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from: University Of Chicago Press
Amazon.com's Price: $18.00 Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 780.92
EAN: 9780226660578
ISBN: 0226660575
Label: University Of Chicago Press
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 296
Publication Date: August 01, 1994
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Sales Rank: 477548
Studio: University Of Chicago Press
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Product Description:
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.'
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - Cage (realy) explained
This book of essays marks the begginig of a new era on John Cage studies. Less romantic, more scientific, less partisan, more academical. Everybody who wants to learn about Cage have to read this book.
Rating: - Forget the Zen--This is a Great Read
This book explores John Cage from all aspects of his life and work. In my opinion, the most valuable essay is Thomas S. Hines' biographical study of the young Cage as he begins to grope towards a definition of himself that includes artist and inventor as well as his role as a gay man in straight society. We see that Cage's experimental roots were clearly evident in his relationship with his gifted, albeit wayward, father, and his rather mysterious mother. Everything was in place well before Cage's ... Read More
Rating: - vigorous essays on a Zen interdisciplinarian
These are a collection of marvelous essays Marjorie Perloff has edited. The scope of Cage is seemingly immense, the implications of his work has touched varigated corners and crevices,abandoned places: the music world, the world of poetry,conceptual art, performance art, mushroom enthusiasts,opera, and other synergistic art forms we have no label for yet. Perloff herself chooses the influence of Duchamp to discuss, the ends of things of the Western canon was a frightening yet fascinating point in ... Read More
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