The SONG-CAGE, Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music, review Another day at the Huddersfield Festival, another swarm of new composers and new pieces of music, performed by visiting groups from all over the globe. It's a fascinating and often bewildering cornucopia, which keeps everybody arguing cheerfully in Huddersfield's pubs and hotels until the small hours. In amongst the blizzard of unknown names there are reminders that even in the strange world of "new music" there are still ranks and heirarchies and Great Masters. We had one on Friday night from the Coro Casa de Musica, an excellent chamber choir from Oporto, joined for the occasion by a handful of solo singers from Denmark. They performed a centenary tribute to John Cage, the cheerful advocate of chance and of "letting sounds be themselves." That smiling acceptance of what the world offers goes hand-in-hand with Cage's desire to vanish into his work. Self-expression was definitely not on his agenda. But one of the pleasing things about this melange of solo vocal and choral pieces was that the man himself was so clearly revealed, in all his innocence and humour. We discovered his fondness for straightforwardly modal melody, in a number of solos from the Songbooks. Hymns and Variations, a calmly radiant deconstruction and random reassembling of hymn tunes by American composer William Billings, was a reminder that Cage was raised in a fiercely religious household. It was beautifully sung by the chorus ranged in a semicircle at the back of St. Paul's Hall. Meanwhile at the front an array of soloists came and went from behind a row of desks bearing curious objects - sound modulation gear, glasses of water, bowls of vegetables, volumes of poetry. They performed solo pieces that sometimes specified nothing more than a "structured action" (many carrots were chopped, with proper solemnity), and sometimes something more "musical," such as the wonderfully comic compendium of vocal genres called Aria. It was hard to give this the concentration it deserved, with the performance of Hymns and Variations still going on in the background. And in general, the pieces could have done with more light and space around them; Hillier's artful arrangement of them in a theatrical sequence was touch too artful. But it did have one brilliant stroke, which was performing Cage's late, austerely simple ear for EAR as a dialogue between onstage soloist and distantly offstage chorus. It was beautiful and touching in a surprisingly old-fashioned way.