Peter Dickinson, CageTalk: Dialogues with and about John Cage (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006; enlarged edn 2014), contains the complete interviews recorded for the BBC Radio 3 documentary. The paperback with a new Foreword and an interview with Christian Wolff came out in 2014. The details about Musicircus from Cage are given there, 211–16, and also appeared in the programme book of the Aldeburgh Festival 2014, 139–40, and as ‘John Cage and his Musicircus’, The Guardian, 20 June 2014.

Cage's Musicircus is simply an invitation to bring together any number of groups of any kind, preferably in a large auditorium, letting them perform simultaneously anything they wish, resulting in an event lasting a few hours. There were performances in 2012, Cage's centenary year – the Coliseum in London on 4 March; the Bath Festival on 6 June; the Aldeburgh Festival on 23 June. Reports of some of these events show that there have been misunderstandings about what Cage intended. There is no score, no parts, nothing is specified except the concept. ‘You won't hear anything: you’ll hear everything’, Cage said. He was a benign anarchist who said he preferred anarchy to government (Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1988–9). He belongs to the American non-conformist tradition of Thoreau, in his cabin by Walden Pond; Harry Partch inventing his own instruments; or La Monte Young with extended drones in his own tuning system. After the 2012 Aldeburgh Festival performance a questionnaire was sent round and apparently the Musicircus put on in the Hoffman Building in every available space got top billing. So, on 22 June 2014, it was put on again as An Aldeburgh Musicircus, this time involving the entire space of the town itself, with anyone invited to ‘join the largest gathering of musicians ever seen in Aldeburgh’. There were massive crowds all along the promenade in good weather and every available venue was used including the CBSO in a tent directed by Thomas Adès. Vexations (c. 1890), the short piano piece by Erik Satie, which can be played 840 times and was put on by Cage in New York in 1963, was running all day at Caroline Wiseman's Aldeburgh Beach Lookout with a relay team of pianists. She also provided 840 eggs each boiled for 4'33“.