John Cage: Composed in AmericaMarjorie Perloff, Charles Junkerman 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." |
Contents
Overpopulation and Art | 14 |
The Model of the Musicircus | 39 |
The Los Angeles Years 19121938 | 65 |
Writing through Marcel | 100 |
Cages Composition in Retrospect | 125 |
The Europeras and the Aesthetics of Opera | 144 |
Utopian America and the Language of Silence | 167 |
John Cages Approach to the Global | 188 |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
aesthetic American anarchy Angeles arias artist asked audience Autobiographical Statement avant-garde become Buckminster Fuller Cage recalled Cage's Cage's mesostics Cagean called Cavell centers chance operations chaos complex composer Composition in Retrospect concept cultural David Ruelle Erik Satie essay Etant Donnés ethical European Europeras event example experience Experimental Music fact happens hear Hereafter cited Hines horizontal human Ibid idea interpenetration Interview with Cage invention James Joyce Joan Retallack John Cage Katherine Hayles language Lecture Levinas listening live Marcel Duchamp Marjorie Perloff means mesostic Middletown mind musicians Musicircus Nussbaum one's oneself opera Overpopulation and Art performance philosophical play poem poethics poetry political question randomness relation Richard Kostelanetz Robert Rauschenberg Schindler Schoenberg sense silence social sound source texts space Stanford Stanley Cavell structure tapes theory things Thoreau tion tradition utopian America vertical weather Wesleyan University Press words worldlines writing York