Download or read book Records Ruin the Landscape written by David Grubbs and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-03 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Cage's disdain for records was legendary. He repeatedly spoke of the ways in which recorded music was antithetical to his work. In Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs argues that, following Cage, new genres in experimental and avant-garde music in the 1960s were particularly ill suited to be represented in the form of a recording. These activities include indeterminate music, long-duration minimalism, text scores, happenings, live electronic music, free jazz, and free improvisation. How could these proudly evanescent performance practices have been adequately represented on an LP? In their day, few of these works circulated in recorded form. By contrast, contemporary listeners can encounter this music not only through a flood of LP and CD releases of archival recordings but also in even greater volume through Internet file sharing and online resources. Present-day listeners are coming to know that era's experimental music through the recorded artifacts of composers and musicians who largely disavowed recordings. In Records Ruin the Landscape, Grubbs surveys a musical landscape marked by altered listening practices.
Download or read book The Music of John Cage written by James Pritchett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-03-14 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to examine fully the work of John Cage, leading figure of the post-war musical avant-garde.
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.
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.”
Download or read book John Cage in a landscape Ediz italiana e inglese written by Roberto Masotti and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book John Cage written by David Patterson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-28 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Cage seeks to explore the early part of the composer's life and career, concentrating on the pre-chance period between 1933 and 1950 that is crucial to understanding his later work. The essays consider Cage's influences, his evolving aesthetic, and his movement toward ideology that would later shape his work.
Download or read book No Such Thing as Silence written by Kyle Gann and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-23 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First performed at the midpoint of the twentieth century, John Cage’s 4'33", a composition conceived of without a single musical note, is among the most celebrated and ballyhooed cultural gestures in the history of modern music. A meditation on the act of listening and the nature of performance, Cage’s controversial piece became the iconic statement of the meaning of silence in art and is a landmark work of American music. In this book, Kyle Gann, one of the nation’s leading music critics, explains 4'33" as a unique moment in American culture and musical composition. Finding resemblances and resonances of 4'33" in artworks as wide-ranging as the paintings of the Hudson River School and the music of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, he provides much-needed cultural context for this fundamentally challenging and often misunderstood piece. Gann also explores Cage’s craft, describing in illuminating detail the musical, philosophical, and even environmental influences that informed this groundbreaking piece of music. Having performed 4'33" himself and as a composer in his own right, Gann offers the reader both an expert’s analysis and a highly personal interpretation of Cage’s most divisive work.
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.
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.”
Download or read book Through the Looking Glass written by Richard H. Brown and published by Oxford Music/Media. This book was released on 2019-01-02 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through the Looking Glass examines John Cage's interactions and collaborations with avant-garde and experimental filmmakers, and in turn seeks out the implications of the audiovisual experience for the overall aesthetic surrounding Cage's career. As the commercially dominant media form in the twentieth century, cinema transformed the way listeners were introduced to and consumed music. Cage's quest to redefine music, intentionality, and expression reflect the similar transformation of music within the larger audiovisual experience of sound film. This volume examines key moments in Cage's career where cinema either informed or transformed his position on the nature of sound, music, expression, and the ontology of the musical artwork. The examples point to moments of rupture within Cage's own consideration of the musical artwork, pointing to newfound collision points that have a significant and heretofore unacknowledged role in Cage's notions of the audiovisual experience and the medium-specific ontology of a work of art.
Download or read book For the Birds written by John Cage and published by Marion Boyars. This book was released on 1995 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book The Selected Letters of John Cage written by John Cage and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-22 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This annotated selection of more than five hundred letters by the groundbreaking composer and avant-garde icon covers every phase of his career. This volume reveals the intimate life of John Cage with all the intelligence, wit, and inventiveness that made him such an important composer and performer. The missives range from lengthy reports of his early trips to Europe in the 1930s through his years with the dancer Merce Cunningham. They shed new light on his growing eminence as an iconic performance artist of the American avant-garde. Written in Cage’s singular voice—by turns profound, irreverent, and funny—these letters reveal Cage’s passionate interest in people, ideas, and the arts. They include correspondence with Peter Yates, David Tudor, and Pierre Boulez, among many others. Readers will enjoy Cage's commentary about the people and events of a transformative time in the arts, as well as his meditations on the very nature of art. This volume presents an extraordinary portrait of a complex, brilliant man who challenged and changed the artistic currents of the twentieth century.
Download or read book A Year from Monday written by John Cage and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-20 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes lectures, essays, diaries and other writings, including "How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)" and "Juilliard Lecture."
Download or read book The Boulez Cage Correspondence written by Pierre Boulez and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of two of the greatest composers of the twentieth century through their correspondence, now available for the first time in English in a paperback edition.
Download or read book Birds in a Cage written by Derek Niemann and published by Short Books. This book was released on 2012-01-11 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At Warburg, Germany, in 1941, four British PoWs find an unexpected means of escape from the horrors of internment when they form a birdwatching society, and embark on an obsessive quest behind barbed wire. Through their shared love of birds, they overcome hunger, hardship, fear and stultifying boredom. Their quest draws in not only their fellow prisoners, but also some of the German guards, at great risk to them all... Derek Niemann draws on original diaries, letters and drawings, to tell of how Conder, Barrett, Waterston and Buxton were forged by their experiences as POWs into the giants of post war wildlife conservation. Their legacy lives on, in institutions such as the RSPB and the British Wildlife Trust.
Download or read book Everything We Do is Music written by Barry Russell and published by Alfred Music. This book was released on 2016 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book for teachers and others, containing more than 50 activities based on the music and thought of Cage. The activities encourage multidisciplinary exploration and listening to sounds in new ways. With an introduction and appendices.
Download or read book Every Day is a Good Day written by John Cage and published by Hayward Gallery Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is published to accompany the first major UK retrospective of the visual art of the pioneering American composer and artist John Cage (1912ndash;1992). The use of chance operations, in particular the Chinese Book of Changes, or I Ching, was central to Cage's compositional method and his approach to his drawings, watercolours and prints, many of which are reproduced here for the first time. Cage's practice is explored in new interviews with key collaborators: printmaker Kathan Brown; Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust; artist Ray Kass; and Julie Lazar, curator of Cage's 1992 'composition for a museum', Rolywholyover: A Circus. Extracts from a 1966 interview between Cage and the critic Irving Sandler are also included. At the heart of the book is a 'Companion to Cage': a selection of quotations by Cage and notes on key themes and influences from 'Alphabet' to 'Zen', making it essential reading on this important figure of the twentieth-century avant-garde. Published to accompany the UK touring exhibition in 2010 ndash; 2011 at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; Kettle's Yard, Cambridge; Huddersfield Art Gallery; Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow; De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea.
