At various times throughout the performance, three, four, five, or seven performers follow the lines or combination of lines found in the graphic score. The sounds that are to be produced are not intended but are the left over of daily activities and occurrences such as sitting, reading, writing, sleeping, cuddling, cooking, eating, digesting, etc. These activities and occurrences are to be demonstrated by the performers according to the graphic notation as the concert goes along. The performers are spread throughout the concert hall and are elevated from ground level.
Subtle occurrences, such as sounds articulated during eating or writing, or "events" we do not control, i.e., that are of coincidental nature such as the breathing during sleep or the stomach fluids moving during digestion, require a direct and simple amplification. They further require one or more amplifiers or regulators that project the body sounds that are amplified by contact microphones and projected over a multitude of loudspeakers into the concert hall all according to the texture of the graphic
notation. The sounds of the amplifiers can additionally be tuned electronically to emphasize their character.
Before the actual performance, performers divide definite lines or combinations of lines of the graphic score among each other. While the various actions last, the temporal texture that follows the graphic notation develops according to the decisions
made by the performers. While silence should be incorporated – employing silence beyond the nature of typical metrical rests–the dynamics become, if nothing else, the result of the actions. The use of amplification and electronic manipulation might stretch the limits of the listening tolerance, but the dynamics should primarily be controlled so that all actions remain generally audible during a performance.
Every member of the audience will receive the graphic score found in the program or on the admission ticket as a stimulus for his manipulation of listening. Thus the listener, inspired by the graph, can change what he hears through Bearbeitung ("playing") using his own ears or those of his neighbor through slow and fast drumming of the ear, by covering and uncovering the auricle, or constantly changing application of the hand as an enlarged shell on the ear. It is also possible for this graphic notation piece to be conducted through radio broadcast.

…intentional…
During the The World Music Days 1987 that took place in Frankfurt's Theater am Turm, John Cage, while preparing a performance of his first Europeras, visited the world première of my multi-medial composition Die Spieldose (the toy box). In a phone
conversation a few days later, Cage commented on my composition: "I was impressed by your composition and the richness of your music, but it was very intentional, and I am really sorry, I must admit, I don't like intentional music." We both laughed and at the same moment it was evident (we had talked about this on several occasions) that being purposely unintentional is also being intentional.
When Cage suddenly died, I not only had to think of this particular conversation, but I was also reminded of how the refreshing directness and alienated naturalness of his compositions and concepts of the '50s and '60s had struck me. I also remember a concert dedicated to Cage during the Internationalen Darmstädter Ferienkurse 1990, given in the Speyer Cathedral to which I contributed one of my works. It was the one-minute long and very noisy version of Variations III, which, compared to his original almost gently-flowing late work, Cage might have considered somewhat too harsh. Nonetheless, he thanked me
for the performance with a friendly smile. Furthermore, I remember that Cage – as he mentioned in an interview with Daniel Charles – was stimulated by the idea of film director Oscar Fischinger in the mid 30´s to listen to objects, to produce pitches and
sounds by touching, and then to discern which sounds they produce. Thus Cage took up Fischinger's suggestion that in order to unleash the Klang of an object and to free its soul, one has to give it a good brushing.
This gave me the impulse to write the graphic piece JC/NY für 3, 4, 5 oder 7 Spieler mit Manipulatoren und Publikum (for 3, 4, 5, or 7 performers with amplifiers that manipulate sound and audience) and to also dedicate it in memory of John [in 1984 I had
already dedicated Wirbelsäulenflöte to John Cage and Dieter Schnebel]. JC/NY continues the style of my earlier compositions such as Cage-Mix and Gehörmassage für tätiges Publikum (ear massage for an active audience) of 1973-74. JC/NY can also be closely linked to works of Cage's middle style period which, on the one hand, most blatently reveals the composer's anarchistic utopia, yet, on the other hand, it also shows the restrictive aspects of his compositions. The "musical formulas" Variations I and Variations II stigmatizes the performer in the last analysis – if they follow the rules closely – to simply carrying out the score commands although in this case accidentally. Positive nevertheless, aspects that are coincidental and thus foreign to us
or go against established aesthetic notions, ought be accepted and require that we grapple with them. This should not be underestimated particularly in a time when, in the field of music, pleasantness, smoothness, boundless, and bulkiness appear to abound, and particularly in a time when a surging hatred is spreading against everything that is different as we can read it daily on park benches in Germany.
The score of JC/NY accentuates tonally what unconsciously results from daily occurrences and activities. In a rudimentary way the piece resembles in its graphic form, a Mesostichon based on a text of Karl Marx with a well-marked box emphasizing the letters. The score also alludes to a rethinking and radical subversion of ideas based on a complete transformation of existent conditions if harmony among human beings for which Cage so much longed is to be approximated at all.

Gerhard Stäbler (Translation by Mark-Daniel Schmid)