Cage, John Books

The Cambridge Companion to John Cage (Cambridge Companions to Music)

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Editorial Review:

American composer John Cage (1912-1992) was without doubt one of the most important and influential figures in twentieth-century music. He spent much of his career in pursuit of an unusual goal--"giving up control so that sounds can be sounds", as he put it. As well as composing around 300 works, he was also a prolific performer, writer, poet, and visual artist. This Companion celebrates the richness and diversity of Cage's achievements and provides readers with a fully rounded portrait of a fascinating figure.

John Cage: Composed in America

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

When the great avant-gardist John Cage died, just short of his eightieth birthday in 1992, he was already the subject of dozens of interviews, memoirs, and discussions of his contribution to music, music theory, and performance practice. But Cage never thought of himself as only (or even primarily) a composer; he was a poet, a visual artist, a philosophical thinker, and an important cultural critic.

John Cage: Composed in America is the first book-length work to address the "other" John Cage, a revisionist treatment of the way Cage himself has composed and been "composed" in America. Cage, as these original essays testify, is a contradictory figure. A disciple of Duchamp and Schoenberg, Satie and Joyce, he created compositions that undercut some of these artists' central principles and then attributed his own compositional theories to their "tradition." An American in the Emerson-Thoreau mold, he paradoxically won his biggest audience in Europe. A freewheeling, Californian artist, Cage was committed to a severe work ethic and a firm discipline, especially the discipline of Zen Buddhism.

Following the text of Cage's lecture-poem "Overpopulation and Art," delivered at Stanford shortly before his death and published here for the first time, ten critics respond to the challenge of the complexity and contradiction exhibited in his varied work. In keeping with Cage's own interdisciplinarity, the critics approach that work from a variety of disciplines: philosophy (Daniel Herwitz, Gerald L. Bruns), biography and cultural history (Thomas S. Hines), game and chaos theory (N. Katherine Hayles), music culture (Jann Pasler), opera history (Herbert Lindenberger), literary and art criticism (Marjorie Perloff), cultural poetics (Gordana P. Crnkovic, Charles Junkerman), and poetic practice (Joan Retallack). But such labels are themselves confining: each of the essays sets up boundaries only to cross them at key points. The book thus represents, to use Cage's own phrase, a much needed "beginning with ideas."

MUSICAGE: CAGE MUSES on Words * Art * Music

John Cage, Joan Retallack

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Charming, delightful, thought-provoking 5 out of 5 stars.
10 of 12 people found this review helpful.

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.

a valuable document 4 out of 5 stars.
7 of 8 people found this review helpful.

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.

Editorial Review:

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.

For the Birds: John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles

John Cage, Daniel Charles

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Editorial Review:

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

Conversing With Cage

Richard Kostelanetz

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Editorial Review:

Conversing with Cage draws on over 150 interviews with John Cage conducted over four decades to draw a full picture of his life and art. Filled with the witty aphorisms that have made Cage as famous as an esthetic philosopher as a composer, the book offers both an introduction to Cage's way of thinking and a rich gathering of his many thoughts on art, life, and music.
John Cage is perhaps this century's most radical classical composer. From his famous "silent" piece (4'33") to his proclamation that "all sound is music," Cage stretched the aesthetic boundaries of what could be performed in the modern concert hall. But, more than that, Cage was a provocative cultural figure, who played a key role in inspiring scores of other artists-and social philosophers-in the second half of the 20th century. Through his life and work, he created revolutions in thinking about art, and its relationship to the world around us.
Conversing with Cage is the ideal introduction to this world, offering in the artist's own words his ideas about life and art. It will appeal to all fans of this mythic figure on the American scene, as well as anyone interested in better understanding 20th century modernism.

John Cage's Theatre Pieces (Contemporary Music Studies)

Willi Fetterman

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Editorial Review:

The experimental composer John Cage (1912-1992) is best known for his works in percussion, prepared piano, and electronic music, but he is also acknowledged to be one of the most significant figures in 20th century theatre. In Cage's work in theatre composition there is a blurring of the distinctions between music, dance, literature, art and everyday life. Here, William Fetterman examines the majority of those compositions by Cage which are audial as well as visual in content, beginning with his first work in this genre in 1952, and continuing through 1992.
Much of the information in this study comes from previously undocumented material discovered among the unpublished scores and notes of Cage and his frequent collaborator David Tudor, as well as author's interviews with Cage and with individuals closely associated with his work, including David Tudor, Merce Cunningham, Bonnie Bird, Mary Caroline Richards, and Ellsworth Snyder.

Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond

Michael Nyman

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Editorial Review:

Michael Nyman's book is a first-hand account of experimental music from 1950 to 1970. First published in 1974, it has remained the classic text on a significant form of music making and composing that developed alongside, and partly in opposition to, the postwar modernist tradition of composers such as Boulez, Berio, or Stockhausen. The experimentalist par excellence was John Cage whose legendary 4' 33'' consists of four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence to be performed on any instrument. Such pieces have a conceptual rather than purely musical starting point and radically challenge conventional notions of the musical work. Nyman's book traces the revolutionary attitudes that were developed toward concepts of time, space, sound, and composer/performer responsibility. It was within the experimental tradition that the seeds of musical minimalism were sown and the book contains reference to the early works of Reich, Riley, Young, and Glass. This second edition contains a new Foreword, an updated discography, and a historical overview by the author.

John Cage (American Composers)

David Nicholls

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Editorial Review:

John Cage was a giant of American experimental music--composer, writer, and artist. He is most widely known for his 1952 composition 4'33, whose three movements continue to challenge the definition of music by being performed without playing a single note. In questioning fundamental tenets of Western music, Cage was often at the center of controversy, and is regarded as an important contributor to many facets of American culture.

To enable readers to understand what makes Cage such an extraordinary figure, David Nicholls masterfully places his striking body of prose and poetry, over 300 music compositions, and prominent performance career into historical, environmental, intellectual, philosophical, and aesthetic contexts. Nicholls’ intimate study of John Cage’s personal and professional life confirms the legacy of this major figure in twentieth-century American culture.

John Cage: An Anthology (Da Capo Paperback)

Richard Kostelanetz

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Editorial Review:

For years he was dismissed as an eccentric exponent of arbitrary noise punctuated by silence. Now, however, John Cage is universally acknowledged as the most influential composer of his generation. Cage’s activities as composer, graphic artist, poet, teacher, critic and—not least—writer are explored in this collection of readings by and about this avant-garde pioneer, covering his most innovative period, 1933–1970. The main concern of John Cage: An Anthology is, of course, music: here composers and critics such as Virgil Thompson, Henry Cowell, Edward Downes, and Michael Zwerin analyze Cage’s contribution to sound; Cage comments on his own works, such as Sonatas and Interludes, Cartridge Music, and Williams Mix; and the editor, Richard Kostelanetz, also includes Cage’s groundbreaking essay, ”Future of Music: Credo” and his perceptive remarks about composers from Satie and Webern to Stockhausen, But this anthology by no means neglects the other aspects of Cage’s creativity. Cage writes fondly here of his collaboration with Merce Cunningham, the space-time avant-garde dancer and choreographer; Barbara Rose and Dore Ashton review Cage’s influence on the contemporary art scene; his poetry is both represented herein and analyzed by Kostelanetz; and his teaching is remembered vividly by his students. Including a newly updated bibliography, discography, and catalog of compositions, as well as more than sixty illustrations, this collection is invaluable not only for students, teachers, and scholars, but for all who take a lively interest in the growth of the avant-garde in the twentieth century.

John Cage (Ex)Plain(Ed)

Richard Kostelanetz

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 1.0 of 5

Sadly tedious 1 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

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.