Writings through John Cage's Music, Poetry, and Art

Writings through John Cage's Music, Poetry, and Art PDF Author: David W. Bernstein
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226044874
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
This volume looks at the creative work of the great avant-gardist John Cage from an exciting interdisciplinary perspective, exploring his activities as a composer, performer, thinker, and artist. The essays in this collection grew out of a pivotal gathering during which a spectrum of participants including composers, music scholars, and visual artists, literary critics, poets, and filmmakers convened to examine Cage's extraordinary artistic legacy. Beginning with David Bernstein's introductory essay on the reception of Cage's music, the volume addresses topics ranging from Cage's reluctance to discuss his homosexuality, to his work as a performer and musician, and his forward-looking, provocative experimentation with electronic and other media. Several of the essays draw upon previously unseen sketches and other source materials. Also included are transcripts of lively panel discussions among some of Cage's former colleagues. Taken together, this collection is a much-needed contribution to the study of one of the most significant American artists of the twentieth century.

Writings through John Cage's Music, Poetry, and Art

Writings through John Cage's Music, Poetry, and Art PDF Author: David W. Bernstein
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226044874
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume looks at the creative work of the great avant-gardist John Cage from an exciting interdisciplinary perspective, exploring his activities as a composer, performer, thinker, and artist. The essays in this collection grew out of a pivotal gathering during which a spectrum of participants including composers, music scholars, and visual artists, literary critics, poets, and filmmakers convened to examine Cage's extraordinary artistic legacy. Beginning with David Bernstein's introductory essay on the reception of Cage's music, the volume addresses topics ranging from Cage's reluctance to discuss his homosexuality, to his work as a performer and musician, and his forward-looking, provocative experimentation with electronic and other media. Several of the essays draw upon previously unseen sketches and other source materials. Also included are transcripts of lively panel discussions among some of Cage's former colleagues. Taken together, this collection is a much-needed contribution to the study of one of the most significant American artists of the twentieth century.

A Year from Monday

A Year from Monday PDF Author: John Cage
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819570559
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Includes lectures, essays, diaries and other writings, including "How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)" and "Juilliard Lecture."

Where the Heart Beats

Where the Heart Beats PDF Author: Kay Larson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143123475
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
A “heroic” biography of John Cage and his “awakening through Zen Buddhism”—“a kind of love story” about a brilliant American pioneer of the creative arts who transformed himself and his culture (The New York Times) Composer John Cage sought the silence of a mind at peace with itself—and found it in Zen Buddhism, a spiritual path that changed both his music and his view of the universe. “Remarkably researched, exquisitely written,” Where the Heart Beats weaves together “a great many threads of cultural history” (Maria Popova, Brain Pickings) to illuminate Cage’s struggle to accept himself and his relationship with choreographer Merce Cunningham. Freed to be his own man, Cage originated exciting experiments that set him at the epicenter of a new avant-garde forming in the 1950s. Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, Allan Kaprow, Morton Feldman, and Leo Castelli were among those influenced by his ‘teaching’ and ‘preaching.’ Where the Heart Beats shows the blossoming of Zen in the very heart of American culture.

MUSICAGE

MUSICAGE PDF Author: John Cage
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819571865
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
The pioneering composer and music theorist makes his final on the totality of his work and thought in these three wide-ranging dialogues. “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. This quest led him beyond the bounds of convention in all his musical, written, and visual pieces. The resulting expansion of the definition of art earned him a reputation as one of America's most influential contemporary artists. Joan Retallack's conversations with Cage explore his artistic production in its entirety. Cage's comments range from his theories of chance and indeterminate composition to his long-time collaboration with Merce Cunningham to the aesthetics of his multimedia works. In her comprehensive introduction, Retallack describes Cage’s lifelong project as “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 twentieth century.

Writings about John Cage

Writings about John Cage PDF Author: Richard Kostelanetz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Distinguished composers, performers, and critics offer views of one of the most important figures in twentieth-century music

Words to Be Looked At

Words to Be Looked At PDF Author: Liz Kotz
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262514036
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
A critical study of the use of language and the proliferation of text in 1960s art and experimental music, with close examinations of works by Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, John Cage, Douglas Huebler, Andy Warhol, Lawrence Weiner, La Monte Young, and others. Language has been a primary element in visual art since the 1960s—in the form of printed texts, painted signs, words on the wall, recorded speech, and more. In Words to Be Looked At, Liz Kotz traces this practice to its beginnings, examining works of visual art, poetry, and experimental music created in and around New York City from 1958 to 1968. In many of these works, language has been reduced to an object nearly emptied of meaning. Robert Smithson described a 1967 exhibition at the Dwan Gallery as consisting of “Language to be Looked at and/or Things to be Read.” Kotz considers the paradox of artists living in a time of social upheaval who use words but chose not to make statements with them. Kotz traces the proliferation of text in 1960s art to the use of words in musical notation and short performance scores. She makes two works the “bookends” of her study: the “text score” for John Cage's legendary 1952 work 4'33”—written instructions directing a performer to remain silent during three arbitrarily determined time brackets—and Andy Warhol's notorious a: a novel—twenty-four hours of endless talk, taped and transcribed—published by Grove Press in 1968. Examining works by artists and poets including Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, George Brecht, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Jackson Mac Low, and Lawrence Weiner, Kotz argues that the turn to language in 1960s art was a reaction to the development of new recording and transmission media: words took on a new materiality and urgency in the face of magnetic sound, videotape, and other emerging electronic technologies. Words to Be Looked At is generously illustrated, with images of many important and influential but little-known works.

Silence

Silence PDF Author: John Cage
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819570648
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
John Cage is the outstanding composer of avant-garde music today. The Saturday Review said of him: "Cage possesses one of the rarest qualities of the true creator- that of an original mind- and whether that originality pleases, irritates, amuses or outrages is irrelevant." "He refuses to sermonize or pontificate. What John Cage offers is more refreshing, more spirited, much more fun-a kind of carefree skinny-dipping in the infinite. It's what's happening now." –The American Record Guide "There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. Sounds occur whether intended or not; the psychological turning in direction of those not intended seems at first to be a giving up of everything that belongs to humanity. But one must see that humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world together, that nothing was lost when everything was given away."

"Silence, Music, Silent Music "

Author: Nicky Losseff
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351548646
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 489

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Book Description
The contributions in this volume focus on the ways in which silence and music relate, contemplate each other and provide new avenues for addressing and gaining understanding of various realms of human endeavour. The book maps out this little-explored aspect of the sonic arena with the intention of defining the breadth of scope and to introduce interdisciplinary paths of exploration as a way forward for future discourse. Topics addressed include the idea of 'silent music' in the work of English philosopher Peter Sterry and Spanish Jesuit St John of the Cross; the apparently paradoxical contemplation of silence through the medium of music by Messiaen and the relationship between silence and faith; the aesthetics of Susan Sontag applied to Cage's idea of silence; silence as a different means of understanding musical texture; ways of thinking about silences in music produced during therapy sessions as a form of communication; music and silence in film, including the idea that music can function as silence; and the function of silence in early chant. Perhaps the most all-pervasive theme of the book is that of silence and nothingness, music and spirituality: a theme that has appeared in writings on John Cage but not, in a broader sense, in scholarly writing. The book reveals that unexpected concepts and ways of thinking emerge from looking at sound in relation to its antithesis, encompassing not just Western art traditions, but the relationship between music, silence, the human psyche and sociological trends - ultimately, providing deeper understanding of the elemental places both music and silence hold within world philosophies and fundamental states of being. Silence, Music, Silent Music will appeal to those working in the fields of musicology, psychology of religion, gender studies, aesthetics and philosophy.

Begin Again

Begin Again PDF Author: Kenneth Silverman
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810128306
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
A man of extraordinary and seemingly limitless talents—musician, inventor, composer, poet, and even amateur mycologist—John Cage became a central figure of the avant-garde early in his life and remained at that pinnacle until his death in 1992 at the age of eighty. Award-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman gives us the first comprehensive life of this remarkable artist. Silverman begins with Cage’s childhood in interwar Los Angeles and his stay in Paris from 1930 to 1931, where immersion in the burgeoning new musical and artistic movements triggered an explosion of his creativity. Cage continued his studies in the United States with the seminal modern composer Arnold Schoenberg, and he soon began the experiments with sound and percussion instruments that would develop into his signature work with prepared piano, radio static, random noise, and silence. Cage’s unorthodox methods still influence artists in a wide range of genres and media. Silverman concurrently follows Cage’s rich personal life, from his early marriage to his lifelong personal and professional partnership with choreographer Merce Cunningham, as well as his friendships over the years with other composers, artists, philosophers, and writers. Drawing on interviews with Cage’s contemporaries and friends and on the enormous archive of his letters and writings, and including photographs, facsimiles of musical scores, and Web links to illustrative sections of his compositions, Silverman gives us a biography of major significance: a revelatory portrait of one of the most important cultural figures of the twentieth century. !--?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /--

Silence

Silence PDF Author: John Cage
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 9780819560285
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
John Cage is the outstanding composer of avant-garde music today. The Saturday Review said of him: “Cage possesses one of the rarest qualities of the true creator- that of an original mind- and whether that originality pleases, irritates, amuses or outrages is irrelevant.” “He refuses to sermonize or pontificate. What John Cage offers is more refreshing, more spirited, much more fun-a kind of carefree skinny-dipping in the infinite. It’s what’s happening now.” –The American Record Guide “There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. Sounds occur whether intended or not; the psychological turning in direction of those not intended seems at first to be a giving up of everything that belongs to humanity. But one must see that humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world together, that nothing was lost when everything was given away.”