Phil Selway on Art Detective

Phil Selway is the guest of his friend Janina Ramirez, the Oxford art historian, on her podcast Art Detective, and he has chosen Gerhard Richter's Cage paintings, which hang at the Tate. Richter painted them while listening to John Cage's music, and Selway hears Cage's trust in chance and coincidence all through them. They are bound up for him with a commission from a couple of years earlier, the music for an event that reinterpreted dances by the choreographer Merce Cunningham to mark the Rambert dance company's move into new headquarters on the South Bank, written with his friends Quinta and Adem. The wall hangings and the dancers' costumes drew on the paintings, and the musicians wanted unitards of their own. “We pushed for them,” he says, still disappointed.

They wrote the music without seeing a step of the dance or any of the images, and met both only at the dress rehearsal, which is the kind of chance Cage and Cunningham trusted. The brief ruled out strong rhythms and strong melodies, which would cut across the dancers' own counts. For one piece they took turns writing a chord, folding the paper over and passing it on, as in the game of consequences. Some of what came out was quite awful, he says, and some of it took them somewhere they would never have gone.

He has just come back from Minneapolis and Chicago, playing music by Cage and David Tudor in concerts beside a Cunningham retrospective, with musicians who were there at the start, such as Christian Wolff and George Lewis. What moves him in those players and in Richter is the same thing. “You've learnt it all and then you've chosen to completely ignore that,” he says. Melody and harmony come to him first, and rhythms “a little later on”, which surprises Ramirez in a drummer.