Book Description
Silence, A Year from Monday, M, Empty Words and X (in this order) form the five parts of a series of books in which Cage tries, as he says, "to find a way of writing which comes from ideas, is not about them, but which produces them." Often these writings include mesostics and essays created by subjecting the work of other writers to chance procedures using the I Ching (what Cage called "writing through").
Customer Reviews:
Very Interesting!!.......2007-02-17
This book is a work of art in itself. John Cage takes so many of his theories and applies them to his writing style, formatting, and type style. I suggest knowing a little about him before reading this book as it is a little easy to get lost in translation (figuratively speaking). Overall, it is definitely worth reading, and it is fairly affordable...a good addition to any collection.
Essential.......2002-05-09
Not just for musicians, but for anybody who is interested in music or philosophy. Cage's ideas presented in the work are fascinating in and of themselves, but even the manner in which he physically notates his thoughts on paper is amazing to see.
There's a common argument that his ideas (and this book) are overrated. I find this difficult to digest, especially when one considers the enormous impact Cage's writings and compositions have had on countless composers (basically anyone composing after 1950 has most likely taken a thing or two from the ideas in this book).
Sometimes he can be a little tough to follow in the book, as properly constructed sentences are not high up on Cage's list of priorities. However, this book has so much to offer that it is worth wading through the occasional slow spot.
So give it a whirl. Even if you don't like Cage's music, reading this book will give you insights into what he did that may change your mind or at least instill a newfound respect. At its best, this is inspiration of the highest sort.
Quintessential Cage.......2001-08-17
I keep reading it year after year and I keep finding sections of it I've never seen before. magic. A the same time, I read the same part overs and over again years later and they just get better.
It's just a remarkable text.
You have to get it.
This book is slightly overrated, actually.......2001-06-13
There is no denying the importance of John Cage as a composer as well as a writer. But even though this book is a necessary provocation for anyone who thinks they know what music is and should be, he is not a philosopher, and his ideas are often contradictory, naive and even romantic.
Romantic? Yes, I would say that for instance his idea of "sounds in themselves" and "nature" are romantic. Can we really eliminate all cultural impact and distortion just by refusing intention? I think not. Sounds are always inflected by history.
Still, I would not want a world without the challenge of his extreme stance.
Nothing Has Been The Same.......2000-05-20
It's always a strange sensation for me to go into a record store, or even see what's available here, and find so many John Cage recordings in print. As the most essential and avant-garde composer of the century, that's gratifying to me [a composer] but also unnerving that anyone so experimental and uncompromising in the arts would enjoy such popularity.
This book goes a long way towards explaining that. And in many ways, this book stands apart from his music, and can be enjoyed without ever hearing or knowing of Cage's music pieces. Because the music was almost by accident - Schoenberg told Cage that he was an inventor, not a composer, and this book demonstrates that, and goes further to show Cage was a philosopher. Music just happened to be the medium where he best expressed his philosophy, but it could have been painting or film, depending on his path. The book defines a way of living and thinking and seeing, and of course hearing, the world. That's what it's about. And it's beautiful and gentle quality capture the essence of Cage, a true quiet revolutionary. His revolution was profound, and best expressed in his piano piece 4'33", where the pianist does not make a sound at the instrument. The revolution of that event was the most profound and destabilizing in the history of music, and yet it was entirely silent. Such is the power of Cage's ideas that he has no need to really 'lecture' about them, he merely presents them and let's their own strength do the rest.
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Writings about John Cage
Manufacturer: University of Michigan Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0472083910 |
Book Description
John Cage was one of the most extraordinary and intriguing composers of the twentieth century--or perhaps of any century. His vast corpus of musical compositions, writings, and performances has amazed, amused, bored, enlightened, angered, and fascinated audiences throughout the world. Despite the controversy surrounding his work, there is little disagreement about his role as one of the most important and influential members of the avant-garde.
In Writings about John Cage, the renowned Cage expert Richard Kostelanetz has collected the writings of thirty-seven prominent scholars and critics. Selections include articles by the composers Henry Cowell, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Lou Harrison, Michael Nyman, Virgil Thomson, and Christian Wolff; by literary figures Paul Bowles, John Hollander, and Manfredi Piccolomini; by critics Daniel Charles, Jill Johnston, Edward Rothstein, Calvin Tomkins, and Peter Yates; and by performers Merce Cunningham and Paul Zukofsky. The contributions cover all aspects of Cage's life and career, including his music, his aesthetics, his prose and poetry, his visual art, and his contributions to modern dance.
Richard Kostelanetz is a poet and critic who has written and edited numerous books on aesthetics, the avant-garde, and literature, including The Avant-Garde Tradition in Literature, On Innovative Music(ian)s, The Theatre of Mixed Means, and Esthetics Contemporary. He is the author of The Old Poetries and the New, also published by the University of Michigan Press. His books on Cage include John Cage and Conversing with Cage.
". . . the most intelligently chosen book of writings about Cage that I've seen. . . . Kostelanetz is a practiced and gifted anthologist, with the discriminating eye of a litterateur, the sensibility of a poet, and the ear of a musician. . . . . [N]o matter how we read Writings about John Cage, we learn--from intelligent and serious teachers whose writings are worth the effort."--Institute for Studies in American Music Newsletter
". . . belongs in the library of anyone who is trying to understand and to deal with John Cage."--Performing Arts Journal
Book Description
The New Grove Dictionary of Music has said of John Cage that he "had a greater impact on world music than any other American composer in the twentieth century," and his musical thinking forms a whole with his writing. For the Birds is a book, a dialogue and an event all at once. The initial conversations were recorded in France between 1968 and 1978 and were then reconstructed, reedited and commented upon by Cage. The final text, with footnotes and asides added over the years, is prefaced by a typographical celebration of his ideas compiled by Cage himself.
This ebullient collection of questions and answers covers a wide variety of topics. Cage's great wit and intelligence are allowed to range across such subjects as his own music and texts, mushrooms, chess, James Joyce, Mao, Thoreau, Satie, electronic music, the prepared piano, Zen, the environment, technology, politics and economics.
John Cage was born in Los Angeles in 1912. He studied music with Adolf Weiss, Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg, and he has shared ideas with Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miro and Max Ernst, as well as such prophets as Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller. He was music director of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for decades and held a number of academic posts. Cage was a composer, poet, graphic artist, teacher and critic. He died in New York in 1992.
"He is not a composer, he's an inventor -- of genius."--Arnold Schoenberg
Book Description
This book brings together for the first time Moira Roth's influential articles, lectures and interviews on the two men who embodied the very spirit of the avant-garde: Marcel Duchamp and John Cage.
Cage, who died in 1992, and Duchamp, who died in 1968, seemed to live on the permissive border of modernism, and later, of postmodernism. The artists have for almost thirty years fascinated, irritated, inspired, and daunted the author of these essays - Moira Roth.
At first they were an inspiration for her writing and teaching then, with their gradual transformation into 'classical' figures, she felt compelled to reconsider and re-evaluate them.
Customer Reviews:
Great!.......2000-05-27
The more you read, the more you can enter into Duchamp's world! This one must definitly be one in your Duchamp's collection. Make yourself "READY MADE"
Book Description
Talking Music is comprised of substantial original conversations with seventeen American experimental composers and musicians-including Milton Babbitt, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Meredith Monk, and John Zorn-many of whom rarely grant interviews. The author skillfully elicits candid dialogues that encompass technical explorations; questions of method, style, and influence; their personal lives and struggles to create; and their aesthetic goals and artistic declarations. Herein, John Cage recalls the turning point in his career; Ben Johnston criticizes the operas of his teacher Harry Partch; La Monte Young attributes his creative discipline to a Morman childhood; and much more. The results are revelatory conversations with some of America's most radical musical innovators.
Customer Reviews:
A very intertaining and solid introduction.......2001-11-04
This is a very entertaining collection of interviews. Duckworth takes his time to explore the issues sufficiently deeply with his interlocutors. Hence, there is substance to the book: it certainly is more than a loose collection of freewheeling conversations. And I am grateful for the fact that Bill Duckworth expanded his survey beyond the obvious collection of Minimalists and Cage. I knew nothing about Pauline Oliveros, Glen Branca or La Monte Young and came away refreshed from reading all their stories. I was generally satisfied by the way Duckworth steers the interviews. The tone is relaxed, sometimes earnest, sometimes tongue-in-cheeck. He is at his very best in the long, sometimes rambling conversations with La Monte Young and John Zorn. But in other cases - such as with the more rigorous and perhaps intellectually more intimidating personality of Steve Reich - Duckworth rigidly sticks to his agenda and fails to capture a number of potentially interesting tangents. The interview with John Cage is outright funny in the way Duckworth fails to catch on with what Cage really tries to get across. He keeps asking the wrong questions whilst Cage, with dwindling patience, is making broad excursions in conceptual hyperspace. But if Duckworth fails to capture a number of interesting opportunities to dig deeper in some of the interviews, this remains a very valuable collection, at least for those new to the whole field of American experimental music.
great fascinating interviews on American creativity.......2000-05-09
Willian Duckworth is marvelous at asking questions,he is so natural at it that he makes you feel you have known his guests all your life. He allows everyone to feel at home, at ease,like catching more flies with sugar quip. Like asking John Cage for instance, "I don't have a very good understanding of what your early musical training was like,". or to La Monte Young, asking if he is the "father of minimalism", I guess it doesn't matter now, since most of what is discussed has played itself out. Here Duckworth interviews creators of primary creative genres of Americana leaning toward the achievements of all the various,nefarious "isms", experimentalism, minimalism, well just intonation doesn't fit, and the ubiquitously opaque post-modernity. And progressing from who are considered the Mammas and Pappas to the younger generation.The genre of Interviews seem to be occurring with greater frequency,speaking of one of the features of post-modernity. It is the most immediate way of knowing someone's art, aesthetic, how they feel about the world,about politics, or how they don't feel. Obsessions are explored in these interviews,as with John Zorn's early buying jags of recordings,jazz etc.,and formative years as with La Monte Young and his obsessions with sound, listening to telephone generators,or machines, the inherent drone in these industrial objects,Also professional associations, and disassociations with the New York scene,Fluxus which includes,just about everyone here interviewed is probed, with nice discussions of the early years of performance art in New York City. Education away from academia was an important component of American music,sorry to say, with those of the post war-generation turning to the east, and World Music, as Steve Reich, Phil Glass,Lou Harrison, Pauline Oliveros and La Monte Young. Young in particular reflects on his education with Pandit Pran Nath on intonation and improvisation and learning it with Marian Zazeela.Professional associations, how to survive by being a performance artist, Duckworth pursues and explores with Meridith Monk and Laurie Anderson, finding gigs in New York City or Europe again was everyone's passion.How do you work? is also a wonderful question, Monk reflects that she has to work all the time to feel attached, whereas she knows composers who don't work for months and claim to feel they don't lose anything. How creators get into ,what they get into, as Ben Johnston reflects on his early education with instrument iconoclast Harry Partch, how Partch taught Johnston to sing fractional tones, an eleventh/sixteenth, and how Partch would devote mornings to music, and afternoons to physical work, building sheds,or home extensions,or gathering wood. Also Johnston speaks about his wonderful string quartets, the Seventh in particular which is based on an 100-tone scale, and how we come to understand it via the relationships it represents rather than hearing 100 isolated tones. With Lou Harrison we have almost a history of American music, in that his life traversed through the primary achievements, the interests in World Music, Tunings, percussion music, and extended techniques,living on both coasts. But Harrison claims he was always a melodic composer, he had to sing whatever he wrote first, to attach himself to the world of sound, no matter how complex his music became.Some interviews are boring however as the the one with Phillip Glass where he simply recounts his life, and his interests, there was not a spirit of adventure, of discovery.Whereas Milton Babbitt has wonderful reflections on his early studies in music with Roger Sessions, and how Babbitt felt he needed to start over. The interview with Christian Wolff was over before it got interesting,Wolff primarily discussed his early music, the pieces associated with the Cage School(Cage,Feldman,Brown,Wolff)(nice photo of them)instead of traversing the set of problematics of dealing with political imagery. That question came as the very last one."Are you still writing political music?". Duckworth admirably gives nice introductions to each composer, and makes you feel the center of where creativity occurs, what excites an artist,and where challenge and repose occurs within music.One good question here always was"When did you first hear of John Cage", or what was the first piece of "so and so" you heard. This makes for a marvelous discussion on what were the initial indeliable moments on one's creative life. Not everyone is gifted at interviews it is a conditioned and practiced art. This work is a great model toward that genre.
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- The place to start with Cage
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John Cage: An Anthology (Da Capo Paperback)
Manufacturer: Da Capo Press
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Silence: Lectures and Writings
ASIN: 0306804352 |
Customer Reviews:
The place to start with Cage.......2006-09-17
This is THE place to begin with John Cage, easily one of the more intriguing creative minds of the 20th century.
Kostelanetz assembles a free-ranging portrait of the man - mostly varied essays and theories of composition and performance, but along the way Cage's more arcane influences also surface: his Buddhism, and fascination with chance, which was embodied in his fixation with the "I Ching," which became both a point of departure for theoretical meditations, and a most unusual compositional tool.
Cage was the quintessential modernist, and even when his music was daunting and intrepid, his ideas were never, ever stupid, ill-informed or socially disconnected. And Kostelanetz' anthology is great, affectionate, engaged and fascinating - it will turn you into an admirer.
-David Alston
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John Cage (Ex)Plain(Ed)
Richard Kostelanetz
Manufacturer: Schirmer Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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Silence: Lectures and Writings
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Charles Ives: A Life With Music
ASIN: 002864526X |
Customer Reviews:
Sadly tedious.......2007-04-13
It is difficult to describe how disappointing this book is or why the information is presented in such a repititious way. It appears to be a blend of interviews from many previous sources (including the author's) and this makes for a confusing read. When answers to specific questions about the performances of Cage's music include different recollections from various interviews within the same paragraph, you end up feeling like your reading a term paper rather than an insightful treatise. After 100 pages of this confusion and constant repetition, I gave up. I know Cage is compelling but you would not know it from this book.
Book Description
In Extended Play, one of the country's most innovative music writers conducts a wide-ranging tour through the outer limits of contemporary music. Over the course of more than twenty-five portraits, interviews, and essays, John Corbett engages artists from lands as distant as Sweden, Siberia, and Saturn. With a special emphasis on African American and European improvisers, the book explores the famous and the little known, from John Cage and George Clinton to Anthony Braxton and Sun Ra. Employing approaches as diverse as the music he celebrates, Corbett illuminates the sound and theory of funk and rap, blues and jazz, contemporary classical, free improvisation, rock, and reggae.
Using cultural critique and textual theory, Corbett addresses a broad spectrum of issues, such as the status of recorded music in postmodern culture, the politics of self-censorship, experimentation, and alternativism in the music industry, and the use of metaphors of space and madness in the work of African American musicians. He follows these more theoretically oriented essays with a series of extensive profiles and in-depth interviews that offer contrasting and complementary perspectives on some of the world’s most creative musicians and their work. Included here are more than twenty original photographs as well as a meticulously annotated discography. The result is one of the most thoughtful, and most entertaining, investigations of contemporary music available today.
Customer Reviews:
imaginative scintillations.......2001-07-12
"The sententious critic puts me to sleep. I would prefer a critic of imaginative scintillations. He would not be sovereign, nor dressed in red. He would bear the lightning flashes of possible storms." --Michel Foucault
Corbett seems to operate according to Foucault's injunction, and bears quite a few lightning flashes, due to his playful imagination and the imagination of the cutting edge artists he covers. "Extended Play" puts Cage and Clinton in the title, but actually focuses on free jazz/improvisation, not composition or funk. Corbett presents marvelous interviews with European free improvisers, including saxophonists Evan Parker and Peter Brotzmann, guitarist Derek Bailey, and drummer Han Bennink, as well as Americans Sun Ra (composer and bandleader),and Anthony Braxton (composer and reed player). He profiles fellow Chicagoans Hal Russell, Fred Anderson, Von Freeman, and Edward Wilkerson Jr. (the latter three all tenor players), English bassist and bandleader Barry Guy, and Sainkho Namtchylak, the only female Siberian Tuva singer in the ranks of European free improv. He does interview John Cage, which I found uninteresting, and George Clinton, which is tremendous.
Whether despite or because of his poststructuralist leanings (I'm with Evan Parker, who, according to Corbett, "...knows I'm a Continental-philosophy kinda guy, which is something he's certain that he isn't."), Corbett takes a stance clearly on the side of "optimism concerning the possibility of resistance," resistance in the realm of popular music against the capitalist status quo.
Presently overseeing the Unheard Music series for Atavistic Records in Chicago -- free jazz/improv tapes buried in the vaults until now -- John Corbett is doing his part to keep ALL the signifiers free!
Ushering in a new era of popular culture criticism?.......1998-01-10
Like Greil Marcus and Robert Palmer, Corbett looks at (popular?) culture as both a product of and a determinant of culture at large. As a postmodernist, he delves into genres that are largely devoid of quality criticism as few are up to the task. Actually he's probably more of a Nat Hantoff or Frank Kofsky of our time in that he's quick to support what may commonly be refered to as music that tries its listeners patience and willingness to explore. I used this book as a reference for my thesis and have recommended it to several people.
Book Description
"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.
CONTRIBUTORS: Joan Retallack.
Customer Reviews:
a valuable document.......2001-02-01
Joan Retallack, a long-time friend and colleague of John Cage, has done us the favor of publishing this series of conversations between the two of them. These conversations (for they lack any conventional formality that might render them 'interviews'), which took place not long before Cage's death in 1992, run the gamut of topics. Through their amiable banter, one gets a great sense of what was going on in the oft-misunderstood artist's mind--especially as regards his fixation on chance operations and the I Ching. The talks also give ample insight into Cage's writing and visual art, practices for which he is lesser known. When not provoking thought about Cage himself, the two (and I mean both of them equally; Retallack has a meticulously rich and compelling mind, and expresses many enlightening points-of-view herself) have revealing conversations about everything from Duchamp to Joyce, Buckminster Fuller to the Koran.
Perhaps the most interesting and rare aspect of the book is the pervasive inclusion of the environmental and more mundane details of the conversations. She is careful to note the frequent occasions when Cage laughed, what he might have been cooking that day, interactions with an artist who stopped by to fix a bookshelf as a favor to Cage and to Merce Cunningham. Especially valuable is the penultimate conversation, when we are made privy to the beginning of Cage's composition process, as he begins to write a new piece on the spot with cellist Michael Bach. These insights into Cage's daily domestic life are perhaps the most revealing aspects of the book into his personality and philosophies.
For those familiar with Cage, this is a must-read. If you are skeptical or confused about his work, these talks will clarify a lot for you. If you have yet to be exposed to Cage, I recommend this book highly as an accurate and exhaustive portrait.
good stuff from precious minds.......2000-08-05
Joan Retallack is immensely gifted. If you're familiar with John Cage, you'll like this book. If you're not too familiar with John Cage, well, I have someone I'd like you to meet.
This is entertaining, compelling, thought-provoking stuff. I can think of few other people who are so mindful of WORD USAGE, or in this case, I guess, WORD "USCAGE." Many insights in this book. I recommend it highly.
Charming, delightful, thought-provoking.......1999-08-10
I know nothing about music, but I loved this book! Cage's conversations brim with humor, wisdom, and amazing insights into every subject under the sun. It's an enormous pleasure to spend a few hours "in his company" by reading this book.
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Twentieth-Century American Masters: Ives, Thomson, Sessions, Cowell, Gershwin, Copland, Carter, Barber, Cage, Bernstein (New Grove)
John Kirkpatrick
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
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ASIN: 0393315886 |
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