DeKALB | Experimental composer John Cage made his first national television appearance in 1960, performing his “Water Walk” on the CBS game show I’ve Got a Secret.

Despite the host’s reassurance that Cage was a real composer, the studio audience responded to his composition, which listed a bathtub and a mechanical fish as instruments, as if it were some sort of joke: members guffawed as Cage methodically walked in circles, hitting radios and watering plants. Over 50 years later, the laughter has died down.

Notations 21, an exhibit running through May 14 in the NIU Art Museum in Altgeld Hall, is a tribute to the avant-garde musical compositions Cage published in his 1969 book Notations. Curated by New York composer and musicologist Theresa Sauer, who published a Cage-inspired visual anthology of 165 composers’ scores, the show contains a collection of works from Sauer’s book. The compositions, which are displayed as pieces of visual art, rarely make use of the standard clefs; instead colorful shapes and designs are often used to communicate music.

Robert Fleisher, NIU professor and coordinator of composition and theory, was featured in the exhibit for the soprano saxophone portion of his composition “Mandala 3: Trigon.” The 24-minute composition, which was scored in 1978 as a part of his doctoral dissertation project at University of Illinois, is named after the Sanskrit word for circle because it uses triangles of musical bars that are read both forwards and backwards in circles.

“I had the idea that I wanted these works to all be performed in the round, not just on a stage but literally just surrounding an audience,” Fleisher said. “I’m kind of quirkily, whimsically saying, ‘Well, this is what I feel this score should look like because the idea of the piece,’ even though its not a very practical solution.”

Fleisher said the piece could be misleading at first glance like many of the other compositions in the show. While museum visitors are shown only one page of the score, it actually is in three parts and comes with complex performing instructions. In addition to being read in circles, it is also played in one.

“It’s a trio performed in the round,” Fleisher said. “The players surround the audience and each player is amplified by a speaker across the hall so it actually ends up being a big circle, alternately. Human, speaker, human, speaker. It’s acoustic and then amplified, so we try to balance each player and their amplified image that comes from across the stage, which is tricky because wherever you’re sitting in the hall is a slightly different mix anywhere. It depends on what your closer to. We try to calibrate that so that when any of these three guys makes a sound, it feels like it’s coming from two places.”

Aside from doing a piece on a MIDI controller last year, Fleisher said he dwells more in the traditional realm of music these days.

“I’m writing more pitch specific music than I did back then,” Fleisher said. “The other thing that has happened is that music print software came into existence which allows you to make beautiful looking more or less traditional music.”