If you have some time this evening, stop by the Walker Art Center’s Sculpture Garden and the nearby Basilica of St. Mary to check out the latest tribute to John Cage, the philosophical saint of the musical avant-garde.

Minnesota was a favorite haunt for Cage, who died in 1992 after a lifetime of provoking and amusing in the gentlest of ways. Back in the 1970s, in particular, he was a regular provocateur at the Walker Art Center and at the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra under its then-director, Dennis Russell Davies.

Layton ("Skip") James, the SPCO’s longtime keyboardist, loves to tell a story about a Cage concert where he was told to walk out on stage, sit at a grand piano, depress the instrument’s damper pedal and await further instructions. After waiting an interminable amount of time, James said the orchestra’s stage manager walked out on stage, pulled out a revolver, pointed it at the piano’s soundboard and cranked off a round -- a blank, as it turned out.

The resulting reverberation from the piano -- along with the horrified reaction from James -- constituted the performance.

The Walker once collaborated in a giant event involving some 40 diverse musical groups that performed -- simultaneously and with great cacophony -- in a circus tent set up at Macalester College. The audience was invited to walk around and enjoy the din.

The Walker has two Cage compositions featured as part of its on-going exhibition, "The Quick and the Dead," that opened in April and continues through Sept. 27. Artist Pierre Huyghe, who is involved in the larger, on-going show, recently installed 50 wind chimes on trees located in the Sculpture Garden north of the garden’s iconic “Spoonbridge and Cherry” sculpture.

Each pipe in the chimes corresponds to a note in a 1948 work by Cage called "Dream." Cage was a devotee of so-called "randomness," so this could be a perfect tribute. Whatever your opinion of that, a stroll beneath the grove of trees is said to be enchanting.

At the Basilica, organist Chrisotopher Stroh is performing Cage’s "Organ²/ASLSP" today at 7 p.m. and at select dates until Sept. 27. The "ASLSP" in the title of the work refers to instructions to play it "as slow as possible." Performance time varies according to the predilections of the performer.

But at least you’ll be able to hear the entire work in one sitting. For the last nine years, "Organ²/ASLSP" has been in the process of being performed at a former church in Halberstadt, Germany.

When it began in 2001, the performance time was estimated at 639 years. A new note is sounded every year or so and it’s a major event in the former East German city. That’s the great thing about an organ: As long as the bellows pump, there’s sound. And according to Cage, the composer of "4'33," even when there’s no sound, it’s still music.