“The most radical American composer of all time” is how Huddersfield University lecturer, writer and original thinker Julia Winterson described John Cage after meeting him at the 1989 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.

This was the same Festival at which Cage and Pierre Boulez – on opposite sides of a compositional dispute for 36 years – were reconciled with a handshake overseen by Olivier Messiaen.

The photograph of this reconciliation hangs in Huddersfield Town Hall. See it and be amazed, for here were giants and their meeting was one of the most thrilling in all 20th century music-making.

This is important hinterland when considering any John Cage performance in Huddersfield – as town and composer are now permanently and joyously linked. The Cassia String Quartet added to the relationship with the Huddersfield première of his String Quartet in Four Parts – wonderfully played – at their Huddersfield Music Society concert.

They were generally quiet and austere, perfectly exploiting the technique Cage developed for the work – a collection of chords and a melodic line. The effect the Cassias created eliminated sensual experience by employing no expression, in the first two movements at least. In the third they hinted at conscious musical purpose, which in the fourth dominated through emphasis on melody.

This work’s ambivalence around themes of conscious and unconscious, being and doing gives it a central place in 20th century music and philosophy. It was written in 1950 and Cage described it as “like the opening of another door; the possibilities implied are unlimited”. How true, for it launched his revolutionary major works – controversial to this day.

To frame it with Mozart’s G major K387 Quartet and Debussy’s only String Quartet was masterly programme-making.

Mozart’s G major Quartet is another example of original thinking, whose moods were teased out by the Cassias from the first movement’s tinkering with harmony, through the minuet’s distortion of triple time to the counterpoint-busting finale.

Debussy said that he preferred action to be sacrificed to feeling, and the great Yorkshire musicologist Wilfrid Mellers described him as “living in the ivory tower of his senses”. Compare and contrast with Cage!

The Cassias rose to Debussy’s stunning sensuality, changing textures and constant activity in a major landmark performance of muscular intensity which will be hard to match.