Precisely four decades separate the first piece in this selection, Ophelia by Cage, which dates from 1946, to the Eight Whiskus, by Cage, of 1985. In the USA a succession of quiet revolutions evolved: from a phase of heroic experimentation to the ‘success’ of the minimalist school at the end of the 1970s, but on the way findng some pieces that could rightly be termed ‘seminal’. One of the keystones for understanding American New Music, in the late post-war period, is the close relationship between sound and vision. The first graphic scores were born and constant associations commenced with Robert Rauschenberg and the protagonists of Abstract Expressionism like De Kooning, Philip Guston and Mark Rothko, the latter favoured by Feldman. In downtown Manhattan, some of the most radical and subversive minds of the artistic world's established order saw lifelong fellowships and friendships formed, like those between Cage and Rauschenberg, Feldman and Guston and Cage and Feldman, albeit with some troubled moments.