Cage s  49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs gives its executants no clues about how they might perform it. Originally created as an invitation by Rolling Stone magazine in 1977, as part of a gala issue celebrating the magazine s recent move from San Francisco to New York, which featured literary and art contributions honoring its new home. Cage constructed his  waltzes as a series of 49 multi-colored triangles superimposed on the Hagstrom map of New York City, each point derived by the use of chance operations. The finished composition is a design of singular beauty. Cage was an inveterate New Yorker, and even after his death in 1992 his most unequivocal composition about the city, the 49 Waltzes, remained totally neglected. Wanting to celebrate Cage s memory, Don Gillespie (who worked with Cage at his publisher, C.F. Peters) decided to collect the sights and sounds from all the locations specified in 49 Waltzes. This ambitious project of filming Cage s 147 specific locations in New York s five boroughs took a year to complete (1994-1995). It is a film whose subject is the unintentional music made by people, birds, planes, automobiles, police and fire sirens, and countless other debris of sounds. Tidbits of hectic Manhattan contrast with glimpses of quiet outer borough streets, parks and cemeteries. Deciding that two hours was an optimal length, composer Andrew Culver, was asked to determine the durations of the 147 locations. Using Cage s computerized I Ching software, Culver arrived at a string of durations ranging from 16 seconds to 3:44. The results proved tantalizing and also somewhat frustrating, since some of the most interesting locations were very brief and some of the more prosaic were lengthy, forcing one to accept their ordinariness. The film is also an amazing video time capsule document of a New York that has long changed, disappeared and evolved. The video and the audio has been restored for the DVD release, and this is the first time that all of the waltzes are shown in their full duration with previously cut footage (due to time constraints) restored.