______, __ ______ circus on _______ (1979)
(Roaratorio, an Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake)

In 1979, Cage invented the concept of the ‘musicircus’. He ‘composed’ a work called ______, __  ______ Circus on _______  in which he explains how a ‘musicircus’ is created. Every ‘musicircus’ is based on a book. The title ______, __  ______ Circus on _______  is to be modified according to the choice of the creators of the ‘musicircus’; the gaps are to be filled as follows: the creators need to find a title for their work (1st gap), the 2nd gap is filled with an article (‘a’ or ‘an’), the 3rd with an adjective which describes the musicircus and the 4th with the title of the book the ‘musicircus’ is based on. Detailed instructions on how to perform a ‘musicircus’ are given in the score of ______, __  ______ Circus on _______.

Cage did his own realisation of ______, __  ______ Circus on _______ which he called Roaratorio, an Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake. It consists of four elements:

1. Cage’s reading of his text Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake
2. traditional Irish music
3. Cage’s reading of his text Listing through Finnegans Wake which lists all of the sounds that Cage noticed as he read Finnegans Wake
4. songs and sounds which Cage recorded in Ireland in June and July 1979, specifically from places mentioned in Finnegans Wake

Cage composed the work following the invitation of the producer Klaus Schöning at the German radio station WDR. Roaratorio is a radio play and its world première was a broadcast by WDR on 22 October 1979. However, during Cage’s life time the first three elements were often performed live, with Cage and Irish musicians, as, for example, at the Proms in July 1987.

Now that Cage is dead, the option of a live performance of Roaratorio does not exist anymore, as WDR, the owner of the actual tapes and their copyright, understandably do not want the texts to be read by anybody but Cage himself. The only way Roaratorio can be performed now is as a loudspeaker performance using the original version, as first broadcast by WDR in 1979. 

There is no score of Roaratorio. You can either perform Roaratorio as a loudspeaker performance or create your own ‘musicircus’ according to ______, __  ______ Circus on _______.

This score is a means for translating a book into a performance without actors, a performance which is both literary and musical or one or the other. The first blank space in the title is the title the work will take, i.e. Roaratorio. The second and third consist of an article and an adjective, i.e. an Irish. The last is the title of the original book from which the work as a whole was drawn, i.e. Finnegans Wake. In 1979, Cage made the first realization entitled Roaratorio: an Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake. In 1983 Merce Cunningham added choreography for the American premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, October 26, 1983. In 2009, in the wake of Cunningham’s death, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company set out to revive the work, which was subsequently seen, in 2010, in Los Angeles and Montpellier.