To a certain generation of Buffalo art and music scenesters, the late composer John Cage was nothing less than the savior of 20th century American music.

These are the people who sat rapt for each of Cage’s 20 or so visits to Buffalo during the city’s heyday as an international center for new music. They are also the driving force behind “John Cage: Lecture on the Weather,” a 23-day festival of work by or inspired by Cage in the Burchfield Penney Art Center’s cavernous East Gallery. The festival is the brainchild of Cage fanatic and Burchfield Penney curator Don Metz.

Aside from being an outrageously ambitious display of local talent, the event is an ideal opportunity for the public to test and perhaps expand its notions of what art and music can be. The opportunity is perfect because of the polarizing effect Cage’s music has on longtime listeners and novices alike.

For all those who view Cage as the great American artist-philosopher, there are more who dismiss him as a disseminator of chaotic claptrap masquerading as music. Others see him as the dead end of a once-promising line of monumentally talented American composers. But of course, as with most artists, the truth of Cage’s appeal lies somewhere in between.

Performer Ron Ehmke, who delivered a piece based on Cage’s writing last Sunday, gives us one example of how to approach someone like Cage. He lauded the composer’s prose writings in books like “Empty Words,” and talked about the composer as an engaging raconteur who exerted tremendous influence on his own life and art.

The music was another story.

“I also wanted to be a part of this [festival] because I knew what was going to be happening,” Ehmke said. “It’s going to be 23 days of unlistenable noise and self-indulgent jibber jabber that you probably need to be high to appreciate.” He was only half-joking.

Leaving recreational pharmaceuticals out of the picture for the moment, there’s a simple and important lesson embedded in Ehmke’s approach. Whatever you think about Cage, it’s clear he was a thinker on a grand scale whose work spanned several disciplines.

Ehmke feels free to embrace some parts of Cage’s life and career and to shy away from others, an a la carte approach that can apply to just about any contemporary artist or musician.

To the legions who approach challenging contemporary art and music on a “love it or hate it” basis, such an outlook can be one of many first steps toward the mind-altering experience to which all great art aspires.

This is why museums like the Burchfield Penney exist and what they accomplish when they are at their best: To propel new audiences, by whatever means, past the surface difficulties of the work itself and into the simple, profound and transformative experience that, if it’s any good, lies at its heart.

For the uninitiated, among whose ranks I count myself, Cage’s musical compositions pose a range of difficulties. They demand a wide-open mind as a bare minimum prerequisite. On top of that, they require the listener to enter an almost meditative state, which is all the more difficult to achieve because of the randomized clamor of the music itself.

But even for newbies, Cage’s concepts can have a profound and immediate effect. He taught people, for instance, that any sound in the world can be music. And that silence, like white space in graphic design or aimless daydreaming in life, is central both to our understanding of music and to music itself. The concepts go far deeper, of course, into subjects like the ego, the role of chance and imperialist politics (see his beloved “Lecture on the Weather,” with two more performances scheduled for Thursday and Saturday).

The lesson of the festival tells us something about the infinite paths that can lead an individual to deep appreciation for an artist like Cage. There are 14 days left for you to find yours.