"Gabriele Emde-Hauffe was born in 1953 in Darmstadt, Germany. She received a humanistic education at a local grammar school in Darmstadt and started studying the harp after her A-levels, first in Darmstadt and finishing in Cologne. Conducted by Péter Eötvös, she worked out modern chamber music and modern improvisation by J. G. Fritsch and Vinko Globokar. Passing her exams in 1980 and 1981, she continued her studies of musical science at Cologne University, based on her thesis, "The Harp between Myth and Reality." From 1981 to 1983 she was a member of Die Junge Deutsche Philharmonie and Ensemble Modern, and collaborated on productions of contemporary music with Ensemble-Köln and Ensemble 13, as well as the NDR-Sinfonieorchester Hamburg. She has performed the solo harp at various international festivals, among them many premieres and international radio, TV, and record productions. At the invitation of the Goethe-Institut, she toured North America in 1982, presenting Walter Zimmermann's works, and also performed in South Korea; her career as a performer has included performances of contemporary music by Berio, Boulez, Cage, Globokar, N. A. Huber, Schönberg, Stockhausen, Webern, I. Yun, B. A. Zimmermann, and W. Zimmermann. Until 1992 she taught harp classes in Cologne and Düsseldorf. Since 1991 she has been teaching her private harp class in Darmstadt. This CD contains recordings from 1985-'87 of pieces by John Cage, Hans Otte, and Lou Harrison."

"John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 - August 12, 1992) was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher, and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.

Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33″, which is performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who present the work do nothing aside from being present for the duration specified by the title. The content of the composition is not "four minutes and 33 seconds of silence," as is often assumed, but rather the sounds of the environment heard by the audience during performance. The work's challenge to assumed definitions about musicianship and musical experience made it a popular and controversial topic both in musicology and the broader aesthetics of art and performance. Cage was also a pioneer of the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by objects placed between or on its strings or hammers), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces. The best known of these is Sonatas and Interludes (1946-48).

His teachers included Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1933-35), both known for their radical innovations in music, but Cage's major influences lay in various East and South Asian cultures. Through his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, Cage came to the idea of aleatoric or chance-controlled music, which he started composing in 1951. The I Ching, an ancient Chinese classic text on changing events, became Cage's standard composition tool for the rest of his life. In a 1957 lecture, Experimental Music, he described music as "a purposeless play" which is "an affirmation of life - not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living"."