Google "Alvin Lucier" and you'll be hard-pressed to find more than a tidbit on the former Brandeis music professor's concert with the late, legendary experimental composer John Cage. His 1965 performance at The Rose Art Museum, which featured the premieres of Cage's "Rozart Mix" and Lucier's "Music for Solo Performer," as well as Christian Wolff's "For 1, 2 or 3 People," was an exercise in imagination and arbitration that has been unfairly relegated to the annals of the University's lore, and recorded as a mere footnote in each of the storied composers' histories.

To celebrate the concert's 40th anniversary, Lucier-joined again by Wolff, as well as experimental composer James Fei and Prof. Eric Chasalow's (MUS) "Electroacoustic Music Composition" class-performed all three pieces Wednesday night at The Rose. Appropriately titled "Rozart Remix," it was a truly aleatoric performance-"chance music," as Cage called it-in which each bizarre piece differed greatly from its original rendition.

Much of the concert relied not only on each musician's improvisations, but also on variables entirely out of their control, from an observer's cough during a momentary silence to the gallery's acoustics and even the audience's attention span.

"For 1, 2, or 3 People," the first and most "musical" of the works, began unmusically enough, when Wolff inflated a small green balloon with his mouth. Positioned alongside Lucier and Fei on the landing between the Rose's lobby and bottom floor, Wolff then allowed the balloon to noisily deflate as Lucier slammed down on a snare drum. Fei soon joined the fray, his clarinet alternating between violent interjections and soothing, ephemeral complements to his fellow musicians' rhythm-dominated parts.

The piece followed an "open score"-instead of playing from arrangements, each musician followed loose guidelines that relied on his own interpretation-and so there was no discernable melody.

Xylophones, toy pianos, tin whistles and other instruments coalesced in a start-and-stop clatter. Sudden, prolonged silences left the audience on the cusp of nervous applause, interrupted when the trio resumed playing. Occasionally, as if by accident, the performers stumbled miraculously upon an idea or climax, only to befuddle the crowd seconds later by suddenly beginning again from the ground up.

Lucier's "Music for Solo Performer," the first ever composition to produce sound through brain waves, proved just as frenetic. Here, a silent Lucier sat motionlessly with electrodes attached to his head, giving no indication of the performance's start. Suddenly, various percussive instruments-a tympani here, a triangle there, even a large, gold gong at the museum's entrance-began to rumble throughout the gallery, each attached to amplifiers responsive to Lucier's brain waves. It produced a rumbling, eerie effect, as though Lucier were some avant-garde poltergeist.

The evening concluded with Cage's "Rozart Mix," a composition requiring 88 tape loops manipulated on reel-to-reel recorders by as many as 12 musicians. Unlike the first two pieces, the audience circulated animatedly around the gallery during this last performance, interacting with the tape-manipulators-who were mostly students-and browsing through the Rose's three current exhibitions.

Outlandishly, the tape loops contained excerpts of a 1965 conversation between Cage and Lucier discussing preparations for the very piece being played. The result was an erratic, warbled buzzing of voices played at varying speeds and volumes. And just as Cage stipulated 40 years ago, the piece did not end until the last audience member had left.

The chaotic "Rozart Mix" was a fitting end to a concert emblematic of Cage's 50-year career, which so often expanded the boundaries of music by challenging its very composition. For Cage, experimentation often relied on introducing elements of randomness to a piece's performance-by distilling choice from creativity.

In that sense, Wednesday's concert couldn't have possibly sounded like its original incarnation, despite featuring the same pieces, instruments and many of the same participants. While at times its sheer oddness was bewildering, "Rozart Remix" was ultimately an exhilarating tribute to Cage's legacy.