I–VI: MethodStructureIntentionDisciplineNotationIndeterminacyInterpenetrationImitationDevotionCircumstancesVariableStructureNonunderstandingContingencyInconsistencyPerformance

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Wesleyan University Press, 14.11.1997 - 452 Seiten
Dazzling innovation in a work by one of America's most important and controversial composers.

"In the nature of the use of chance operations is the belief that all answers answer all questions," John Cage writes in this edition of his contribution to Harvard's prestigious Norton Lecture Series in 1988-89. More like performances than lectures, these six mesostics -- a complex horizontal arrangement of text to form vertical letter sequences that spell out key words -- illustrated for his audience the concept of "nonintention," a kind of meticulously choreographed anarchy in which choice and chance join to redefine the concepts of meaning and meaningfulness.

Drawing text from Thoreau, Wittgenstein, Joyce, McCluhan, and daily newspapers, Cage used a computer program to combine seemingly disparate lines into a whole that explored fifteen central aspects of his compositional credo. This edition includes the mesostics, transcriptions, and a CD recording of the question-and-answer sessions that followed and of Cage reading in a sonorous baritone that infuses the mesostic with life, depth, and musicality. The aesthetic integrity and artistic growth that have characterized Cage's half century of production are nowhere more clearly evident than in this tour de force.
 

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Autoren-Profil (1997)

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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