MUSICAGE: CAGE MUSES on Words * Art * Music

Cover
Wesleyan University Press, 19.01.1996 - 408 Seiten

The entire range of John Cage's work and thought, explored in three wide-ranging dialogues, which constitute his last unified statement on his art.

"I was obliged to find a radical way to work — to get at the real, at the root of the matter," John Cage says in this trio of dialogues, completed just days before his death. His quest for the root of the matter led him beyond the bounds of the conventional in all his musical, written, and visual pieces. The resulting expansion of the definition of art — with its concomitant emphasis on innovation and invention—earned him a reputation as one of America's most influential contemporary artists.

Joan Retallack's conversations with Cage represent the first consideration of his artistic production in its entirety, across genres. Informed by the perspective of age, Cage's comments range freely from his theories of chance and indeterminate composition to his long-time collaboration with Merce Cunningham to the aesthetics of his multimedia works. A composer for whom the whole world — with its brimming silences and anarchic harmonies — was a source of music, Cage once claimed, "There is no noise, only sounds." As these interviews attest, that penchant for testing traditions reached far beyond his music. His lifelong project, Retallack writes in her comprehensive introduction, was "dislodging cultural authoritarianism and gridlock by inviting surprising conjunctions within carefully delimited frameworks and processes." Consummate performer to the end, Cage delivers here just such a conjunction — a tour de force that provides new insights into the man and a clearer view of the status of art in the 20th century.

 

Inhalt

List of Illustrations
ix
Conversations in Retrospect Joan Retallack
xiii
Art Is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else John Cage
3
A Selected Cage Computer Programs
315
E Notated Time Bracket Sheets for Thirteen 1992 Pages 14 15 16
328
H Excerpts from Score for Europera s 333338
333
N First Page of Ten 1991 Violin 1
346
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Autoren-Profil (1996)

Composer John Milton Cage, Jr., is best known for his avant-garde music, including pieces such as Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951) in which 12 radios are turned on intermittently. His 1943 premiere concert of percussion buzzers, pottery and scrap metal, all chosen for their potential sound. Cage was born in Los Angeles in 1912 and studied music privately, becoming a teacher at the Chicago School of Design in 1941. Between 1944 and 1966, he was musical director at Merce Cunningham and Dance Co., and in 1949 he won a Guggenheim fellowship. Cage wrote Virgil Thompson: His Life and Music (1959). His essays and lectures on music were collected into several books, including Silence: Selected Lectures and Writings (1961) and A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings (1967).

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