It worries me that John Cage’s music is not being quickly forgotten. I had assumed that, like many a composer fêted in his lifetime, he would slip into prompt obscurity on his death.

Yet here, a dozen years later, is the BBC Symphony Orchestra devoting its annual Barbican composer weekend to him, as though he remained a powerful force. Three days of concerts, talks, films and “happenings”, with Radio 3 broadcasts of all the concerts (except the 18-hour one), a Channel 4 transmission of the opening event and a stir of publicity running to a feature in The Sun and a question on Any Questions? — this was a commotion to give pause to those who believe he is without interest as a composer.

John Cage Uncaged was the weekend’s title, but it was hard to know what he was being released from, unless a cage imposed by his contemporaries, for the programmes mainly set him beside them. The first, under Lawrence Foster, was a most peculiar affair, beginning with William Schuman’s New England Triptych, whose all-American bluster seemed like the nightmare from which Cage was trying to awake. George Antheil’s spiky little Jazz Symphony was small help in finding one’s bearings, while favourite works by Aaron Copland and Charles Ives were evidently there as crowd-pleasers. They certainly exposed the limitations of Cage’s orchestral writing. To put his ballet The Seasons (1947) with Copland’s El Salon Mexico is to sprinkle ash on gold dust.

Henry Cowell’s 1928 Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, given a belated London premiere with Philip Mead as soloist, was more apropos: its orchestral stodginess and cavorting with keyboard clusters (Mead wore protective arm-length gloves) was a genuine Cagean celebration of noise.

Then came the Cage piece everyone still seems to have heard of — hence the media coverage — his 4’33” (1952), marked “tacet for any instrument of combination of instruments”.

Twentieth-century culture boasts nothing more iconoclastic than this quaintly demarcated interval of silence. The rules are simple. The performer(s), here the con-ductor, must indicate with a gesture the division into three movements, during which nothing is performed. The audience listens to the ambient sounds of itself and the hall. Artistic intentionality — Cage’s original sin — is thereby removed, and sound left in what, for Cage, is its raw state of spiritual suggestion. As a Zen Buddhist who identified composing with the pure operation of chance, he necessarily achieved creative nirvana with 4’33”.

The problem is that the piece works (if at all) in the opposite way to that “intended”, as Foster’s account made clear. While the large orchestra was motionless and the large audience sat raptly attentive to an icon (this was not a crowd in need of pleasers), ambient sounds stubbornly refused to occur. At least, nothing more interesting than the air-conditioning hum (always a nuisance in this hall) and a couple of coughs, neither conducive to a spiritual state. But as soon as we stopped listening — in the movement breaks (at one of which Foster waggishly wiped his brow) — there was a low rush of murmuring and throat-clearing, and, paradoxically, it was these parallel waves of sound, normally taken for granted, that struck me as having comprised the structure of the piece.

Thus it was only when I was not listening to 4’33” that I derived a modicum of musical satisfaction from it. The supposed beauty of noise left to its own devices was a non-starter with me. Cage might have argued that precisely by allowing me to relish this noise between movements, the piece had done its work. Yet it was the pattern of the noise, not the noise itself, that I relished. Against the odds, I had imposed a musical perception on the piece, because that is what music-lovers always try to do. For the piece to work consistently with Cage’s philo- sophy, one would have to desist altogether from trying to relate sounds to each other.

In other words, he is a composer not of music but of antimusic. Music, minimalistically considered as organised sound, is for him simply a means of inducing a spiritual awareness. And the terrible truth is that his organisations do not (in my experience) do this. Even his reputation as an “inventor of genius” (Schoenberg’s phrase) seems grotesquely exaggerated. His meticulously notated schemes are purely formalistic and self-serving; quite unlike those, say, of György Ligeti, truly an inventor of genius.

The Barbican weekend, with its Musicircuses for 340 performers in the foyer, its all-night performance of Vexations, by Cage’s favourite composer, Satie, and its skilful dadaist presentations of the 1958 Aria and 1970 Song Books (with sopranos Lore Lixenberg, Frances M Lynch and Nicole Tibbels) may have seemed like fun for all the family. Sitting through the unmediated chance operations of Atlas Eclipticalis or Apartment House 1776 (given by the London Sinfonietta), or the 1988 work simply called 101 (after the number of players), was not fun. These pieces, in which the orchestra hits any old note within absurdly prescribed limits, were not pretty and not music and not Buddhism and not cricket. As Stockhausen suggested in a 1992 Radio 3 documentary, Cage had a wonderful talent as a graphic designer: “It is just a shock in the history of European tradition that someone like him can be called a composer.”