy (Poland), Alte Schmiede (Vienna), Syracuse Museum (USA), University of Houston, University of Texas, Auditorium Maximum (Medellin, Columbia), University of Mexico City, Trinity Laban (London), etc. with films made by Roberto Battista (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBR8OAA-5p8), and Rob Mundy (http://vimeo.com/robmunday)