Musicage: Cage Muses on Words * Art * Music

Abstract

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 multi-media 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 twentieth century.

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