Writings Through John Cages Music Poetry And Art

Author : David W. Bernstein
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226044874
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Writings through John Cage's Music, Poetry, and Art written by David W. Bernstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Kenneth Silverman
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
ISBN 13 : 0810128306
Total Pages : 497 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Begin Again written by Kenneth Silverman and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-11 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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" /--

Author : John Cage
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press
ISBN 13 : 0819571865
Total Pages : 411 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book MUSICAGE written by John Cage and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-06 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Marjorie Perloff
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 9780226660578
Total Pages : 302 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book John Cage written by Marjorie Perloff and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1994-08 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Nicky Losseff
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351548646
Total Pages : 335 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book "Silence, Music, Silent Music " written by Nicky Losseff and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : John Cage
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780819560285
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Silence written by John Cage and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 1961-06 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.”

Author : Kay Larson
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0143123475
Total Pages : 497 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Where the Heart Beats written by Kay Larson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-07-30 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : John Cage
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780819563118
Total Pages : 420 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book MUSICAGE written by John Cage and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 1996-01-19 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. "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.

Author : John Cage
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press
ISBN 13 : 0819570648
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Silence written by John Cage and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-20 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.”

Author : John Cage
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press
ISBN 13 : 0819570591
Total Pages : 201 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Empty Words written by John Cage and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writings through James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, Norman O. Brown, and "The Future of Music."