John Cage worked in the field of music, and so it was as a composer that he was usually identified. But it was his ideas in general that made him one of the 20th century's most brilliant, most constant guiding lights. Cage died Wednesday at the age of 79; doubtless his afterglow will illuminate the lives of thinking persons for generations to come.

Cage was prolific throughout his life, but especially so in the last decade, when ensembles worldwide commissioned pieces from him in honor of his various septuagenarian birthdays. Yet even when Cage's fame was at an all-time high, his works were more often discussed than actually heard. The quality of his recent music - as music - ought not be underestimated. One encounters in these compositions the occasional mix of uninhibited dissonance that once upon a time - in the 1930s and early '40s - gave Cage a reputation as a hell-raiser. Far more often, though, one encounters long moments of exquisite delicateness that hark back to Cage's ''middle period.'' The years immediately following World War II found Cage deeply involved in the study of Zen Buddhism; Cage was much influenced by the premium this introspective philosophy placed on serendipity, but he was influenced even more by Buddhism's appreciation of quietude.

As were his compositions from the '50s, Cage's newer works consist almost entirely of musical gestures whose every element - pitch, rhythm, sonority and so on - was determined somehow or other by chance operations. More significant, most of these newer works - like their post-war forebears - are filled with silences that make their relatively few sounds seem all the more precious. Cage's recent output, which ranges from miniatures for chamber ensemble to concertos and full-length operas, fully deserves the exposure it will surely receive now that the composer's posthumous career has been launched. It is sensible music, and most of it, even by a conservative's standard, is ear-pleasing music. Still, the real value of these pieces - of all John Cage's pieces - lies less in their musical content than in their non-musical sub-texts.

Cage has often been accused of being a musical anarchist, of advocating a ''style'' of composition in which law and order has no place. Taken out of context, many of his published statements indeed suggest a nihilistic stance. And his catalog includes more than a few works whose chaotic surface might lead a listener to conclude that Cage was just a noisemaker. In fact, Cage was a very strict rule-follower.

When he said, in the early '50s, that he would ''withdraw from decision-making in music,'' he meant only that he would abandon music's traditional decision-making processes. Instead of making subjective choices about, say, the sequence of notes and their durations, he created systems in which such choices were rendered meaningless and could therefore be left to chance. The creation of the systems, however, involved a great many choices, most of them as personal and deliberate as artistic choices can be. Most important of these, in terms of the way the music actually sounds, were the selection of the sonic ingredients and the establishment of the methods by which specific musical events would be determined. On these Cage worked meticulously, often tooling for months the machinery that would yield music of just a few minutes' duration. Once he finished, he stood adamantly by the results.

The vast majority of music generated by Cage's various chance operations was ''indeterminate'' only up to the point at which the notes were set down on paper; after that, the material was deemed as unalterable as a text by Mozart. Behind all this is the concept of the willingness to accept, even to take pleasure in, the happenstance of things not in a person's control. The world as a whole is filled with stimuli both sonic and otherwise. To grasp it all is more than a human being can do, yet it is certainly possible to get a temporary grip on at least parts of it. When one makes a selection - as Cage did in his pre-compositional exercises - the focus becomes clearer, the images sharper. Attuned to select phenomena, all one needs to do to sample their ''music'' is to attend to their random interplay.

In his 1961 book ''Silence,'' Cage wrote that ''our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos or to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and one's desires out of the way and lets it act of its own accord.''

Even skeptics, I think, would have been impressed by the loving reception Cage got earlier this month on and around the campus of Northwestern University. The week-long festival was titled ''John Cage Now,'' and its half-dozen concerts indeed concentrated on Cage's freshest compositions. And just as up-to-date were the lectures and the panel discussions, all of which - even when the topic of the moment was something Cage had done in the past - focused sharply on Cage's relevance to the world today.

Outsiders, of course, can argue that Cage is not relevant at all, that throughout his long career he has merely posed as an artist, that his enduring success is yet another proof of aesthetes' gullibility. Insiders know better, and a festival such as Northwestern's is almost by definition a gathering of insiders. Not surprisingly, opinions expressed in public held to a straight and narrow path. There was a slight stirring in the audience when musicologist Charles Hamm, in his keynote address, quoted colleague Leonard B. Meyer to the effect that ''the radical empiricism of John Cage represents the most significant change in Western culture in 300 years.'' Of course, it is easy to overstate the role Cage has played. But the gist of the remark was never in dispute. For those in attendance, the value of Cage's work is taken for granted; if it is not the most significant catalyst of modern thought, at the very least it ranks among the Top Ten.

The work, in all its recent forms, centers on the concept of indeterminacy.

Before 1951, Cage went about composing in the traditional manner. His sound-palette was adventurous, sometimes even unique; he liked to write for unorthodox percussion ensembles, and most of his pieces from the 1940s are scored for the ''prepared piano,'' an otherwise normal piano whose voice was drastically altered by means of screws, dowels and other objects inserted between the strings. Nevertheless, Cage's early music invariably consisted of pitches and rhythms about which he had consciously thought; as composers had done for centuries, Cage set pen to paper only after he decided that the music should go a certain, specific way.

In 1951, after several years of exposure to Zen philosophy, Cage became convinced that valid music could be created from sounds that were somehow left to chance. His first indeterminate work was ''Imaginary Landscape No. 4,'' a piece for 12 radios and made up of whatever resulted when performers twisted the volume and tuning knobs according to a precise set of instructions. After that came ''Music of Changes,'' a thoroughly written-out essay for piano whose entire content - pitches, rhythms, volume levels, tone-colors - derives from elaborate coin-tossing procedures described in the ancient Chinese oracle book called the I Ching. The I Ching figured strongly, too, in the next year's ''Imaginary Landscape No. 5'' and ''Williams Mix,'' both of which feature scraps of commercial recordings transferred to magnetic tape. For the 1952 ''Music for Piano,'' in which a number of parameters are left to the discretion of the performer, Cage wrote note heads only where he found imperfections in his manuscript paper. For ''4'33'','' also from 1952, he wrote nothing at all; this most famous of Cage's indeterminate works consists not of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence but of the myriad ambient sounds heard while a non-playing pianist sits at the instrument for exactly that length of time.

For by-the-book literalists, these and all Cage's subsequent efforts amount to nonsense. They cite the nearest Webster's, which says that music is ''the art of organizing tones in combinations and sequences that constitute a cohesive, unified, continuous composition.'' And then they wonder: Where is the art in picking notes by some random method? What is the difference, really, between a so-called composition of Cage and an earful of everyday noise? With so many crucial organizational elements of his music left to chance, how can Cage be considered a composer?

These are good questions, more easily asked than answered.

Some of Cage's compositions are indeed made up of sounds that in non-musical contexts would be regarded as pure noise. By putting them in a musical context - that is, by declaring them to be components of music - Cage has greatly expanded on Webster's definition. For Cage, the quality of ''music-ness'' is determined not by the sonic phenomenon itself but by the perception of that phenomenon; music, for Cage, is the result not of composing but of listening.

Mainstreamers will argue that that reasoning is circular, that just because Cage says something is music does not in fact make it music. And to their jabs there is no logic-based parry. The acceptance of Cage's premise, like the acceptance of many other ideas currently in the air, is by and large a matter of faith. One does not have to be a believer, though, to hear music in the majority of Cage's compositions.

The outlandish ''noise'' pieces date mostly from the 1950s and '60s, and they are vastly outnumbered by works scored for conventional instruments. In these, just as in ''Music of Changes,'' the details are indeterminate, selected by the I Ching and a variety of other chance operations. And as different as the means have been, the musical ends have been remarkably consistent.

There is a paradox here. For an artist who sings the praises of randomness, a personal style seems an impossibility. Yet Cage's music has a distinctive aura, recognizable almost the instant one enters its space.

Although Cage is often credited with allowing any sounds to be music, it is simply not true that he admits just any old sounds into his compositions. During a rehearsal by the Northwestern orchestra of a brand new cello concerto titled ''108,'' a violinist asked if at a certain point in the score the notes might be played pizzicato. Cage replied that yes, the piece certainly allowed for that. Then, upon hearing the results, he changed his mind. It didn't seem right, he explained in a public forum the next day; the sound of the plucked strings, he said, were ''out of character.''

''Why would I make a decision here instead of leaving it to chance?'' Cage asked. ''The answer is simple.'' There was a long pause, and doubtless many in the audience wondered whether Cage considered the answer to be so simple that it went without saying. But then, with perfect theatrical timing, Cage followed through. ''Sometimes,'' he whispered into the microphone, ''you just have to use common sense.''

Common sense, in Cage's case, translates into uncommon sensitivity to the interplay of sounds. And today - more than ever before - it is the essence of Cagean performance practice. The issues of taste and subjectivity vis-a-vis Cage's indeterminate music came up again and again during the festival.

''Yes, you can read through the notes as fast or as slow as you like,'' the leader of the Arditti Quartet advised a student ensemble that was working hard on the 1983 ''Thirty Pieces.'' ''But the approach, in general, has to be very gentle and subtle. You don't want to do anything that is, well, disruptive.''

''Yes, I'm free to play whatever opera paraphrases I choose,'' said pianist Yvar Mikhashoff of his contribution to the 1991 theatrical potpourri called ''Europeras 5.'' ''But I'm expected to exercise good judgment here. I can play any excerpts, so long as they fit in.''

''Yes, the gestural content of each performance is determined entirely by chance, and thus I don't believe that the results of one performance can actually be superior to those of another,'' conductor William Brooks said of the 1970 ''Song Books.'' ''But it is quite possible that certain results of chance operations can be flawed. And it is our job - as performers - to keep the flaws to a minimum.''

On the surface, remarks such as these teem with contradiction. But for those who share Cage's attitude, the contradictions exist only on the surface. At the heart of Cage's work, insiders know, is an extraordinary amount of discipline. For every freedom granted a performer, hundreds of self-imposed constraints have been experienced by the composer. The specific sounds of a piece may be in one way or another random, but not the painstaking methodology that brings those sounds together.

Cage's musical personality has always been strong, and even in the '50s there were performers who sympathized with it. Only in recent years, however, has sympathy for the Cage aesthetic become widespread. It used to be that calm, transcendent beauty sprang only accidentally from a Cage composition; today an effect of that sort is almost to be expected.

All three facets of the standard Cage lore figured into the piano recital that Margaret Leng Tan, sponsored by the New Music Circle, presented Sunday at the St. Louis Art Museum auditorium. But there was more, a reminder that Cage - for all his notoriety - has never been merely an iconoclast. His approach may be unorthodox, but the 78-year-old Cage has always held to the traditional idea that the composer's role is to create music worth experiencing. Some of his works indeed offer experiences that seem primarily provocative or amusing. But many of his works, no matter what their medium or method, strive only to please the ear. Although he has garnered more attention for his grand splashes, Cage has devoted most of his efforts to finely wrought constructions in which every note is meant to be a thing of beauty.

Sunday's program paid homage to Cage the rebel; what it concentrated on was Cage the craftsman and Cage the poet. Tan is a native of Singapore, and along with the Japanese pianist Yuji Takahashi, she is one of today's foremost interpreters of Cage's keyboard literature. That Tan and Takahashi are Asian probably has less to do with their affinity for Cage's music than the simple fact that they are sensitive artists. There is, to be sure, a Zen-like aura that surrounds Cage's more delicate pieces. But the aura originates with Cage, a Westerner who did not adopt the Zen stance until he was in his 30s. Besides, Tan is a Juilliard-trained pianist who turned to the avant-garde repertoire only after she tired of the mainstream European fare.

She opened the two halves of her program with ''The Perilous Night'' from 1944 and ''In the Name of the Holocaust'' from 1942, two of the several dozen works that Cage designed for a piano ''prepared'' by inserting various small objects between the strings. Tan did not neglect the music's rhythmic elements, but she seemed to emphasize the sonorities and their lingering echoes. Sloppily prepared, a piano sporting screws and rubber washers just makes noise; meticulously prepared, as the Art Museum's was, it becomes a gorgeously resonant percussion orchestra.

There were gorgeous resonances, too, in the 1948 ''In a Landscape'' (a limpid impressionistic essay scored for a very normal-sounding piano); in the 1946 ''Ophelia'' (a vigorous, uncharacteristically tonal piece in the manner of Prokofiev, also scored for normal-sounding piano); in Tan's own arrangement (featuring zither-like chords plucked on the piano's strings) of Cage's 1987 ''One''; and in an excerpt from the 1975 ''Etudes Australes'' (sparse, chance-generated music for a minimally prepared piano played from the keyboard and the inside). The first half of the concert ended with the 1952 ''Water Music,'' a quasi-theatrical bonbon animated by gurgly bird calls and randomly tuned-in radio broadcasts. But the climax came just before that, with a rare performance of ''4'33''.'' ''4'33'' '' is the infamous ''silent'' work in which the pianist makes no sound at all for four minutes and 33 seconds.

Appropriately, composer John Cage grinned like a pixie as he accepted wave after wave of applause. And the two men who thought up the project probably gritted their teeth in angry frustration.

Cage's ''Europeras 1 & 2'' was commissioned by West Germany's Frankfurt Opera. Its world premiere was supposed to have been in mid-November of last year, but three days before the scheduled opening a fire destroyed the opera house for which the production had been designed. A round of performances did take place a month later in the nearby Schauspielhaus, but on a scale much smaller than originally planned. The Frankfurt Opera's performance July 14 in Theater A of the State University of New York at Purchase - part of the ninth annual PepsiCo Summerfare festival - was actually the first presentation of ''Europeras 1 & 2'' in its complete form, with all the scenic and lighting effects realized and with a large pipe organ among the accompanying instruments.

Judging from the way it pulled the audience together at what seemed the optimal moment, one might suppose that the climactic arrival of the blimp was something that Cage had planned. In fact, like almost everything that happens in ''Europeras 1 & 2,'' the blimp was the result of pure chance.

Cage, 75, is the master of composition by so-called indeterminate means. It was in about 1950 that he decided he needed to escape from the responsibilities of musical decision-making; his methods have changed from time to time, but not his ideas about how the meaning of art - and of life itself - depends less on what the creator puts into it than on what the perceiver is able to draw out of it. In some cases, Cage has left just about everything up to chance. The content of his famous 1951 ''Imaginary Landscape No. 1,'' for example, consists of whatever sounds are at the moment being broadcast by the dozen radios whose tuning and volume-control knobs are twisted by the ''performers,'' and the score of his 1958 ''Music Walk'' is something the pianist makes himself by arranging - on the spur of the moment - transparent plastic sheets covered with dots and grids that can be read as musical notes.

Usually, however, Cage has exercised considerable control over such aspects of his music as texture, duration, pacing and overall mood. And chance in most of Cage's music has governed not the performance but only the process of composition; in other words, once a piece is finished it's finished, and it is expected that the performers will treat the score as respectfully as they would any score produced by more traditional means.

In the early days, when his knowledge of Zen was still fresh and new, Cage got his pitches, note lengths, volume levels and so on by tossing coins or flipping sticks according to procedures outlined in the ancient Chinese oracular book called the I Ching. Cage has tried several other approaches; his 1952 ''Music for Piano I'' is based on the imperfections in a sheet of manuscript paper, for example, and his 1975 ''Etudes australes'' is a translation into music of stars on a sky map of the Southern Hemisphere. Still, the I Ching has proved the most reliable source of randomness; Cage still uses it, only now it's in the form of a computer program that offers the same results much more quickly.

Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn, the two co-directors of the Frankfurt Opera, knew that this is how Cage works, and so they more or less knew what to expect when Cage agreed to concoct ''Europeras 1 & 2'' for them.

As did Metzger and Riehn, Cage felt that this should be a composite of everything that made up the tradition of European opera. For his music he turned to the existing literature. The 19 singers were asked to choose their favorite arias, but the placements in time of these arias, and the ways in which they overlapped, were decided by the I Ching computer. The members of the conductorless orchestra were allowed no leeway; their parts were made up of bits and pieces of almost a hundred 18th- and 19th-century operas that the computerized I Ching chose and mixed at random. And serving as an electronic adjunct to the orchestra's percussion section was a noisy tape collage of operatic debris that now and then - at moments specified by the computer - roared stereophonically from one side of the opera house to the other. For the costumes, Cage had the computer sort through thousands of illustrations in a multivolume 19th-century encyclopedia of international dress. For the black-and-white flats that would form the opera's always-changing set, he had the computer select from - and crop - old photographs and engravings of animals, opera sets, opera performers and 19th-century opera composers.

Along with the blimp, the props included an igloo, a garbage can, a step ladder, a wheelbarrow, a tree and a giant mynah bird, all of which were picked by the computer from among the nouns in an unabridged edition of Webster's dictionary; the same dictionary's verbs provided the stage action. Cage's I Ching computer program determined the lighting cues. Using vintage summaries of the standard operas as its source material, the computer also wrote 12 different versions of a pseudo synopsis. Given that information, anyone with an imagination should be able to get an idea of what Cage's ''Europeras 1 & 2'' sounded like and looked like. And doubtless it's exactly what Metzger and Riehn had in mind when they offered Cage the commission.

But they had something else in mind, as well, a long-lasting ''effect'' that - when viewed in the cold light of reality - seems utterly preposterous.

Remember, we're talking about Frankfurt, the city that in the decades surrounding World War II was the site of a heady think-tank called the Institut fur Sozialforschung. Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and others who made up the so-called Frankfurt School were a mixed lot of sociologists and philosophers much indebted to the writings of Marx, Freud and Hegel. As they saw it, Western culture was going down the tubes in part because too much energy was being spent in catering to the bourgeois tastes of the masses. They stressed the necessity of what Hegel had called the ''dialectic'' function of art, a confrontational function that made people think - and thus improved them morally, intellectually and every other way - because it challenged the status quo way of looking at the world. In a nutshell, the members of the Frankfurt School held that for new art to be valid it had to have a chip on its shoulder. And it had to be, like strong medicine, hard to swallow.

The Frankfurt School's influence on European and American intellectual life in the mid-20th century is not to be underestimated. In our current age of easily ''accessible'' art, however, its resonance is faint. Indeed, the opera house in Frankfurt is probably one of the few places on earth where the radical pronouncements of Adorno and the others are still taken literally.

Here's an excerpt from the official English translation of the program booklet essay that Metzger, admittedly a disciple of Adorno, wrote for the Frankfurt premiere:

''Rather than negating the operatic abstractly by selecting a different form of musical theater, (Cage) chose instead the 'determinate negation' of opera in the Hegelian sense; which is to say, that which is to be negated is incorporated in its entirety in the shape the negation takes, constituting the specific substance of negation and sublated concretely within it. Such a process is irreversible, and we can wait with bated breath to see whether the blossoming opera composers of 'our time' will immediately comprehend that their hour has come; they are from now on also sublated.''

In the German version, the equivalent of that fancy final word is ''aufgehoben.'' It means more or less the same thing: canceled, eliminated, wiped out, erased, shot, kaput. According to Metzger, ''Europeras 1 & 2'' marks the end of an era. There can be no opera in the future, because everything that is opera has been packed into this elaborately staged three-hour operatic hodge-podge.

I don't suspect that the Frankfurt singers saw it that way as - dutifully heedless of whatever else was going on around them - they belted out their bread-and-butter arias. I don't suspect Cage sees it that way; this is a work ''in the spirit of 'Hellzapoppin,' '' he's said, a two-act ''comic'' opera intended for no other purpose than to ''ventilate people's heads.'' And I'm sure that most members of the July 14 audience at SUNY-Purchase didn't see it that way.

As human stories go, the relationship between Cunningham and Cage is one of the most extraordinary this century has known. Equally extraordinary are the artistic results, some of which will be on display in Kiel Opera House next weekend when the Cunningham dance company makes its sixth St. Louis appearance.

The serendipitous first encounter took place in the fall of 1938 at the Cornish School of the Arts in Seattle. Cage, whose work was discussed on this page a week ago, was 25 at the time, and he'd been employed by the school to serve as piano accompanist for Bonnie Bird's dance classes. One of the dance students was Cunningham, a 17-year-old from the small town of Centralia, Wash., who had entered Cornish the previous year with the intention of learning to become an actor. As much as their lives have been documented, little is written about what transpired between Cunningham and Cage during that season in Seattle. Obviously, though, they hit it off, and it was perhaps inevitable that their paths would cross again.

In the summer of 1939, Cunningham enrolled in a program offered by the Bennington School of Dance at Mills College in Oakland, Calif. Modern dance pioneer Martha Graham was on the Mills faculty that year; she liked what she saw in Cunningham and invited him to come to New York. A few months later, Cunningham joined the Graham company and for a few years also studied classical dance technique with George Balanchine at the School of American Ballet. Cunningham was a Graham soloist right from the start. The role of the Revivalist in Graham's 1944 ''Appalachian Spring'' (which the Graham company presented here in November) was created especially for him, and so were major parts in Graham's ''El Penitente,'' ''Every Soul Is a Circus'' and ''Letter to the World.'' Cunningham might have had a long, fruitful career as a Graham dancer. But he chose to remain with the company only until 1945.

Cage had as much to do with Cunningham's departure from the Graham troupe as he did with his joining it. Cunningham's teacher in Seattle had been a Graham dancer, but it was primarily because of the prodding of Cage - who in the spring of 1939 had moved to San Francisco - that Cunningham signed up for the program at Mills. Cage stayed in the Bay Area until 1941; he spent a year in Chicago, then settled in New York. One of his first projects on the East Coast was the creation of music for a 1942 program put together by Cunningham and several other Graham dancers independent of the Graham company.

''I admired his dancing,'' Cage told New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff in an interview five years ago. ''(But) I didn't admire Martha's work, because it was turning literary. I told Merce if he would leave Martha, I would write the music for him. . . . I encouraged him to do his own work, apart from Martha Graham.''

Cunningham responded favorably to the encouragement. In April 1944, he and Cage presented another concert. It was a boldly experimental venture in which Cunningham's solo dancing was propelled by some of Cage's music for ''prepared piano,'' a piano in effect turned into a percussion orchestra by means of screws, rubber washers and other objects inserted between its strings. The audience was small, but it included the New York Herald Tribune's Edwin Denby, who wrote: ''I have never seen a first recital that combined such impeccable taste, intellectually and decoratively, such originality of dance material and so sure a manner of presentation.''

Cunningham responded favorably to that encouragement, too. From 1945 to 1950, he free-lanced. As a choreographer, he had some successes, the most important of which was the 1947 ''The Seasons,'' a Cage-scored work commissioned by the company that would later evolve into Balanchine's New York City Ballet. But the opportunities to present his kind of solo dancing were limited, and his thoughts were leaning more and more in the direction of ensemble pieces. In 1949, Cunningham gathered around himself some students who, he felt, were sympathetic to his views. With Cage serving as its music director, manager and general factotum, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company made its debut in 1951; the inaugural program included ''Sixteen Dances,'' a work whose choreography - like the accompanying music by Cage - was composed largely by so-called chance operations.

Practically everything Cunningham and Cage have created - together or separately - since the landmark ''Sixteen Dances'' has involved chance operations. The method was described in an article on this page last week on Cage's music. It's worth describing again, because its workings are often misunderstood.

Randomness is rarely a factor in the performance of a Cunningham or Cage piece. There is no room for improvisation; the dancers or musicians know exactly what they're doing, and what they're doing is following precisely the fixed, fully notatable instructions laid out for them by the work's author. Randomness, however, is crucial to the composition of the Cunningham or Cage opus. A certain vocabulary of movements or sounds is set up in advance, and this vocabulary results entirely from choices - decisions - on the part of choreographer or composer. What is left up to chance is the way the elements of this vocabulary are combined.

Cage prefers complicated numerical procedures derived from the Chinese oracle book called the ''I Ching,'' and Cunningham prefers simply to toss coins. The results are comparable. Just as chance operations determine the temporal placement of specific sounds in Cage's music, so do chance operations determine the timing and physical location of gestures in Cunningham's choreography. The order in which the events occur don't matter. But the events themselves - the small-scale ingredients of dance or music - count for everything, and that's why Cunningham's and Cage's work has such readily identifiable style.

The Cunningham style - characterized by erect postures, balletic extensions, broad leaps, torso pivots and fast backward movements - can be previewed on television Monday. At 9 p.m., KETC-Channel 9 will air ''The Collaborators,'' a locally produced half-hour program that mixes clips of Cunningham's 1977 ''Travelogue'' with an interview by dance archivist David Vaughan of Cunningham, Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, the avant-garde visual artist who for many years served as the Cunningham company's scenic designer. After the interview will be ''Coast Zone,'' a 1983 video piece for which Cunningham used chance operations to determine not only the choreography but also the camera shots.

And the Cunningham style will be very much in evidence next weekend at Kiel. The Friday and Saturday evening programs will be made up of the 1982 ''Duets,'' with music by Cage; the 1981 ''Channels/Inserts,'' with music by David Tudor; and the 1984 ''Pictures,'' with music by David Behrman.

''Duets'' was created not for Cunningham's own company but for the American Ballet Theatre, and it consists of six relatively straightforward duos randomly composed and randomly overlapped. ''Channels/Inserts'' is an adaptation for stage of a work originally made for video; it features the ''real time'' equivalents of crosscuts, freezes, split images and other effects unique to the film and video media, the timings of which were determined - like those in ''Coast Zone'' - by tosses of coins. Most of the reviewers who have seen the new ''Pictures'' have praised the dramatic lighting effects created by Mark Lancaster; the audience should know that the lighting, like almost everything else in the piece, results from chance operations.

Why chance?

She was being carefully articulate, and her tone of voice was of the serene, gentle sort one tends to associate with the California-chic version of Cage's Westernized Zen Buddhism.

Indeed, the opening work on the program was a modified version of Cage's 'Four Minutes and Thirty-three Seconds,' a 1952 opus that requires a pianist to sit idle at the keyboard for just that long while the audience listens to attend to all the accidental 'music' -- coughs, rustles, rumbles from passing cars, etc. -- that surrounds them.

In this case, after a few minutes Cage's piece was overlaid with another non-composition, something called 'Touch Music,' in which four performers 'played' soundlessly on hand-made keyboards constructed of cotton, sandpaper, plastic, wood and other distinctly textured materials. Then a subtle mixture of pre-recorded environmental sounds -- the chirping of birds and crickets, mostly -- began to fill the room. Then, and still within the limits of Cage's delimited quasi-stillness,several members of the ensemble simultaneously read excerpts from the 1961 collection of anecdotes and aphorisms that Cage titled 'Silence.' They spoke softly, and even though their words and syllables clashed the total effect was nevertheless one of exquisite euphony.

The audience was spread about the spacious Main Gallery of the California Institute of the Arts, a multi- disciplinary college founded in 1961 and funded in large part by money from Walt Disney's private estate. Some of the listeners sat in chairs; quite a few -- as is the custom at CalArts -- lay comfortably on the floor.

The Cage readings melted into the program's next offering, a subtly controlled improvisational piece for electronic and acoustical instruments. The music was going downeasily on this sunny Saturday afternoon. For the ensemble it was a much-anticipated debut; the performers were going about their business with maximum concentration, yet they seemed keenly aware that around them many heads were nodding in approval.

That a tribute to John Cage should take place during CalArts' ninth annual Contemporary Music Festival is not out of the ordinary. Students on the Valencia campus are taught to be skillful in music, theater, dance, film-making and the graphic arts, and they'realso taught to be inventive. Traditional disciplines are as much a part of the curriculum here as at any arts school, but CalArts is best known for the instruction it offers in experimental concepts and techniques. The annual festival tends to emphasize the newest developments in music, there's always room for an homage of sorts to one of the avant garde's father figures.

THE UNUSUAL THING about last weekend's Cage celebration was the age of the performers: The youngest was eight, and the senior memberswere only 13 years old.

'The younger the better,' said Frank Becker, director of the recently formed CalArts New Music Youth Group.

'All of these kids are taking regular music lessons, and we want them to study traditional music theory and history aswell. But we also want to get them used to contemporary music. Too often the avant garde is isolated, set apart from the rest of music. We think it should all be integrated, and we want to get them started as soon as possible.'

Becker is a composer of electronic music; his piece titled 'Stonehenge,' for flute, percussion and synthesizer, shares space with works by Philip Glass and Steve Reich on an Angel recording put out a few years ago by flutist Ransom Wilson, and the audio logos for television news programs in many American and Australian cities bear his signature. He began organizing the CalArts youth group last summer, at the request of the school's recently appointed dean of music Frans van Rossum. Becker lived in Japan from 1968 to 1982, and for the last 11 years of his residence there he led a similar youth group at the Yokohama International School.

'It was a successful program,' Becker said. 'The kids liked it, and so did their parents. The reaction to the CalArts program has been good, too. We had to do a real selling job when we launched it -- I had to make a lot of presentations, and at first the parents simply didn't understand what this sort of stuff was all about. But we were able to get about 40 kids signed up. They come from all over the Los Angeles area, and most of them are enrolled in the 'magnet schools' for gifted children.

'They're a precocious bunch -- very sharp, and very creative. Some of the pieces we did on the Festival program involved precisely scored music. For example, my 'Pentagrams III,' for orchestra and tape, was notated pretty much in the traditional way, but I wrote it, of course, with their abilities and limitations in mind. Other things were more freer, more open. It's important, I think, to get these kids involved not only in the performance of new music but also in its compositional processes.

'For 'Touch Music' they made the instruments and the scores themselves. You couldn't hear what they were doing with those little pieces of cotton and felt and rice grai ns glued to paper. But they were playing 'silent' notes in specific orders, for specific durations and with specific intensities. It was all in the spirit of John Cage, but it had the added advantage of teaching the kids what it's like to actually compose their own music.'

The CalArts New Music Youth Group is a pilot program, Becker said, and, as far he knows, the only thing of its sort in the country. 'We hope to expand it next year,' he said, 'and we plan to institute a preparatory program for older kids so that we can send students into CalArts already knowing something about contemporary music. And there's talk about setting up a class in music education here, a course that teaches CalArts students how to teach new music to children. It's pretty exciting.'

Many of the audience members agreed, and the performance by the Youth Group turned out to be one of the festival's most talked-about events. But the five-day affair contained other exciting things, as well.

The festival opened the evening of Thursday, March 7, with a performance by San Francisco Minimalist composer Paul Dresher at the Japan America Theatre in downtown Los Angeles. For the next three days (when I attended) everything took place on the Valencia campus. On Friday there was a program devoted entirely to works by CalArts professor Mel Powell, followed by a late-night bash propelled by music from the art-rock group The Mope. Saturday's activities included the Youth Group's debut performance, a mixed-bag concert of works by Carl Stone, Elzbieta Sikora and Bunita Marcus, a solo recital by cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, a program of music by Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, a jazz interlude, a concert featuring two lengthy orchestral pieces ('De Staat' and 'De Tijd') by the Dutch Minimalist composer Louis Andriessen, and, finally, a very loud session with the high-tech ensemble called Repercussion Unit.

Sunday's menu began with a balm for ears assaulted by the previous evening's finale: several hours' worth of trickling multiple-piano music extracted from the 1983 'Lemniscaat' of Simeon ten Holt, another Dutch proponent of the Minimalist style. Then came a concert by the CalArts Chamber Singers and the Los Angeles vocal ensemble I Cantori, a program of works by San Diego composer Robert Erickson, a vigorous and eventually heated roundtable discussion involving performers and critics, and, lastly, a concert featuring a new work by CalArts resident conductor Stephen L. Mosko and a fully-staged treatment of a mini-opera by William Albright based on Yeats' 'A Full Moon in March.' The Festival ended on Monday night, again at the Japan America Theatre, with a program that included works by Steve Reich, Matthias Kriesberg, Tom Johnson and Joan Tower.

If space for this column were more abundant it would be given over to a description of Louis Andriessen's mysterious, vapory and splendidly beautiful 'De Tijd' -- the 1981 composition has been recorded, and it can be found in the catalogue of the Dutch label called Composer's Voice.