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."
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