In 1957 Ichiyanagi Toshi attended the concert in New York celebrating the 25 years of John Cage's musical career and he immediately fell in love with Cage's thought. He moved to New York, where he studied with, among others, Aaron Copland and lived downtown with La Monte Young and Noguchi Isamu. In 1958 he attended the courses given by Cage at the New School for Social Research of New York University and became an ardent disciple of Cage. Ichiyanagi became part of the New York avant-garde, acting in happenings; both he and his wife Ono Yoko joined the avant-garde group Fluxus. He began to compose pieces using aleatoric techniques and requiring theatrical gestures (ex. Piano ongaku dail- dai7, Music for piano 1-7, 1959-61).

Other members of the same Japanese generation of composers like Takemitsu Toru or intellectuals like Akiyama Kuniharu took part in Europe at Fluxus events - although not like Ichiyanagi. It is probable that the "open form" of happenings had been made possible for Japanese by exposure to twentieth-century Western art forms, shaped by personal subjectivity and radically opposed to the extreme formality of traditional Japanese art. Indeed, avant-garde art in Japan has tended to favor informal rather than conceptual elements.

(I.) It is the way and the instant in which the gesture in art is performed that is essential. In traditional Japanese arts and music, subjectivity finds expression, but the artist, as an intellectual, has gone beyond the ephemeral sense of ware (meaning each transient human individual) to emphasise the transcendental and general concept of ware as human awareness.

(II.) The nature of Japanese artistic subjectivity seems to be centered in the space between (ma, a concept that plays an essential role in life and arts), between the individual and the people and the objects the person is interacting with.

(I.) and (II.) may be thought as the very fundaments of happenings and Fluxus aesthetics.

Musicologist and scholar in musical aesthetics, Luciana Galliano combines a prevailing competence in contemporary music with a strong interest in Asian music, advanced on a M.A. in Musicology achieved at the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music. Director of the Music Section for CESMEO (International Institute for Advanced Asian Studies), Luciana Galliano teaches History of East Asian Music at Venice University Ca' Foscari. She writes on the greatest Italian musicological magazines, collaborates with the Koln Deutschlandradio and with Japanese musical magazines. She published in 2002 "Yougaku. Japanese Music in the Twentieth Century" (Scarecrow Press).