When we separate music from life what we get is art (a compendium of masterpieces). With contemporary music, when it is actually contemporary, we have no time to make that separation (which protect us from living), and so contemporary music is not so much art as it is life and any one making it no sooner finished one of it than he begins making another just as people keep on washing dishes, brushing teeth, getting sleepy, and so on. —from “Composition as Process”, Silence (1961) by John Cage.